Nothing spoils a vacation quicker. You teach yourself some of the language, get on with the locals, avoid the tourist traps, and just when you've forgotten all your troubles and you're feeling magnanimous and at your ease, someone nearby goes and ruins it.
They will be existing quite blamelessly among their friends and family, conversing to each other normally, or even more pleasantly than usual. At home you might smile for them and the happiness they had found. Here however, they strike you as unbearably loud and unspeakably crass. You notice how badly their clothes fit, and yet how you wish they'd wear more.
With an orclike air and children in tow they evoke the forced march of Merry and Pippin, and it wounds your feelings to see so many of them unchecked in civilised lands. Their travel agent must be a raven-haired, sallow-faced betrayer, hated in these parts for pouring poisoned words into the ear of the local authorities, and you wish he'd have been made an outlaw before it was too late.
Again, we're talking about one soldier who shot some men in the back, not an entire nation's defense predicated on illegal methodology. Let's try and keep our alarm in perspective; When we see the Looney Tunes & Close-up Magic Division using hijinks and misdirection at scale while masses of onlookers cheer the end of international rules-based norms, we will have cause for perturbation.
I am no soldier and I don't study rules of engagement - so I won't comment. If I ever found myself in his shoes, I would count myself lucky for a chance to survive by any means whatsoever.
All that is beside the point I was driving at with banjo over there. It might be true, but it wouldn't have been productive to point out that all warfare is deception, for example.
Neither does the fact that both sides have been using cluster bombs since the onset of the war, but nobody's talking about it anymore.
I wish we could return to the age of limited warfare. Small armies, pitched battles, limited engagements. But it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle, isn't it?
I agree with the basic idea that there ought to be rules of engagement, but you might be setting an unreasonably high standard. You know what happens to POWs in Russia. He was alone and outnumbered. At worst I would suppose he deserves a mild reprimand.
It can always get worse. I found the US bad enough to leave five years ago. The UK is on the same path, but it seems like nowhere is truly resistant to the larger problems.
If America's cities were all occupational juntas, practically speaking what would be different? Extrajudicial killings? Public officials and journalists being threatened? Dissent brutally quelled? Top-down class war?
I think they'd appreciate you giving them the benefit of doubt.