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.\n
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<\/I> a few who commit murder. It’s a package deal.\n
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.\n
Look, the thing I found the most horrifying in Catch-22<\/I> 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.\n
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17203,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434\/revisions\/17203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}