Followup on Tal Afar

I opposed the war from the beginning, but nothing that has happened since has increased my opposition. You know that bad things will happen in wars, which is why you oppose them except as a last resort. (Abu Ghraib was probably avoidable, but Bush signalled his intention of doing that kind of thing very early, and people like Dershowitz egged him on.) The occupation is actually less messy than I expected.

The soldier’s response is typical of non-pacifists in the military who believe that their obligations must be honored. He knew from the start that he wouldn’t be able to pick and choose what he did once he was in. His opposition to the war presumably doesn’t rise to the level of believing that it’s a criminal war requiring opposition at any cost.

The use of material incentives, which are often rather paltry, to fill the military strikes me as problematic in the long run. People who gamble on no war are screwed when war does come.

Writing seems to be, in part, a knack. I have a young friend who did poorly in HS, has never been to college, and doesn’t read much, but he writes very well. Basically all you have to do is get him to drop some bad habits, such as wisecracks and cliches.

Well, if you’re a soldier with a gun and people are trying to kill you, you are liable to shoot. And if you are operating in an environment full of civilians, a lot of civilians are going to get killed.

I don’t think it’s Western superiority; I think it’s self-preservation.

What mill said. Every word.

No, sorry, deciding to fight wars for George Bush — or just signing up for the military hoping against reason that George Bush won’t put you into battle — is not morally equivalent to taking out student loans and working part-time. Many people manage the latter. My wife, for example.

And opposing war really has nothing to do with being middle class and tut-tutting what’s on a plasma screen. What a presumptive argument. It’s appalling that so many people find ways to come off like they’re more honest or pragmatic by offering rationales for why America must kick the shit out of some Third World country every few years. We don’t even try to imagine what could be done with the hundreds of billions of dollars and the hundreds of thousands of lives we devote to “defense” each year. That is to say, the military-industrial complex has us right where they want us.

A country full of scared people trying to act tough. Sad little cheerleaders.

I can’t stomach the argument of people who claim they are “really” in the military for some higher motive. Higher education? Right, there’s no other way to get through college. I suppose one could get a job, take out a loan …? Nah, let’s sign on to follow orders without question, even if those orders require us to kill strangers — then whine about how we had no “choice.” Why should I support the troops again?

Right, there’s no other way to get through college. I suppose one could get a job, take out a loan …? Nah, let’s sign on to follow orders without question, even if those orders require us to kill strangers — then whine about how we had no “choice.”

This attitude is not only annoying, but also quite ignorant. Federally subsidized student loans are very stingy these days, and as the letter-writer mentioned, not all students are eligible. Expensive, unsubsidized loans are not available in unlimited amounts, either, and college tuition is rising far faster than inflation.

Working one’s way through college is simply not the same option that it was two decades ago, and it is not an option that is available to everyone.

I think that the soldier’s assumption was that neither war nor the American military are essentially evil, but that this war is a bad one.

I kow someone who joined the military because his alternative was hoeing crops all his life.

Entering the military for school benefits is not “a higher motive”. Just a practical one. Enpirically it’s true that young people don’t fear death, but that doesn’t make it less weird. That’s why they wreck cars, rob banks, and dabble in heroin too. Entering the wartime military for the benefits does not seem rational to me except for the poorest of the poor.

Tina,
I don’t think that is an argument you want to make. The last 20 years have seen an incredible growth in the number of regional and community colleges. These schools offer accredited hours at far less cost than larger state schools. And there aren’t many states where can’t find a school that meets your needs at less than $100/hour. And if you can’t shoulder the burder of $100/hour loans, education just isn’t that important to you. I mean, come one, your getting a college education for less than an average car. And that is too expensive?

> Better they should become drug dealers or hookers, frankly.< Holy crap. The condescending tone of moral superiority in some of the comments here is unbelievable. A lot of us on the left dislike this type of attitude when we see it in right-wing writers (eg: Free Republic, The Corner, etc.) Why is it okay for us to take this tone? I don't mean to single out Philboid Studge - much of this thread is deeply depressing.

Jet,

Perhaps it’s a case of mistaken (cyber) identity, but aren’t you ( or weren’t you ) in favour of Operation Iraqi Freedom? If so, what did you think making the omelette was going to imply?

Of course, that this particular event was going to happen at that location at that time couldn’t have been predicted, but it was easy to predict that in the course of OIF, something like this was going to happen. Did you not accept that when you supported OIF?

If not, then you weren’t in favour of the war as it was most likely to be concretised, you were in favour of the war as it should have been concretised if only we lived in an ideal world.

If so, stand proud and tell us: ” This is worth it.”

The condescending tone of moral superiority in some of the comments here is unbelievable.

Mark,
atrocities have been committed in Iraq. A guy writes a letter defending his position in respect to his and his comrades participation in these atrocities. He explains but doesn’t show much regret; he’s doing it to eschew incarceration and enjoy the full benefits of a decent education. I think the ‘enjoy the full benefits of a decent education‘ part is a bit objectionable, wouldn’t you agree? Why would it be condescending to point it out?

Gosh, Mark. I don’t mind you singling me out, but it would have been nice to read some form of rebuttal at least, rather than just a tsk-tsk at the supposed “condescending tone of moral superiority.” Tell me how a gun-for-hire is morally superior to a prostitute, assuming the goals in either case is financial? I know drug dealers personally who do not sell to minors and are disconnected completely from organized crime. How are they worse than someone agreeing to kill other people because that’s the best way he can imagine paying for his education?

Why should we support the troops again?

It’s simply not fair to blame young people trying to preserve their own lives under fire for the consequences of Bush’s policies. The death of innocents is the entirely predictable consequence of “unleashing the dogs of war”; you can’t make the front line soldiers who are actually in the toughest position of all responsible for getting rid of all those consequences for you. THe morally culpable people are the leaders who got us into an unnecessary war and then horribly mismanaged it to boot. At the same time we can’t let “supporting the troops” stop us from highlighting the steady flow of atrocities like Tal Afar. They are the best way to help people see through the stupidity of the “hey, Saddam was bad, so war is good” arguments from the right.

As for joining the military…in the decade before Iraq the U.S. military had been used in lots of humanitarian interventions and justifiable/rational wars (e.g. Afghanistan). A young person might make a perfectly reasonable bet that this pattern would continue. Also, frankly I think it would be a very bad thing for the future of the left if only right-wing people went into the military. It’s a critical social institution, we need people on our side who understand it well.

So I support that kid, although I hope he thinks long and hard (and ethically) about the reality of what he is seeing in Iraq. Beyond just what he has to do to preserve his own skin.

Killing the parents in the Tal Afar incident was not an “atrocity,” if by that abb1 has the usual meaing of moral blame attaching to the soldiers.

It was a horrible, haunting example of the FUBAR kind of shit that happens every week in any war. Which is why decent governments don’t start wars unless they have to. Which is why the U.S.’s government is not a decent one.

But to seriously suggest that what the soldiers did, on the facts we have, was wrong, is contemptible. And I write as someone permanently haunted by the little just-orphaned boy in those photographs, one of thousands of children we’ve orphaned over there, in our bogus war. It’s not the soldiers’ fault, and I really wish that every commenter on this thread who thinks otherwise could be drafted into street duty in Mosul.

The guy says that he is completely opposed to the war in Iraq. I take it as that as far as he is concerned, being there and killing people there is unjustified in general.

I don’t have a problem with him staying there to avoid incarceration. I don’t have a problem with him trying to do whatever he needs to do to get out of there alive. I would do the same.

But to do it to enjoy the full benefits of a decent education – that is: not enlisting back in 2001 in order to enjoy the benefits, but being there now in order to enjoy the benefits – I find a bit unseemly.

Is this really so arrogant on my part?

“Events like this happen in war zones even when everybody follows the rules —- “

That’s the hear tof the matter right there. War always involves unintended consequences, usually bad ones. I don’t think one can blame the individual soldiers in an incident like that’; if you feel your life and the lives of your comrades are in danger you have to act. But even if everyone (and I’d be surprised if everyone does) in such situations waits until the last possible moment, and does all they can to avoid hurting innocents it is inevitable that sometimes they will guess wrong and kill the innocent.

That’s why it should always be viewed as the last, desperate resort and not as a useful policy tool. This is what the war fans don’t seem to appreciate. War always creates tragedies, no matter how good the intentions or how noble the cause. To enter into a war which is not absolutely unavoidable is a terrible crime.

>No, sorry, deciding to fight wars for George Bush

I’m sorry, but I almost *voted* for George W. Bush. And I can’t imagine the the direction, magnitude and number of, as Joel Turnipseed put it, “moral vectors” this guy has to deal with.

Our strength and weakness as liberals (as opposed to Leftists)is our habit of never being 100% convinced of and absolute truth. If I was this kid, I see me arriving at exactly the same state he is in – putting down my gun has serious moral implications too. Start with breaking the mutual “got your back” bond with your comrades, and go to the point of “what if I’m wrong, or what if this war was wrong but we can’t turn back” &etc.

Kerry was written up for 20 kills in ‘Nam and he came back and helped (or singlehandedly if you can believe the wingnut fantasies) put paid to the whole adventure. If he had just spent his time there avoiding combat he could never have done that.

Joel, I do disagree with this strongly: “as witness the difficulties our correspondent in Iraq has in getting a fair hearing here among the wise crowd”.

This IS a “fair hearing” – because it presents many different interpretations and forces the participants to support or knock down each one. We won’t arrive, like a jury, at a final truth here, but this is the proper way to evaluate him. If the thread just consisted of your comments and my “attaboy” (because I agree with you 100%), what the hell would that be?

wesaferthemhealthier (uh, no doubt the latter, but the former is of some questioniable status),

I’m not looking to write a second book about war, but here’s what I think: war is wrong, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. Extraordinary circumstances happen, and so all societies train their young men (and, frequently, women) to be warriors. Warriors, once trained, are committed to their countries, each other, and to their own conception of themselves as warriors (to name just three of many other constituents). Not only are they committed to these things, they are part of them (I take a very deep view of Aristotle’s “politikon zoon” – and the attendant “body politic,” the best exemplar of which relation was Socrates’ sacrifice in the Apology). Which is to say, we not only wear the uniform of our country, but the country wears us.

This being the case, each act of war is incredibly complicated, and each atrocity of war carries in its anguish many moral tensions. Blame exists, unquestionably, but that blame is shared by several corporate organisms of which we are part (including those whose wronging ascribes us that blame). To tease apart the specifics is to tease apart both society and the self… and should be done w/greatest generosity & imagination possible if we want to avoid becoming horrible charicatures and, to the extent that we destroy the framework for what makes a good life good, destructive monsters ourselves.

(on preview: chris — of course, should have said, “among some of us here.”)

Philboid Studge pulled this out of his ass: “Somewhere in the area of 100,000 innocent Iraqi citizens have died at the hands of American soldiers.”

Your propoganda is lame. That 100,000 number wasn’t attributed to just US soldiers. That was part of a range of total estimated civilian casulties. And since it is the insurgents who are going out of their way to target civilians, you’d be hard pressed to claim American Soldiers were even responsible for a majority. So, yes, your bullshit was detected.

A different Chris: people are putting this serviceman down as the moral equivalent of a ‘hooker or a drug dealer’ (philboid), putting words into his mouth (abb1): I think they’ve behaved disgracefully. My apologies and respect to the guy himself, if he reads this.

Joel: I think that UK pay is a bit higher, but US benefits (food, living quarters, etc) are incomparably better. There is no UK equivalent to the cheap goods that you get in PXs in the US bases: just NAAFI shops where you get a small range of goods (chiefly chocolate and an immense quantity of porn) at pretty much the same prices you would pay in a civilian shop. The worst food I have ever eaten in my life was at Catterick School of Infantry. From what I’ve seen, the British Army does quite a good job of looking after its long-service NCOs when they retire, but a bad job of setting something up for the poorly-educated 21-year-olds who leave it every year. Do you think that the GI bill works well for those US servicemen who leave after a few years? Or is it like the UK- guys with technical qualifications get good civvy jobs, infantrymen have big problems?

Philboid, you’re a liar and a moron:The Lancet survey, which has been extensively debated here, did not come close to saying ‘100,000 innocent Iraqi citizens have died at the hands of American soldiers’.The 100,000 figure is for likely excess deaths, including casualties from all sources plus rises in the death rate from disease, medicine and electricity shortages, etc.

“They’re just following orders,” though, right? Hmm…Where have we heard that before?’Okay, Philboid, anyone who wears or has worn military uniform is Eichmann, since, after all, we ‘only obey orders’. Everyone who disagrees with you, everyone whom you dislike, is a Nazi. Nazi, nazi, nazi. If idiots like you, and Ken Livingstone, and the joke President of Ireland- the professional victim Mary McAleese- have their way, we may as well all agree that the use of Nazism as a source of historical reference is entirely worthless.

You know, abb1, philboid, if some guy writes a letter to say that he’s fighting, not by choice, in a guerilla war in which civilians are routinely killed as an inevitable consequence of insurgent tactics, and that he deals with it by doing everything he can not to kill civilians short of the point where he’s likely to be killed himself—well, my first reaction is not to shout, You monster! at him.

I loathe this war—any war—about as much as anybody. One of the many reasons I loathe it is that it places fundamentally decent people in positions in which self-preservation forces them to do awful things—and encourages by reaction a moral degeneration in them, simply out of the need to maintain psychological integrity by not facing up to the full measure of what they’ve done. This writer, thank God, seems to have escaped that moral degeneration, so far, and for that one has to wish him the best.

The question of whether, and how, soldiers deserve blame is in many respects (short of the deliberate commission of war crimes) a false one, anyway. Ask yourselves the political question: Do you want this correspondent, and the others in the military like him, on your side or not? It may give you a fine glow of self-righteousness to condemn him: but a genuinely Left response to this letter would note the class issues it raises (funny how the blame-the-troops “Left” feel entitled to declare those issues nugatory) and find a way, simply as a practical matter, to be in solidarity with the guy.

Abb1, you wrote: ‘A guy writes a letter defending his position in respect to his and his comrades participation in these atrocities.’

There is not one (1) sentence, phrase or word in the letter from the serviceman in Iraq in which he says that he or his comrades have ‘participat(ed) in these atrocities’. You put words into his mouth. Clear enough for you?

Joel, my main point was that Abb1 gave a grossly inaccurate summary when he said ‘‘A guy writes a letter defending his position in respect to his and his comrades participation in these atrocities.’ The guy did indeed offer a defence of the Tal Afar shootings, as probably justified (like him, I’d say they were justified, if horrible, if the troops did everything they could to stop an oncoming vehicle). There is no conceivable way that the guy said he or his mates had ‘participated in these (or any) atrocities’. That was flat-out misrepresentation by Abb1.

OK, Joel, whatever. He didn’t have to mention the benefits of a decent education as a reason, and that’s the only line I have a problem with. Not a big deal, forget it.

The soldier who wrote the letter seems to be an extremely diligent, competent, humane, and respectable human being. I’m not questioning any of that. I believe that most soldiers are, in fact, very good people. But I don’t support the fact that my country now spends about $421 billion a year, plus whatever this war costs on top of that, to turn these fine people into the type of casualty described by Joel Turnipseed.

http://tinyurl.com/636wh

Joel wrote:

it takes generosity to understand how much any act of war destroys the actor as well as those acted upon.

Sorry if it’s not clear, but this is precisely what I try to understand. It’s what I find incredibly frustrating about our country’s insistence that the Soldier represents the unquestionable epitome of manhood, decency, and the American way. Yes, we need a military, but will anyone who’s arguing against me agree that the American military has grown far beyond the level that every other country spends to defend themselves against outside aggression? Last I checked, our military spending amounts to about what the rest of the world spends, combined. That’s quite simply out of control.

Yes, I know people whose best choice in life has been to enter the military. My father, for example. The thing is, he went to great lengths to disabuse me of the all-pervading notion that becoming a soldier is the most fine and noble thing a young person can do. And now as a middle-aged person, I firmly believe he was right. That’s right, he was a soldier, and in American society nobody questions a soldier, right?

I’ll hold my viewpoint in the face of people like “jet” who think my “kung-fu is weak.” Whatever you say, my friend. Just keep ridiculing all voices of dissent and keep encouraging those young people to “be all that they can be” and join the “Army of One.” They are the sacred cows of American society whose motives and actions must never be questioned. It will be so romantic and noble when they give it all up to become the next “destroyed actor.”

First, to the people who whine that this soldier shouldn’t be in Iraq: It wasn’t his choice. It was your choice. Now I hear you saying, “But I didn’t send him to Iraq!”. Yes you did. Yes you did. You did, and I did, and your neighbor did, all of us did. We are pathetic, overfed, lazy, jerks who pound on keyboards and think that means something, but not a single one of us has the guts to put our bodies on the line to end this war. We could end this war, all of us, if we had the guts. If 2,000,000 people descended on Washington D.C., and stood in the streets around the White House, just stood there, day after day, week after week, month after month, if after each person gets beat down by a cop gets replaced by another person, this war would end. This war would end. The people of America will not hold for Americans being shot down in cold blood in the streets by soldiers in tanks. But we don’t have the courage. We don’t have the courage of Ukrainians who stood out in the streets in cold and snow to protest a stolen election. We don’t have the courage of the Serbians who braved death every day to protest the Butcher of the Balkans until the day he was forced to leave. We’re a bunch of apathetic fools who make brave sounds but are, in the end, a bunch of gutless cowards, afraid to risk all for what we know is right. And we get the nation we deserve.

If you are going to look for the person responsible for atrocities in Iraq, look in the mirror.

But you won’t. I know you won’t. Because other than a few moments of utter honesty, I don’t either. So we blame the victims. So we blame the victims. We are truly pathetic.

– Badtux the Irate Penguin

Shorter Donald Johnson: The Lancet study does indeed prove that US troops may have killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians, so long as one entirely ignores what the authors of the study actually said about Fallujah and attributes to them the desire to reach entirely false conclusions.

Shorter Abb1: Did I insult a young man in Iraq who is behaving bravely and honourably? Not a big deal, forget it. If I feel so morally superior to everyone, it’s because I hold myself to such high standards.

A chap called John Allen Paulos in his book Once Upon A Number makes the throw away comment: “freedom of expression should not be measured by how likely the average person is to be silenced but, by how likely someone with something to say is.”

If this is the case, isn’t the story at the beginning of this thread just a distraction?

Well, the way I see it, I am criticizing a motive/rationalization expressed in the letter and you are defending an imaginary person against my criticism by attacking me and without addressing the substance of my criticism.

So, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I am indeed an arrogant SOB. So what? Do I have a point or not?

Abb1:
Sorry, I don’t think you have a point. Yes, this soldier’s statement may have been poorly worded. And, yes, his motives for serving in the military may or may not be construed as selfish. But you fail to give this soldier the benefit of a doubt under circumstances that are very trying. He’s on the front line — where suicide bombers look like civilians — heck, they are civilians. No matter how unjust and FUBARed this Iraq debacle is, you are criticizing his motives, when he is the one who has to make split-second life-or-death decisions on a daily basis. I think you need to look within yourself at your own moral compass if you can’t find compassion for both the soldiers AND the victims in this incident.