Cat Yelled At For Lounging In Sun

There has been a lot of discussion about a diarist at The New Republic's website who claims to be an ex-Iraqi soldier. I'm not down on all the details, but apparently he is claiming to have witnessed several atrocities and is detailing them. The conservasphere is in an entirely-predictable uproar about the situation, since such claims kind of put lie to the idea of a Just War being fought in Iraq by our angelic troops, who can do no wrong.

Honestly? I have no idea whether the post is true or not. Some of the 'can't be' arguments sound pretty valid to me, but I have no basis for analyzing it one way or the other. But I agree pretty much with Grame Wood here. Whether or not this particular set of claims bear out, it is an undeniable fact that many, dozens, hundreds of horrible things have taken place under our auspices in Iraq.

This isn't particularly surprising. We train our soldiers to do two things: to kill people and to blow shit up. Why, then, should we be the least bit surprised when we find out that their instinctive reaction, in a stressful situation like a firefight in a strange town with unknown assailants, is to start killing people and blowing shit up?

The fact is, we shouldn't. Most of our soldiers are good, honest, patriotic young men and women. Some are sadists who joined up because they liked the idea of killing people with government license. It's simply impossible for an organization of a million people to maintain perfect order and quality control in every single circumstance. They're real people, which means that they're going to have flaws, make mistakes. Even the 'good' ones.

The implication of this fact is that we should do our best to keep our soldiers out of places where their instincts, their human-ness, can lead to bad outcomes. Like trying to control and rebuild a country the size of California where we don't understand the language, or the customs, and where we are most decidedly not wanted.

Unless, of course, it is really warranted. In 1942, there was a real possibility that the Germans could take over the entire continent of Europe, which, allied with a Japanese empire, could have led to an eventual bi-coastal threat to the sanctity of the US. So it made sense to send troops to Europe and into the Pacific.

In 2003, there was simply no chance of a serious threat to US sanctity. Even if you believe that Saddam was close to reconstituting his nuclear weapons program, at best that justifies an invasion, an overthrow of the existing government, destruction of said programs, and then getting the hell out of Dodge. Morally, not the best way of going about things. But neither is what's going on over there right now....