The Insanity of No Difference or "Culpability & the Chain of Command"

Mikaela says:

Our world’s getting crazier by the day. More dangerous by the minute. Our fine government’s enlightened response? More force. Send more pawns to get chewed up in an impersonal fight to the death over ideas and borders that aren’t even visible anymore.

Don’t like a government? Send troops. Don’t like a terrorist action? Send troops. Send them into insanity, and when they go insane and kill people you didn’t ask them to (or did, knowing you wouldn’t stand behind them when they carried out your non-order)? Prosecute. Wipe the blood off your hands. Recruit more killers.

I’m so against war, so against force, so against violence that it’s hard for me to find any molecules in me that can understand our addiction to the send-troops reflex.

Today’s article in the Washington Post excerpted below changed my outlook on war and provided a rare glimpse at the inextricable Catch-22 we’ve constructed for our soldiers.

Journalist Andrew Tilghman did what too few journalists have done – travelled to the worst combat areas and talked – really talked – and listened to our troops. In this article, he highlights his conversations with Private Green, who at the time was 3 weeks away from raping a 14 year old Iraqi girl and murdering her family, covering it up to look like a military action.

The article describes what it is like to be constantly under attack. There is no safety for soldiers. There is no safe zone. People are always trying to kill you. It makes no sense to “be careful” when there’s no such thing as safe.

These soldiers have been sent into an impossible situation with an impossible mission – save yourself at every moment but achieve … some objective that is impossible to achieve through force … by using force. Kill but don’t kill indiscriminately, although you will be targeted every second of every day indiscriminately. There is no uniform for the soldiers you are allowed to kill, but you must only kill them and not civilians, who will be indistinguishable from those you are supposed to kill.

In these conversations, Green’s dissociation from the horror of war just seems sane – the sane response to insanity being insanity. Tilghman says outright that instead of alarming, Green’s quotes just seemed honest. Three weeks later, they seemed in retrospect ominous and chilling.

My question is this: Isn’t the inability to judge between sane response to insanity and a mass murder that we all find reprehensible and horrific itself troublesome? If we can't tell the difference between what seems like a legitimate rationalization of force and a murderous mindset, can’t we take one small step and agree that force itself is wrong? Or at the very least questionable? If that’s true, can’t we stop proposing force as the cure-all for the world’s ills?

That reality of our soldiers’ daily binds, combined with Bush’s recent threat to “show the light” to Cuban people, not to mention our taunting of Syria and Iran, plus Donald Rumsfeld’s capitulation to testify publicly under intense outrage that he would initially refuse, has me stunned with new understanding.

I don’t agree that soldiers sent into insanity should not be held responsible for their actions. Just as we tried and prosecuted war criminals in Germany after World War II and found each responsible for his part in mass murder, so I think our soldiers should face the same justice.

With the same logic, commanders who order – explicitly or implicitly – these pawns to murder should be held even more responsible. Likewise, the politicians who send down orders to military officials who must then carry out “force” on the ground should have ultimate culpability.

I want the link between political idea men to commanders to soldiers to dead civilians, some “innocent” some “combatants,” whatever the hell those terms really mean, to be so visible as to be undeniable and unmistakable. I want them all to wear the chains they’re forging. I want our soldiers to be able to tug on the collars attached to their necks and know that Bush’s head thrashes on his 300-threadcount sheets.

I want us not to forget that the chain of command links us all, and we are all part of the craziness, the insanity, the bloodbath, the madhouse where death and life are hardly cause for news.

It is time for us to renounce force, call to question our national obsession, and fight ideas with ideas for once. We are communicative beings; we have other ways to negotiate. We must hold our politicians responsible for their part in the shedding of blood and demand that they stand for peace or get out of the way. The world can’t wait for us to run out of bodies.

My apologies for the length of this re-post. It’s that important. I have edited for length where I can. Please read the full article here. Excerpts below:

“I came over here because I wanted to kill people.”

Over a mess-tent dinner of turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old private from West Texas looked right at me as he talked about killing Iraqis with casual indifference.

"The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.' "

He shrugged.

"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing," he went on. "Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.' "

At the time, the soldier's matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as a rare example of honesty. I was on a nine-month assignment as an embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of my time with grunts like him -- mostly young (and immature) small-town kids who sign up for a job as killers, lured by some gut-level desire for excitement and adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that was full of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly desensitized to death. I thought this soldier was just one of the exceptions who wasn't afraid to say what he really thought, a frank and reflective kid, a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone.

But the private was Steven D. Green.

The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three weeks after we talked.

When I met Green, I knew nothing about his background -- his troubled youth and family life, his apparent problems with drugs and alcohol, his petty criminal record. I just saw and heard a blunt-talking kid. Now that I know the charges against Green, his words take on an utterly different context for me. But when I met him then, his comments didn't seem nearly as chilling as they do now.

"See, this war is different from all the ones that our fathers and grandfathers fought. Those wars were for something. This war is for nothing."

"We're out here getting attacked all the time and we're in trouble when somebody accidentally gets shot?" he said, referring to infantrymen like himself throughout Iraq. "We're pawns for the [expletive] politicians, for people that don't give a [expletive] about us and don't know anything about what it's like to be out here on the line."

The soldiers who fought alongside Green lived in conditions of near-constant violence -- violence committed by them, and against them.

When he said he was inured to death and killing, it seemed to me -- in that place and at that time -- a reasonable thing to say. While in Iraq, I also saw people bleed and die. And there was something unspeakably underwhelming about it. It's not a Hollywood action movie -- there are no rapid edits, no adrenaline-pumping soundtracks, no logical narratives that help make sense of it. Bits of lead fly through the air, put holes in people and their bodily fluids leak out and they die. Those who knew them mourn and move on.