catholiclefty

So, apparently, the US troops in Iraq are going to get ethics lessons. Well, that's nice. Better late than never, I suppose. On the other hand, this seems rather like 'diversity training' or the like to me. The people that actually need it don't take it seriously and don't learn anything, and the majority of people who don't need to learn anything in the first place have their time wasted.

Still, if what is reported to have happened at Haditha has actually happened, they certainly need to do something. Perhaps they should be having their 'ethics training' before they actually get onto the battleground though? Just a thought.

Alternatively, maybe we shouldn't be sending young men and women to fight in unjust and nonsensical wars, in the first place.

I'd not seen this until very recently, but in 1998 former President Bush with Brent Scowcroft wrote, in their book A World Transformed, with respect to the 1991 Gulf War:

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome.


No further comment necessary, methinks.

11 British soldiers killed this past month alone and now A month-long 'emergency' in Basra has been imposed.

Iraq is a disaster and I have no idea what we can do about it. Remaining there seems to be adding to the chaos, but withdrawing would seem to inevitably lead to even more chaos. I deeply wish we'd never got ourselves into this quagmire in the first place. I also wish that my predictions as to how much of a mess this would get had been wrong. This is one occasion when being right gives me no pleasure at all.