Editorial:
A Brief Note about the Sky and the Road
Is there any true moral difference in a bomb dropped from a jet and a bomb placed by the side of the road? I remain confused with that one.Mr. Benson is a Vietnam War veteran: what appears as an entirely rhetorical question to others has only the thin veneer of abstraction to those who have actually seen combat in the grim wars of our age. In other words, moral philosophy for a veteran is carved on the edge of a blood-stained knife. The moral dilemmas don't get any more real than when fighting as a soldier; and notably, the moral killing box doesn't get any less real with years separating service from retrospection.
Edited and extended, this was my response:
I thought about your question long and hard. It's not that I hadn't thought about it before: I had; but every time I revisit the difference between them and us I try to look more deeply. Perhaps curiously, it is always to the tools of war that I return, for it is in the machines by which we deliver death to one another that the cold reality of war slips through in the raging thunder of power over the lives and deaths of others.
I think about the young naval officer in fire control who orders the launch of a cruise missile that has to fly hundreds of miles to come to its end in a residential neighborhood of Baghdad. Does he understand the specific, exact connection between what he utters and the death that ensues so far away from him that he'll never have a clue about even the names of the people who died because he ordered them to?
I think about the hot-shot flyboys talking with dispassionate, technocratic calm as they matter-of-factly announce that fox is away. The weapons control officer will not see the instant of ripping death literally sweep men, women, and children off their feet and hurl them—along with bricks, animals, chairs, toys, beds, and cooking utensils—in a flaming, shrapnel-filled wind. Do he and the pilot envision what they've wrought?
I think about the young soldiers in a Bradley hammering big rounds in bright streams of light into a cluster of buildings. Do they see who's on the other side? Civilians? Combatants? Both? How could it possibly matter if they can't see it?
Eventually, the question simply turns the other way: how could they possibly see it if it doesn't really matter anymore?
Finally, I think about a pair of young Iraqi men methodically going about the business of daisy-chaining a couple of old artillery shells and attaching some wiring, switches, and maybe a cell phone, then high-tailing it away before they get their heads blown off by either a sniper or the bomb, itself.
It has now come to me after all these years.
You know what the difference is between the guys laying IEDs and the guys cutting loose an air-to-surface missile?
For the Iraqi insurgents, this war is worth killing and dying for.
For us, this war is only worth killing for; it sure as Hell isn't worth our guys dying for.
The Dark Wraith has spoken.
Published 6/09/2006 01:31:00 AM
<< 26 Comments Total
Good morning, Dark Wraith. The neo-cons have never figured out reality, being a superpower does not imply that you can easily occupy another nation, regardless of the superiority in firepower. I agree, all we can deal out is death, but can we accept the responsibility for it? And for what? Liberty? Freedom? What a pile of shit. I doubt it. The madness has to stop. The neo-cons will never grow up. Like a bunch of mean little kids in a playground, they need a severe ass-kicking.
Good morning, Dark Wraith. Well said.
My father-in-law is also a Vietnam vet, who worked in "communications". He tells stories - few, to be sure, even after all this time - about handing out candy and food to whole villages, along with pamphlets about the "American way of life", and hearing that the village was destroyed the next day. That does things to people. I fear the stories that the veterans from this war will tell their children.
The difference between our troops and the insurgents is the insurgents are fighting for their country.
"For the Iraqi insurgents, this war is worth killing and dying for." -- DW
Which is why I began coming to the conclusion about three years ago that "this war" is one that we can never "win", short of complete obliteration of the Muslim empire.
PoLT ventures the opinion that when facing a foe whose "credo" is,
"I would rather die than put up with your shit",
that foe is undefeatable.
Perhaps The Wraith, with his background in medieval as well as more recent history, can enlighten us as to whether this attitude has always prevailed and if that attitude is the reason the "Crusades", which began in 1099 I believe, have always failed.
Not DW, but it certainly exists in this country (at least in history and also in sentiment). Note the motto on the New Hampshire license plate:
LIVE FREE OR DIE
Note also Patrick Henry's famous quote:
Give me liberty or give me death.
- oddjob
You sure hit it on the nose with that one:
"For us, this war is only worth killing for; it sure as Hell isn't worth our guys dying for."
And I think that's a incontravertable indicator that we are in a war we should never have started.
Siri
For the Iraqi insurgents, this war is worth killing and dying for.
For us, this war is only worth killing for; it sure as Hell isn't worth our guys dying for.
And that is exactly why we cannot win.
Wraith, that's certainly one possible criteria for determining what is or is not a "just war." Of course, one of our great soldiers did in fact say (it wasn't made up by a scriptwriter for George C. Scott) that you don't win wars by dying for you country but by making the other poor son of a bitch die for HIS country. At the time he said it, plenty of Germans, Japanese, and Russians were willing to sacrifice themselves for their countries although it's pretty clear that they were actually dying for the handful of thugs who were running their country. Same was true in Vietnam, I believe -- Ho Chi Minh and his successors were willing to fight to the last Vietnamese for the privilege of oppressing them. So maybe it was a bad decision for us to get involved; that's about the only similarity between Vietnam and Iraq that I'm willing to concede.
Some people do make the right choice.
"It usurps international treaties and conventions that by virtue of the Constitution become American law. The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the Iraqi people with only limited accountability is not only a terrible moral injustice, but a contradiction to the Army's own Law of Land Warfare. My participation would make me party to war crimes."
Note the motto on the New Hampshire license plate:
LIVE FREE OR DIE
Note also Patrick Henry's famous quote:
Give me liberty or give me death.
If I incorporate these mottoes as part of my credo, I will also make absolutely sure who it is who is trying to enslave me before taking any action, while at the same time recalling some of Mr. Henry's other words: "Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third (Eighth? Ninth?) can profit by their example."
Hello Dark Wraith-
I had to check out your blog after our discussion yesterday. However, with this editorial, I must say-
-War is ugly no matter what. Either target victims or random, helpless victims, there is always death. Except for our thickheaded "war lords", it's never wanted. It is always bloody.
-Also, in your quote of if this war is worthy of dieing for, that's when the true victor is revealed. Who is sacrificing their all? And it even comes to a religious point for either sides- who will do all they can to do what's right according to one’s own beliefs?
good morning dark wraith: many times people think i'm talking in the abstract when i'm actually being quite literal. and yes, the moral evaluations of a warrior are done on the razor edge of a blood stained knife. my specific quandry with this started in the series of valleys along the DMZ. my task was to pinpoint concentrations of enemy supplies and personnel for the high flyers in the 52's. i have to suppress chuckles when ever i hear of things like "precision" bombings. i have truly never in my life seen anything less precise than a 500lb bomb dropped from a jet. even guided, they are only as good as the guide, and the techs, and the mechanics, and...well you see. i was sent into an area to assess things after 6 52's had done their work. there was literally nothing left. not people, not buildings, not vegetation, not bugs. who pulled that trigger? i had my part in it. i suppose there are some that would draw a moral difference, but i don't anymore. children died that day. women, old men, babies, dogs, pigs, chickens, mosquitos, butterflies, spiders, snakes, frogs, fish, you name it. if it was alive before i made the call, it wasn't anymore. who killed them? all of us. me, the guys in the air, the guys on the ground in thailand, the jerks in the pentagon, the assholes in the white house and congress, my mom, all of us. even with accepting that, though, i still can't imagine myself snapping a la haditha or my lai and slaughtering people begging for mercy. but i can understand those who snap. i can also see myself walking away from something like haditha and never mentioning it again. as a matter of fact i see stuff like that many nights.
one passage from wilson has always grabbed my attention comes from the memoirs of josephus daniels. it is an account of a conversation which occurs in 1917 wilson said to him:
There are two reasons why I am resolved to keep our country out of war if possible:
1) If we go to war thousands of young men will lose their lives. I could not sleep with myself if I do not go to the extreme limit to prevent such mourning in American homes.
2) Every reform we have won since 1912 will be lost. We have got new tariff, currency, shipping and trust legislation. These policies are not thouroghly set. They will be imperiled, or lost, if we go to war. We will be dependent in war upon steel, oil, aluminum, ships and war materials. They are controlled by Big Business. Undoubtedly many captains of industry will be patriotic and serve their country, but when the war is over those whose privileges we have uprooted or started to uproot will gain control of government and neither you nor I will live to see government returned to the People. Big Business will be in the saddle. More than that--Free Speech and other essential Rights will be endangered. War is autocratic."
welcome to the united states, bought and paid for by halliburton bitchez.
Good afternoon, Stephen Benson.
The parallels among wars never cease to amaze me. I talk at length in both macroeconomics and microeconomics classes about the anti-trust legislation that was enacted in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and I explain that no small motivation for the passage of such measures was the growing monopoly power of companies with which the government contracted for war materiel. The war profiteering at the government's expense was far more an indignation to Congress than were the deprivations the trusts had been visiting upon the common people for decades. Even at that, the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act only modestly hit big business at first. It was only when FDR and Presidents that succeeded him got serious that the bite really came, what there ever was of it.
The funny part of those lectures comes when I click off the major provisions of the anti-trust legislation, starting with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, walking through Clayton and the FTCA, and finishing with the so-called "Chain Store Act" (the Robinson-Patman Act).
Inevitably, at least one student says something to the effect that every day, businesses do things those laws made illegal.
God! but I love making young people cynical.
The Dark Wraith should probably knock it off with furthering the alienation of yet another generation.
Good afternoon, Dark Muz. I extend to you a warm welcome.
If you are of a mind, you must plow through some of the articles in the Editorial and Analysis section of the sidebar: you will find there the chronology of an arc of thought and position I am setting forth in opposition to the controlling political theory and its implementation that have come to plague our time.
The neo-conservatives and their religious fellowship of the Right have no guiding philosophy for which they, themselves, would be willing to die. Theirs is the belief system that beckons others to the ways they cannot, in and of their own will, impose upon themselves. From their bitter resentment at the sexuality of others to their fierce call that young men and women die for their vision of a world conforming to their hazy values, the Right drags us into an abyss from which we may not recover.
Beliefs are for the controllers. Compliance is for the controlled.
The Dark Wraith has no interest, however, in their jackboots.
Greetings, Dark Wraith and Friends.
To make moral comparisons between two nations or groups of people at war assumes that first a moral/ethical equal footing can be found and second, the terms of and or reasons for the conflict are given.
It should be as plain as the nose on the face of the proverbial donkey, at least by now, that the reasons for war are multi-layered and unique to the nations that are engaged in it; this war is not any different.
I thought about this for a few minutes and have the opinion that if the reasons for this war are understood, the moral obligations to our own country [i]do[i/]outweigh the moral obligations to the [i]other[i/]country.
It is truly sickening to think that in a country where people think less about the starving/homeless and more about the $250 a month flute lessons for their 6 year old, people have the bad taste to champion the plight of some middle eastern nation whose main interest in this conflict involves GOD [i]not[i/] country or self interests.
Whose moral center do you relate to? Blowing up Americans for GOD (A-LA)? Or blowing up Iraqis and Muslim/Islamic terrorists for deterence and self preservation?
Good evening Dark Wraith, and good it is. If you want to drop a roadside bomb, come on over to Pam's. The open thread is basically void of human life, so you will do minimal damage.
Plus, it's apparently lesbians night off. As well as everyone else, maybe you'll luck out.
Glad to see oddjob commenting here. Howdy, oddjob!
Good evening, Clay.
I resolve distinction by result and consequence: if two actions, regardless of claim for inspiration, come to the same resultand have the same consequence, then the actions are equivalent.
One murderer can claim God commanded him to his foul deed while another murderer can claim that Satan bid him commit his outrage. In both cases, people died as a result of the crime; therefore, the crime is the same: it is premeditated murder.
Whether or not both men heard voices, whether or not both men feel that they acted from strength of conviction, they both committed murder. No amount of their own pleadings should sway the objective execution of justice upon them.
In precisely the same way, the particular plea of the country that goes to war is irrelevant to the objective determination of what it has done.
I am weary of hearing "special and mitigating circumstances": this is the bleeding heart of those unable to properly adjudicate the guilt of and punishment for either the individual who has acted wrongly or the nation that has done so.
In both cases, there will be people incapable of rendering justice. Still worse, it is impossible to cabin their apologies in one or several cases: their soft-heartedness spreads like a cancer until the society is full of "special circumstances" maniacs and the world is full of "well we understand this war" rogue nations.
The Right-wing conservatives make no representation to true conservatism by patting any country—our own included—on the back and letting it get by with wrongful action. I have made my position abundantly clear in op-ed articles like The Belt of Justice: a President who lies gets no better treatment than my own kin who would lie to cause death and destruction to others and to our own people. Both the bad child and the bad nation deserve and will receive certain, severe, and swift retributive punishment, and the wailing of supporters, friends, and other weaklings cannot serve as a deterrent to rightful action. Neither the child nor the nation will find rectitude in some fairy-tale world of soft-and-cuddly "understanding."
I will not be lied to. I will not have kids die for someone's twisting of facts to fit bad behavior, bad policy, or bad anything.
And make no mistake about it, Clay: I was trained to kill people whom I was told are my enemies. I reached adulthood when I came to realize that my moral obligation does not end with their words; it ends with my judgment, drawing down whatever God-given moral authority I can bring to bear within myself upon the situation. If it ever comes to my own determination—after I've heard what some President or his war-hawk cowards have to say—that I really do face an enemy, I will have no problem with killing, and I will do so with a prejudice only another soldier would understand. To defend my society, my property, my kin, or my tribe—you included, Clay—I will not have a major problem with drawing blood in such a manner as will deter the madmen from ever returning from their filthy holes in Hell.
That's another application of that belt of justice to which I referred above. God help my enemy should that belt need to be brought down upon his disgusting, unworthy ass.
And God help my leaders in the same circumstance.
The Dark Wraith has spoken.
Cheeseburger delievery!!! Anyone home?
So, you've returned, konagod.
After all I've done for you: the roof repairs, the extra-strength linoleum on the kitchen floors, the box of Arm & Hammer baking soda in the refrigerator.
And you think cheeseburgers are going to change the dynamic?
I think not.
Okay, maybe.
The Dark Wraith reaches for the horseradish sauce.
Dark Wraith,
I do see your point, however, the atrocities of war and the suffrage of innocent people are two things that comprise the cornerstone of American enterprise and have shaped the persona and ethos of American people.
Shall we now turn our backs on what was, what is and what shall be forever more--human conquest--or shall we embrace anew our commitment to capitalism?
At risk of talking from first one side of my mouth and then the other, I must admit that although the United States of America is a great country and it took the lives of countless thousands of brave warriors to maintain the freedoms it's citizens and guests now enjoy, I would be hard pressed to find a single good reason to empose this nations tactics in that regard on another country unless either provoked to do so or we/the host nation convinced us it was neccessary for our own protection.
Question: Precisely what were the manner of tactics invoked by citizens of foreign nations that brought us as a country to the state of affairs we now find ourselves in--with particular regard to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan--as you understand it?
Good evening, once again, Clay.
You and I both know the world has many evil people in it; and by the word "evil," I certainly do not mean merely "bad": I mean evil in a visceral, insensible way that measures its life not in human years, but rather in ages, possessing weaklings of any given era with its worst excesses, making them strong in its grip that they might in rare instances rise to impose that awful thing upon a nation or even a group of nations.
Understand that I have no desire to see peoples of the world under the boot of monsters, be they theocrats of Iran, the butcher of Uzbekistan, the corrupt tyrants of China, or the religious monstrosities that ruled Afghanistan.
We as a nation unfortunately have no problem with monsters so long as they do our bidding. The Taliban became our enemy not because they declined to participate in the pursuit and capture of Osama bin Laden, but rather because they had become insufferably obstructionist in negotiating rights of way for commercial hydrocarbon resources.
We as a nation didn't give a rat's backside about the atrocities Saddam Hussein committed upon ethnic and religious groups within Iraq. We wanted a militarily securable footprint on a major reserve of oil. Many, many people who supported the war in Iraq secretly, within their own hearts, knew very well that overrunning Iraq was a play to control hydrocarbons. The lies set forth by the Bush Administration were not embraced by the American people because of their compelling nature, but rather because of their plausibility against the obvious and outrageous alternative explanation that we were out to take what wasn't ours.
I am a teacher of economics and finance (among other subjects). I make no bones in class about the power of greed, and I make no apology for it as the motive force of growth unparalleled in human history. At the same time, I make no apology for the civil society that uses governmental institutions, social norms, and, yes, even religious tenets to circumscribe the passion that drives greed to corrosive ends. Like any other of what some branches of Christianity call "mortal sin," greed destroys just as surely as does wrath, gluttony, lust, or any other cancerous tissue that overtakes and finally suffocates the human and humane soul.
Clay, we labor under a persistent myth about the efficacy of war as transformative. Only the malevolent aggressor nation changes the world by such means, and then only for an age until brought low by the inevitable erosion of the venality of the succession of leaders in the despotic central state.
We did not become a free society on July 4, 1776. It didn't happen that way at all. We had been watched far too poorly, controlled far too loosely, imposed upon far too capriciously for way too long by our masters in Great Britain. By the time they finally came to grasp fully that we were already free but for their silly taxes and inadequate garrisons of troops, it was too late. Although we suffered mightily in the years after the declaration of our independence, the British had lost us as a colony, the Revolutionary War notwithstanding.
And that is not to say the war was not necessary and inevitable. It is to say that it was perfunctory. No one told us, "You are free."
We made that call ourselves.
We will not free the Iraqis. They will do that themselves, maybe next year, maybe in a century. All we have done is deprive them of the madman capable of maintaining in relative peace and stability a nation incapable of sustaining itself otherwise as such simply because it was, from its inception, an artifice of the Western theory of the nation-state.
Afghanistan was another matter altogether. It was a mess before the Taliban, it is a mess now, and it will be a mess for centuries to come. All we're doing is feeding our kids into a sick meat grinder that's just going to keep on crushing them between religious nutcases on one hand and violent drug lords on the other. That we choose the latter as our allies speaks volumes about the morality of our cause.
There is an incredible myth these days that I must address. It goes something like this: the Cold War is over.
Like Hell it is. We let down our guard because we thought the Cold War was between the Soviets and the West. Well, it wasn't: it was between our way of life and progress and another way of life and progress anathema to certain of our core values.
Seen in that light, the Berlin Wall coming down, all those "velvet," "purple," and whatever else revolutions in Eastern Europe were irrelevant. Forces anathema to our way of life were still out there, filling the vacuum our previous ideological foe had left in its pathetic passing.
Clay, the very same strength, resolve, intelligence, methods, and theories that had carried us for nearly half-a-century were still valid, still our best hand to play, and exactly the hand we have refused to play throughout this Administration.
The neo-cons didn't learn anything, and now we suffer every talking head mumbling about some "new era" that requires new methods. Well, here's some news for them: war was one of those things we tried and learned not to use; so was domestic repression.
It's like some kind of lobotomy was performed on the American psyche. Good God, we know how to win the world, but instead we're going to have a war.
Clay, do you remember what Reagan did after the bombing that killed all those Marines in Beirut? He pulled us out.
That's right, he got us out of there before we ended up in a quagmire. Now, fit of surprise, here come the neo-cons telling us that he made a huge mistake by letting the Islamists know that we could be scared off.
Well, they're dead wrong. He bought us a whole bunch of years with the Islamists believing that we couldn't be suckered into a decades-long killing box like Vietnam once again.
For all the reasons I would damn Reagan, particularly for his willingness to let small, venal idiots conduct his foreign policy in Central America, he earns praise for grasping what entirely eludes the fools in Washington today; and here's the lesson someone needs to ram down the collective throat of both the Republicans and the Democrats: unless you have absolutely no other choice, you never, ever let your enemies choose your wars.
The Dark Wraith considers learning that lesson in his own life one of his few personal victories.
Dark Wraith, my friend,
There is not a single word I could add that would not tarnish such a fine piece of writing...
Thank you.
you never, ever let your enemies choose your wars.
DW, I had never thought of that. Thank you for clarifying this in my own mind. It's not only eloquent, but powerfully apt.
Oh, & konagod, Dark Wraith's blog is probably the closest thing I have to a home page. This is where I hang out most.
- oddjob
Good morning, Dark Wraith.
Your comment from Sat Jun 10, 02:08:06 AM EDT was awesome!
Thank you!
...and your quote, "Apparently, parading the enemy dead is now in vogue at the Pentagon.
Achilles would be proud."
is so true! How long were the pictures of Saddam's dead sons shown over and over? Now, we get to enjoy Zarqawi's death photographs.
Good morning, and thank you for the support for the comments I made.
Because what I wrote goes to the heart of my political position, later today I shall post the distillation of several previous comments from this thread as an editorial here at The Dark Wraith Forums.
The Dark Wraith will return later.
morning dw.
i'll add my thanks and plaudits for your post and subsequent commentary. you're on a hella roll here, not to trivialize the seriousness of the subject.
and thanks to the rest of you too.
Good evening, Dark Wraith.
Many years ago, I observed a robot that welded at a certain production facility; the movements of the arm, the way the conveyor brought the pieces up to it, etc.
And what is the difference between this robot welder and a human one, I wonder?
The human claims the work of his hands as his own. There is no culpability to the robot.
You see, these robots will go out of calibration every so often, and do something like burn through 50 parts, or place the weld exactly 1/4" away from where it should be. Robot doesn't feel bad about it. Robot doesn't get fired. Robot doesn't have to make a trip to the office to explain its behavior.
It occurs to me that what is different in the example of the bombs you give is much the same. It's the degree of separation that's at issue.
It's a common thing for a man to maintain some degree of attachment to the work of his hands, for better or worse.
It's also a common thing for a man to maintain a sense of ddetachment from things which are removed from him, to accept on an intellectual basis without feeling, an acknowledgement without understanding.
Seems to me that the aerial drop, the "put it down there somewhere," serves to make the death more impersonal. Sorry about all your dead bodies, but I'm just doing my job. We then accept such a personal thing as death from an unknowing, callous stance. The truth of the matter is forever removed from us, though we can try to piece it together by becoming more and more graphic in our descriptions of what we can deduce. The human tragedy is rendered somewhat less painful.