One of the things about being a pundit-type blogger (rather than the livejournal type, you know) is that I feel it incumbent upon me to live up to stereotype, that is, to respond to the latest news story. In this case, the Marine who shot an unarmed wounded man in a mosque.
The problem is that I’m an insensitive SoB, and pretty much shrug stuff like that off. I mean, yes, bad Marine, yes mitigating circumstances, yes. Stuff like that happens in war. I can’t say that, during the time when I supported invasion, I specifically imagined this happening, but on the other hand I didn’t imagine that we would be able to invade and occupy the country without some soldier somewhere killing some poor defenseless sap. That’s part of the war decision, right? War isn’t clean. It’s not just soldiers or “combatants” who die, and even if almost all of our soldiers are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, there will be a few who commit murder. It’s a package deal.
Now, torture of prisoners was not included in that package. That shook me. I wasn’t prepared, emotionally, for us to be the bad guys in that institutionalized sense. This news is different.
Look, the thing I found the most horrifying in Catch-22 was the moment when Aarfy says “I only raped her once.” The rest of it, all of the awful stuff, well, war is like that, and dammit, they liberated Dachau. As Chairman Mao said, you can’t make an omelette without slaughtering thousands of innocent people. That’s why you have to have a very good reason to go to war. Doing the moral calculus is brutal; you can’t just add up the butcher’s bill, you have to add up the cost to the country, moral and diplomatic, of some berk doing something like this. Which was bound to happen.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
but let’s not mince words. few of our troops there have brotherly love for the locals.
i mean, that line has to be drawn. we’re there to liberate only if you believe that the iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11. we’ve all seen the PIPA poll results, i’m sure. a lot of americans believe the iraqis are involved with al-qaeda; some believe saddam hussein was involved in the attacks themselves; and a few terrified souls here believe that it was iraqi pilots hijacking the planes. as far as i know nobody has polled american soldiers about this. but if they follow the beliefs of the general population, they’re treating people pretty rough.
Yes, but I would guess the soldier on the ground doesn’t hate Iraqis more than our boys in WWII hated the Japanese (who actually did bomb Pearl Harbor). At any rate, this fellow did know that insurgents (or terrorists or whatever he considered them) had shot him the day before and killed at least one of his buddies. I don’t say that to excuse him, just to underscore that this sort of thing is bound to happen in war.
Thanks,
-V.
hmm yes i see what you mean. good point.
i think i was more disturbed by the words exchanged than by the act, which i handled how i handled 9/11 and other “formal” violence – a serious human error, and a done deed – one tries to look for ramifications, not revenge. but with “now he’s dead” – anytime the culture of professional soldiers is revealed, it disturbs me.
David wrote:
few of our troops there have brotherly love for the locals.
Can they have this, and survive? Can they not, and survive when they return home?
i wish i knew how far back we had to go to make it possible for us to overthrow this particularly dictator without creating deadly chaos. i’d like to forgive us all for the things we did to iraq in between the first and second invasions with something generous like “if only we’d given diplomacy time to work” and “if only we’d waited until we could launch a real occupation.” the thing is as V points out we’ve been beating these people around the ears for 13 years, heading for 14. i would add that we created a tragedy in encouraging the shi’a to rise up and then pulling our promised air support.
i’ve seen a few japanese treatises on this subject, relating to the application of force by wealthy democracies. their point of view is pretty interesting – many of them believe that a democratic, industrial nation cannot effectively give military help. elected politicians do not know how to apply force and will almost always do it in a way that endangers both their own troops and the people in the faraway place. military officers get years of training on the giving and taking of life – politicians never even have to hold a gun. and so on.
when i was thinking about this attitude i stumbled on a part of it that made a lot of sense to me personally. politicians are in the trade of never really saying “no.” if there is something that people are concerned about, but the politician sees would be rejected in political circles, the easiest way from point A (desire) to point B (high job performance rating) is to slap something together and get a big rush of results immediately. maybe it does more harm than good for the stress levels of working folk but it maintains the real power relationships that are the most important thing.
in relation to 9/11 for instance – and i’m just pulling a country out of a hat here – saudi arabia seems to have been the most involved of any particular country, even including afghanistan – but iraq was already set up to take the fall – the easiest path. far easier than executing an invasion of mecca. (although invading karbala was just about as bad, if more practical because iran, the only country with a shi’a majority, was in no political position to complain, and because saddam had been hostile to shi’a pilgrims.)
to make iraq a good fall guy, people had to be made to believe certain things about the iraqis and iraq’s government had to be treated in a certain way – you can’t talk tough to a shadow like bin laden and you can’t talk tough at all to the fahd family. this was creating a further disaster. colin powell should be ashamed of himself for going along with such a craven political ploy, knowing as he did that the troops would be entering the country with a terrible mental picture of the situation, especially the part about “only terrorists and torturers will be shooting at you.”
this was the guy after all who once called off the big show in iraq because it wasn’t sporting.
i know i’m wrong about some of these things and i hope people will correct them liberally. (NPI.) (no pun intended.)
in this situation, though, the ways that we have applied force there, we’ve won no friends. as someone told me once, if this is how you got it, it must be how you wanted it. if you wanted something different you would have worked toward that instead.
can american troops in iraq survive in iraq with brotherly love for the iraqi people… many would say no. i would say, if you want things to work out well there, stop treating the folk like stupid dogs that you have to hit to train. even dogs respond better to love than to being beaten. stress helps nobody.
can they survive back here when they return – no. lynndie england is case example number one for the fall that awaits vets of this effort when things finally crumble. the bushies will absolutely not take the fall.
just rereading the first part of that and it seems pat. sorry.
maybe instead of a mother-whore complex we have a hero-villain complex.
all dichotomies eventually lead back to mother-whore.