Dogger Wrote:Graybeard,
I really do think it's time for people to stop drinking W's Kool-Aid. We are Americans, we have never entered a conflict where we were not targeted first. Saddam had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with 9-11. Yet we invade Iraq on some intervention prevention manifesto garbage. (I've struggled to remember what the heck they called their reasoning of going into Iraq.) Quite simply he has created this mindset of you better get me before I get you. No W is not directly responsible for the abuses but his monumental ineptness in planning for a post war Iraq is. Tell me, what business does a reserve military police unit from Pa. and Md. have in extracting information from P.O.W.'s have. Who was in charge? These shadow govt. contractor's really sicken me. Why in the hell are they questioning people or softening up or giving the treatment to prisoners?
Point of clarification here,
First of all, the U.S. has been the aggressor nation in many wars, most notably The Spanish-American War, WW1 (or the USA got involved when no real threat to the USA existed) and the Vietnam War.
There are various proxy wars such as the Panama affair of 1990 (or was that in '89?), the Grenada invasion of 1983, the Kosovo bombardment, and this list can go on and on.
The rhetoric that led to our involvement with all of these military actions is quite similar to the rhetoric employed by the Bush Administration. In the case of WW1, Wilson feared political ramifications for not acting to engage Germany and the Central Powers. As a consequent, he took advantage of political rhetoric seeking to damage his presidency and used it to rally the people to support the war. What many don't realize today about WW1 is that the draft was put into use because so many Americans were opposed to the war.
By argument one could claim the USA was the aggressor in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, WW2 and the Korean "police-action." In some cases the arguments are very persuasive, but the nation did not act militarily until being attacked, the Mexican War notwithstanding.
As for W's responsibility in the abuse case, there are precedents that claim W is directly responsible for what happened at that prison, and what has happened to other "detainees" in Iraq.
On a psychological basis, and the U.S. Army has studied this extensively since WW2, soldiers of all stripes break down psychologically as a result of combat. In the WW1 era they called this "shell-shock" or combat fatigue. By the end of WW2 the Army realized that shell-shock did not mean mere refusal to fight as it connotes, but it represented what historian James McPherson called "combat narcosis" and this is the adrenaline rush one receives when faced with near-death experiences. This same rush can be experienced, on a milder level, by extreme sports enthusiasts when they bungee jump, snow-ski, or skydive.
One constant of all warfare for all nations and cultures since the beginning of time is combat makes some men and women (not all) commit atrocities, some atrocities being just cruel and dehumanizing acts like the guard soldiers in the Abu Ghraib photos, and some atrocities being completely unheard of such as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
The psychological component that compels men to do terrible things in combat has been explored by many authors over the past 100 years, but perhaps the best work and research has been provided by Sidney Axinn in 'A Moral Military' and the often referred to 'Just and Unjust Wars' by Michael Walzer. But John Keegan's 'Face of Battle' focuses entirely what men experience in battle and he uses four historical battles to bring his conclusions to light (none of the battle involve U.S. servicemen or women). In his accounts of this four battles, he brings up the atrocities that were committed and how the men dealt with the atrocities after the fact.
Sidney Axinn, in his book, brought up an important fact regarding our military, and this is how George W. is directly invovled. He examines our congressional acts and treaties that make us a part of international organizations that govern warfare, the Geneva and Hague Conventions. As part of our congress approving our involvement in these acts, our government is supposed to inform all service eligible males (and now possibly females) by age 18 of the entirety of these rules. Not only the U.S. but all nations that have agreed to the Geneva and Hague Conventions on international rules of war are to inform their populations as to these rules, whether they are in the military or not.
This has never been acted upon, either by the U.S. or most other nations (I think the French have a high school elective that deals with it, the Swiss actively abide by all rules).
What links this to Bush is his war plan of involving what General Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf called "junk troops" or specifically National Guardsmen and reservists. In most Army, navy, Marine and Air Force boot camps, the boots are given some instruction on rules of war as per the conventions. This is usually done in classroom form after a 14 hour day of P.T.
Enlisted guardsmen, to my knowledge, are never informed of such standards unless entering a battlezone, which is hardly not the time to bring up military ethics.
It is a given that in any war Americans or other combatants will commit acts of atrocities. No one person, based on their national origin, religion or creed is excepted to this and that is why these provisions to educate the masses on the rules of war, are contained in the Geneva and Hague Conventions.
Atrocities come with the territory of war and Bush wanted this war, and since atrocities have happened (and we are only hearing and seeing about the "milder" atrocities) then GW Bush is certainly directly responsible for these actions committed by our reservists and National Guardsmen fighting a war they were not trained to fight.
What Axinn also elucidates in his book (used at all of the militar academies in this country) is if the USA is part of the conventions, then why don't we follow all the rules? Why include these conventions as our official government policy if we don't intend to abide by everything laid out in the agreements?
