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Here we go. Forgive me right off the bat dude, because I’m not going to respond to your comments at all. This is not because I haven’t read them or that I don’t respect your opinion, but rather that I think so strongly about this, I don’t think there is anything that someone can tell me that will change my mind. Again, I’m not knocking you or your reasoning, I think I just have to get this off my chest. Maybe give me another day and I’ll respond to your email specifically. But for now, here is Gib’s opinion of the situation. I have a lot of smaller thoughts and will try and expand upon them as best I can in the time I have.
First of all, I think it’s bullcrap that people would try and blame this on the stresses of battle. That’s the kind of reasoning people try and use to downplay the severity of the Mi Lai massacre. If you are going to use that argument, that Battalion Commander has to admit that he did a less than poor job of preparing his unit for the rigors of a deployment. Yes, being in theater is stressful and there are inexplicable attitudes and emotions that come out and are experienced by our soldiers, but I really think that this is fallacious.
My next thought is of precedence. This is something that I have thought more about in recent times, especially since that was the one thing that Duane had to say to me that one fateful Friday meeting. If we allow this one case to happen, what does that mean for the future. These sort of “do whatever it takes to accomplish your goal” actions only serve to foster an anything goes attitude. A soldier who thinks he can take liberties in theater is a dangerous thing for a lot of reasons.
One of those reasons and I think another thing we have to look at is what sort of repercussions take place from situations like this. While it is nothing on the scale of Abu Ghraib, it certainly doesn’t add to our image in country. People look at our soldiers (who aren’t exactly welcome in all areas) and see that they’ll do pretty much anything they want, their respect for us just plummets that much more. The war in Iraq isn’t going to be won by how many terrorists or freedom fighters or whatevers we kill, its going to be how well we get their people on board with our plan and get them to buy into our vision of democracy for them. This of course is a whole other issue that I won’t touch here, but the principle applies.
And along those lines, look at it with reversed roles. There aren’t too many Iraqi’s that appreciate what this guy did I’m sure. But we think it’s okay because it might have saved some lives on our side (which almost suggests that our brand of human being is better than theirs). I’m of course looking at the situation with the idea that there was no guarantee that this prisoner had the sought details or was even a threat in the first place. That’s the whole thing with waterboarding- after awhile the subject tells you whatever they think you want to hear. But I digress. There have been cases where people (usually terrorists of some variety) have captured American citizens and tortured them, beheaded them, whatever. Now to many Iraqi’s, we are no better than the average terrorist. My military science teacher was just telling me a story today of how in his first deployment he was on a convoy. The convoy just started firing during the movement. They didn’t actually see anything, someone just got scared and opened up. Everyone else joined it because someone else was shooting, the convoy stopped, and for a minute or so people were just shooting. At nothing. In a city. How can an Iraqi citizen see something like that and think that we are there to help them? And that isn’t even a bad story. Again I’m digressing. So there is obviously an enormous amount of national outrage when a citizen of ours gets beheaded by some hooded dudes on Al Jazeera. Understandable. Imagine the outrage by Iraqi citizens when something like this goes down. This is the whole idea of our actions sometimes doing more harm than good. We convert more people to terrorism than terrorists do I think. These actions need to be publicly condoned (they were to some extent) and this guy needs to be made an example of. First, making an example of him gets all our soldiers on the same page with interrogation- there are set rules and you just don’t say f*ck it when things get tough. Second, making an example of him shows the Iraqi people that we do give a shit about them and that we aren’t going to just slap war criminals like him on the wrist and let him go.
LTC West also tread a very slippery slope here and made it slippery for future generations of deployed soldiers. Now this is an extreme way of putting it, but if we condone crap like this we are next saying that torture is cool too. Whatever it takes to save American lives, screw the other guy and his rights as a human being. LTC West was quoted after some of this started going down as saying that in war you have a moral responsibility to protect the soldiers in your command. I disagree and would reword his statement. Commanders have a responsibility to protect their soldiers; they have a moral responsibility to act morally. We can’t have rogue officers going around doing whatever the heck they want on a whim. This situation went from interrogation to torture. What LTC West did was pure torture and that is not cool in my book.
One last thought I had was of the circumstances surrounding this guy’s capture. People were certain that he was plotting and/or had information of an attack that was going to take place against American soldiers. It’s as if this was some special case in which Americans were targeted and we were going to do whatever it took to stop it from happening. HELLO? THIS IS A WAR! Our soldiers are targeted every day by hundreds of dumbasses that decide they want to make a bomb in their garage and kill Americans. This is no special case (to my knowledge). And if it’s okay with this situation, then it pretty much becomes okay to do this stuff whenever you want, as long as it saves American lives. Again, I have this feeling that such an attitude is saying that American lives are more valuable than Iraqi lives. I don’t agree at all.
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