dysnomia.us

glass houses

Presumably by now you’ve seen the Pentagon video released by Wikileaks, which shows US forces killing civilians. It’s not news that this sort of thing happens, of course, only that we have video of it. Wars kill people, and not always the ones that were intended.

I’ve seen a number of people today protesting that it was an honest mistake. Yes, it was terrible, they say, but this sort of thing always happens in war. If they’re perceptive, they point out that we’re much better about it than we were during WWII or Vietnam. This much is true.

I’ve seen others excoriating the helicopter crew, calling them anything from irresponsible to bloodthirsty. I’ll leave it to you to watch the video and decide whether they did this on purpose or not. But it’s pretty much missing the point. Their moral culpability, or lack thereof, does not reduce ours by one bit.

Mistakes happen, especially in war. We could probably accept the mistakes if we were fighting for our own survival, or fighting for a cause we believe in strongly enough. But we chose this war, based on lies and the failure of democratic institutions to counter those lies. And these sorts of mistakes are one of the consequences.

A lot of people are arguing what responsibility those soldiers bear today, but not enough are questioning their own.