War Lies and the Deaths They Caused

[queerbychoice]

That cartoon summed up perfectly the actions of the Bush administration. Now, for the effects that those actions had . . . CounterPunch has an extremely important article today on The Suicide of an Iraq War Veteran.

Comments

[sankta.livejournal.com]

Do you know of any exhaustive lists of servicemen injured while in Iraq? I haven't been able to find the name of a.. friend of mine who was supposedly injured there, but I have a feeling it's because she wasn't.

[chisparoja.livejournal.com]

i really feel bad for that guy. however i feel that the article is flawed. it says that these people are in trouble because they are reservists who just wanted money for college and were not prepared for the rigors of military life. that may be true, but it is not the main injustice here. they suggest that the entrapment of Americans who are not psychologically prepared to commit murder under orders and feel no remorse for it is comparable to the actual deliberate campaign of murder orchestrated by the commanders or engaged in independently by individual soldiers who are sociopathic and joined the military for those reasons (who are much, much more common than the Americans are willing to accept).

the sociopathic soldiers and generals who give these orders, and who openly enjoy murdering people, should be most vigorously condemned. in romanticizing the soldiery as victims for cheap and easy lefty propaganda points, this gets obscured. Lucey was a victim, but many soldiers and officers are not victims, but pure perpetrators, all the way up to the top of the chain of command. one of those people was Lucey's commanding officer and included among them were probably quite a few of his fellow soldiers. the American military is not immoral just because it is a military, or because it doesn't ensure that only society's (overwhelmingly male) sociopaths are harvested to go kill people. it is immoral for what it, specifically, does, in ways that, say, the Japanese Self-Defence Forces are not immoral.

this is the point that it is verboten to make in America.