Comments on: The corrosiveness of war

By: Ken

Ken — Mon, 24 May 2004 18:16:16 +0000

“But I do think that the method of waging war where you just fire off cruise missiles or drop bombs, and never see or fear your enemy, is immoral.” Well, hell, killing them in the first place is immoral. Sometimes you have to do it anyway. I don’t see how you get a lot of extra immorality just because you’re protecting yourself from them while you’re shooting them. What would have been really immoral is throwing away our ground troops on a ground invasion of Serbia. It’s a good thing those troops were still around when we actually needed them a couple of years later…

By: Andrew Reeves

Andrew Reeves — Sat, 22 May 2004 01:23:11 +0000

To a modern American, what comes to mind first is the Vietnam experience, with individuals who went to a war overseas coming back as fundamentally changed creatures who could not reintegrate into normal life. The Taxi Driver/First Blood image of the half-mad Vietnam Vet, never able to re-integrate into society because of his hellish experiences in Vietnam has a large component of myth to it. In his book Stolen Valor, B.G. Burkett, himself a Vietnam veteran has done a great deal of research to debunk the idea that the average Vietnam Vet hovers on the verge of psychosis. This is not to deny that horrible things happen in combat; they do. People who have experienced these things, though, usually manage to get on with their lives. The main sign that someone has experienced some fairly traumatic combat is not in the person being a complete wreck, but rather that they do not really like to talk about it. Indeed, someone’s tendency to tell stories of whatever war he participated in is usually directly proportional to his distance from the actual shooting.

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 21 May 2004 22:55:02 +0000

Of course, from a European perspective, it is entirely possible that both Clinton and Bush could be a fault, albeit in different ways.

By: mm

mm — Fri, 21 May 2004 22:20:05 +0000

Actually, Barry, I voted for Clinton. And he wasn’t that liberal. But I do think that the method of waging war where you just fire off cruise missiles or drop bombs, and never see or fear your enemy, is immoral. Stephen Carter has written on this at much more length than I can here, so I will simply refer to him.

By: theophylact

theophylact — Fri, 21 May 2004 22:18:09 +0000

Found guilty today…

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 21 May 2004 15:39:45 +0000

Recent news from the Financial Times posted on Friday: “Crispin Blunt, a British opposition MP who has just returned from Iraq, however, described the preparations for the handover on July 1 as a ‘complete shambles’. “The former soldier and Conservative MP described the US approach to occupation as little more than ‘a campaign to intimidate the Iraqi people’. “He said that UK troops in Iraq did not yet know what their status would be once the new interim government took over on July 1. “’We are seeing the collapse of American policy,’ he told BBC radio’s Today programme.”

By: Barry

Barry — Fri, 21 May 2004 15:13:39 +0000

Awwwwwwwwwwwww, mm, you know that you are supposed to wait until at least comment #5 before you start blaming Clinton. Excuse me, the Evul Librul Klintooooon.

By: a lesser mongbat

a lesser mongbat — Fri, 21 May 2004 14:02:16 +0000

This sort of mental situation has been repeatedly documented in stories of war. To a modern American, what comes to mind first is the Vietnam experience, with individuals who went to a war overseas coming back as fundamentally changed creatures who could not reintegrate into normal life. Many people can relate a story of a relative or friend who was in a war and spent the rest of their life recovering. On the milder end of such things, my grandfather was a WW2 vet who saw action in many of the larger battles in the Pacific, and he slept with a .45 and a knife close at hand for the remainder of his life after the war. You sure didn’t want to get close to him when he was asleep. On more than one occasion, he nearly killed his cat, thinking in the half-awareness of dreams that it was a Japanese soldier when it jumped on his chest as he was sleeping. This mental cost of war is very real, and for those affected it is the end of a peaceful life and the beginning of perpetual paranoia. Sadly, it is a cost all too rarely accounted for in the calculations of war.

By: mm

mm — Fri, 21 May 2004 13:55:14 +0000

I guess ClintonWar, where you just drop bombs from 30,000 feet, is morally preferable.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Fri, 21 May 2004 10:04:47 +0000

All you really want to do in such an environment, said Sergeant Mejia, is “get out of there alive.” So soldiers will do things under that kind of extreme stress that they wouldn’t do otherwise. Very true, which is why I find arguments such as ‘I know such soldiers, etc. they are good boys, they would never do this kind of thing’ so tedious. This kind of assumption rests heavily on observations based only in a selected environment; when you move towards one where bullets start flying around things change quite rapidly and people have never ceased to surprise me in this regard – the oddest things happen, as those who you wouldn’t credit seriously turn out to demonstrate hidden reserves of courage and those whose training and record would lead you to expect more of them, crack under pressure. At the level of the individual and personal experience, war really isn’t just a continuation of politics; it has a real tendency to fuck you up.