Two Questions

I’ve just had a fairly heated argument with a friend over the latest ugly news from Fallujah: the footage of a marine shooting a wounded, unarmed man lying prostrate and helpless in a mosque. We both had the same visceral reaction to the pictures: horror, moral outrage, a sick sense of helplessness. But we disagreed sharply over what to do about the soldier who pulled the trigger.

I said he’s guilty as hell, and should be punished. All the arguments about the maddening chaos of urban combat and the uncertainty of asymmetric warfare notwithstanding, the video clearly shows a guy standing over a hurt and now-harmless enemy, and killing him in cold blood. There’s no arguing with that.

I got into a little bit of a self-righteous froth, spouting tired bromides about moral imperatives and Geneva conventions and slippery slopes. But there was a basic problem with my line of reasoning: reason doesn’t apply. We’re talking about a kid who’s been dodging bullets for days, faced every moment with the prospect of death or mutilation from behind every door, around every corner, under every corpse. What he did was definitely wrong, but — given the circumstances — perhaps understandable.

Intellectually, this makes a little bit of sense to me. Emotionally, I still can’t buy it. It’s hard to get past the image of a wounded (not innocent, certainly not innocent, but wounded and helpless) guy being shot dead by one of our own. Our soldiers carry with them not just the fate of our country but the weight of our principles, and seeing them jettison those principles so carelessly calls into question everything we stand for as a country, and as a people.

That’s a naive sentiment, of course. I’ve never been in war, never been shot at, never felt my life threatened by people hiding in the shadows, so I have no room to talk. But if you pull away from this specific incident, rise through the ugly, grubby muck of reality and try to see the whole situation from a moralist’s-eye-view, it’s hard to deny that this is quite a blow to our moral standing.

I think what scares me about this, and part of what makes me want to lay the sole blame for this incident at the soldier’s feet, is the secret fear that, were I in the same situation, I might have done exactly the same thing. I like to think of myself as a moral creature, defined by moral boundaries that I would never cross. But is it true?

Maybe not.

So there are actually two questions here: first, why did the soldier react as he did, under those circumstances? And, second, who’s responsible for creating those circumstances?

The answer to the second question, at least, is clear: it’s the architects of this terrible, unnecessary war; it’s the ones who beheaded Iraq and let it flail around in its death-throes before it came back to life as a shambling headless terrorist state, animated by fanatical insurgents whose entire worldview consists of fundamentalism and murder and tyranny, who hate us with a zeal unmitigated by reason. It is the people who created the situation they went to war to diffuse. It’s not the soldier, or his platoon leader, or the generals who planned this attack. It goes much higher than that, to the ones who conceived of this invasion in the first place, and then lied and blustered their way past all obstacles to carry it off, and then forgot to plan for the aftermath.

It’s the ones who created the monster they sought to destroy.

So it occurs to me that I’m playing right into these people’s hands by focusing my outrage on the soldier, alone — Bush and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Pearle and their ilk want all the blame to accrue to guy who pulled the trigger, despite the fact that he’s just the endpoint, the logical conclusion of a long string of misdeeds and incompetence for which they are solely responsible.

They managed to get away with this in the Abu Ghraib scandal: the grunts who did the deed are paying the price, as they should, but the ones who made the deed possible are still running the country,

They’ll probably get away with it this time, too.