Ye gods, two political posts in a row? Sorry! Come back tomorrow, when I get back to my usual discussion of various wangs.
I was reading Tuesday Morning Quarterback today, and came across something I think needed a response. TMQ is penned by Gregg Easterbrook, with whom I agree on most football topics (he likes to see more running and less passing in the NFL, for example), and disagree on most political topics. I am coming around to his side of things a bit, since it’s becoming clearer that the Bush Administration is single-handedly destroying the fundamental freedoms of the greatest country the world has ever known, but I found this a bit, well, unfocused:
A few months ago President Bush said the estimate he has been given by military intelligence is 30,000 Iraqi deaths caused either directly by our military or set in motion by our invasion. . . by invading Iraq we made ourselves responsible for what happened next, and what has happened next is killing of the innocent.
And here’s my emailed response:
Now, I’m no defender of the President or his tactics; I believe that our invasion of Iraq was justified, but GROSSLY, even criminally, mismanaged by this administration. However, I don’t think that we’re responsible for every dead non-combatant Iraqi any more than we’re responsible for those who were killed by Saddam while we made no effort to stop him.
I think we can categorize civilian deaths thusly:
a) Those who died of natural causes, and can be ignored for this discussion.
b) Those who were killed accidentally by American military action (happened to be standing nearby when a laser-guided bomb took out a weapons depot, etc.). Obviously, America bears the bulk of the responsibility for these deaths (although the use of “human shields” by Saddam certainly didn’t save a lot of innocent lives).
c) Those who were killed purposely by American military action, which obviously is murder. Obviously this happens, although I don’t think it happens much. (I don’t have any statistics to bear this out, so I’m willing to admit I’m wrong if I turn out to be so.)
d) Those who were killed by Saddam’s loyal troops and/or insurgents (which I believe to be the bulk of the of the deaths).I agree that category B is sad, but a necessary consequence of war. I’m no professor of military history, but I think a major bungle in the Vietnam conflict was the government’s attempt to soothe open public relations sores by halting the bombing of targets in North Vietnam. Attempting to prosecute war and making the lives of non-combatants the first priority results in the deaths of Americans. Am I placing the value of the life of an American soldier over that of an Iraqi child? Yes. Yes I am.
Category C is murder, and everyone involved in it needs to be brought to justice. I believe that this is what happens in those few situations.
Category D is, flatly, not our fault. In WWII, the Nazis made a practice of getting revenge for successful missions by the French Resistance (and other underground groups) by simply grabbing innocent citizens and gunning them down. Knowing that this would happen didn’t stop the Resistance from operating, nor should it have.
Put a different way, if a Mafioso gets convicted of a crime and sentenced to jail, and in response he has the prosecutor’s family killed, is that the prosecutor’s fault?
This email is ridiculously long and needs to be edited, but since I just read all 8742 words of TMQ, I feel no guilt.
Your thoughts? Keep in mind, when it comes to political discussions, I am completely out of my depth and basically an idiot.
