Are you saying that America has reached a fork in the road?
It’s the US, so it’s more like a spork in the road.
Lots of good responses, I’ll add my two cents.
I think it’s best to think of this as the Bin Laden mission. It’s a tight knit circle and everyone involved was prepped for months and knew the mission beforehand - President down to button pusher. Same here. It’s probably just Pete-Admiral-button pusher. Everyone knows the orders before the mission.
You can take part or refuse to take part. A different admiral involved in the planning quit over legality concerns. He was replaced.
Thats for the basic premise of striking civilian boats. You know the mission before, take part or refuse to take part. If for some reason you’re not in that loop, I wouldn’t think a “button pusher” should be held accountable for following those superior orders. It’s either legal or not and it should be presumed to be legal. Per DOJ/DOD, the basic premise was vetted and is legal. You can’t really refuse that nor be expected to do a legal analysis of the basic premise before pushing the button.
The other part is how the mission is carried out. It doesn’t always go according to plan. Having survivors is an in the moment decision (obviously it could and should be contemplated in planning). But killing survivors is not legal, and DOJ/DOD lawyers can never make that part legal (all their fake legal cover justifying the basic premise will still say “in accordance with the laws of war”). In this scenario, it would be manifestly illegal to order the killing of the survivors. If anyone was unsure, there would be jag lawyers in the room to ask (probably a loyalist hack one, but still).
Were someone to properly refuse that double tap order, I’d guess they would just be quietly sidelined. No one would want to explain any of this in court; the refuser would love to.
I find this line of thought intriguing. Twenty years ago I’d have rolled my eyes (setting aside for the moment that such a measure wasn’t needed). “How the hell will you manage that?” I might have asked. “It’s right there in the Constitution.”
Now I’m finding Constitutional reverence pretty quaint when one side simply ignores the supposed guardrails.
Do I want a complete abandonment of the Rule of Law? No. And yet…some extrajudicial thumbing of the nose to a corrupt SCOTUS that leads to a new normal is appealing.
Yeah, yeah, slippery slope, blah, blah, blah. Well, something’s gotta give.
It’s something I’ve struggled with for years now. I spent a lot of time online arguing with conspiracy theory types, because even 20 years ago, I knew that if that mindset became mainstream, it would cause serious damage to democracy and society at large. Democracy only works when an overwhelming majority of the population believes that it works. The belief that, if you lose today, you may still win tomorrow. Victory is never complete victory, defeat is never total defeat.
But then Trump came along, with his whole “The election will be/was rigged!” schtick. And I watched far too many people on the MAGA side buy into that. They started to lose faith in democracy, and even as I knew how bad it would likely turn out, I started to lose faith too, because democracy can’t work if only one side accepts the results of an election. And we’ve seen Republicans all over American trying to game the system so that elections don’t really matter. Gerrymandering states so that a minority of voters can win large majorities in the legislature.
And now, we see Democrats doing the same, because they’ve finally accepted that there’s no other way to win. If they continue to play by the old gentlemen’s agreement rules, Republican domination, and all the crap that implies, will control the country forevermore.
So yeah, I think your system is fucked, and needs a complete reboot, even as I recognize how hard and nasty that will be. And how likely it is that these efforts will still fail.
I never wanted to be in this position, and if the Republicans had, at any time in the last decade or so, acknowledged how fucked up they are, I’d have been happy to go back to the old rules of the game. But that hope is pretty much dead now. I can’t see any scenario in which the MAGA types in charge now ever admit to any mistakes in going out of their way to kill democracy.
How do you win a race to the bottom? What does “winning” look like for the good guys? Genuinely interested.
Democracy is dead. The fight now is for civilization.
Well, it won’t look like democracy, and may very well look a lot like Berlin in mid-1945. And actually winning isn’t guaranteed. There’s a decent chance the good guys lose, no matter what they do, or how they do it. More Berlin in 1934, less 1945.
I can’t see the MAGA types ever giving up power voluntarily. They may still give a fig leaf of attention to “Democracy” in the same way people like Putin do, but the fix will be in. At some point, they may just drop the fig leaf to let us see the naked authoritarianism, but that is still a few years away. Somewhere along that path, violence at some level will likely become necessary.
How it evolves after that is anyone’s guess. History is replete with wars and revolutions in which the end results were entirely different from what the people involved intended when the shooting first started.
Like I said, it will be hard and nasty, which is why the “good guys” are so reluctant to go down this path, at least so far. We’re smart enough to realize how bad things can get, and too many of us don’t yet believe that MAGA will get bad enough to justify that cost.
I think we have discussed this here before (but a brief search I did not find it).
IIRC, while it is in the rules to refuse an illegal order woe to the person who tries to do that.
No matter how “right” they are they are likely to spend years in prison awaiting a military trial from a military less concerned with what is right and instead is more concerned about making sure the person who did this is so thoroughly stomped on no one in the future would even consider refusing any order.
I kinda get it. The battlefield is not a place to have discussions of morality/ethics. You have to be super-duper obviously refusing an illegal order such that there is NO other way to view it other than blatantly illegal. Much less than that and you are probably well and truly fucked for the rest of your life.
Even if the person is proven ultimately correct in having refused an order they have probably had their life thoroughly wrecked (which dissuades anyone else with a conscience in the future).