The last thing I'd ever want is to be seen as a troll, my apologies too all. Though some things are inevitable, it's only AFTER so much time that some of the examples I've seen started popping up. I believe that it was due to the instruction/lack thereof of the commanders up the chain that has led to the downright disasterous situation we're in. I only wish to inspire discussion and stirring of the pot. Trolling i'm not.
As for it becoming the norm, my understanding is that with the extrordinary rise in IED attacks, the prevailing mindset of American soldiers in Iraq is the one we see that of a war criminal. I'll use the example of one Jody Casey, a 29 year-old veteran of occupation of Iraq, he said, "I have seen innocent people being killed. IEDs go off and [you] just zap any farmer that is close to you. You know, those people were out there trying to make a living, but on the other hand, you get hit by four or five of those IEDs and you get pretty tired of that, too." While he didn't participate in such killings himself, Casey said that the overall atmosphere in Iraq was such that "you could basically kill whoever you wanted - it was that easy. You did not even have to get off and dig a hole or anything. You're driving down the road at three in the morning. There's a guy on the side of the road, you shoot him ... you throw a shovel off."
According to Casey, his unit had been advised by troops who had previously served in the area [al-Anbar province] to keep shovels on
their vehicles. Each time an innocent Iraqi is killed, a shovel thrown next to the body is evidence that the dead civilian, when killed, was in
the act of digging holes to plant roadside bombs.
How about another example...Michael Blake, another veteran who was in Iraq the first year of the occupation, revealed that the message US troops are given prior to their deployment is: "Islam is Evil," and "They hate us." The 22-year-old veteran, now a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War <http://www.ivaw.net/>, said, "Most of the guys I was with believed it," confessing that he had witnessed innocent civilians killed indiscriminately. He said that he did not partake of the atrocities, but that it was true that "When IEDs would go off by the side of the road, the instructions were - or the practice was - to basically shoot up the landscape, anything that moved. And that kind of thing would happen a lot ... so innocent people were killed."
While this doesn't prove much, this does make me believe that there's a trend going on. I find it reasonable to believe that these things happen on a scale much larger than we know. I also find it reasonable to find fault with the leaders who got us into the mess, who are partly responsible for any such trend. That's my arguement, however hypothetical it may be.
Karl Rove 
