Being against the war while "supporting our troops."

[Loach]

@CTB

OK, so no one can question the execution of a war plan without simultaneously losing the right to say that they “support the troops”? I will wait for **loach to confirm this. I think it is still a reasonable question. Everything to this point has been examining who cannot speak against the war while still supporting the troops. My question is very specifically regarding who can perform this magical feat, as I suspect that this list is much more manageable. But perhaps, as you suggest, the list simply does not exist.

I have answered this many times. Why should I retype? Of course I am oversimplifying the concept. The world is not black and white and I am basically trying to cram a grey concept into a black and white framework. You can whatif me to death. I won’t play that game. I will grant you there are probably people who actively support individual troops or units in concrete ways while actively being against the war. I have never seen any but I’ll assume there are. Those who speak out against the war generally tack on a “but I support the troops.” They are either being hypocritical or condescending. Working against what the troops are trying to accomplish is the opposite of supporting them. If that is what you believe then that is what you should do. It is your duty to speak out and fight against what you believe is wrong. Just know that what you say and do may have an effect on the troops. Knowing that many are against what they are doing can effect their morale. Bringing political pressure may cause their mission to be a failure and render any sacrifice meaningless. Many believe their sacrifices are already meaningless. If you believe that way then by all means exercise your rights and do what you can to change things. Just don’t be a hypocrite.

Damn I did go and retype it.

[CTB]

@Loach

I don’t know what you mean by “fealty”. I know you picked that loaded word for a reason, but we do swear an oath.

<snip>

This is not a feudal country, so no we are not vassels but the military is held to a different standard than civilians.

OK, perhaps my choice of words was incorrect, but I think you are attributing more malevolence than I had in mind. I had in mind more allegiance rather than that you were a vassal. My bad.

So you swear an oath to obey the orders of your military superiors, and the President, being the commander in chief, obviously is the top of that particular hierarchy. If we can get away from my poor choice of words, where does that translate into taking so personally a sign factually stating that the President lied? A much more important part of that oath is “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. You are required to follow orders from your commander in chief, but the only thing that you have taken an oath to “support and defend” is the Constitution, from enemies both foreign and domestic.

I support our troops in everything that they do that supports and defends the Constitution. I hold the troops blameless for any action undertaken in response to a legal order from a superior officer. However, this field manual goes into a bit more detail about the standard that the military are held to:

1-62. No one is only a leader; each of you is also a subordinate, and all members of the Army are part of a team. A technical supervisor leading a team of DA civilian specialists, for instance, isn’t just the leader of that group. The team chief also works for someone else, and the team has a place in a larger organization.

1-63. Part of being a good subordinate is supporting your chain of command. And it’s your responsibility to make sure your team supports the larger organization. Consider a leader whose team is responsible for handling the pay administration of a large organization. The chief knows that when the team makes a mistake or falls behind in its work, its customers—soldiers and DA civilians—pay the price in terms of late pay actions. One day a message from the boss introducing a new computer system for handling payroll changes arrives. The team chief looks hard at the new system and decides it will not work as well as the old one. The team will spend a lot of time installing the new system, all the while keeping up with their regular workload. Then they’ll have to spend more time undoing the work once the new system fails. And the team chief believes it will fail—all his experience points to that.

1-64. But the team chief cannot simply say, “We’ll let these actions pile up; that’ll send a signal to the commander about just how bad the new system is and how important we are down here.” The team does not exist in a vacuum; it’s part of a larger organization that serves soldiers and DA civilians. For the good of the organization and the people in it, the team chief must make sure the job gets done.

1-65. Since the team chief disagrees with the boss’s order and it affects both the team’s mission and the welfare of its members, the team chief must tell the boss; he must have the moral courage to make his opinions known. Of course, the team chief must also have the right attitude; disagreement doesn’t mean it’s okay to be disrespectful. He must choose the time and place—usually in private—to explain his concerns to the boss fully and clearly. In addition, the team chief must go into the meeting knowing that, at some point, the discussion will be over and he must execute the boss’s decision, whatever it is.

1-66. Once the boss has listened to all the arguments and made a decision, the team chief must support that decision as if it were his own. If he goes to the team and says, “I still don’t think this is a good idea, but we’re going to do it anyway,” the team chief undermines the chain of command and teaches his people a bad lesson. Imagine what it would do to an organization’s effectiveness if subordinates chose which orders to pursue vigorously and which ones to half step.

1-67. Such an action would also damage the team chief himself: in the future the team may treat his orders as he treated the boss’s. And there is no great leap between people thinking their leader is disloyal to the boss to the same people thinking their leader will be disloyal to them as well. The good leader executes the boss’s decision with energy and enthusiasm; looking at their leader, subordinates will believe the leader thinks it’s absolutely the best possible solution. The only exception to this involves your duty to disobey obviously illegal orders. This is not a privilege you can claim, but a duty you must perform. (Chapter 2 discusses character and illegal orders. Chapter 4 discusses ethical reasoning.)

1-68. Loyalty to superiors and subordinates does more than ensure smooth-running peacetime organizations. It prepares units for combat by building soldiers’ trust in leaders and leaders’ faith in soldiers. The success of the airborne assault prior to the 1944 Normandy invasion is one example of how well trained subordinate leaders can make the difference between victory and defeat.

So questioning of orders that a soldier disagrees with (not to mention cases of illegal orders) are to be met with respectful, but couragous dissent. Once a decision has been rendered, it is then the soldier’s duty to perform that task in a supportive fashion. Certainly an understandable necessity, particularly in forward areas.

So if we hold civilians to the same standard as the military, then it is still well within bounds to voice dissent. But here’s the thing… many people do not feel that the current President is open to other viewpoints and do not feel that they have been heard, nor that the President’s decision to go another direction have been fully and properly explained. We are missing the step above that says “Once the boss has listened to all the arguments…” This is true even within the military structure, ans Rumsfeld’s treatment of top military brass in the Pentagon is common knowledge. Frustration is the inevitable result, and from that frustration you will of course get instances where people’s displeasure is expressed in less respectful terms.

If the troops (and this is a big if) do not understand that in a democracy all citizens have to actively ensure that their government is acting in a way that is in keeping with their eithical framework because we bear the burden of selecting our leaders… well, I respect our troops too much to even suppose that they do not know something so basic to our democracy. To know that they are protecting the rights of citizens to perform that very self-determination should be envigorating, not demoralizing. It is these very freedoms that the Constitution was created to protect, and those freedoms are the only thing you have sworn to protect and defend.

I see that as I have been writing this you have posted another response. I can’t really say that it answered my question, though you do pout and groan about re-typing something. You propose that to be against the war is to doing “the opposite of supporting them”. That is a strong charge, one that I could only be met with actual support of the enemy or active sabotage of military activities. Ithink you are going a bit overboard here. If the military actively encourages dissent when faced with questions of ethics, surely the citizenry at large are free to do so without charges of consorting with the enemy, or being a hypocrite, from the likes of you.

Do you have any evidence whatsoever that dissent at home reduces combat effectiveness of troops? Do less open countries tend to have stronger militaries? I would submit that those societies that promote debate have throughout history been the ones to dominate others. Perhaps you have some evidence that points otherwise.

[coleridge78]

@Loach

I will grant you there are probably people who actively support individual troops or units in concrete ways while actively being against the war. I have never seen any but I’ll assume there are.

Actually, I know many of them. They’re people like one of my oldest friends, whose boyfriend of eight years and most of their close male friends are on active duty in places like Baghdad and Ramadi. Some, like her bf, are on their second tours. She and friends and co-workers send boxes, every week, of everything from the useful (baby-wipes, apparently, are popular) to things to try and maintain some sanity in the long periods of non-activity (VHS tapes of television shows are the biggest request). They do all this, and at the same time contribute time and money to the anti-war effort.

They’re people like my co-worker and his wife and the members of her church group, who provide material and emotional support to wives and children stateside who are struggling so that their husbands and fathers in Iraq and Afghanistan can have some peace of mind. They do all this, and have also helped organize and marched in the state’s largest anti-war rallies (among other efforts).

They’re people like three of my co-workers who have recently returned from active duty around Baghdad and southern Iraq, and are helping out their buddies and the families stateside. Two of them, on arriving at the camp from where they were going to head back to the states, dismantled the homemade armor on their vehicle and helped a new group just arriving to get it onto theirs, since Rumsfeld’s Army saw fit to send them driving all over Iraq in jeeps with canvas doors. They’ve since become involved in the anti-war movement. They saw the dead civillians, every day, firsthand, thousands of them, and started wondering pretty quickly what sort of hell this is, and for what.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. If you want to minimize what these people do, or the fact that they even exist, then all I can say is this: I “support the troops”, especially the ones who are my close personal friends (and family, which I didn’t even touch on), but it’s hard to find respect for a man who discounts people’s dedication, their physically and emotionally exhaustive efforts, over the Internet. I don’t mean this to be a personal attack, as I’m sure given the chance to discuss more fully you wouldn’t really be disrespecting these people… but that’s certainly what it sounds like to this point.