First, thank you for a very polite and civilized reply on this very fraught issue! It shows great strength of character.
Unfortunately, and I'm sure you see this coming, I completely disagree.
The "I was only following orders" argument is not a good one.
I was a thirty-year New Yorker, so I always go back to 9/11. The men who flew jets into the World Trade Center were following orders and doing what they were told. They didn't choose who they fought, either. We agree that this is very bad.
Or look at organized crime. A young man swears into a criminal gang and then has no agency at all, simply kills whom he is instructed to kill. We agree that this is bad, too.
Morally and ethically, it should make no difference if the organization doing the wrong thing is run by the US government or not.
Historically, things were different.
A young man serving in the Vietnam War looking at the US military saw two generations of somewhat-noble service, particularly against the Nazis, who were objectively evil and a tremendous threat to all mankind.
(Actually, the Korean War was a great crime too. Because America hated communism, they simply carpet bombed North Korea, committing endless war crimes like dropping napalm on civilian neighborhoods. By the end, less than one building in six was left standing, and well over a million North Koreans dead: reading the details only makes it worse.
(The details of the atrocities were mostly in the newspapers at the time, but Americans were all for it, because communism, you know? Now Americans only know about the Korean War because of those witty doctors poking fun at the military in that hit TV show, eternally in syndication.)
(If you wonder why North Koreans hate America so much, look no further than the bombing of Korea.)
And, of course, the great majority of soldiers in Vietnam were conscripted — which means, when it comes down to it, recruited on threat of imprisonment by force.
Modern soldiers do not have these mitigating factors.
There is no draft. It is a volunteer army — they take this as a job, in order to earn money.
And all the information is there for them to see. The US lost Vietnam, and yet the Domino Effect never happened, so the whole premise of that war was one big delusion: two million dead for nothing. And then it’s failure after failure up through Iraq and to Yemen.
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The result of this "orders" argument is total ethical whitewashing of crimes against humanity and that is wrong.
The private obeys the sergeant. The sergeant obeys the lieutenant, and all the way up to the generals, who are obeying Congress and the President.
But America long has the tradition that their leaders bear no moral responsibility at all for the consequences of their acts.
Indeed, America passed a law allowing it to invade the Netherlands if any American military person, elected or appointed official were ever tried at the Hague.
So Kissinger, Nixon, Reagan, W and Obama become honored elder statesmen, and it’s thought to be rude even to mention that each one of them blatantly committed war crimes against both international and US law. The US Secretary of State can laugh and clap on tape about an enemy being killed horribly but Americans are baffled if you consider this behavior inappropriate.
The President-elect of the United States advocated aggressively for the Rape of Iraq, an obviously stupid fucking war (I’m still angry!!) based on transparent lies with completely delusional planning, planning that Biden (and Clinton and Schumer and all the rest, and W and Cheney of course). Hundreds of thousands of people died — millions injured — more Americans killed than in 9/11 — a hundred thousand American permanently injured and over a million Iraqis — the country set back a generation and still in turmoil almost twenty years later.
Saddam repeatedly attempted to negotiate with Bush, even offering to step down, but Bush turned him down every time. Bush was determined to have this war at all costs. But no one involved ever accrued the slightest blame.
The result is millions of innocent dead bodies over two generations due to wildly unrealistic, delusional theories, like Kissinger's Domino Theory, or out-and-out lies, like Bush's "Weapons of Mass Destruction/the war will pay for itself and be over in a few months!" song.
And not one person ever accrues any blame or responsibility ever. I got screamed at by an American because I had the temerity to mention that Colin Powell was one of the architects of the Iraq War, and that he had “apologized”.
Here’s Powell’s “apology”:
“It turned out, as we discovered later, that a lot of sources that had been attested to by the intelligence community were wrong,” Powell said in Washington, DC.
“I understood the consequences of that failure and, as I said, I deeply regret that the information — some of the information, not all of it — was wrong,” said the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“It has blotted my record, but — you know — there’s nothing I can do to change that blot. All I can say is that I gave it the best analysis that I could.”
He’s sorry that his record is blotted — boo-fucking-hoo for this rich and powerful man who lied to the UN and by proxy, the entire world.
Hundreds of thousands of people died in the Rape of Iraq, but he “gave it the best analysis he could” (and that’s a lie, by the way. The weapons inspectors made it completely clear that there were no WMDs there. The one informer who talked about WMDs had been wildly inaccurate before. They want to war in Iraq because they needed to do so for political reasons, not because of “sources in the intelligence community”!)
Where is the apology to the people of Iraq? To the US military who died? To the US taxpayers who spent two thousand billion dollars on that war?
This is a literally psychopathic attitude and yet he’s also considered an elder statesman, even a hero for finally breaking with the Republicans over Trump.
“Soldiers are deluded dupes” has an element of truth, but removes all moral agency from the individuals actually performing the killing, injuring, blowing up of cities, and the people organizing and abetting these activities.
Denying soldiers moral agency, the ability to tell right from wrong, is morally dangerous, because it gives a grunt moral license to do pretty well anything if some guy in a uniform tells them to. More, it reduces the soldiers to mindless automata, when in fact they are humans and individuals, each with a moral and ethical responsibility to themselves, their families and friends, and the entire human race.
We cannot change our past, but we can accept responsibility for it, and we can try to change the future.
I have plenty of friends who worked in the military — “served” is one of those words that has been carefully cultivated to give the impression that blowing up innocent people provides some service to Americans. All of them have understood and admitted that they worked in an evil organization, and speak freely of it.
Soldiers or ex-soldiers who have not understand that they are participating in a great crime are in a state of moral and ethical error; there is blood on their hands, and they continue to amass more with their actions and words.
It is up to us to politely but firmly and clearly remind them that murder is a crime and a sin; that if you break into someone else’s house and shoot them, it isn’t self-defense.
It is up to us very very few mouthy pacifists, because sure as heck, no one else is ever going to tell them that, not in twenty-first century “Thank you for your service” America!
You seem like a nice person, but you have adopted this American ethic, likely without thinking it through, that America as a whole can commit terrible crimes against humanity, crimes based entirely on lies and paranoia, and yet no moral, ethical or legal blame will ever accrue to any individual American involved in planning or committing this seventy-year(*) spree of devastation, horror and carnage — which is exactly how this devastation continues unchecked to this very day.
If everyone decided the endless conflict was wrong and ceased to participate, the long nightmare would be over in an instant, but it grinds on and on, perpetual unquestioned war over generations against an ever-shifting choice of distant enemies who had mostly offered no harm to any American until they were invaded.
Ethically, your acceptance and even encouragement of this moral whitewashing makes you complicit in this endless cycle of lies and murder.
Please reconsider your stance on this matter!
And thanks for reading.
(* — in fact, the United States has been at war for at least 222 out of 239 years of its existence. Militarist site. Pacifist site.)
