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Originally Posted by 9th Engineer
I fully agree that shooting civilians is completely indefensible, please don't get me wrong. This war has taught me something you won't hear many places, democracy cannot unite people. Democracy is the eventual creation of a people already united by common morals and above all else the understanding that life is sacred. I do not see this in these people. They still in the feudal warlord stage of their civilization and no amount of effort on our part is going to pull them past it faster. Regardless of whether we want them to live in a society that values life, peace, and freedom if they do not want it we cannot give it to them. And nothing I've seen leads me to believe they really want this.
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Thanks for the clarification. I really didn't think that you were completely defending the situation, but I wasn't sure. I've never been in the military, which means I have obviously not been in combat. The not being in combat is something I share with my President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense. There is nothing unusual about this. In fact, our founding fathers would probably approve of having men who have always been civilians in ultimate charge of the military.
However, I do have some measure of empathy and I have spoken and associated with people in the military, as well as reading on the subject. People say that noone who has been in combat, especially in urban settings fighting an insurgency, can understand the stress. Actually, I think that to some degree I can. Like you I think I can understand the motivation, the stress, and the rage.
I just think that it doesn't make any difference. In regular law, when a person is committing an illegal act, they are completely responsible for their actions. If a drug dealer, for example, in self defense shoots back at another drug dealer and kills a 9-year-old girl, he does not have a defense. If a person robbing a bank shoots and kills a customer because he perceived some threat, he has no defense. I am sure that when these kinds of people go before a judge they may attempt to rationalize their decision, blame it on circumstances or the victim, but it probably does them no good.
As I said in my post, this incident has some conservatives acting like the kind of liberals that conservatives love to hate. The kind of liberals that defend the criminal by attacking the victim, or by stretching extenuating circumstances to the breaking point in an effort to allow the defendant to shuck off responsiblity.
I was never that kind of liberal. Like you, I can possibly glimpse the reasoning of these people, but I also recognize responsibility for ones actions.
Of course we are partially responsible for this in some way. We allowed our elected officials to give our President the authority to start a war. And he was the kind of person who invisioned a clean decisive war, one in which there would be no insurgency, a short occupation, and a grateful nation that would completely take on the burden of it's reconstruction - you know, a moron.