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Old 11-28-2006, 03:19 PM   #17 (permalink)
ubertuber
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Quote:
Originally Posted by host
...US troops today who do not question and resist immoral or illegal orders, are part of an "all volunteer" force, and should reasonably be held to a higher standard of humane, legal, and moral conduct.

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US troops are members of a professional fighting force. IMO, we must give them credit and hold them responsible for discerning what is a bullshit, illegal, pre-emptive "war of choice", and what constitutes fighting a direct and imminent threat to our national security. Maybe not on day one of any given conflict that they are ordered to participate in, but surely when the fight is a thousand or more days old, as this phoney, GWOT now is.
host, I'm troubled by your interpretation of the responsibility to not follow illegal orders. This is an established tenant, and as deltona couple points out, applies to the legality of an order, which is subject to court interpretation, not the morality, which is not (and indeed is the product of opinion polls, in that moral scales differ). Your interpretation is a recipe for quick anarchy. More than that, I'm flabbergasted at the idea that this legality of orders argument can be applied to directives issued by the civilian government. The idea that the military itself can declare a war "bullshit, illegal, of choice, etc" is dangerous. Down that path lies a 4 branch government - executive, legislative, judicial, and military. That is not a place any of us wish to end up (MacArthur almost put us there, and as it is we're close enough) - especially since one branch would obviously have its own guns, to go with an incorporated judicial system. How many years would it be until the military found that a war not yet authorized was essential to the national security. In this circumstance would we have entered WWII a month earlier? A year? What about the Cuban Missile Crisis? After all, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you start to look at the whole world as one giant collection of nails. Apply that to a self-directed military and consider the consequences. I think that, for all its flaws, the current system is best. The military must remain absolutely subordinate to the civilian establishment, which we at least have an indirect control over through our votes.

In fact, I think that the idea that the Iraq war is unequivocally illegal is naive. You may argue that the war has been waged in a criminal way (possibly) or that its moral or ethical basis was fundamentally flawed from the beginning (probably), but the idea that existing UN resolutions allowed for the use of force has enough traction that the idea would be tied up in any judicial proceeding for a long, long time. In this case, the legal bar may have been set far below the ethical and moral ones. That doesn't render the bars interchangeable.

P.S. Just because we haven't learned all of the lessons of the Vietnam War does not mean that we are repeating our mistakes in their entirety.

P.P.S. Nice thread willravel.
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Last edited by ubertuber; 11-28-2006 at 03:24 PM..
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