A court-martial gave Sergeant Paul Cortez a 100 year sentence for his role in the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and her family. [Although he'll be eligible for parole in ten years, apparently. I must agree with Joe Miller at Catallarchy: ten years for four murders and a rape seems ridiculously light.) According to SGT Cortez, he and three of his squadmates conspired in the rape and murder, and SGT Cortez will have to testify against his squadmates when their cases reach trial. Cortez expressed remorse for his actions and his defense attorney argued that combat stress played a role in his actions. The prosecution, correctly in my view, argued that stress did not excuse rape and murder, and the jury agreed.
While I do not think American troops are raping Iraqis as frequently as Riverbend seems to think, once is too many. When any large group of people is assembled, the odds are that some fraction of them will be prone to criminal behavior. When those people are placed in a situation where many of the normal rules of human behavior are not enforced, such as a war, some of them will act as if none of the rules of human behavior apply. It is largely for this reason that militaries work so hard to instill discipline in soldiers. No matter how much training is done on ethical behavior, however, it is almost certain that the effects of combat will leave some soldiers with the belief those rules do not apply to them, and the result is atrocities.
One hopes that the American military will adjust its training program to try and reduce the chances of such incidents in the future, but I do not believe that any amount of screening and training can prevent all such occurances. War is such a massive deviation from the norms of human society that it may not be possible to predict how otherwise normal people will react. That does not mean the military should not do everything it can to screen out anyone who might do such things, only that we cannot count on screening and training to prevent such events.
Therefore, we should do everything in our power to avoid creating such solutions in the first place. War always have brought atrocities with it, and it always will. Deciding to go to war should include the knowledge that not only will innocent people die through good faith attempts to hit the enemy, but innocents will be raped and murdered by our own soldiers. That is part of the price of war. We would do well to read what they can about people like SGT Cortez and Sabrine Al-Janabi now, and remember those names the next time they we deciding whether or not we should go to war.