The Problem is the War, Not the Soldiers

The Problem is the War, Not the Soldiers

By Fran Quigley

The website WikiLeaks.org recently released a video of a 2007 U.S. Army attack in Baghdad that included among its victims two Reuters news agency employees, several would-be rescuers of the dead and dying, and two children.

The video depicts U.S. soldiers agitating for permission to shoot, then gunning down civilians and laughing as tanks running over dead bodies. To some, this suggests that prosecution of the soldiers is called for.

Josh Steiber sees it differently.

“I urge you to be slow to judge those who are trapped in these (war) machines and ask yourself if you did or didn’t do anything to create this trap,” he wrote on the Iraq Veterans Against the War website. “The high number of soldiers that I deployed with, including my friends whose voices and images are in this chilling video, wanted to improve the lives of their friends, families, and their own futures.”

Before Steiber became a conscientious objector, he was a member of the Bravo Company 2-16 depicted in the video. Although Steiber was not a part of the mission that day, he understands the soldiers’ perspective in a way most of us cannot.

“If you want to keep things like this from happening, stop screaming at soldiers who are fighting in a war that most Americans advocated to begin with,” he wrote.

Instead, Steiber urged, we should “(d)emand political and military leaders reexamine the system that creates the callousness displayed in this video or the huge amount of our national budget that we pay for this thriving military system.”

In a telephone interview last week, Steiber brought up a portion of the video where the soldiers learned that their victims had included the two children.

“I heard the soldier say, ‘Well, it’s their own fault for bringing kids into battle,’ and I heard a little bit of the struggle in his voice, along with the quick excuse,” said Steiber, who recognized the voices of his colleagues on the tape. “There is more struggle with this among the military than people realize.”

Steiber’s point is that the casualties of war include not just Iraqis and Afghans, but also idealistic young American men and women. A Rand Corporation study showed that almost one in five U.S. military service members return from Iraq and Afghanistan reporting symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or major depression, a finding which conjures up the sad legacy of mental health damage suffered by many Vietnam War veterans.

The Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes once said, “War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.”

Justice Hughes’ challenge was rhetorical, but it lines up with Steiber’s message. We should direct our judgment not toward the battlefield, where young Americans are accused of barbaric acts, but toward the halls of Washington, where politicians create battlefields designed to turn young Americans into barbarians.

“If we are shocked by this video, and I definitely think we should be, we need to look to the top to see who is responsible,” Steiber says.

This column is online at http://www.indystar.com/article/20100419/OPINION12/4190302/1002/OPINION/War-itself-is-the-problem

Fran Quigley
Visiting Professor of Law
Indiana University School of Law--Indianapolis
Also, Associate Director, Indiana-Kenya Partnership/USAID-AMPATH, and Staff Attorney, Indiana Legal Services

(reprinted w/permission)

and no one is held accountable.

until they are, these occupations and destruction will continue.

I can't believe that President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. How ironic. :(

Today anyone has access to the means of making an informed decision prior to signing up for the military. If you sign up for the military
during a time in which your country is inarguably engaged in aggressive warfare, you own it. Many people don't sign up, precisely because they
are able to anticipate situations such as the one shown in the wikileaks video without having "been there".

And your mythically village never existed at all.

Not even today, on this very site, does everyone have access to "the means of making an informed decision."

What informs a decision to join are war movies, video games, the desire to strike on your own, desperation because you don't have the money to go to college, some asshole recruiter who promises you gold plated crap when the reality is everything is crap plated crap, and a thousand other concerns, fears, expectations of others, and factless truths.

Nobody knows the scars left by war in the minds of soldiers until they've been there.

where they want to place the blame. Preemptive whitewashing by one's own team is inappropriate, imo. In post World War II Germany there were many educated people who, in the event that they came across someone who lost family members to the holocaust, always started to "set things into perspective" by talking about how Germans suffered from the war too and how bad conditions led to the war etc. Such things were generally frowned upon.

and small town kids.

If you had to return to a war zone three, four and five times, you'd lose a part of your soul and/or accidently kill when split second decisions must be made.

No, WE, WHO HAVE ENOUGH money that we don't have to send our kids to kill and die for corporations don't get off that easy.

Every time a war crime is committed, it also reflects back on US, you and me = American Citizens.

for a lot of kids.