Manufactured "Atrocity"

I came across some very eloquent comments over at adventuresofchester who is blogging in detail well-informed analysis of the Fallujah campaign. some of his readers had some great insights that I reproduce below, and with which I am in full agreement:

It is insane that we are now saying that it is illegal and un-American for a soldier or marine to kill the enemy. The rules of war are an assinine concept, given that the other side refuses to abide by them. As General Sherman so eloquently wrote, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it...."

PB

6:41 PM

Anonymous said...
Chester writes: "But when fighting for the future of civilization, it is best to uphold it."
Actually, no. The correct statement is: "But when fighting for the future of civilization, it is best to win."

Fighting is, itself, the antithesis of civilization. There is nothing civilized about war. Civilization is not promoted by the way you fight, and is not retarded by the way you fight. It is promoted, or retarded, by whether or not you are civilized to begin with, and by whether or not you win.

The only issue is: what tactics, in a given time and place, promote winning? If, as I think plausible in current circumstances, the best tactics are to kill as many IFBs (IslamoFascistBastards) as possible, without regard to whether or not they are wounded, captured, or whatnot, then those are the best tactics. Period. A civilization intent on preserving itself -- and thus promoting civilization -- should employ whatever works best, in the face of an existential threat. Whether or not indiscrimate killing of IFBs is really the best tactic is a legitimate question. It is obvious that some (many?) IFBs who survive due to our "civilized" adherence to the "rules of war" simply survive to fight against us another day. Evidence: reports of Gitmo prisoners released to take up arms against us again.

The expected rejoinder to this cold-blooded harshness is that, in adopting it, the civilized are corrupted and slide down the slipper-slope into un-civilization. In the abstract that argument might carry some weight. But there is abundant evidence to the contrary. Consider WWII. Faced with an existential threat, the allies, fighting a "good" war (and it was a good war! I'm not being ironic), resorted to the most incredible measures of mass slaughter of "innocent civilians": the fire bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The actions of the Marine in this incident are monumentally trivial by comparison. But the horrifically uncivilized actions of Churchill, Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower, etc., carried the day, and the civilization we are now defending is the civilization saved by their actions. So, if resort to barbaric and uncivilized behavior in war devalues and corrupts the civilization engaging in same, the civilization we now defending is not, really, civilized -- it being the descendant of uncivilized war, conducted on a broad and massive scale, far dwarfing all of Fallujah. But we don't think it is uncivilized: the civilization we now enjoy, and are defending against an existential threat, is truly a civilized civilization, defended and won, in the past, by barbarisms on a scale unimaginable to those who carp and whine about Abu-GrabAss or the Marine-in-Fallujah.

...

Machiavelli said it best (I paraphrase): it is good to be loved; it is better to be feared.

Ben Crain

Indeed. When will people realize this isn't a game?