The Sole Survivor

[marct]

This is the heart of the problem we are having at many levels in the military. One time there was a pretty broad ethical line that COULD NOT be crossed....However my contention for the last seven years is that there is no authority to commit war crimes because the GWOT is considered (by guys like Douglas Feith) as "A new type of war."....We cannot continue to go there. Al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban sympathizers are combatants when on the battlefield. Unarmed civilians who may rat your mission out are part of the game.

This has been a concern of mine for quite a while now in more than just a purely military setting. I must admit that one of the reasons why I dislike Feith so much is because, IMO, he embodies the ideology of the ends justify the means without regard to what those means do to the people and their social system. As with many theologians, both "secular" and "sacred", he appears to live in an illusory world which, because it is "true", requires that everyone must accept it and, if they do not, be made to accept it "for their own good". In this way, he is similar to UBL and other brands of fanatics.

Abu, you mentioned "honour" and "chivalry" and they are important in this respect - they are lodged inside individuals. This is something that fanatic ideologues cannot accept - for them, "truth" must be given from a central system - it cannot be contained within individuals and serve as a source of opposition to that central system. This is all about a fight between types of power: "power within" and "power over" as Miriam Seimos would say.

We cannot second guess their moral struggle on the battlefield but the fact that he said military training was not a factor in his reasoning for voting against killing the civilians is indicative that the system has gotten so far off the rails that we need to re-institutionalize our own sense of honor and chivalry.

I think the wild west like "War on Terror" has really badly damaged our image as professionals....There have been too many incidents of murder (as many as 100 cases), abuse and random "screw it I'll just shoot them, its a different war and these aren't humans" have been seen and we will hear MANY more reported in the post-conflict period. This is an anathema to COIN. Paticularly in the Pashtunwali-soaked areas of the Lower Hindu Kush. Ask Kipling for examples.

Leaving aside the actual efficacy of it, and I agree it is about as useful as sending a package of Twinkies to a famine zone, there are other, more important issues. The "War on Terror" has done more than "damage" the US military's "image as professionals" - it appears to have damaged, at least in some cases, your self-image; in theological terms, your souls. It has done so by putting you in what Bateson called a "double bind"; a situation where you are squeezed between two conflicting and contradictory positions. Pulled apart a bit further, think of the "debate" over waterboarding with some ideologues saying that it is not torture while knowing that it is. The "solution" being offered to this double bind by certain ideologues - "it's not torture, just a necessary tool in the War on Terror" - is not a solution that can be accepted while retaining honour.

Someone in the next DoD needs to be tasked to bring the nation's Honor and adhering to laws and humanity back as a core value (AGAIN) at the troop level. God bless all of those team guys. They are asked to do hard things, but the issue is not about the ROE, its about the ROL, Rule of Law.

We have some major league recalibration to do after this war.

While I agree, I would go further that saying it is about ROL - I would say I is about basic philosophy in the original meaning of that word; it is about "knowing yourself". Institutional "recalibration" is a good start to that; even St. Paul managed to realize that one when he noted that "I had not known sin but by the law" (Romans 7:7), but that is only the start - it is still basing individual ethics, "honour" as it were, on some system external to the individual which is amenable to manipulation by ideologues. Honour (and ethics) must be internal even if they are shaped by external (actually inter-personal) systems. If they don't live within you, then you are "just following orders" - a "defense" that I doubt will be accepted by any sane court or deity.

Marc

ps. Yes, Wayne, I am a radical immanentalist