Soldiers' morality
It has been an awful month in
Iraq, dominated by the news of prisoners’
abuse in detention facilities run by the US
and its allies, by the decapitation of an American,
broadcast on the Internet, and of course by
the usual list of bomb explosions and casualties
all over the Middle East. Plenty of commentators
have remarked on all these events, but I have
made a list of what I think are interesting
phrases related to the prisoners’ abuse
scandal, and that I’d like to submit to
the readers’ attention. What I think is
relevant in the following quotes is what they
reveal about the common sense of morality that
appears to be shared by a lot of us. As we shall
see, it makes for a disturbing picture of our
ethical standards.
One of the first excuses adduced
by the accused soldiers and their friends and
families is a classic: “I (he/she) was
following orders.” Well, all right, what
that means is that responsibility needs to be
ascertained throughout the chain of command,
but in what sense is this an excuse for the
soldiers’ behavior? It didn’t help
the Nazi at Nuremberg whenever they tried the
same approach, and for good reasons: when an
adult individual does something, even at the
prompting of somebody else, that individual
is primarily responsible for what he has done.
In the United States, it is common to try children
as adults for all sorts of crimes, and one often
hears calls for the death penalty in some such
cases. But when it comes to our own “boys”
(and “girls”) doing awful things,
all we have to do is to point the finger to
whoever gave the order? What happened to one
of the cornerstones of the American ethos, personal
responsibility?
A second common refrain heard
during the past few weeks has been that “they
were not properly trained.” As if a mature
adult actually needs special training to figure
out that it is not moral to torture prisoners
of war, that it is not ethical to humiliate
people that are in one’s custody, for example
by forcing them to engage in acts that their
culture or religion considers demeaning. On
a much minor scale, of course, a similar attitude
is behind the idea that if someone at the office
sexually harasses one of his employees, the
problem will be fixed with “sensitivity
training,” as if any reasonable man wouldn’t
know that touching, or even talking to, a woman
in a certain manner without permission is simply
not an acceptable thing to do.
Many of the friends and family
of the accused soldiers have been understandably
shocked and surprised at the news of the abuses.
But, rather than accepting the reality of photos
and testimonies, a common reaction has been
along the lines of “he is such a nice boy,
I simply can’t believe he could do that
sort of things.” This, of course, is the
same simplistic attitude that explains why the
majority of crimes are committed by people who
know the victim, the latter being simply unable
to think that her nice uncle, neighbor, or friend
could possibly do what they in fact went on
to do. In several of the televised interviews
with friends and family of the accused soldiers,
the attitude was palpably not just one of disbelief
at the reality of the events, but rather one
insinuating the possibility that somebody, somewhere,
was simply making all of this up.
To continue with our brief analysis,
consider Donald Rumsfeld, the (too) briefly
embattled Secretary of Defense: he immediately
went on television to “take full responsibility”
for the abuses, and then gingerly (even contemptuously)
ignored calls for his resignation. What exactly
does it mean to “take responsibility,”
then? I thought, naively as it turns out, that
it would mean that someone at the top of the
chain of command (say, Rumsfeld) would resign
because he had not been able to correct a problem
of which he had been aware for months before
the scandal erupted. But I guess Mr. Rumsfeld’s
dictionary includes some other, hitherto unknown,
definition of “taking responsibility.”
We then come to President Bush,
who has been quoted saying, after viewing the
photos of the prisoners’ maltreatment,
“this does not reflect the America I know.”
Well, the problem is that -- contrary to what
Mr. Bush and his cronies have been saying for
years -- there is no such thing as “the”
America they know. The United States of America
is, like many other places in the world, sometime
a wonderful and sometime an awful place to live,
depending on the circumstances. Americans, like
any other people in the world, don’t have
a monopoly on goodness (or on evil, for that
matter), but are simply a bunch of human beings,
with all the great potential and faults that
human beings typically have. That is why it
is equally silly to say that one is “proud
to be an American” (how can one be proud
of a birth accident?), as that one “hates
America” (how can one meaningfully hate
an abstract entity?). Rather, one should say
that one is proud, ashamed of, or even hate,
particular Americans, especially individual
leaders and the policies they implement.
The Bush administration also tried
to get some mileage out of the alleged fact
that the US is “dealing” with the
matter openly and swiftly, as opposed to some
dictatorship that American blood has helped
eliminating. Right, except of course that that
dictatorship had actually been helped into place
by the same American interests that later removed
it, not to mention the maddening fact that the
Bush administration tried to keep the news of
the abuses out of the public eye for months,
while at the same time doing absolutely nothing
to stop the practice. Only when the news finally
became public Rumsfeld “took responsibility”
(see above).
Lastly, one of the most disturbing
comments I’ve heard in the news about this
whole horrible affair began appearing after
the decapitation of Nick Berg was broadcast
on the Internet: “well, see, at least we
are not as barbaric as they are.” Yes,
there is no question that the decapitation of
a human being is a barbaric act (although, let
us remember that the US is the only Western
country that still applies the death penalty
-- being killed by raw decapitation is surely
worse than being fried on the electric chair,
but at some point this becomes an academic matter
for the person involved). And surely decapitating
one prisoner outdoes abusing several by a long
shot (then again, at least one prisoner did
die under torture in American hands). But even
to make the comparison, it seems to me, dramatically
lowers our own moral standards. So now the US
is no longer a knight in shining armor, interested
only in bringing democracy and economic prosperity
to the rest of the world. We are reduced to
a picture of the US army doing awful things,
yes, but at least not as awful as those of the
other side. Have we completely lost our moral
compass? Did we ever had it to begin with?
