You know Goya’s cycle "Los Desastres de la Guerra"?
Jul 12th, 2007 by Paul Moor
By comparison those graphic horrors look like a day in the country with Uncle Don when you read this journalistic triumph just published in “The Nation” - long, very long, but well worth reading in its entirety if you sincerely care about what the Bush administration has perverted the USA into during the past few years….
If you can’t take the time for that really exceptionally long article - damned near book-length - you can also find a conscientious summation of it in London’s “Independent”, Great Britain’s official newspaper of record, replacing the Murdoch-castrated once great “Times”.
This kind of phenomenon has been observed in every armed conflict. It is part of the “horror” of war, a descriptor that we have grown accustomed to hearing and have habituated to.
Although a similar context might not elicit similar behavior from everyman, combat seems to corrupt the ethics of many.
In a defensive war, moral crimes would likely be overlooked; when we are positioned as aggressors (as in Iraq, Viet Nam), it seems to become more of an issue. What we should be exalting are the thousands of soldiers who maintain their composure in spite of the bedlam and insanity of their circumstance.
Since war itself is an atrocity, it is naive to affect righteous indignation at the atrocities within the atrocity. At this point, the guilt for soldiers misbehavior falls on those who continue to support our presence in Iraq.
The liberal (socialist) presses in Europe love to target the US now, but when we were over there liberating them from Germany you didn’t see as much concern about the behavior of our troops.