While I do not believe these few soldiers represent the greater United States military, I fear that Iraqi’s will not want to distinguish them from their peers as easily:

U.S. soldiers stepped outside the law when they murdered three Iraqi detainees “in cold blood,” a prosecutor told a U.S. military hearing on Friday.

“U.S. soldiers must follow the laws of war. That’s what makes us better than the terrorists, what sets us apart from the thugs and the hitmen,” said Captain Joseph Mackey, closing arguments for the prosecution of the four U.S. servicemen.

“These soldiers did just the opposite. They cut them loose and murdered them in cold blood,” he said.

The hearing into the deaths on May 9 during a raid on a suspected insurgent camp on an island in the marshy fringe of Thar Thar Lake, southwest of Tikrit, will determine whether the four soldiers should be court-martialled for the killings.

If found guilty of premeditated murder, they could face the death penalty.

Another defendant in this case should be the United States government, and in particular their “stop loss” program. You can’t help but wonder if this crime would have never happened if certain key issues were different.

The first issue that could lead a soldier to act like this is the stop loss program. Just last week we heard of another 3,000 soldiers who were on their way home. Those orders were changed and they are now stuck in Iraq for at least another six months. Combine that, along with the recent NYT’s article about soldiers feeling like their only mission is to drive around Baghdad and not get blown up, then you are left with soldiers going to extremes.

Another key issue is the actual plan for Iraq. When Democrats question the progress, the Republicans quickly say “what do our troops think hearing this?” Well what do our troops think when the administration constantly sets new goals that must be met for a troop withdrawal. We hear that it is this election or that election, or as the Iraqis stand up we will stand down. This is all good except the fact that we have gone through all the political markers and we hear the administration, along with the commanders, boast about Iraqi forces taking the lead and we still are increasing our presence there.

While what these soldiers did is horrible and they deserve punishment for it, we can not overlook the enablers of it. These enablers sit in their air conditioned offices in Washington D.C. making decisions that have severe psychological and physical ramifications on our troops and we have seen the product of that. These are the lessons of Vietnam that opponents of the Iraq War constantly say we forgot. Guess what. They are 100% correct.

One last thought about all of this. Yesterday Peter Pace tried to tell Senate that we have a large number of battalions combat ready, opposing the report just released by Senate Democrats that says the opposite. If we have all these battalions combat ready then why aren’t we rotating them in and out of Iraq? If we truly have these resources then perhaps incidents like Thar Thar, Haditha and all the others could have possibly been avoided. So are our commanders working to destroy our soldiers there or are they lying to Senate about the readiness of our troops? I really hope that this question can be asked by someone in power.