For those who don't live in the Seattle metro area and might have missed it, there was an outstanding guest
column in last Friday's Seattle P-I written by University of Washington professor Michael Honey who discusses the Lt. Ehren Watada case (the Fort Lewis Army soldier who is refusing deployment to Iraq on moral grounds).
What I find meritorious about Honey's essay isn't so much the defense of Watada, but his citation of the Nuremburg Principles to call into question the moral responsibility of each and every serviceperson who participates in the Iraq invasion:
Watada is the first soldier to resist the war based on the Nuremburg Principles pioneered by U.S. prosecutors during Nazi war crimes trials after World War II and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (and the United States) in 1950.
Those principles hold soldiers, as well as heads of state, liable for "crimes against peace" (planning, preparing, initiating or waging a war of aggression or conspiring to do so), war crimes (violating "the laws or customs" of war) and crimes against humanity. A key phrase reads: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relive him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
This has been my precise puzzlement over why so many are against the war but say they "support" the troops. Every single member of the armed forces had a moral choice whether to take part in the unprovoked slaughter of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children. The penalties for refusal would have been harsh, yet that does not absolve them of the moral possibility of said refusal that the Nuremburg Principles demand.
In my mind, those who participate in such an atrocity are just as guilty as those who ordered it. Given that the case against the troops is so easily arguable from both moral theory and international agreements, I can only conclude that most in the liberal blogosphere refrain from discussing our soldiers' culpability for political, rather than philosophical, reasons.
But isn't such intellectual and moral cowardice exactly the sort of thing we accuse Republicans and many Democrats of? If our troops are guilty of crimes against humanity, then it would seem that a reality-based community infused with values of truth, reason, and logic would not avoid condemning those who must be condemned.