Don't Support the Troops

Don’t Support the Troops
by jk

	x	While criticism of the US war in Iraq continues to mount, even in circles, such as the US mainstream media, where it had been effectively censored up till fairly recently, one theme is continually promoted amongst critics: we may be against the war and Bush’s policies but we obviously DO support the troops. In the face of quite reasonable conservative attacks which equate opposition to the war with opposition to the troops fighting it, the war’s critics have allowed themselves to be bullied into an intellectually and morally contradictory position.
“Thumbs up!” to torture and murder in Iraq signaled by US soldier at Abu Graib prison, Saddam’s torture den now under new American management but serving the same Saddamite menu to clients.

How can someone be opposed to the war, be convinced that it is in every way an illegal and immoral policy of the US government, and yet still claim to support the troops charged with carrying out the illegal and immoral policy? Some critics have responded by claiming the apparent paradox stems mainly from a disagreement about the true meaning of “support the troops”. They allege that conservatives have sought to equate that phrase with “support the war”, and that this is an unfair or unnecessary view, given that one of the things antiwar types wish to do is to save the troops by bringing them home and out of harm’s way. In other words, the war critics say, it is certainly possible to be FOR the troops, in the sense of being sympathetic with their plight of being ordered into a dangerous place, while still being opposed to what they’ve been ordered to do there. The problem with that view is that it ignores a basic premise of the duty of any soldier—to carry out his orders even if he should disagree with the political wisdom of them. Thus, if one thinks the policy of this war is bad, for example in that it has resulted in many Iraqi citizens, of all ages, losing their lives at the hands of the US military, and if on the other hand it would have been possible to spare some of those Iraqis by having some American soldiers die instead, how does one truthfully or consistently maintain that he supports the troops but not what they do?

Aren't honest opponents of the war facing a choice of saying they either support American troops, or they support the Iraqi victims of those troops? Is there really room for a nuanced position when life and death are the choices being fought over? And if there was, somehow, room for nuance in one’s view of US troops and their actions, was that not destroyed forever by the revelations and the pictures from Abu Graib? One cannot any longer hide behind the fact that the US military and the US media have conspired to paint a picture of the war as mainly the effort of America’s “finest” to bring democratic virtues to the poor oppressed of Iraq. What the United States clearly intended on bringing Iraqis was a heavy dose of “do what the hell you are told or get ready to be tortured and killed.” In other words, as someone pointed out, we didn’t close the store of torture and murder in Iraq, we just changed its management. We now know that the war crimes committed by US troops in Iraq (and elsewhere) were not the acts of a few depraved soldiers, who somehow all ended up in the same unit and guarding the same cell blocks in Abu Graib, but that their acts were the end product of a policy, approved by George Bush and his top military leaders, of tossing out the “inconvenient” Geneva Convention rules and adopting the ones favored by Saddam Hussein.

This is hardly surprising when one understands that the Iraq war was fought partly for the purpose of Bush obtaining personal vengeance upon Saddam and partly to give the US control over Iraq’s oil reserves, and had nothing to do with any moral problem on the part of US leaders—who after all left Saddam in power in 1991—concerning Saddam’s treatment of his people. Indeed, this minor rationale, of saving Iraqis from Saddam, was initially far down the list of reasons given by Bush for America to go to war with Iraq. Since subsequent to the “end of major hostilities” and Bush’s declaration of “mission accomplished”, the claimed primary mission of finding stockpiles of Iraqi WMD was NOT accomplished at all, and nor was the secondary one of demonstrating any responsibility of Iraq for the 9/11 attack on the US, nor the related claim that Saddam had Qaeda links (an idea which the US government has constantly hinted was true but at the same time admitted had no factual basis), Bush was left with the least important mission of all—pretending to give a damn about bettering the lives of Iraqis..

In the end, if supporting the troops means supporting Bush’s dishonest and criminal war in Iraq, and if one is opposed to that war, he must not support the troops who fight it any more than he supports the appointed President who orders them to do so. If supporting the troops instead is held to mean getting them the hell out of Iraq as quickly as possible, that worthy goal has to be measured against the fact that for every day they are not liberated from their terrible unaccomplishable mission, American troops are serving the interests of a clearly unfit and probably insane commander-in-chief. We may pity the men and women forced into the service of such a leader. We should pity more the people upon whom their service is inflicted.

May 31, 2004