Why do american troops pretty much never commit war crimes on a mass scale?

>soyboys ignoring all the others to focus on the only wrong one
Predictable

>The Philippine-American war never happened

High win-loss ratio.

Because the reality is war crimes only exist for those weak enough to be prosecuted for it. It's the most obvious modern example of might makes right.

>What would be the most recent example of at least a great regional power committing a mass crime?
Soviets in Afghanistan probably. 1.5+ million dead, 5+ million displaced.

Because we're the good guys.

Vast majority of there wars were fought after the 1800s, that particular style went out of fashion. Now its all about the dystopic and covert atrocities done to domestic citizens and foreign alike.

Nukes

Did you get "triggered" there, Leddit McSpacing? Almost no one else in the thread is offering examples for discussion. What's more mass involved than a city?

>American protecting the mudslimes because muh commies.

For that alone all the America will burn in hell.

War crimes are difficult to cover up in a country with free press which is reporting to the masses back home from the front lines. Said masses don't look too favourably on war crimes and so the policy taken is one which doesn't encourage war crimes and punishes those who commit them in some capacity.
Basically, war crimes hurt the re-electability of a president so they are suppressed.

There's only so much room on the rack for Ottoman lovers, user. France and Britain, first come first serve...

Stay mad Ivan.

Thousands of women and girls were raped in Okinawa. The marines came in armed, told the unarmed civilians (no men cause all conscripted) to bring the ripe women to them where they would be raped by entire companies. Is this not a warcrime? No punishment was done.

America has never been involved in a war for its own survival, apart from the revolution in which it wasnt actually a country yet

Soldiers tend to commit warcrimes against civilians they hate, and america generally doesnt hate its enemies

>native massacres
they resisted justified police action after giving up their sovereignty
>Trail of tears
indians couldn't withstand a short stroll. Not our fault
>firebombings
civilians who consciously or unconsciously support a war effort are legit targets. All japs supported tojo, so killing them was roughly equivalent to shutting down arms-producing machinery. Also it's tojos fault for keeping his flesh machinery in wooden houses
>atom bombings
saved lives
>b-but atom bombs kill people over time with radiation and cancer
and shrapnel and infection can render equally painful and inevitable death
>My Lai
the villagers supported the cong
>Highway of Death
retreat=/= surrender

Do the Marine and Army infantrymen in the Pacific refusing to take prisoners after Guadalcanal count? I know the Marines in particular went out of their way to take no prisoners

Literally impossible to assemble any army of scale without them committing individual even sometimes junior+~ level command crimes. You cannot control things to the man. The combination of the stresses of war and the lawlessness that it brings is ripe for these things to happen.

What is Korea?
What is the philipines?
What is Vietnam and Cambodia?
What is the trail of tears?

>How much more mass scale do you have to get than the native massacres and Trail of Tears
Both of these were quite small actually, mainly because there weren't that many Native Americans. Total number of Native civilians dead to U.S. action is in the tens of thousands. The Trail of Tears took perhaps 4,000 lives out of the 15,000 deported Cherokee.

Compared to shit that no one even remembers like the Kazakh famines, Circassian genocide, Herero genocide, and any of the dozen Indian famines, pretty minor.

Am a proud veteran, but this assessment is not without substance.

Unless you formally abandon your armaments or signal surrender, you are a legitimate military target.

If I were to send a vehicle towards your or others with people you care about, what would you do?

If you took more than two seconds to respond to that complicated matter, you could likely be dead and only mourned.

It would be incredibly dishonest to say that the U.S. has committed no war-crimes.

That said, since My Lai there has been a real effort to avoid such incidents again.

Combat actions will nevertheless always be in question, but that doesn't mean any or most actions by troops on the ground are wrong.

Fortunately, the burden of proof is on the other foot. One likely not to look for real answers in tough locals, since they cannot do so without the same people they are prosecuting to protect them.

"war-crimes" have been and will be committed by US forces in the past, and modern day, as well as into the future.

That said, "war-crimes" has became a very loose term recently, not the same to the past solidity involved with in prior examples.

It's not a war crime if you win

Japs are not humans, does not count.
I would not take prisoners either if I was fighting against those shifty, undisciplined fuckers.

Afaik US and maybe the tommies are the only ones who had specialized MPs and heavily relied on their image back home. Being the good guys was an important part for the recruiting campaign of the allies in WWII.
Unsurprisingly during Vietnam US atrocities spiked because all of this was thrown out of the window.

>Why do american troops pretty much never commit war crimes on a mass scale?
Public policy and decentralized command. The former prevents leadership from pursuing policies that would encourage war crimes for fear of public opinion. The latter allows for less direct control over the soldiery the higher up the chain of command you go.

That's not to say that American soldiers don't commit atrocities, just that they're more spontaneous than deliberate.

>literally the only country in history that nuked entire cities
>it's not war crime when we do it

Because American troops don't really do much. Their purpose is to clean up after the airforce. And the American airforce has shown no qualms about bombing civilians and using both chemical and nuclear weaponry.

>The Battle of Okinawa had a greater casualty rate than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined
>There are people who still think an amphibious invasion of the Home Islands wouldn't be orders of magnitudes worse

At least one returning GI must have fucked his wife while Japanese bones sat in the same room.

Not really, since the Imperial Japanese were notorious for commiting the war-crime of perfidy. Basically Japan unitalerally breached the convention (den Haag), in this case the US-soldiers were under no obligation to uphold that part of the convention either.

because americans are the good guys. anyone that says other wise is either some neo-nazi, or some communist, or some islamic radical.

Because the term of a "crime" is subjective. A state never commits crimes, unless it is enforced on them, an it always judge others for it. Actually, no country committed war crimes in their own opinion (apart from the cucked ones like Germany)

>le lesser evil maymay

what do you think war is you child?

I'm saying Hiroshima makes Srebrenica or Babi Yar look like nothing.

more people died in the babi yar massacre than in hiroshima user. And do you really think its the same as lining people up for days on end to shoot them into ditches?

That's fucking glorious. I wish I could have to opportunity to do something similar one day.

>Herero genocide, and any of the dozen Indian famines

Lots know about that though.

Uhhh...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Bud_Dajo

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre

No it was the settlers being greedy for land and the US government not holding up their side of the treaty.

pretty sure soviets in afghanistan wasn't a 'war', they were helping the government regain control of the country.

now suddenly those combatants become terrorists, and aren't protected by the laws of war.

Probably a couple who boned their Japanese war brides (making lil' Hapas ofc) while the bones of said war bride's relative sat in the same room.

>Highway of Death

Most of those vehicles weren't even occupied. The Iraqis ditched their stolen Kuwaiti Mercedes after the first few hundred got vaporized by B-52s

>*: black American GI's had the highest rate of rape per capita in Europe
>niggers being niggers

Who would've figured?

That’s almost verbatim the argument nazis used against soviets.

>causes 1 million civilian casualties in iraq
>divides the country so that it becomes a shithole

Fuck off amerisharts have fucked up enough in the last few decades.

Some letters from the Philippine-American war

>I have six horses and three carriages in my yard, and enough small plunder for a family of six. The house I had at Santa Ana had five pianos. I couldn’t take them, so I put a big grand piano out of a second-story window. You can guess its finish. Everything is pretty quiet about here now. I expect we will not be kept here very long now. Give my love to all.

>Talk about war being “hell,” this war beats the hottest estimate ever made of that locality. Caloocan was supposed to contain seventeen thousand inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native. Of the buildings, the battered walls of the great church and dismal prison alone remain. The village of Maypaja, where our first fight occurred on the night of the fourth, had five thousand people in it at that day,—now not one stone remains upon top of another. You can only faintly imagine this terrible scene of desolation. War is worse than hell.

>We burned hundreds of houses and looted hundreds more. Some of the boys made good hauls of jewelry and clothing. Nearly every man has at least two suits of clothing, and our quarters are furnished in style; fine beds with silken drapery, mirrors, chairs, rockers, cushions, pianos, hanging-lamps, rugs, pictures, etc. We have horses and carriages, and bull-carts galore, and enough furniture and other plunder to load a steamer.

causes 1 million casualties.
citation needed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ranch_Hand

lolwat

Not a war crime.
The only people who bitched about it where hypocritical scientists.

Using chemical weapons against civilians isn't a warcrime?

They werent used against civilians, they were pesticides used against the forests and jungles.

Does that mean that bombing a town is okay as long as you target the buildings and not the people living in them?

I suggest you read up on the Geneva Conventions are what specific war crimes are before you just keep asking dumb question after dumb question.

But to answer your question, yes bombing a town with civilians is justified if there is sufficient military necessity. Such as the VC operating out of jungles and homes and also operating without uniforms or designation of country.

If the VC hadnt been rampantly operating out of the jungles, then the US would have been violating the GC because there would be no sufficient military threat coming from them

>you can do everything as long as there are military reasons for this
What's GC even good for?

Because the victors get to write history.

Maybe if you read up on it like I asked you would understand. Here is just a couple I found that the NVA widespread violated.

• using human shields;
• conscripting or enlisting children under the age of 15 into armed forces, or using them to participate actively in hostilities;
• committing sexual violence, in particular rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution and enforced pregnancy.

And now 1 mill suffer from its after effects

news.com.au/world/asia/vietnams-horrific-legacy-the-children-of-agent-orange/news-story/c008ff36ee3e840b005405a55e21a3e1

Hypocritical?

Just because they suffer doesnt make it a war crime. The suffer mainly because of the actions of their own people failed to act to protect them.

The scientists who developed bombs and shit to help the military destroy shit complain when the military uses it to destroy shit.

>implying there is something wrong with any of that

All of that is a direct violation of the International Laws of War. This thread is about war crimes, not buzz word topics of stuff america did that people mistake for war crimes or genocide.

Different sets of scientists

Better dead, than red. literally.
Fuck the commies

nice b8 m8
globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-people-in-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051

>Dude we will help you free yourselves from Spain
>DUDE WHAT ALLIANCE? DUDE WHAT DEAL? NO, WE JUST ASKED SPAIN TO HAND YOU OVER! WHY ARE YOU REBELLING. DO YOU HATE FREEDOM?
Daily Reminder Ameriniggers destroyed the first democratic republic in Asia.

>firebombings of WW2

Krauts and Nips aren't people

Because they control the narrative and thus portray any war crimes as exceptions. Kinda weird how during the Vietnam Adventure they could've just called themselve Einsatztruppen and noone would have doubted the accuracy of the name.

And yet not a single war crime didnt go unpunished.
America is actually unique in the fact we actually try and imprison our war criminals unlike every other country on the planet that just sweeps it under the rug.
USA has had war criminals, but never on a mass scale, and they have never gone unpunished, learn what a war crime is you dumb fuck

Plus the 20 million number is total fallacy.

Its funny, when I was in Afghanistan a soldier went rogue and massacred about 10-15 civilians.

He was in prison within a couple of hours and eventually tried for treason and war crimes and is in jail for multiple life sentances. Doesnt really fit your narative for sweeping it under the rug does it?

Fun fact, agent orange itself is decently safe to humans.

2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, the primary component of agent orange, is still used today as a herbicide for lawns.

The problem with Agent Orange is that the government bought their stock from the lowest bidder, and their shoddy quality control caused the herbicide to contain very poisonous dioxins.

Uncle Sam would have been able to avoid most of the shitstorm around agent orange were they willing to pay for a better quality product.

Moot point because it was used primarily as a herbicide to destroy the jungle so it isnt considered a banned weapon, thus not a war crime under international laws

>>My Lai
>the villagers supported the cong

Yeah the slaughtered babies were massive supporters of VC.

>WE ARE THE GOOD
>And yet not a single war crime didnt go unpunished.
horseshit. The Dachau massacre wasn't prosecuted for instance. patton dismissed it. And that is just one example. maybe try and google "american war crimes" for starters.
Also you might want to work on your manners.

There is a fairly large gap between being good and super moral, and not committing large scale war crimes.

The US may not have always been very moral, but strictly legal speaking, has never and I mean never committed large scale war crimes.

I have researched American war crimes, and they have all been very small isolated incidents, certainly not even comparable to the Nazi and Japanese industrial scale genocide, or the Soviet man made famine which is indeed a war crime.
Hell even Germany simply rearming its military past the international post WW1 treaty is a war crime.
America always skirts a very fine line morally with firebombing industrial centers and such, but it is always legally proper, mainly because our system is set up in such a way with oversight.

Out of curiosity, where is your line for "large scale"?

Mass scale as defined by OP would probably be targeting an entire ethnicity for genocide, and probably division or brigade level for other war crimes.

And by division or brigade level, i mean that a brigade or divisions worth of men are committing war crimes in unison, unified.

Where would you put the use of ~400k tons of Napalm in Vietnam or spraying 20 million gallons of defoliants? Isn't that chemical warfare?

t. /leftypol/

The specifics of attempting to destroy the environment in regards to war crimes are only applicable if the environment isnt being used for military uses.

Needless to say the jungles where 100% used for military uses.
The chemicals used to destroy the jungles were legal. As another poster noted, they may have been of shoddy quality but that doesnt constitute it as a war crime.

>what is Vietnam?

>The suffer mainly because of the actions of their own people failed to act to protect them.
They suffer mainly because Americans are huge hypocrites who'd rather kill a million innocents than have their interests suffer.

...

>Mass scale as defined by OP would probably be targeting an entire ethnicity for genocide, and probably division or brigade level for other war crimes.
You mean like putting American-Japanese into concentration camps?

Stage guerilla attacks and setup death traps all throughout the jungle.

Cry when ur enemy burns the jungle down

Calling them concentration camps is a huge huge leap.
BTW what was the death toll in those camps?

>Cry when ur enemy burns the jungle down
Burning the jungle down would've probably hurt fewer innocents in the long run.

But put more US military lives in danger.
Debating the morality or necessity of it is a fine topic to argue, but it was 100% not a warcrime, which is what this thread is about.