[QUOTE=Sal Ammoniac]
I just don’t get this at all. It’s not George Bush who’s kicking down doors in Anbar and taking names. If Bush threw a war and nobody came, it wouldn’t be much of a war, would it? I mean, if you supported the war, that would be one thing, but you (apparently) don’t. I just can’t get past this doublethink that says that the war is bad, but the people who have voluntarily gone out of their way to make it happen are somehow untainted by the badness.
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I said, “for the purposes of [this] discussion”. While no fan of Bush, or the war (which no one is), I do not equate a bad decision with an immoral one. It was a mistake, I have yet to see that it was necessarily immoral. And before I am willing to extend a badge of immorality to soldiers who simply take orders (which are not usually immoral), I feel the need to, at the very least, have the immorality of going into Iraq be proven to be so. Much of this discussion wants to take as a given: the war in Iraq is immoral. Yet, no one has explained why. MrDibble now goes so far as to insist I take it as a given. Uh, no, I don’t think I will. Especially when he is asking me to then extend that assumed immorality to the soldiers, and then consider it factual. E-fucking-gad! Talk about a immoral action!
Part of the reality is that soldiers cannot, and should not, question every order given them. Doing so, would make the military, any military, ineffective. Now, some people, like the idiot on the San Francsico Board of Supervisors who think we shouldn’t have a miltary might be fine with that, but that’s why he gets classified as an idiot. I don’t know if any posters here would take such an extreme position, but they should realize that that is an inevitable result of asking soldiers to weigh the morality of every order given order befoer they act. Especially when everyone knows they most often will lack all the information to do so. Even to their own satisfaction.
[QUOTE=Sal Ammoniac]
And anyway, if the premise of enlisting is that you’re willing to let Mr. Bush, of all people, be the sovereign judge of your morality – well, that’s just fucked up.
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That’s the debate isn’t it? It’s your position that Bush is so immoral that everyone should know and agree with that. Yet, some people do not agree with that premise. As I’ve stated consistently on these boards, I don’t like Bush and look back on the day he was annointed as the nominee as a black one. (But that’s more a matter of the Republican party, which is another discussion.) Bush might have very well made a mistake, but I do not see the immorality of it. When assessing the morality or immorality of an individual, I think one has to look at their actual acts. If they have committed no immoral acts, you cannot failrylabel them as immoral. Claiming that they are immoral because they follow orders and participate in what you may consider an immoral war, again, begs the question and assumes the war is immoral. Now, it is perfectly fine for you to make that assessment for yourself. I see nothing wrong with doing so—for yourself. But if you wish to achieve unanimity on the point you’ll have a very hard time, as people view the morality of the basic misadventure differently.
On the other hand, we achieve much greater unanimity when we look at specific acts. If a soldier rapes a 14 year-old girl, I think everyone would be on the same page. So maybe this discussion is bound to get nowhere. It seems it needs a fondational discussion. Something along the lines of “Assuming going to Iraq was an unmitigated military and political blunder, was it also immoral?”
As I’ve said, I’m willing, for the purposes of this discussion, assume the answer to be “yes”. The question is even if it was, and Bush could be fairly labeled as immoral (having committed an immoral act, which I’ll assume for now), to what degree does that moral culpabaility extend to the troops.
One thing I don’t get is that if Bush is held to be morally culpable it is due in no small part to his should having known better. That he didn’t just make an innocent mistake. Yet, the troops didn’t have that information, allowing them to make a different decision, one that we would not view as immoral. It doesn’t seem fair in the least.