I was watching a video of Bill O'Reilly's appearance on "The David Letterman show" and I was struck by a phrase that falafel boy said. He was referring to activist Cindy Sheehan's labeling of Iraqi insurgents as "freedom fighters", and said "No way anybody who blows up women and children is going to be called a "freedom fighter" on my program!".
Well when I heard that I remembered this. I was struck with how easily we excuse our own peripheral damage and then condemn the enemy combatants blatant disregard for human life.
Now before you get all huffy because I am getting worked up over these 14 deaths I would like to make the point that I am talking about all of the civilian deaths that resulted from our aggressive bombing of Iraq in the build up to the war and throughout the conflict. It is very hard to get any real numbers out of Iraq but the number that shows up the most often is 100,000. This number may be high but even if it were wrong by half it would be a catastrophe. We can no longer occupy the moral high ground on this issue. They bomb innocents and we bomb innocents.
Now the Iraqi insurgents seem to adhere to a belief that every innocent victim of one of their bombs is guaranteed a place in heaven because they died in a noble cause. We may find this repellent and a perversion of religion but historically our own Christianity is on shaky ground when it comes to respect for the innocents that are sacrificed in the churches noble causes.
The truth is that is a crime that any of these individuals should die in a war that they did not chose. When we leave we can almost certainly expect for the country to erupt in civil war. There will be many more deaths that will result from that conflict. We condemn the deaths at the hand of Saddam Hussein but the question that must be asked is have we saved more lives then we have taken? And how many more will die after we leave?
It is very hard to get any real numbers out of Iraq but the number that shows up the most often is 100,000.
ReplyDeleteIt shows up most often because it's a nice round scary number that the leftist MSM is quite fond of throwing around, despite its inaccuracy.
This number may be high but even if it were wrong by half it would be a catastrophe.
Oh, definitely. Not nearly as much as the alternative -- leaving a man responsible for the deaths of millions in power would have been, of course. And it leaves aside the important question of how many of those deaths are innocents. And how many come at Coalition hands compared to how many lie squarely on the shoulders of your and Cindy Sheehan's wonderful and noble 'freedom fighters.'
They bomb innocents and we bomb innocents.
Ah, the moral equivalence of the left that we've come to know and loathe. The difference is they deliberately and specifically target innocents and we do not. It's the difference between murder and manslaughter.
historically our own Christianity is on shaky ground when it comes to respect for the innocents that are sacrificed in the churches noble causes
I'm not a Christian and never have been, so there's no 'we' or 'our' here. I will say, however, Christians have been pretty well-behaved of late with regard to 'sacrificing innocents to the church's noble causes.' Certainly they've been more scrupulous than, say, members of the 'Religion of Peace.'
I was struck with how easily we excuse our own peripheral damage and then condemn the enemy combatants blatant disregard for human life.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, this observation can be extended well beyond the military. Even here at home, our domestic law enforcement, even when acting perfectly reasonably and within the bounds of their duties, occasionally make snap decisions that end up killing or otherwise harming people who, it later turns out, were never really a threat to anyone.
Even if actions like these are legally justified, the fact remains that innocent people got killed who didn't deserve to be killed. It seems to me that we owe these victims and their loved ones a lot more than what they typically get (a quick "so sorry folks, now move along" and maybe a token out-of-court settlement) for their troubles, at least without having to actually sue for damages. Yet there is no great hue and cry for our society to make such reparations even for our fellow Americans in peacetime, so is it any wonder that the same is not true for casualties of foreign wars?
Correction: Rather, that the same is true for casualties of foreign wars. (I must have been having one of those "could care less/couldn't care less" moments. But at least no one died as a result of my spur-of-the-moment decision.)
ReplyDeleteThe difference concerning the police is that we all agree that they are supposed to uphold he peace in their individual cities and we provide them a certain amount of flexibility because of the difficulty of the job.
ReplyDeleteMy assertion is that we should really never have been in Iraq in the first place so all of the resulting deaths are potentially a crime.
To make the comparison more defined it would be like a cop from Boston going to Texas to arrest a suspect without the local cops "okay". That officer would not be protected by the law to invade that suspects home or arrest him without the proper paperwork.
Gryphen, you seem to be missing my point. What I'm getting at is that by and large, the American public has been pretty thoroughly desensitized to "collateral damage" inflicted in their name in any setting.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of law enforcement, I don't think officers should be prosecuted for acting in good faith just because of a bad end result, but I definitely believe that their employers - the city, state or federal government in question - absolutely owe substantial recompense to the innocent victims or their families in these incidents, and these victims shouldn't have to go through a long legal battle to get it. You break it, you've bought it. Yet this is clearly not the prevailing attitude among the American public. If anything, the public is actually hostile to this idea. The prevailing attitude seems to reflect the generally prevailing legal position: that as long as the cops acted properly and in good faith, the government owes the victims nothing.
In the case of the Iraq war (or any other war), whether it's justified or not is ultimately beside the point. Even whether any particular use of deadly force in the course of the war is justified or not is also beside the point. None of this can be expected to matter much to the people killed, or to their survivors who only know that their loved ones are dead, their homes are destroyed and that Americans are responsible for it - just as the fact that the police may have acted in good faith and according to the law can't be expected to matter much to the family of the innocent man they killed because they thought the cell phone he was carrying was a gun pointed at them.
Again, if Americans are so desensitized to collateral damage on the home front that we tend to shrug it off, why would there be any greater sensitivity toward foreign strangers in a far-off war?
You might try this for a count. They are actually also on the high side, since (if you look at their database) they count ANY deaths caused by violence as being caused by "US-led military intervention in Iraq".
ReplyDeleteHowever, even with that exaggerating, they aren't anywhere near 100,000 (or even half that) now - which is quite some time after that Lancet 'study' was done.
Please note I didn't link any of the actual debunkings of the original study because I fear you wouldn't trust a pro-war site. The link above is to an anti-war site.
Okay I see the loquacious trolls are lose on this topic, must have been the Billy mention , or perhaps Cindy...oh, well...I thought Dave did a great job putting Billy o in his place..and for the life of me I don't remember Cindy EVER calling them freedom fighters- that is a Rummy phrase...am I wrong or did she ever say this ?
ReplyDeleteShe did say it. Under "Rhetoric" - 5th paragraph from the bottom: "In an interview given to Mark Knoller of CBS, Sheehan states her belief that the Iraq War has made terrorism worse and referred to the foreign insurgents coming to Iraq as "freedom fighters". "But now that we have decimated the country, the borders are open, freedom fighters from other countries are going in...""
ReplyDeleteThere's a link there to an .mov file if you want it direct from the source.