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Mustt_mustt
Citizen
Username: Mustt_mustt
Post Number: 166
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 11:31 am: | 
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Tom,
I did read that Packer piece in the New Yorker but the problem I had with it was that he never quite defines the American version of 'democracy.' And we can agree in most ways that there are serious flaws with the system of political governance. The Republic practicing democracy is a pretty ugly picuture! So what are the benefits of exporting this version at gunpoint, a pre-emptive act of imposing a flawed democratic model that simultaneously violates the sovereignty of the other; an act that carries great violence and suffering with it.
There are folks on this thread who think that it's a perfect model and are even willing to wage a war to clone it in other parts of the world.And guess who is in charge of "spreading democracy?" Yes, it's the CIA and the military. What an irony?
Michael Janay's clinical or should I say surgical description of how the mistakes in Iraq can better translate into strategies for possibly attacking Iran shows how the neocons have hijacked the democracy project. War is waged to "spread democracy and freedom." Apparently the Ad Council (which made the "I am an American" ad) came up with the line that the Bush Administration should constantly sell freedom and democracy as reasons for going to war. Looks like it worked with some. Bush and neocons (the guys who think like Janay in clinical terms) have followed it with a religous zeal, to the extent that they have "democratically" isolated themselves from the rest of the world. They are attempting to create "a unilateralist democracy," whose mission is to spread democracy and see freedom march on, even as thousands of human beings are being killed along the way. (I don't even to flashback to Vietnam or Latin America now). The cold logic of these people (not to forget Kissinger and McNamara) goes that the price of inflicting pain and suffering on another people is the only means to the end goal of 'violently inculcating' democracy in other parts of the world. Ther strategy is a perfect blend of neo-conservative ideology and realist politics. And the scary thing is that these guys talk about it in an almost nonchalant fashion over dinner.
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cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 2917
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 5:13 pm: |
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How does one spread democracy, must_must? Is it where suddenly the hierarchy becomes so enamored of the idea that they voluntarily give up their power. Where did that happen?
When popular calls for democracy begin to swell and the entrenched tyrant uses police action often with the barrel of a gun (like the democracy protests in Saudi Arabia that were effectively squelched recently, or pick previous pro-tyranny slaughters), at some point those seeking freedom need to use the barrel of a gun. We used one on behalf of the Albanians in Kosovo. We financed guns on behalf of non-communists in Central America, and communism hasn't made a comeback. When people are free, it's very rare they choose to end that arrangement of their own will. We didn't allow Muslims to defend themselves in Bosnia, so we used the gun for them. Jeez -- the UN is shooting people in Haiti right now. Why not give up there too and say 'ya know, some people just can't handle freedom.'
This democracy-at-the-barrel-of-a-gun cliche is getting real tiresome. Aside from the collapse of the Soviet Union which was done peacefully I guess you could say -- and blow off millions starved, tortured or shot and the costs we incurred in our efforts to bury the Soviet Union militarily -- changes from tyranny to democracy end up with someone getting killed.
It's like you can't see how much bigger this whole thing is than just Iraq. Or just the Middle East. Tyranny doesn't just collapse of it's own weight. It needs to be pushed by someone. If no one pushes, people just continue to die at the hands of tyrants, and it seems you're intimating that death is death -- be it at the hand of the US or at the hand of (name despot here).
Freedom came at the barrel of a gun right here in the US. Maybe since you've enjoyed it so long, it's no big deal to you. Eastern Europe just has rookie enthusiasm I guess. |
Iwant2 KeepMyJob
Citizen
Username: Fastfusion
Post Number: 7
Registered: 12-2004
| | Posted on Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 6:56 pm: |
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I would rather fight evil in it's back yard than my back yard. It is so simple to see what we are doing.
I am so glad to live in the most powerful nation on the planet. There are no bullets coming through my windows. We must be doing something right for the last 200 years..... |
tulip
Citizen
Username: Braveheart
Post Number: 1784
Registered: 3-2004
| | Posted on Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 7:42 pm: |
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Hmmm..."Freedom came at the barrel of a gun right here in the US" cjc ... for the Native Americans, Africans? Do the ends justify the means always? |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 2921
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 7:45 pm: |
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Right, tulip. I forgot. The important thing to remember also is the Indians never slaughtered each other to gain territory or 'peace' from a tribe that threatened them. And I loved Shaka Zulu on TBS. |
tulip
Citizen
Username: Braveheart
Post Number: 1785
Registered: 3-2004
| | Posted on Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 7:50 pm: |
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Go to university and study anthropology and history as I did for seven years, cjc. Now you're not only saying that the ends justify the means, but that war justifies itself, and one wrong justifies another. Just where do you imagine this war breeding war ends, cjc? |
tulip
Citizen
Username: Braveheart
Post Number: 1786
Registered: 3-2004
| | Posted on Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 7:52 pm: |
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cjc: You and Michael are the ones seeing the world from a Shaka Zulu perspective, that is, good vs. evil, civilized vs. uncivilized, white vs. black. Think it over again.
And another thing, if you studied world cultures, both preliterate and literate, cjc, you would learn that many "tribal" and preliterate societies have had, and still have, elaborate means for conflict resolution, dispute settlements, and social cohesion. If you don't know about these, I suggest you try to get hold of some cross cultural studies and really get started... |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 2922
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 8:11 pm: |
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I'm all for conflict resolution, tulip, provided the person I'm in conflict with is also up for conflict resolution where we can sit around and calmly reach an agreement. If the other party fails that, ahd given no other recourse except defeat, slavery, tyranny or similar ends, my means is to kick the c--p out of him. Just as my Indian and Aftican brothers did long, long ago. |
tulip
Citizen
Username: Braveheart
Post Number: 1787
Registered: 3-2004
| | Posted on Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 8:14 pm: |
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Indeed. Being "up" for conflict resolution requires shrewd, intelligent negotiating skills, a keen knowledge of what is to be gained, what can be sacrificed. This level of subtlety and planning may be too difficult for some, hence, descent into warfare. |
Tom Reingold
Supporter
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 4804
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 11:55 pm: |
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cjc, please read the Packer piece in the New Yorker and tell us what you think of it.
Iwant2KeepMyJob, I guess you are saying that might makes right. If you look at things that way, it is self-fulfilling. |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 2923
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, December 19, 2004 - 10:33 am: |
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Packer wishes that Iraq had more in common with the Ukraine. It's nice that he says they're apples and oranges in a fruitbasket of efforts at democracy. OK fine. Me too. I take issue with his nuanced characterization of an organized, peaceful transition to democracy there. It was slow and organized if you just look at recent history -- what he calls a 3-4 year period of rolling democratic movements, but the overall millions of dead over decades in all of the former Soviet Union doesn't fit that picture.
And yes, simply having a war doesn't necessarily get you democracy. Yes, they have to grow over time, just as we did. When is Haiti going to be 'ready'? Shall we pull out until they are?. He gives Afghanistan short shrift. Didn't seem to prefer the way it was hammered out. Not home-grown enough, but things don't always go according to 'international standards' whatever THAT is. Would the US revolution fit international standards? Only 1/3 of the population wanted to separate from the crown, after all. Afghanistan is no small success, by the way.
And while there are problems in Iraq, it is not at all descending or looking like civil war there as Packer says in his article. It's just not, no matter how many times critics look (hopefully?) for it. Kurds aren't marching against Shia en masse, or Sunnis as a people against anyone else. |
Montagnard
Citizen
Username: Montagnard
Post Number: 1355
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, December 19, 2004 - 1:28 pm: |
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The Vietnamese eventually won their freedom from the United States, but only after millions of them had been killed or crippled for life.
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tulip
Citizen
Username: Braveheart
Post Number: 1790
Registered: 3-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, December 19, 2004 - 3:29 pm: |
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Would the US revolution fit international standards? Only 1/3 of the population wanted to separate from the crown, after all.
Comparing any contemporary military conflict to the American Revolution is a risky business. The American Revolution did not occur in a time and place when war could escalate to the point of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and otherwise tearing apart the human race. Nor did it take place in the kind of powder keg environment that is today's Middle East. It was a war of liberation, not agreed to by all concerned, that's true. Although it had many victims, it didn't really have the same degree of "collateral damage" possible, compared to the Iraq War. |
Straw's world
Citizen
Username: Strawberry
Post Number: 4155
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Sunday, December 19, 2004 - 4:43 pm: |
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Tulip,
As usual, your argument makes no sense. You seem to say that no wars can be fought today because of the presence of deadly weapons.
However, if for some reason a war has to be fought to stop those deadly weapons from being used, you have yet to ever clarify what to do in that situation. Since you can't fight a war, you obviously can't protect yourself from the weapons you fear. Any thoughts on the subject?
What you've pretty much indicated is you feel wars should never be fought period..Thanks for the suggestion. Let's be sure to remind the terrorists. Doubt they'll take your advise though.
Thank god liberals have nothing do do with the military decisions being made today by the United States of America. |
tulip
Citizen
Username: Braveheart
Post Number: 1794
Registered: 3-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, December 19, 2004 - 4:57 pm: |
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You seem to say that no wars can be fought today because of the presence of deadly weapons.
I am saying that wars being fought today have a different potential for universal deadly outcome than wars fought before nuclear weapons were invented. There's more at stake when you are unsettling an entire region of already unstable nations, poised for defensive combat. I am saying, we have to look before we leap into wars with nation-states that could fall in line against us, and have access to weapons of mass destruction. I am saying this is not the thirteen colonies fighting a specific battle against a specific foe, within a defined region, and with a defined goal. We are fighting a general war, with an undefined goal, in an undefined region, with disaster for all around the corner. Pardon my hyperbole, but you, straw, need to see the forest for the trees. It's just too risky right now to say that the Iraqi war is in any way as necessary, as inevitable, or as just, as was either the American Revolution, or World War II, despite the latter's vast implications for destruction around the world.
However, if for some reason a war has to be fought to stop those deadly weapons from being used, you have yet to ever clarify what to do in that situation,
I am saying that the inevitable outcome of escalation in the environment of this war is far more deadly and unversally dangerous than any previously. I am saying that ANYTHING that can be done other than outright military conflict, not just with Iraq, but (and here's the current list as I know it) with Syria, Iran, North Korea, or any other nation, should be tried, and not just by one leader or another, but by a joint group of the best leaders, thinkers, planners, and international statesmen and women that we have available to us.
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Iwant2 KeepMyJob
Citizen
Username: Fastfusion
Post Number: 12
Registered: 12-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, December 19, 2004 - 4:59 pm: |
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Tom R "Iwant2KeepMyJob, I guess you are saying that might makes right. If you look at things that way, it is self-fulfilling."
No. An absolute conviction to eliminate an evil ruler who degrades and murders his people. I didn't care about WMD (because he himself was one) so much as people being subject to unimaginable torture and brutality. The UN failed us; someone needed to remove the barbarian.
I teach my children that WAR is the last resort. I have shown them the brutality of conflicts that end in a war. I have taught them to insist that all nuclear and biochemical weapons be destroyed in their future. I have also taught them how to fight when they are threatened by a dangerous adversary. And how to make that fight decisive and permanent so it will not happen again.
What I think we need to do now is to get back to the principle idea that our soldiers lives come before Iraqi lives. We must let the casualties happen on the enemy’s side of this conflict and at all costs to all others, protect the lives of our soldiers. I feel just one American Soldiers life is worth more than all of the Iraqis lives totaled. I wish with all my heart that everyone would put down their guns and RPG's and sit down and have a coffee and discuss a peaceful end to this. But that will NEVER happen when we are fighting single minded fanatical genetic defects.
All of this comes from our support of Israel. Who our enemies have sworn to destroy. Which will never happen as long as the USA is willing to support our friends in the Middle East?
I have a 17 yr old son just itching to join the USMC, and my convictions still stand firm.
Jeeshhh, I talk a lot……..I’ll try to be quiet for a while…….take after my mother…
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Montagnard
Citizen
Username: Montagnard
Post Number: 1357
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, December 19, 2004 - 8:52 pm: |
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It's the oil, my friend. Oil brings out the moral fervor in Presidents and ordinary folk too.
BTW, your son's enthusiasm is deeply appreciated in the boardrooms of the nation's energy companies.
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Rastro
Citizen
Username: Rastro
Post Number: 515
Registered: 5-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, December 19, 2004 - 10:09 pm: |
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IWant... Just to play devil's advocate...
quote: An absolute conviction to eliminate an evil ruler who degrades and murders his people. I didn't care about WMD (because he himself was one) so much as people being subject to unimaginable torture and brutality. The UN failed us; someone needed to remove the barbarian.
I assume this mean you would agree to our invading half of Africa, North Korea, Cuba, and our liberation of Tibet and East Timor.
quote:What I think we need to do now is to get back to the principle idea that our soldiers lives come before Iraqi lives. We must let the casualties happen on the enemy’s side of this conflict and at all costs to all others, protect the lives of our soldiers. I feel just one American Soldiers life is worth more than all of the Iraqis lives totaled.
You are lumping together the insurgents with the people that we are there to supposedly liberate - including those fighting along side our soldiers. If a single US soldier's life is worth more than all the Iraqis, you should be shouting to get us out of there, because you can be guaranteed that for any day we are there, at least one US soldier will die. If there lives aren't worth a single US soldier's life, how could their freedom be?
We are not fighting against Iraq. The war is IN Iraq, but against an insurgency. And our administration won't even call it a war.}
But don't be quiet. You have as much right and reason to "speak" here as the rest of us, and a new voice can be refreshing. |
Mustt_mustt
Citizen
Username: Mustt_mustt
Post Number: 167
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Monday, December 20, 2004 - 8:41 am: |
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December 16, 2004
www.counterpunch.org
Getting in Touch with Your Inner Terrorist
How We Became Barbarians
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
People can get astonishingly sensitive when they discuss moral issues.
Someone who can scarf popcorn all through *both* Kill Bills will go hoarse about the killing of innocents in Israel or Iraq or anywhere suitably distant. Someone who'd cheer a B-52 strike on Baghdad will murmur feelingly about the perfect little hands of a second trimester fetus. And everyone hates terrorism with a passion because it victimizes innocent people: that's so outrageous!
Really the claptrap about terrorism has gone far enough. Brutes should at least recognize their own brutality. None of us, left, right, or center, are all that bothered about the deliberate killing of innocents. Virtually none of us think it's that big a deal to tear the flesh off a child.
I'm not being cynical. There are some things that most people genuinely, sincerely abhor, important things like genocide and torture. There has been real progress on these fronts. That's just why we should notice that, on the matter of ripping the flesh off children, we have regressed. We weren't always so vicious; at least we tried not to be. Perhaps we will try again--but not until we realize how low we have sunk.
A little history might help.
The slaughter of innocent civilians has deep roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Bible is clear about this. In 1 Samuel 15:3, God says to Saul: "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and •••." (Saul gets into hot water with God for sparing the king and some livestock.) David, beloved of God, was no sissy about conquest: "And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon." (2 Samuel 12:31)
But sometime during the wars of religion in Europe (from 1618 to a bit after 1648), people started to think this was not so great. In 1625, Hugo Grotius' The Law of War and Peace began to set different standards: Grotius ingeniously argued that the Hebrews' practices, being a response to the direct command of God in a particular case, could not be held as a model for human decisions in wartime. Instead he suggested that "Though there may be circumstances, in which absolute justice will not condemn the sacrifice of lives in war, yet humanity will require that the greatest precaution should be used against involving the innocent in danger, except in cases of extreme urgency and utility." (III.11.8)
The phrasing is echoed in the pieties of today's general staffs. The practitioners of 'collateral damage' love to tell you that they take "the greatest precaution ...against involving the innocent in danger".
But when? in "cases of extreme urgency and utility"? or in cases not at all urgent, and of dubious utility? Grotius was most concerned, of course, about the lives of non-combatants, especially the aged, women, and children. What are our conventions and practices about taking innocent life?
From Grotius' time until sometime after the First World War, there was a gradual, unsteady progress away from killing innocent civilians. Armies fought on battlefields; battlefields were more or less unpopulated. Navies fought on the ocean. Soldiers foraging for food and fuel might kill civilians, but this wasn't considered acceptable.
Even great colonial atrocities like King Leopold's rape of the Congo--not exactly warfare--were usually concealed. The general idea, the official story, was that civilians deserved humane treatment. If the notion that their destruction should be an essential and typical part of warfare was not explicitly rejected, it was also never entertained.
Wars were to be fought by and against soldiers.
The official story started to change with the introduction--even with the contemplation--of air power. H.G. Well's The War in the Air (1908) predicted that Zeppelins would be used to bomb civilian populations and break their morale. The Germans tried this in World War I, when the tactic was so novel that the Imperial War Museum now comments that the raids "put civilians in the front line for the first time". (http://london.iwm.org.uk/)
These raids signaled a decay in the attempt to humanize warfare, but they did not quite succeed in changing ideas about destroying civilians. The world was shocked when, in 1937, Nazi aircraft dropped 100,000 pounds of bombs on the Spanish town of Guernica, killing 1,500 people, about a third of the population. This tender-heartedness did not survive the Second World War.
Britain and the US decided that maybe bombing civilian populations into despondency wasn't such a bad idea. They bombed with enthusiasm. Whether or not the casualty counts in Hamburg and Dresden have been exaggerated, no one denies that innocent civilians were in fact targeted. This objective is implicit in the World War II distinction between 'strategic bombings', which aimed to destroy defense industries and other military-related objectives, and 'saturation bombings', intended to level whole cities. This was a decisive and fateful step away from Grotius' not wholly unsuccessful attempts to humanize war.
The brutalization of attitudes towards attacks on civilians was and is quite universal. We may deplore some such attacks, but not all of them. We disagree, not about whether they are ever legitimate, but rather about whether they should be blatant. Some think it's ok to kill civilians as long as they're not really your target. Others think that they can be all or part of your target. It's the difference between dropping bombs you know will kill civilians and dropping bombs to kill civilians.
It's not a very important disagreement and it's not very important to those involved. The victims' suffering is just as great in either case, and the perpetrators seem able to live with their deeds. Even those who moralize about saturation bombings don't seem too upset. Left-wing and liberal political writers sometimes speak of the stench of burning flesh in Dresden; they themselves give off more than a whiff of bad faith.
The bombing of Dresden has been in the public eye at least since Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five was published in 1969. This was twenty-four years after the event, a time-span not considered too long for punishing child molesters. If attack was so criminal, where were the loud calls for the prosecution of those responsible? Why didn't we hear demands for a truth commission or day of atonement to commemorate the event? Why has this crime evolved into nothing more than a shocker for occasional use in polemics about something else? Only Nazi sympathizers have crusaded to bring the perpetrators to justice; others have kept their scruples to a murmur or a snide remark.
The plain truth is that there is, in our culture, no serious opposition to deliberate, direct mass killings of civilians. The enemy, of course, must not attack innocents. Our side must not do so if the attacks are ineffective or superfluous. But no one says: even if these attacks saved thousands of our soldiers' lives, we must renounce them. And silence speaks volumes here: what we ignore, we permit.
Suppose, though, that some of us do genuinely abhor even our own side's direct attacks on civilians. What then of indirect attacks, like the strategic bombings commonplace in World War II? Some have, with pointless indignation, questioned their effectiveness--as if anyone would deny that ineffective attacks are morally undesirable. These condemnations are just a way of avoiding the real issue: what about effective ones? The morality of *effective* strategic bombing in a justified war has never been questioned except by tiny minorities of hard-core pacifists. It apparently hasn't occurred to anyone else that there might be something wrong with such tactics. The strategic air strikes of World War II taught us to defend them with a then-unnamed excuse, 'collateral damage'.
Before the excuse had a name, it had universal acceptance. This cannot be understressed. Virtually everyone, right and left, East and West, North and South, Christian and Muslim, male and female, young and old, accepts that civilians, including innocent children, should be blown apart or horribly mutilated for the rest of their awful lives in the name of military convenience. To put it another way, virtually everyone approves of some wars. Virtually no one calls for an end to the use of air power in warfare--what? no strikes against munitions factories, shipyards, transportation links, war-related government buildings? As long as we approve of the war itself, such tactics raise hardly a ripple of doubt, let alone protest. Yet we all know with moral certainty, all of us, that innocent civilians, including children, will be killed in strategic air strikes. So we all accept that this should happen.
Do we think it should happen only in cases of what Grotius called "extreme urgency and utility"? No, not at all. Using air power against strategic targets is just something you do in warfare. It's standard procedure. So the general strategy which is known to mutilate civilians isn't even up for discussion. As for the specific decisions, no one suggests you need a really compelling reason to mount such attacks No one suggests that the decision to attack such targets is normally a choice between victory and defeat. It's not as if someone says: we'll lose unless we bomb this munitions complex. At both levels of decision-making, there is no anguished deliberation, and no good reason is required. A very mediocre reason will do fine. That's all we require for the killing of innocent civilians. When the US or Israel offers the excuse of collateral damage, it's not just their excuse. Whoever we are, it's our excuse too, and it's a bad one.
The sleight of hand in the collateral damage excuse comes from obliterating the distinction between the expected and the unexpected.
Unexpected collateral damage is a true accident. It is also the exception, not the rule, as an example will make clear. Suppose some naval battle in which a destroyer is sunk in shallow water. After the fighting is over, divers inspect the vessel and are horrified to discover it carried several dozen civilians--children, perhaps--who were being transported to safe exile in a nonbelligerent country. This is *unexpected* collateral damage: no one imagined, and no one should have imagined, this terrible but also terribly unusual circumstance.
But when the Americans or Israelis speak of collateral damage, they are not speaking of the unexpected kind. On the contrary they know with certainty--the commanders, the soldiers, the decision-makers--that civilians are in the firing line, and will be killed. To suppose, for example, that the attack on Iraq would not produce the death of innocent civilians would have been frivolous. This is *expected* collateral damage, innocent deaths that no reasonable person could fail to expect.
The distinction matters because the expected sort of collateral damage is, in ordinary contexts, criminal. Suppose, for example, Joanne decides she wants to kill Jack by running him over in her Nissan Pathfinder. She knows he goes to a movie at the Paramount every Friday night. She plans to drive into that movie line at high speed. She will hit him and, as she knows full well, some of the people standing behind and in front of him. She also knows full well that, when she hits them, they will be killed. She executes her plan. Well, guess what? She is guilty of homicide, not only of Jack, but of anyone else she kills. (Indeed, even if she were exonerated of homicide against Jack--perhaps he had abused her--she would not be exonerated of homicide against the other moviegoers.) It's literally collateral damage, but it's not accidental. Both morally and legally, it counts as deliberate, and that's enough: desire to kill is not a necessary condition of murder.
We all, all of us, approve of such murders, whether of adults or children. We approve some wars, past, present or future. We approve of the 'strategic' use of air power (and artillery) in a justified war to attain military objectives. When we do so, we also approve of dropping bombs when it is known they will kill innocent civilians.
This is expected collateral damage, which is murder. We approve of that. And since the killing of innocent civilians is a war crime, we have no principled objection to war crimes, either. We love to formulate the laws of war, but our morality--not just our view of what is expedient--condones their violation.
What then? First, though terrorism may, for all I know, be outrageous and immoral, our objection to it is also outrageous: where do child-murderers like us get the nerve? We cannot help feeling that, damn it all, our intentions matter, and we don't intend to kill children the way a terrorist does. It's true that we intend to kill children in a somewhat different way, but it makes no moral difference. Our intentions are not innocent enough, and they do not matter enough, to make us any better than terrorists.
The tendency today, as the laws on murder demonstrate, is not to count good intentions as excuses, because the child ends up just as dead or mutilated regardless of what we intend. But it is not as if traditional morality would be significantly more indulgent in these cases. Christianity, which is where the older emphasis on intentions comes from, sometimes espouses doctrines like the 'double effect': if a doctor operates on a woman and knowingly causes the death of her unborn child, it is not sinful because the death of the child was intended only as an undesired consequence of the operation, not as its purpose. But we, or the Americans, or the Israelis, are not like the doctor. Neither high-level strategic decisions nor on-the-ground tactical decisions involving 'expected collateral damage' can appeal to some double effect argument.
High-level decisions to use strategic bombing are not made to attain some imminent, urgent goal, like saving a mother's life. One could almost say they are never made at all; the bombing is more like a reflex. The real decision is to go to war, usually in the name of some grand, vague, general objective, like fighting for freedom or democracy, or against fascism or oppression. When we decide to bomb factories, airports and rail junctions, we almost always do so to win, not because we think it's the only possible way to stop some Rwanda-like massacre.
We see ourselves as fighting for some good cause, but that, according to neo-Christian moralities of intention, is nothing but an arrogantly vague excuse. Most people who commit most atrocities think they're fighting for some good cause. This no more exonerates them than it does the child molester who just wants love, or the murderer who wants to right the wrongs done to his family.
Particular tactical decisions to use air power may show *some* sort of concern for saving human lives, but not the sort required by the 'double effect' excuse. Unlike the decision *not* to use air power, the attackers' decision to use it stems from concern, not for the lives of others, but for the lives of the attackers themselves. The doctor is concerned for another's life, not his own.
But suppose the attackers do want to save lives other than their own. Still their situation is not like the doctor's. They have a lot more room to maneuver.
If the doctor spares the child, he assures the death of the mother, and vice versa. He's not, in any practical sense, calculating risks. He is faced with a simple, stark decision, a choice between certainties. He is doing the only thing he can to avert the immediate and certain death of the woman lying before him.
The decision to use air strikes, on the other hand, is usually a choice involving many alternatives. Some mean a slower advance, some are less certain, some more expensive, some riskier--but they're there, and they introduce uncertainties. We don't genuinely resolve these uncertainties. We don't normally consider, much less weigh, all the viable alternatives. We therefore cannot be sure that air strikes are the best way to minimize the slaughter of innocents, or our losses. What's more, our confidence that air strikes will reduce the risk to our own troops is invariably much greater than our confidence that air strikes will reduce the risk to innocent civilians. Our military men use air power largely because they fear that otherwise they'll take considerably more casualties, and because they'd rather not test unproven alternatives.
At no level, then, is the use of strategic or tactical air attacks simply a desperate measure to spare civilian lives. By no stretch of the imagination can our situation be confused with the doctor's, nor can it square our actions with the Christian morality of intentions. Our military calculations center on victory, not compassion, and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous. Our intentions may not be as obviously savage as a terrorist's, but what they lack in savagery they make up in dishonesty or self-deception. Perhaps terrorism offends us so because it refuses to stumble through the labyrinth of excuses we have tried so hard to maintain.
What, then, is left to us, if we have become so cruel? We cannot say that two wrongs don't make a right, or that our hypocrisy doesn't justify others' savagery, because it is the very rules of morality that we have come to view differently. We really do believe that murdering innocents is, in the relevant cases, no sort of wrong at all. We cannot reproach others for terrorism, not because this would be hypocritical, but because it would be inconsistent. Our own standards allow what we might like to forbid.
But things are not so bad. They're fine, in fact. We should never have been pious about terrorism in the first place. We never really found it so atrocious after all. Nor was it terror that crossed some moral line; that was crossed when we became addicted to the convenience of air power. This will not change until some less cruel yet more efficient technology emerges. Until then we have no choice but to work within the abysmally low standards we have adopted.
Terror, by our own standards, isn't always wrong. Neither is the murder of innocent civilians, including children. Excoriating these practices is nothing more or less than a cynical or pointlessly moralistic diversion from any serious attempt to prevent them.
Such an attempt can't attack the practices themselves for the excellent reason that we have no moral basis for attacking them. To the extent that they can be prevented, it is only through appeals to self-interest, not to compassion or a level of decency we quite obviously lack.
Indeed our somewhat more effective attacks on torture and genocide probably owe much of their success to the fact that such atrocities, unlike killing children, rarely do much to serve the interests of their practitioners. Self-interest is, after all, one value we all sincerely espouse. What makes atrocities criminal, even for barbarians like ourselves, is when they go beyond what self-interest commands.
This is why Israeli and American atrocities are so much worse than Iraqi or Palestinian atrocities. The Iraqis fight viciously because they have to convince very thick-headed invaders that no, they really shouldn't be there. Against tanks and planes dropping huge bombs on urban targets, the resistance can be effective only if it thwarts every effort of the invaders to win support by rebuilding the country. Every collaborator and every do-gooder is therefore a target. Innocent people are the Iraqis' 'collateral damage'. The Palestinians too must fight viciously because they are being deprived of the very ground on which they stand by ever-encroaching settlements, and because they have so little to fight with. It may be that the Iraqi and Palestinian cruelties are not, in the end, the most efficient form of resistance. It may be that they are, for this if for no other reason, unjustified. But we do not demand of ourselves that our atrocities are really and certainly the only possible way to advance our vital interests; we cannot demand it of others.
On the other hand, Israeli and American atrocities are not merely scandalous but contemptible, because they serve either no purpose at all, or a purpose fit only for idiots. Israel has no need for the occupied territories except to humour spoilt-brat American 'settlers' who demand fortified playpens in which to spin out fantasies built on pseudo-Biblical nonsense. America has, as it well knows, no need to be in Iraq, nor does it have any need--quite the contrary--to support Israel. Not even self-interest justifies these crimes: they do the perpetrators far more harm than good. That is something which, even in the barbarous moral world we have created, we don't need to accept.
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Robert Livingston
Citizen
Username: Rob_livingston
Post Number: 617
Registered: 7-2004
| | Posted on Monday, December 20, 2004 - 10:43 am: |
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Bob Herbert:
"From the earliest planning stages until now, the war in Iraq has been a tragic exercise in official incompetence. The original rationale for the war was wrong. The intelligence was wrong. The estimates of required troop strength were wrong. The war hawks' guesses about the response of the Iraqi people were wrong. The cost estimates were wrong, and on and on.
"Nevertheless the troops have fought valiantly, and the price paid by many has been horrific. They all deserve better than the bad faith and shoddy treatment they are receiving from the highest officials of their government."
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Tom Reingold
Supporter
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 4812
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Monday, December 20, 2004 - 4:48 pm: |
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Calling the other side genetic defects ensures that you won't sit down to coffee, nor that you will understand its viewpoint.
Iraq was not the threat we thought it was. It's time to quote Emily Litella: "That's different. Never mind." |
Mustt_mustt
Citizen
Username: Mustt_mustt
Post Number: 170
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - 9:01 pm: |
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"Iraq was not the threat we thought it was.
That's exactly what I was thinking when I was driving back home from the station, listening to today's bonb attack in Mosul on the radio. Not that I did not read about it in the NYT but it is just that existential feeling that sinks into you when you are listening to the radio in the close confines of the car. I thought to myself that the 22 and thousands more individuals who died in this senseless war were really a result of one man's decision to go to war, which he apparently came to after a fifteeen minute walk in the garden adjoining the White House. What a terrible decision and what a terrible waste of life!! And our Prez has the moral gumption to tell us that us that the news was bad especially because it came days before Christmas. One thing for sure, Bush will be praying very long and hard tonight for all those families (Iraqi and American) whose lives he destroyed with that "walk in the garden." |
cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 2940
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - 10:42 pm: |
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I wasn't aware that Saddam took a walk in the garden before he broke 12+ UN resolutions and failed to fully comply with arms inspections. |
Nohero
Citizen
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 4222
Registered: 10-1999
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - 11:53 pm: |
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Saddam Hussein did violate UN resolutions, Cjc.
But, we had inspectors in Iraq, who left only when our government told them to get out because the invasion was coming.
That fact, coupled with the fact that our own government admits that there was nothing to find, is what makes some people distressed about the terrible price being paid for this war.
We are a powerful and intelligent country - and we could have reformed Iraq without the loss of life we are seeing now. |
Iwant2 KeepMyJob
Citizen
Username: Fastfusion
Post Number: 15
Registered: 12-2004
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 22, 2004 - 1:13 am: |
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Mustt_mustt , what would your response to a direct attack on America be?
What would you do if our allies were attacked?
Better yet, If Iran finally has a nuclear warhead and a delivery system that can target and hit Israel, what should we do?
You know what I would want to do. I am interested in what you would want to do.
If the unarmed civilian population of a country agrees with the actions of its government by not acting to redirect that government, are they not a legitimate target?
Sharing the guilt of the government they have left in place to act as their spokesmen.
Even if in their effort to change that government it would cause their death isn’t it their responsibility to still try? And in doing so, we witness their murders; shouldn’t we become involved to support that effort?
Common sense would tell a person that you don’t support actions against a superior power that will result in your cities being destroyed. You would have to be a fool and natural selection should then take place.
I could be wrong ............
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llama
Citizen
Username: Llama
Post Number: 656
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 22, 2004 - 6:36 am: |
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What does all this have to do with Iraq?
Wake up! If we invaded Canada we would face an insurgency! |
Rastro
Citizen
Username: Rastro
Post Number: 522
Registered: 5-2004
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 22, 2004 - 10:26 am: |
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IWant,
Just to play Devil's Advocate, you wrote:
quote:If the unarmed civilian population of a country agrees with the actions of its government by not acting to redirect that government, are they not a legitimate target?
Sharing the guilt of the government they have left in place to act as their spokesmen.
Even if in their effort to change that government it would cause their death isn’t it their responsibility to still try?
Are you suggesting that those who disagree with Bush and don't openly revolt should be considered just as guilty (by those outside the US who consider Bush's actions to be criminal)?
It would appear by logical extension that you are advocating the overthrow of a government by anyone that disagrees with it. In fact, you're saying that they should all die while trying to overthrow that government, rather than let is stand.
Is that your position? |
Mustt_mustt
Citizen
Username: Mustt_mustt
Post Number: 172
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 22, 2004 - 11:22 am: |
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IWant,
You say:"If the unarmed civilian population of a country agrees with the actions of its government by not acting to redirect that government, are they not a legitimate target?"
That's the classic terrorist line of thought, isn't it? Not that you are a "terrorist," but the choice of your words is very interesting!They speak of a "universalism" that is very much steeped in unilateral thinking. |
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