Mr. President: You pulled the trigger

The slaying of a wounded Iraqi insurgent fighter is playing big in Arab news. It's not good for the United States. I suspect mostly on my side of the street, Democrats and liberals, will decry the act of the killing itself. The killing is nasty business, that's for sure, ugly and brutal as it gets.

Yet I think it's wrong to blame the soldier that pulled the trigger. At the bottom of my pool of conflicting feelings is the idea that I want our soldiers to come back alive. They need to do what they need to do in order to return. In a comment to an earlier post, I said that "We are all the troops, everyone of us." I was roundly criticized by the right wingers that read this blog for comparing myself to a soldier. But I stand by it. Though there is enormous honor and bravery in their actions, I refuse to separate and romanticize the military from us. They are us and we are them. There is far less than six degrees of separation for all of us to anyone in Iraq. We all have family and friends there; Or have friends with family and friends there. None of us wish the death of our soldiers over the death of those we are fighting.

The soldiers in Iraq are out doing the business of our country. In their actions they embody one of the reasons why the USA has endured as the longest standing democratic republic on earth: The military is in the hands of the civilians. That soldier pointing his gun at the wounded man just saw his comrade blown to bits in a similar situation not ten minutes before he pulled the trigger. It is not for me to judge if he was right or wrong from my easy chair. I am sure there were hundreds of equally grevious decisions that were made during the assualt on Falluja. What is hidden from the camera will haunt the soldiers of this nation for decades to come. What appears on camera will haunt the entire nation for decades to come. For that, the civilan leaders of this nation must bear full responsibilty.

It is the President, Ms. Rice, Vice President Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld and their entire cadre of group thinkers who must be held accountable. For sure they are guilty of the big crimes. It was them who ordered the military to invade Iraq to punish a despot for a crime he didn't commit. They engineered the death of between 30,000 and 100,000 civilians. They are the authors of the book of evil that is Abu Ghraib. It is them who ordered the entire city of Falluja razed to the ground, it's population brutalized, it's women and children cast into a humanitarian crisis the size of which is still unclear. There is more. The truly disasterous mistakes by our national leaders with regards to Iraq can barely be numbered. But first on the list is the mistake of placing our sons and daughters, friends and families, in morally precarious situations in support of a morally wrong war.