I think it's fixed now -- it's to an NYT story.
Followed the link back to the NYT story; sorry if Tom Tomorrow gives anyone cooties.
The officers have been relieved, I presume for dereliction of duty — no real consolation, but at My Lai the officers led and conducted the massecre. It's not clear this wasn't one squad led by an E6. Coverup, if any there be, is another story.
But the important thing is that John Murtha is running down our troops. In fact, all other messengers should be shot, and we should agree that there are at most 1-2 bad apples and that nobody else is responsible and no other lessons are to be learned. Also, this and Abu Gharib were the only atrocities. There weren't any others, and don't bother Googling.
I heard on the radio that the Marines planted a shovel and an automatic rifle on the scene. That sounds like an attempt, at least, at coverup.
(I really should sign off for the weekend now.)
Me too -- I'm actually out of work, and we're going away for the weekend, not to return until Tuesday. I should be packing.
More links, published seven hours before Dan Perkins (Tom Tomorrow), late last night.
Following your's and Tom Tomorrow's points about people not willing to criticize soldiers and making excuses for them- does this have any connection to the reduced recruiting standards that have been necessary? Lowering educational standards and overlooking minor crimes- I don't know if they would have worked their way through to active, deployed soldiers yet. Hopefully this isn't something that's systematic because we've been forced to accept soldiers who are more likely to do this kind of thing.
Gross.
does this have any connection to the reduced recruiting standards that have been necessary?
No. Absolutely not. Let's not even entertain this argument, okay?
Whoa- why so touchy? I'm thinking more about the willingness to overlook criminal backgrounds, not education. I wouldn't argue that less educated people are more likely to do this sort of thing, but people with a criminal background?
Oh, okay. Sorry. I have bad memories of a CT thread right after Abu Ghraib hit the news where an astonishing number of supposedly highly-educated left-leaning people were quite happy to believe that the great unwashed had innate criminal capacities that we chattering classes were, of course, above understanding.
11: They do. If you'd read more of The Black Stallion books, you'd know that.
Really, B, I think you're reading too much into all of this.
What the story leaves unclear is how this came to light. Thinking in terms of parallels to My Lai, where I believe there were initial reports and some American resistance, for which people have subsequently been recognised, but that the story started with Australians on a radio showk, and then an investigateion uncovered the coverup, we seem to have a somewhat similar pattern. What is unclear is whether the Time story in March started the investigations now coming to light, or whether the investigations were ongoing and Time got wind of them.
#10: given what constitues a criminal background these days, not likely.
Oh my god, I think I am going to have to start killing all of you off, one by one. 'FI were you, I'd avoid the virtual quad for a while; that clock tower has some pretty clear sight lines.
It's my innate criminal capacities. The ones I picked up from reading too much literary theory.
"What the story leaves unclear is how this came to light."
Not sure what's unclear.
It broke in Time magazine in January. They got it from Iraqis, like they wrote:
In January, after Time presented military officials in Baghdad with the Iraqis' accounts of the Marines' actions, the U.S. opened its own investigation, interviewing 28 people, including the Marines, the families of the victims and local doctors. According to military officials, the inquiry acknowledged that, contrary to the military's initial report, the 15 civilians killed on Nov. 19 died at the hands of the Marines, not the insurgents. The military announced last week that the matter has been handed over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (ncis), which will conduct a criminal investigation to determine whether the troops broke the laws of war by deliberately targeting civilians.Time got it, as they wrote, from "eyewitnesses and local officials interviewed over the past 10 weeks."
Obviously, word of things like this spread amongst Iraqis. How could it be otherwise? And so word got to some Time sources.
What's unclear?
I should have written "It broke to Time magazine in January." Sorry.
And to be ultra-clear, Time got accounts such as this.
Fine. I should have written "what the story this post links to, in the New York Times, today, which mentions the original story, in Time, as being in March leaves unclear is..."
I must be being slow. I don't get what question you have that is unanswered.
Gary, IDP is responding to the condescending tone in 19.
Anyway, I think gary raises an urgent problem in 7. Why doesn't the blogosphere pay more attention to who posted what when? This is an important issue. We should take more time to award points to who breaks these stories first.
I agree. But I must take issue with Gary's characterization of "seven hours before", when it was in fact only 6 hours and 52 minutes.
"Gary, IDP is responding to the condescending tone in 19."
I thought I was trying to be helpful in clarifying whatever the question might be. Oh, well.
But Gary must be exasperated, I know I am, by a kind of "well-informed gap" about all stories of this kind. And of course, his links are quite apropos to show how knowable this has been. The gap I'm referring to is between the people with knowledge now easily obtained, with little time and effort, in order to be well informed about a host of issues, and the ignorance of many otherwise sympathetic people you encounter, online and off. This passive ease should be compared with the diligent clipping of newspapers done by our forebears, Dwight Macdonald during WWII, I. F. Stone in the fifties and Sixties, the Soviet Dissidents, in order to be this well-informed.
I've been on both ends of this one. When the Downing Street memo came out, I was on to it right away, and then had to be amazed time and again in the following weeks as people I know and talk to became aware of it. "How can you just now be finding out about this?" I wanted to scream. But as one thing after another that should have sunk any government remotely responsive came and passed, like walkers passing in a fog, I stopped following the full stories quite so closely as before. I'm still way ahead of the game, willingly conceding that we should always be alert, but it's as if I no longer believe the truth will make me free.
This is not an excuse.
There's not a person here who couldn't be driven to be a cold-blooded killer. Under the right circumstances, you all could willingly hunt down and kill women and children. That's the truth.
History shows it. Dozens of social science experiments prove it. Think hard about it, because it's true.
This is not the sole responsibility of the soldiers who pulled the triggers. America is responsible for this, 100%.
We trained these men to be killers, we put them in a foreign country where they're not wanted, we kept them there too long, they're getting picked off day by day which is exactly what you would expect to happen, and some of them decide to take matters into their own hands and 'fight back' using the time-honoured tradition of scorched earth.
Even the Bible has instructions: kill all the women and children, leave no one. Let this be a lesson: don't mess with us.
I'm as disgusted as anyone at what's happened, but we've got to stop fooling ourselves into believing we can have a "professional army."
There's no such thing.
I thought I was trying to be helpful in clarifying whatever the question might be. Oh, well.
No one is gainsaying that you did this. You certainly provided helpful information.
Think hard about it, because it's true.
Right, talk down to the audience.
This is not an excuse.
I'm sorry, but I can't decipher what the antecedent of "this" is.
Under the right circumstances, you all could willingly hunt down and kill women and children. That's the truth.
I'm no expert, but I've read a few books on the physiology and psychology of killing. I'm skeptical of this. Sure, I can conceive of circumstancce under which this is true - involving selective brain damage followed by an intensive retraining regimen, but, that hardly seems relevant. Let's stick to what we're talking about - the war- and evaluate the claim using restricted, real-world scenarios. Can anyone turn into such murderers? As you see from the news reports, most marines didn't particpate in this. They, however, were not willing to block their fellow marines. Still, they were not directly involved in the killing. I think this causes trouble for your assertion.
America is responsible for this, 100%.
I'm not following your reasoning here. First off, why "america"? That's really broad. It includes, for instance, minors and immigrants who can't speak the language or vote. But, aside from all of that, I'm included therein, too. I'm not sure how you can claim that I am responsible for something on which my existence has no effect. That is, if I had never existed, in all probablility this would have all carried on as it has. Since I am completely immaterial, how can I be responsible?
the time-honoured tradition of scorched earth
I don't think it's workable to call something so small-scale to be an application of scorched-earth policy.
we've got to stop fooling ourselves into believing we can have a "professional army."
My understanding of a "professional army" is an army composed of soldiers who are paid wages. What's your definition?
I'm as disgusted as anyone at what's happened, but we've got to stop fooling ourselves into believing we can have a "professional army."
There's no such thing. More than a bit of exaggeration, I think. That, or a complete redefinition of the term, which has a useful meaning and set of distinctions from various other forms of army, from draft to rabble.
Alternatively, perhaps your point is that war is hell. Not original or revelatory, in that case.
"My understanding of a "professional army" is an army composed of soldiers who are paid wages. What's your definition?"
Definitely more exclusive than that; it would definitely include "highly trained," "having a set of professional ethics and practices and standards," "having a cadre of NCOs and officers with as much experience as possible," and "reasonably competent," just for starters off the top of my head. Most usages also exclude armies of draftees, using "professional" to specifically identify an army of volunteers and career soldiers who are therefore "professional."
For examples, see, for instance, the British Army prior to both WWI and WWII.
Note "professional" doesn't, of course, mean "perfect," or "incapable of atrocity" or "incapable of error or failure," or any other impossibility.
re: professional army,
I should have added "full time."
Definitely more exclusive than that; it would definitely include "highly trained," "having a set of professional ethics and practices and standards," "having a cadre of NCOs and officers with as much experience as possible," and "reasonably competent," just for starters off the top of my head.
The first two are reasonable, because you're not going to have a full-time, paid army and not train them or have rules and such. Of course, the professional ethics of the army need not forbid the wanton killing of anyone outside the army or their civilian controllers. Perhaps they conventionally do, but since we only interested in what the concept of a "professional army:" must refer to, not what it might refer to, particular ethical codes are outside of our scope . Likewise, the the second two characteristics aren't necessary, either. I'm sure it's good for a professional army to have those characteristics, but an army meeting all the other criterion, but lacking those, would still be a professional army.
I may not have been clear that I wasn't attempting to describe a personal preference towards what the definition of "professional army" should be, but my understanding of what the definition is as used by any military historian.
And an army that doesn't have a code of ethics can't be relied on to engage in predictable behavior, nor treat civilians professionally, and thus win wars, and thus isn't, by definition, professional.
(Again, this doesn't mean that said codes won't get violated at times, because professionals are also human, and fail at times.)
Similarly, if the NCO cadre and office cadre aren't experienced as possible (wars aren't always available for all, but to whatever extent they can observe foreign ones professionally and also engage in study and foreign training with actively engaged foreign militaries, they can't train professionally, and once again, Q.E.D., they definitionally aren't professional. (That the U.S. Army cadres were so minimal in size between the Great War and WWII was a matter of great concern, and if we'd not preserved a highly professional minimal cadre, however ill-funded -- and, boy, they were, they had to train the new draftees largely with broomsticks for rifles, and tractors for tanks -- they could never have trained the WWII draftees, and we'd simply have had endless Kasserine Passes.)
This isn't personal, subjective, opinion of mine; this is what any book on military history will tell you. There's an actual objective definition of what a "professional" military is, and a professional literature.
Similarly, I wouldn't try to invent a personal definition of what a "professional lawyer" is, or a "professional doctor." There are fixed and established standards for all three things.
Trying to derive the minimal conceptual components of the concept "professional army" is something of an interesting game, but, for the purposese of discussion, I suppose we're most interested in how "professional" relates to morality. (Archie, of course, making the implicit claim that there was a fairly strict link.)
So I'll exceprt the relevent stuff (although the historical stuff was interesting):
And an army that doesn't have a code of ethics can't be relied on to engage in predictable behavior, nor treat civilians professionally, and thus win wars, and thus isn't, by definition, professional.
I'm actually not following you on the link between "treating civilians professionally" (right now a bit of an ambiguous concept anyway) and winning wars.
My most basic counterobservation here is that a professional army ethics may be quite necessary, but such a code has no necessary similarity to modern conceptions of "moral." Is that controversial? I'm just thinking of "evil" armies, (soviets, communists, orcs..) which I also think of as professional armies.
What I think LB has been trying to establish with links on this site for the months I've been reading it, is that whomever starts a war accepts a risk that this sort of thing will happen as a consequence. This doesn't take away the responsibility of the individual actors; theirs is the greatest guilt, and thousands of soldiers, considering rotations over three years and counting, will have been confronted with similar situations without resorting to murder, certainly of this berserking quality.
We have a right to expect the following, I think: that those who do these things will be held responsible, investigated and brought to trial. That those responsible for their control and supervision, their officers, will be held responsible. That anyone found to have covered-up, to have obstructed the justice of the first two, shall be held responsible for what are both derelictions of duty and willful crimes.
All of this appears to be happening, now. I'm sure the story of how will reflect shame on some, honor on others.
There is something else, though. The higher leadership's responsibility, not just for creating these conditions, but, having creating them, taking steps to minimize the risk. This entails leadership, from the president on down, to instill in everyone the understanding that they will not act nor tolerate any dehumanization or disrespect, and will hold everyone responsible, and accept a share of that responsibility themselves.
For all I know, at least so far as the troops are concerned, this has been done. Rumsfeld and the top commanders may have recorded messages, and made a habit of stressing these points whenever they visit troops, training or in the field. I hope so.
But from my admittedly sceptical, hostile outsider viewpoint, the failure to accept responsibility, admit mistakes or show much interest in detail on the part of the President, and the Secretary's aura of impenetrable arrogance, and the widespread feeling, which I share, that the Abu Ghreib investigations and trials have taken a disturbingly long time to begin reaching senior officers, despite reasonable suspicion that these practices did not spontaneously occur to the perpetrators, give reason to doubt that they have met this responsibility.
"I'm actually not following you on the link between "treating civilians professionally" (right now a bit of an ambiguous concept anyway) and winning wars."
We're fighting a counter-insurgency in Iraq (and not dealing so well with the low-level civil war), as we have at other times, as armies often have, and to do so, you have to follow counter-insurgency theory; I don't care to expand on that, as it's a long-winded topic, and I've certainly written about it on my own blog enough times, but to win a counter-insurgency, you must win the population to your side, and drain the sea of population the insurgents otherwise seek to swim in.
If your army is unprofessional in dealing with civilians, you lose. It's the most basic thing there is in counterinsurgency warfare.
"(right now a bit of an ambiguous concept anyway)"
Not really; there are thousands of professional papers on it.
"I'm just thinking of "evil" armies, (soviets, communists, orcs..) which I also think of as professional armies."
They, as a rule, don't win counter-insurgencies. See Afghanistan, or Germans in WWII Yugoslavia.
"But from my admittedly sceptical, hostile outsider viewpoint, the failure to accept responsibility, admit mistakes or show much interest in detail on the part of the President, and the Secretary's aura of impenetrable arrogance, and the widespread feeling, which I share, that the Abu Ghreib investigations and trials have taken a disturbingly long time to begin reaching senior officers, despite reasonable suspicion that these practices did not spontaneously occur to the perpetrators, give reason to doubt that they have met this responsibility."
Those at the top, at least, yes. Particularly the President and SecDef.