I Say Cut Down the Damn Trees and Kill the Rainforest

This is in response to the NYT article below and DMA's comments:

I do not belittle the tremendous psychological impact that war zones or other extreme environment may have on individuals, but I refused to view aggressors of sexual assaults as victims, regardless of the circumstances.

I'm stretching this a bit, but taking a compassionate stance towards despicable acts of this sort is to say that it's also OK for a guy living in the US (or anywhere else, really) who has been dealt a really shitty hand all his life and has never had a girlfriend to rape or sexually assault someone. Come on now. This is a place where right is right and wrong is wrong, and there can be no relatives or qualifiers.

The bottom line is that there needs to be well-defined rules and repercussions for actions of Americans in Iraq that are upheld in a formal legal system, prosecutable across state lines. In Iraq male contractors are highly stressed and sexually frustrated blah blah blah, but I am willing to bet that if they will go to jail for 20 years for doing what they did to those women (who are put in the same stressful environment, mind you), a sizable number of these cases would not have occurred in the first place.

It's crazy to think how fine a line we're all walking on now that our society is, relatively and generally speaking, in order. Put the same people in a place with a different set of rules, and all hell breaks loose. I'd like to have faith in human goodness and all that, but it becomes really difficult when the bad apples speak the loudest and tend to rein the forest.