Gazing out from the top floor of the AMC multiplex in Times Square the other night, I found myself face-to-face with the mammoth CBS video screen there. Images from the war flashed but nobody seemed to notice; might as well have been football highlights or scenes from Survivor. I can never quite get used to the idea of watching real people shooting real bullets and dropping real bombs on real people who become really dead; it always just seems so bizarre to be watching it on TV, and even just reading newspaper accounts. The video turned to the NBC tape of the shooting of the wounded Iraqi prisoner, and the closed captions said there would be an investigation. "Was it self-defense," the words continued, "or murder?" More below...
Well, is that the only choice? Because I've read of many incidents over the last 20 months of war in Iraq that didn't seem like self-defense. Just today, in the Times, after reading about this incident, I read, in the next to last paragraph of a story on page 12:
But however deadly the rebels were able to make this filthy dead-end in the desert, there was also something terribly pathetic about their stand. After the makeshift bunkers had been mercilessly bombed, a man in a white dishdasha emerged and tried to get away by crawling across the slag heaps. He was machine-gunned, he plopped to the ground, and he died where he fell.
That doesn't sound like self-defense. Neither does the concept of zones in which you fire indiscriminately at anything that moves. But consider that the notion of self-defense even here in NYC is such that a few years ago, four police officers were acquitted of all charges after firing 41 shots at a man they thought was acting "suspiciously," and who pulled out his wallet which was mistaken for a gun. Earlier this year, a grand jury declined to indict an officer who shot an unarmed 19 year old boy who startled him on a Brooklyn rooftop. It seems as if, at least here in this blue city, uniformed officers receive wide leeway when firing their weapons.
In a war zone, self-defense surely takes on a whole different meaning!. A war zone! Man, I'm not even going to begin to pretend to have any idea what these are people are going through; to fight in a war is beyond inconceivable to me, more like preposterous or flat-out bizarre. I cannot judge the actions of the vast majority of the individual soldiers there either. I can't say from here that the marine on the NBC tape didn't genuinely fear for his life, for whatever reason. In a place where human life is so very cheap and where soldiers don't know where the next shots are coming from, self-defense can mean almost anything I suppose.
I can however judge the people who put these soldiers where they are, and I'd like to pose that same question about the war in Iraq: Self-defense? Or murder? We all know that self-defense, in the wake of 9/11, was the original premise. Of course, it was also the only way to possibly sell the war, and once the first marine landed, the White House declared, "And it shall be called Operation Iraqi Freedom," and the idea of imminent danger that Cheney and company had ominously warned us of became almost an afterthought.
Now we know that there were no weapons and no weapons programs. If the proponents of the war knew that, or even if they knew the intelligence wasn't conclusive, or if they perhaps overstated and exaaaa-gerated the intelligence, then that would mean that the war was not self-defense. Then... what was it?
I haven't even mentioned Bush here yet; first of all, paraphrasing from a speech by Seymour Hersh posted on a recent diary here, to say that he helped scam us into a war would be giving him credit for having an understanding of the situation. But also, to be perfectly honest, even here in the friendly confines of Daily Kos, I am not comfortable saying that a sitting President of my country is a -----. I can't even say it, guess I still have a certain respect for the office despite the simple fool that's occupying it.
Not so, however, for the people who were the real driving force behind this war. Self-defense? I don't think so, and I don't think they thought so either. So then, murder? If it's a fair question to ask regarding a frightened marine in a Falluja mosque, then it's certainly a fair question to ask regarding this Administration.