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Where is this all going?

Snip…

Court marshal proceedings in began today in Washington DC against US Army Lt. George Wilson. Lt. Wilson, the young scion of a prominent family from California stands charged for violating rules of engagement and international rules of military action. The case of Lt. Wilson has gathered world wide attention due to the extreme heinous nature of the crimes for which Lt. Wilson is now being charged and prosecuted.

For those not familiar with the case, on August 22nd, acting under the direct orders of the US central command, Lt Wilson was part of a team working within the Sunni triangle to capture or kill suspected leaders of the Iraqi insurgency. During a raid in the town of Ramadi, Lt. Wilson used subterfuge and deception to take cover in the town of Ramadi. By threatening violence against a man and his younger child, Lt. Wilson was able to gain knowledge of the whereabouts of a supposed local commandant of the insurgency, a “General Al-Khardhnes”.

Lt. Wilson then pulled a gun from his holster and threatened an Iraqi homeowner with death. He and his team then used the home as a place of refuge during the evening. After forcibly incarcerating the inhabitants of the home for several hours, Lt. Wilson then illegally used his authority to establish a roadblock, forcing civilian traffic in the town on one of the roads covered by Lt. Wilson’s men. In the home in front of this road, Lt. Wilson and his driver, Sgt Wolfson took cover and awaited the possible arrival of the man who was purported by locals to be “General Al-Khardhnes”.

Lt. Wilson then ordered his men to load their weapons and prepare to attack on sight the insurgent General Al-Khardhnes. After several hours of laying in wait, the man who locals called General Al-Khardhnes arrived at the checkpoint. Once discovered by Lt. Wilson’s men, he began to open fire into the home occupied by Lt. Wilson and the incarcerated civilians. Lt. Wilson and the opposing insurgent force of the General and his bodyguards began a running urban gun battle in the streets of Ramadhi. Stray bullets flew into the home occupied by Lt. Wilson and the civilians and soon spread to the surrounding neighborhood. After many volleys in the gun battle, Lt. Wilson is personally credited with killing Al-Khardhnes and his bodyguards.

From here the story takes a gruesome turn. Lt. Wilson then ordered Sgt. Wolfson and an Iraqi civilian to load the dead bodies of Al-Khardhnes and his bodyguards to the hood of his Hummer, where they were then paraded through the streets of the town of Ramadhi.

Sources within US Central Command have said that upon arrival at Camp Anaconda with the now long dead bodies of the insurgents still tied to the roof of the Hummer; Lt. Wilson was congratulated personally by General Abiseid and referred to him as “ My Insurgent”. However, after international outcry over the incident that occurred in the following weeks, Lt. Wilson was placed under arrest and told to undergo a military court marshal for his actions on that day in Ramadhi.

In a related story, the US Senate today took up debate about how and when members of the military can and should discharge their weapons and under what circumstances cover can be taken in a combat zone.

End snip..

I admire the members of our military, but I don’t envy them. The job is hard and often thankless and made up of hours of endless tedium interspaced with moments of extreme violence for which no amount of training can prepare you. They do their thankless job of soul searing tedium, secure in the belief that the cause is just and the people and the government that they are serving are thankful for their efforts and their sacrifices made while serving in that cause. If this were not true, if the members of the military were to feel that their actions would not be given sanction by the nation, or that their basic job were to be so redefined as to make it nigh impossible to carry out, the effect on operating morale would be staggering.

With all the weapons that the people in the military have been up against in the past, the Hoplite Phalanx, Greek fire, the pike square, massed cavalry, long rifles, the machine gun, poison gas, no weapon can match the weapon that’s now been unleashed on our soldiers sailors and airmen. Our troops can beat any army on earth except one; the army of international lawyers and tribunals that set to define their every act and every action carried out in uniform as a war crime.

The case I sighted above is real. It did happen, and the figure in question wasn’t some low level unknown trooper but a major figure from American history. It didn’t happen in Iraq, and his name wasn’t “Wilson” but the act described occurred pretty much the same way I related it its parallel to modern age. What’s important to know is that the brash Lieutenant wasn’t court marshaled for his act, he was venerated, in fact he went on to serve the Country and the Army as a legendary figure in history, because the Army in which he fought and the culture he lived in understood the nature of warfare for the truth of what it is instead of the perverted unworkable nonsense that many people on the left would prefer it to be today.

The story is a variation of an event in the life of George S. Patton. Yes, That Patton. While he was a part of the US Expedition into Mexico against Pancho Villa, in 1916 young Lieutenant George Patton took part an ambush, which resulted in his shooting and killing a member of Pancho Villas gang. After Lt. Patton killed Mexican General Cardenas, he then had the body tied to the hood of his touring car and drove through the town exalting his prize to the townspeople. His commanding general, General Pershing called George “ His Bandito”. The parallel story I created from that event was meant to help illustrate what would happen to young Lt Patton if he were in the world of today, where every action on the battlefield is now examined in great detail, not by Generals and War Colleges but by lawyers. Today’s world is quite different from the world of Lt. Patton, yet we expect our service members to operate as if nothing has changed, all while the rules they operate in are in flux due to the prevailing politics of the time in which we all live.

Remember that the interests and the motivations of the 'international legal community' is not based on the idea of saving your life or ensuring the effectiveness of the US Military, in fact it’s quite the opposite. Since the international community can no longer compete militarily with the United States, it has decided to take the only course available to defuse the threat of an powerful and effective US Military, and that is to redefine the rules of battle and the legitimate use of force in the world.

Today the debate on what is and is not within the legal bounds of behavior for the military has gone all the way to the US Senate, which has now defined the concept of “torture” so loosely that virtually any interrogator or guard at any location that is even remotely involved with any prisoner interrogation will be rendered useless within 24 hours after the first person who is interrogated is released and made available to the press. Despite what has been guaranteed by the members of the Senate to protect the members of the military from charges of abuse, the charges will come and demands will be made for the names and locations of all of these sites where, as they now define it, “abuse has occurred”. In the interest of not being thought of as a “mean bad man”, every Senator will give in to these demands by the world court of opinion.

But it wont end with the interrogation staff or the guards or the people who run the facilities involved with prisoner welfare. The next step will be to redefine warfare itself into something very much like crime fighting and that of a big city police force where warrants must be served and use of deadly force must be authorized by legal warrant, signed and agreed upon by the UN tribunal itself. When civilian deaths at the hands of a legitimate military force occur they will be treated as police forces today treat cases of officer-involved shootings. Entire brigades at a time will be rendered useless as its command structure is charged and accused by the world court of opinion who, using Rodney King as their guide, will tie the US Military down with baseless charges of abuse at every turn with the help of video cameras in the hands of civilians in war zones.

In this scenario, imagine being in today’s US Armed Forces. During one of you tours of duty in Iraq you surround a home where in recent days sniper fire has been sighted. Instead of taking direct military action to bring the situation to an end by attacking the home, you sit and second guess yourself as whether or not to fire into the house because you don’t know if there are civilians that may be killed, which will result in your being indicted as a war criminal then next time you pass through the European Union on vacation.

The direct result of this second guessing is that more of your men are killed and the indirect result is that with the impotent use of force against the enemy, they are emboldened to continue the attacks. What’s worse the enemy will seek out civilians to hide behind, since their cover provides the only weapon that can beat the US Army, that being its own conscience and desire to minimize casualties.

If that isn’t bad enough, we now have entire groups of people who refer to the Iraq War as an “illegal war”, including many esteemed members of our own government and this is very dangerous indeed because the words will eventually have consequences if they are allowed to go unchallenged. Let’s say that someone in some part of the world decides to act on that phrase and declare that any and all members of the US military that took part in the “illegal war” are subject to trial in their country. Let’s say that its not just one socialist backwater like Spain, but it spreads to other countries and soon there is a general consensus that the members of the US military, both currently serving and retired are subject to possible persecution by their country for “war crimes”. Once the debate begins the definition is allowed to set and people in this country find themselves arguing for what is and is not a war crime, the debate in a sense is over.

A small change here and there to the worlds legal systems and judicial standards and simply discharging your weapon in a war zone could get you sent to prison.

This is where the debate on “torture” will inevitably send us. The mistake in the debate on torture was not the validity of the positions we take one way or the other, but to engage in it at all because to carry out the debate gave legitimacy to the idea that something was in fact wrong, and there is no way to win that debate. As soon as you start it, you’ve lost. Today we are debating “what is torture”, but soon the debate will move to “what is and is not legitimate methods (if any) of warfare”.

Lets be absolutely clear here, the debate on “torture” is not about helping define the legal boundaries for how people in authority are to behave. It is not about ensuring that we do not become “like them” The debate on torture has one goal, and that is to slow the success of the United States in the war on terror. My stand on the “torture” debate has been exactly the same from the beginning and essentially it comes down to this, if hooking up a captured insurgent to a car battery will help end the war on terror one day sooner, then all I have to say in this matter is that the red wire is positive and the black is negative.

I expect civilian oversight of the military and I expect there to be standards to which we adhere, but I also expect results. This is essentially where I deviate from most people’s stance. “Torture” or “not to torture” is not a real debate; the real debate is “what works?”. Captured members of the Jihadists are the single best source of information on how the organization works and who is in it and should we decide that we will not 'aggressively interrogate' because it might result in a possible war crime for the interrogator, the result will surely be that more people will die, not people being interrogated, but innocent civilians who by the inaction of the interrogation and intelligence systems who were not able to intercede before the jihadist actions could be carried out. For those who argue the most for precise and exactly language on the use of torture, they should be aware that there consequences for their acts, and those consequences aren’t that someone in custody wont be made to feel in danger but that many, many more innocent people will die.

We must remember that the military is not the police force and we must not allow the standards of operation of the military to slowly creep into redefining it into a police force. They are not policemen and should not be subjected to that standard. I want men and women who serve us to remember that the first step towards ending a war is not necessarily killing them but removing the enemies “will to fight” by any means necessary, and if tying the dead of the enemy to the hood of your hummer has the correct effect on the enemy morale, then I say by all means -do it! I don’t want a military that is constantly looking over its shoulder wondering, “what should I do?” when they are taking fire and losing men. No one in uniform is going to do their job if they feel we are going to hunt them down for doing theirs.

We can beat their armies; we can occupy and change their countries, but its still a very big open question if we can beat their lawyers.

Posted @ December 16, 2005 01:33 AM | Current Affairs

Posted by: Giacomo at December 16, 2005 03:33 AM

Posted by: OhBloodyHell at December 16, 2005 08:51 AM

Posted by: Cowboy Blob at December 16, 2005 08:02 PM

Posted by: frank martin at December 16, 2005 08:13 PM

Posted by: Francis W. Porretto at December 28, 2005 04:38 AM