Wednesday, June 07, 2006
(10:03 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Supporting Troops
It's probably the case that the American troops in Iraq are not getting regular orders to massacre civilians. It's also probably the case that most of the American troops in Iraq would behave like decent human beings if they were leading their normal lives back in America. I see no reason to believe that the soldier who shot a wheelchair-bound old man in the head in Iraq would not hold open the door for me if I were carrying several packages, for instance. Certainly the soldiers who shot infants and children would have promptly gotten up to offer a pregnant woman their seat on the bus. And none of us could entertain the least doubt that all of them would stand reverently, hand on heart, while the national anthem was being sung at a minor league baseball game or a church service. We're basically dealing with decent Americans here -- on this, there is no question.And if we were dealing with a situation in which they were defending the freedoms of America against aspiring foreign conquerers, I have no doubt that they would behave appropriately. If they were fighting in a war against presumed equals, who demand respect as much as opposition, they would be the very image of noble citizen-warriors. But they're not defending their nation's freedoms, and no equal enemy could possibly exist in the current situation. That's what makes sentiments like this paragraph from Peter Daou (quoted approvingly by Tom Tomorrow) so naive and dangerous:
In their rush to ascribe malicious motives to anyone who draws attention to the horrors in Iraq, these people [right-wing war supporters] ignore the obvious, i.e. that the greater the aberration, the more newsworthy, not the less. In other words, it’s because the war’s critics have faith in the character of our troops and our nation that they are so deeply troubled by such grotesque deviations from the norm. It is the war’s critics, not its blind supporters, who assume the best about our military and who harp on stories like Haditha because it is contrary to everything they believe about America. The contrast is stark between those who rise in condemnation and those who shrug off a few slaughtered women and children.In reality, the "America" these liberal war critics believe in simply does not exist. Massacres are not exactly abberations, but instead represent the "truth" of the kind of war that Iraq is -- that is, a resource war launched by people with no respect for the basic principles of international law or human rights.
We can't pretend that America is just one country among others, and we can't invoke general principles like the right to self-defense in order to justify the specific ways that our military functions in real life. In fact, the ideal country invoked by just war doctrines simply does not exist any more, and all ideas of war based on that fantasy are worse than useless. In reality, in the actual world we live in, we can say with some confidence that the majority of militaries exist for the following purposes:
- To solidify US hegemony -- whether through so-called "humanitarian intervention" or through wars of aggression such as Iraq (i.e., the US military and associated mercenary forces)
- To be pressed into the service of the former (i.e., the armies of allies and potential allies)
- To terrorize a nation's own citizens (i.e., the armies of "rogue" or "failed" states)
