just an amazing youtube of an american officer berating iraqi policemen for five minutes straight. watch it. some absurd/terrible things:
- the very brave soldier translating at his side, who just stands there repeating the abuse in arabic, occasionally imitating the officer’s physical stance and body language. and when the officer starts berating one policeman in particular, the translator has to get in his face too…
- the fact that the officer starts out by accusing the policemen of being mahdi militia collaborators, yet by the end has gone into this kind of pompous motivational mode, offering advice on how to “erase that image”:
You wanna fix your image? This group right here? Fuck your stupid checkpoints, they’re worthless. Get together, get all your weapons, and start marching south, towards the river. I guarantee you’ll get into a gunfight, and I guarantee you’ll fuck some people up. Get down there and kick some ass!
- the comment at 3:55-4:20 that prompts this response, according to an arabic-speaking friend, is one of the policemen complaining that: Whenever we go out, the Americans stop us and call us Wahhabis and Iranians, and say ‘What are you doing here?’ We go out on raids, and they just call us Iranians and take away our IDs, etc.
- i know that this clip exemplifies something morally serious, but i can only view it as something lurid. i refuse to just point to it like it’s in any way obvious how it fits into some larger critique about iraq. the officer, who unquestionably knows more about the actual situation in iraq than me or anyone following my tumblr, is probably voicing at least a few reasonable concerns and i don’t know what i would say to someone like him.
