The Mark of Cain
Today is Friday, 9 June 2006.
An esteemed reader suggested a topic to your author: “Commentary on our military now providing etiquette lessons to the troops (God love 'em) regarding not massacring the natives. Is My Lai so far in the past that no one thinks it could ever happen again?”
There’s a phrase I wish I’d written: “ … etiquette lessons to the troops (God love 'em) regarding not massacring the natives.”
As the MoB has pointed out before, the “rules of war” are dictated, always and only, by the victors in war, who also adjudicate transgressions of those rules. The brutal fact is, those “rules” are enforced mainly when they are of advantage (and they are written for advantage to the powerful to begin with).
For example, it is regarded as in bad form (going EmilyPostal, as it were) (to be caught) walking into a home and spraying women and children with torrents of bullets. It is regarded as entirely becoming an officer and a gentleman to drop a 500-pound bomb from a great height on a home, knowing that civilians are very likely inside. It is argued: but infantry can see women and children, while airmen can’t. Counter: in the split second infantry walks into a home, how do they know the women and children aren’t concealing weapons? Better safe than sorry, so, no crime, or so they say.
Ah, but we’re talking about doing it deliberately, when infantry knows they’re civilians. Well, airmen drop the bombs deliberately, knowing that the percentages of reality mean that civilians will be killed a good deal of the time. They don’t need visual confirmation in each and every situation to know that.
But a truly proper, suitable, and comprehensive commentary can be fashioned only within the context of a judgment upon war, and upon this war in particular.
I assert that all killing is murder, whether within arbitrary rules or not, whether one is 100% positive the quarry is combatant or civilian. I say, “all killing is murder.” This is a statement of values unshared, I dare say, by a majority of USE/USSA citizens, and a majority of humans throughout the ages. “You killing me is murder; me killing you is justifiable courage, if perhaps regrettable.” Once one adopts the value that there are good killings and bad killings, every sophist with an IQ exceeding a pretzel can figure out how to move the goalposts so the home team scores a touchdown every time.
Killing = murder = not good.
I use “good” here in a very strict philosophical and theological sense: “the good,” an absolute. I don’t bother to hide behind appeals to the commandments of deity: I simply assert that the statement is true. Love it or leave it.
There are circumstances in which I would kill. Were I to be in a store when a Klansman walked in with a Glock and took aim at an African-American, I would use any measure, including deadly force, to stop the Kluxer. My action would be justified in so far as averting a greater harm, but I would still have killed another human being, and so have committed murder. Justification of the act (i.e., the achievement of a better result) does not change the essential nature of the act: killing remains murder.
Atrocity is the essence and nature of war. War itself is the atrocity, and all war’s components are contributory atrocities. “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry; ask the dead.” (Ernest Hemingway) The war against Iraq was not even justified by a higher good, anymore than were the German and Soviet conquests of Poland or Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait.
Facing facts: our ruling elites don’t squander half the annual Federal budget on war (past, present, and future), only to intend to have a few “laws of war” thwart their collective will. Certainly, a few unlucky souls at the bottom of the military heap will be made examples for propaganda purposes of public consumption, whether as guilty of torture in a prison or bloodbaths in an Iraqi living room, but bombs will still carpet the world in pursuit of the ends of empire, and maybe the lucky relatives of the dead will receive a “death gratuity.”
(Use of the latter term is pure rage and sarcasm; it’s the official USE/USSA Government term for the pittance paid to the next of kin of members of the military fallen in battle. Sort of like a tip left in a restaurant, only Uncle Sugar ain’t no twenty per cent tipper.)
Make no mistake about it: the civil war in Iraq began on 9 April 2006, when Saddam Hussein went into hiding and Ba’athist power dissolved, and the Bush regime had no coherent plan and insufficient power to stop civil war. That is: the civil war in Iraq is the direct consequence of the Bush regime’s conquest and occupation of Iraq, and therefore the Bush regime bears ultimate ethical responsibility for all the deaths and sufferings in the civil war. Zarqawi bears immediate responsibility for his terror, but the Bush regime bears ultimate responsibility for Zarqawi’s terror, and for the terror directly unleashed by Bush regime forces.
Terror is a tactic, a means to an end, not an end in itself. This is the case whether it is the terror of Zarqawi, or bin Laden, or German, British, and American terror bombing of cities during World War II, or the American conquest and occupation of Iraq. The USE/USSA can make “GWOT” ("Global War on Terror") only by including itself as a primary target.
To return to our original consideration.
I believe it is unjust to imprison a handful of enlisted rankers, subjected as they were to peril and energized by vicious anti-socialization, while the high command who gives unnatural birth to a war carefully loaded with religious and racialist overtones is permitted to cower in their safe houses, white or pentagonal, and then fade away to highly-remunerative retirement in Palm Springs or on Texas ranches.
In this case, the fish indeed rots from the head, and that is where the war atrocities trials and punishments should begin.
I do not foresee that this supplementary training in the etiquette of war (or “core warrior values,” as the Department of War styles it) will accomplish much. So long as the infantry is subjected to hard-core anti-socialization in training, then inserted with criminally insufficient planning and support into a war zone where there is no “behind the lines,” and so long as our wicked rulers demand results … well, as the increasingly Brezhnev-like Rumsfeld says, “Stuff happens.”
An esteemed reader suggested a topic to your author: “Commentary on our military now providing etiquette lessons to the troops (God love 'em) regarding not massacring the natives. Is My Lai so far in the past that no one thinks it could ever happen again?”
There’s a phrase I wish I’d written: “ … etiquette lessons to the troops (God love 'em) regarding not massacring the natives.”
As the MoB has pointed out before, the “rules of war” are dictated, always and only, by the victors in war, who also adjudicate transgressions of those rules. The brutal fact is, those “rules” are enforced mainly when they are of advantage (and they are written for advantage to the powerful to begin with).
For example, it is regarded as in bad form (going EmilyPostal, as it were) (to be caught) walking into a home and spraying women and children with torrents of bullets. It is regarded as entirely becoming an officer and a gentleman to drop a 500-pound bomb from a great height on a home, knowing that civilians are very likely inside. It is argued: but infantry can see women and children, while airmen can’t. Counter: in the split second infantry walks into a home, how do they know the women and children aren’t concealing weapons? Better safe than sorry, so, no crime, or so they say.
Ah, but we’re talking about doing it deliberately, when infantry knows they’re civilians. Well, airmen drop the bombs deliberately, knowing that the percentages of reality mean that civilians will be killed a good deal of the time. They don’t need visual confirmation in each and every situation to know that.
But a truly proper, suitable, and comprehensive commentary can be fashioned only within the context of a judgment upon war, and upon this war in particular.
I assert that all killing is murder, whether within arbitrary rules or not, whether one is 100% positive the quarry is combatant or civilian. I say, “all killing is murder.” This is a statement of values unshared, I dare say, by a majority of USE/USSA citizens, and a majority of humans throughout the ages. “You killing me is murder; me killing you is justifiable courage, if perhaps regrettable.” Once one adopts the value that there are good killings and bad killings, every sophist with an IQ exceeding a pretzel can figure out how to move the goalposts so the home team scores a touchdown every time.
Killing = murder = not good.
I use “good” here in a very strict philosophical and theological sense: “the good,” an absolute. I don’t bother to hide behind appeals to the commandments of deity: I simply assert that the statement is true. Love it or leave it.
There are circumstances in which I would kill. Were I to be in a store when a Klansman walked in with a Glock and took aim at an African-American, I would use any measure, including deadly force, to stop the Kluxer. My action would be justified in so far as averting a greater harm, but I would still have killed another human being, and so have committed murder. Justification of the act (i.e., the achievement of a better result) does not change the essential nature of the act: killing remains murder.
Atrocity is the essence and nature of war. War itself is the atrocity, and all war’s components are contributory atrocities. “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry; ask the dead.” (Ernest Hemingway) The war against Iraq was not even justified by a higher good, anymore than were the German and Soviet conquests of Poland or Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait.
Facing facts: our ruling elites don’t squander half the annual Federal budget on war (past, present, and future), only to intend to have a few “laws of war” thwart their collective will. Certainly, a few unlucky souls at the bottom of the military heap will be made examples for propaganda purposes of public consumption, whether as guilty of torture in a prison or bloodbaths in an Iraqi living room, but bombs will still carpet the world in pursuit of the ends of empire, and maybe the lucky relatives of the dead will receive a “death gratuity.”
(Use of the latter term is pure rage and sarcasm; it’s the official USE/USSA Government term for the pittance paid to the next of kin of members of the military fallen in battle. Sort of like a tip left in a restaurant, only Uncle Sugar ain’t no twenty per cent tipper.)
Make no mistake about it: the civil war in Iraq began on 9 April 2006, when Saddam Hussein went into hiding and Ba’athist power dissolved, and the Bush regime had no coherent plan and insufficient power to stop civil war. That is: the civil war in Iraq is the direct consequence of the Bush regime’s conquest and occupation of Iraq, and therefore the Bush regime bears ultimate ethical responsibility for all the deaths and sufferings in the civil war. Zarqawi bears immediate responsibility for his terror, but the Bush regime bears ultimate responsibility for Zarqawi’s terror, and for the terror directly unleashed by Bush regime forces.
Terror is a tactic, a means to an end, not an end in itself. This is the case whether it is the terror of Zarqawi, or bin Laden, or German, British, and American terror bombing of cities during World War II, or the American conquest and occupation of Iraq. The USE/USSA can make “GWOT” ("Global War on Terror") only by including itself as a primary target.
To return to our original consideration.
I believe it is unjust to imprison a handful of enlisted rankers, subjected as they were to peril and energized by vicious anti-socialization, while the high command who gives unnatural birth to a war carefully loaded with religious and racialist overtones is permitted to cower in their safe houses, white or pentagonal, and then fade away to highly-remunerative retirement in Palm Springs or on Texas ranches.
In this case, the fish indeed rots from the head, and that is where the war atrocities trials and punishments should begin.
I do not foresee that this supplementary training in the etiquette of war (or “core warrior values,” as the Department of War styles it) will accomplish much. So long as the infantry is subjected to hard-core anti-socialization in training, then inserted with criminally insufficient planning and support into a war zone where there is no “behind the lines,” and so long as our wicked rulers demand results … well, as the increasingly Brezhnev-like Rumsfeld says, “Stuff happens.”
posted by HH at 9:42 AM
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