Hypothetical: "My loved one is fighting for Iraq..."

Great Debates
1

[Inspired, in a perverse way, by this thread. ]

“My relative/friend/loved one is fighting in the military of Iraq. How dare you wish death on him!”

**"Well, he's fighting for the wrong side. His leader is a maniac. Besides, MY relative is fighting for the US military. How can you wish death on HIM???"**

“He’s not fighting for Saddam, he’s fighting for his country! Your relative is fighting for that maniac Bush!”

**"Look, we don't even like Bush. He's fighting for the United States, not Bush. What is my relative supposed to do, let your relative kill him? It's either him or the other guy!"**

“Your relative doesn’t have to fight. He shouldn’t even be there. He has a choice. He always had a choice. He can give up, get out of harm’s way, and go home.”

**"It would be very risky for him to do that at this point. Look: we're right, you're wrong. If that means my relative has to kill your relative, excuuuse me."**

“You are not right! Your crazy leader has broken all the international norms of acceptable conduct! I hope your relative and all his friends get killed.”

 **"Ditto to you. Say, isn't it against Board rules to wish death on someone? Our cause is inspiring the whole world. Something CAN be done against power-mad tyrants!"**

“No, WE’RE inspiring the whole world. You are nothing but an accessory to murder.”

**"No, WE'RE right. You are a very, very bad person."**

“No, WE’RE right. You’re vile. You want my loved one to die.”

 **"You're disgusting. You're the one who wants my loved one to die. Let's go to the Pit."**

“I support my troops.”

**"I support my troops."**

[Now: replace “United States/US” with “Iraq”, and replace “Iraq” with “United States/US”. Then relace “Saddam” with “Bush”, and replace “Bush” with “Saddam”. Works either way.

How easy it is to get outraged by the opinions of others. How hard it is to imagine the shoe on the other foot. How easy to not care about people who are far away and unrelated to you.

Hmmmm…thousands of SDMB members, all over the world, and not one of them has a military-age male relative in Iraq. Or else they haven’t been willing to say so. I wish they would.]

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]

Here’s one.

3

Rats. Let’s try that again.

Here.

4

The thing is, tclouir, there is an objective difference between the US and Iraq, and an objective difference between Bush and Hussein.

This objective difference does not, I agree, prove the necessity of war. Indeed, notwithstanding the objective difference I mention above, the US is the aggressor here, in the sense that we invaded Iraq rather than the other way around.

BUT - some cultures are simply better. I have no problem in saying that the barbaric practice of female circumcision, for example, is something that should be stamped out, even if it means I am denying certain African tribes their cultural autonomy. By the same token, I believe it is not wrong to work for the removal of a government that practices torture and brutal as a matter of policy.

Whether the methods used to remove this government properly extend to armed invasion of a soveriegn nation by another, I am not yet fully convinced.

But it’s not as simple as a=b, tclouie. Because a does NOT equal b.

5

I hope your (hypothetical) relative surrenders, or at least gets captured without bodily harm.

I know he’ll be treated humanely by US captors. He might be disarmed and released fairly quickly.

I hope that, a year from now, he will find that his country is better off. No more Saddam, no more sanctions, and rebuilding by the international community well underway.

6

That is the exact line of thought which causes conflict and war. You can hear any culture say that it is “simply better”, in fact all cultures think that they are superior; if they didn’t think they practiced the best way to live, then they would adopt another culture… Hitler thought his people were “simply better”- its a very dangerous thing to think.

Its alot like saying “my god is real and yours isn’t”. But how can you ever know? Ive never seen the chart that ranks various cultures so where does this assupmtion come from? should i ask for a cite? People have different ideas of what culture should be and how it should be practiced so what makes some better than others?

Now thats not to say that i think culture should be forced on anyone. If people consciously CHOOSE to live a certain way, everyone else should mind thier own damn life. Any “culture” that excersices force is actually a form of government or population control in my view; its not culture.

Culture consists of free will and doesn’t force or impose its views. There is absolutely no obvective basis to say that a culture is superior

7

Crap! I’ll go report this news to Amnesty International so they can close up shop.

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Ummm…what page is the “Iraqi loved one” on, exactly? I skimmed that whole long thread, and couldn’t find it.

Or perhaps you misunderstood my meaning. I meant a military-aged male relative in Iraq…who is Iraqi.

D’oh! Shoulda been more specific. But even so, I think most people understood my meaning.

9

I was thinking something along these lines in the context of the threads about “supporting our troops.” There’s this senseless war going on in which people are killing each other because of their country of citizenship, and I’m supposed to shut up and make the well-being of some people who happen to come from within the same arbitrarily drawn lines on a map my top priority. I know this means I’m unpatriotic and therefore a bad person, but I don’t see why I should care more about their lives than about Iraqi lives. Some people have said that our troops should follow orders from the president, no matter how wrong those orders are, but why doesn’t the same apply to Iraqi soldiers? Even if they don’t follow Saddam’s orders, defending your country from foreign invaders seems like an appropriate reason to pick up arms.

:confused: Are you by any chance a third-world dictator? They’re the ones who generally accuse human rights organizations of being culturally biased. Or do you belive that some cultures advocate torture, for example?

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Sure. Forced female circumcision.

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That’s perfectly fine with me. Conflict and war have shaped the human race is it began. It shaped the environment that led to the development of the human race.

And if conflict and war is necessary to blot out barbaric practices like forcible female circumcision and feeding people into plastic shredders, I think I’m OK with that.

  • Rick
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I checked and it turns out AI is involved in trying to end FGM. Up until a couple years ago, they were close to being a one issue organization.

Are you some kind of activist against FGM? We could have another debate on that subject. It’s certainly not the worst HR violation occurring in the world, and I personally would not want to be involved in a campaign against it. But anyway, I don’t understand why you’re bringing up that issue. Are you advocating that the U.S. invade countries where it’s being practiced?

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I mention it as an example that makes it easy to prove that there are objectively good and bad cultural practices.

I am not advocating basing our entire foreign policy on it, no.

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So then your also OK with exterminating jews, to follow that line of thought… that is basically what your saying right? War and conflict arent always going to favor YOUR point of view… And who in the hell wants to give up there life for some war that someone is telling them to fight because its “the right thing to do”?

Also i dont know anything about this female circumcision thing, but if women do this voluntarily, why the hell would anyone want to take that right away from them? and if its not voluntary then its not an actual culture in my book. Nobody should be forced to do anything they dont want to. That would be a different story which should not include cultural discussion.

15

It’s the culture of the people forcing the FGM on the girl. It’s the culture the girl (usually) grew up in. That the girls are often unwilling doesn’t make it less “cultural.”

I’m ignoring your strawman about the Jews.

Julie

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:slight_smile: chula – you go, girl. Chula y con opiniones perspicaces. Straight up!

I suspect there are more people who are asking themselves the same questions, but for some reason they are not heard/not expressing themselves in this climate.

Hey, how did this get to be a female circumcision thread???

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Re: Female circumcision

So back in the days you guys would have been all for a friendly arab invasion of europe to free us of witch-burnings? Of the US for the same purpose?

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Hm, sorry for my part in hijack… Maybe someone should start a FC thread.

19

I don’t have any loved ones fighting on either side in Iraq, but I do have a former coworker who is Iraqui American and has loved ones in Baghdad. My heart goes out to him and his family.

To the OP: It’s hard to separate the wish for the “success” of our own troops from the desire that no Iraqui lives beyond the tyrant and his henchmen be lost.

I’d like to see the whole world as free as Americans are (not to say that our freedom is unlimited – just greater than most other countries’). I have to agree with Bricker. It’s not that the US is better than every other country, but how can you compare a country like Iraq in which torture is an acceptable practice, forcing civilians to drive bomb-laden trucks at approaching tanks is a normal military practice, and testing chemical weapons on your own people (Kurds) is considered okay, with a country like the US, whose soldiers proceed in an invasion avoiding civilian casualties to the extent possible and bring water and food for the “conquered” people?

As presently constituted, the United States is better than Iraq. Under different leadership in Iraq, that might not be true.

20

We hope that that’s the case!

Unfortunately, some things about the USA are changing. I don’t have a specific cite, but I think I read an AP article about how Rummy, defender of the Geneva Convention, and his top military men are contemplating sending Iraqi “terrorists” to Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo, Cuba after the war – which would itself be a violation of the Geneva Convention. In other words, if an Iraqi fighter is unlucky enough to be classified as a “terrorist” (probably for using unconventional or guerrilla tactics to fight the US), he will be held indefinitely in an outdoor cage with no legal representation and no release date. And, of course, on the way over he’ll be shackled, blind-folded and orange-jump-suited. Some of the X-Ray prisoners have reportedly attempted suicide, some more than once.

Also, the following article, by Alexander Cockburn in the April 14 issue of The Nation, is very disturbing:

"…On March 6 US military officials acknowledged that two prisoners captured in Afghanistan in December had died during interrogation at Bagram air base north of Kabul. A spokesman for the air base confirmed that the official cause of death of the two men was “homicide”…

…On November 21, 2001, around 8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pashtun civilians surrendered at Kunduz to Northern Alliance commander Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum…Jamie Doran’s 2002 documentary film Afghan Massacre records how 3,000 prisoners were loaded into container trucks, with the doors sealed and the trucks left to stand in the sun for several days…As thirty to forty US soldiers looked on, those prisoners still alive were shot and left in the desert to be eaten by dogs…

…[T]he Pentagon and State Department have tried “by any means possible” to stop an investigation."

If possible, please also read the March 31 issue of the Nation, titled “In Torture We Trust?”, which features a sobering discussion on the implications of the US adopting an Israeli-style interrogation policy.

I’d just like to point out that the moral justification for America’s fight against Saddam is seriously undermined when we do things that resemble something Saddam would do.

Things are getting scary now. Sort of like the USA isn’t the USA any more.

Of course, that’s not to say we’ve never mistreated prisoners.