Where is the hell raising?
Did you hear about this?
BAGHDAD — An explosion killed a police commander Monday during a visit by a man in a wheelchair who might have been a suicide bomber or an unwitting victim of insurgents, officials said.If the man was used by militants, it would be the third time this month that Iraqi security forces say disabled people were used to carry explosives that killed themselves and others.
In an another era, if our enemy had used the infirm like this, our political leaders and the media would loudly denounce such atrocities. We can’t do much about the fact that the media isn’t helping matters any, but where is the Aministration? Why aren’t they raising hell about this?
February 27th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
The administration is probably still reviewing memos to determine whether they’ve declared such actions legal themselves.
In all seriousness, though, the administration has thumbed its nose at international standards of decency. If the conduct of war is to be like pornography, such that whether it’s humane is known when it is seen, then I think the issue doesn’t command outrage. To jihadists, this is probably like Rush Limbaugh’s fraternity pranks.
I’m personally outraged by it, but I’m similarly outraged by the way we’ve paraded around our prisoners of war and other violations of trying to conduct wars and be a civil society under the rule of law, whether merely national or occasionally (and sometimes sensibly) international.
I’m interested in the standard you’re using to hold the administration to account. I suspect you and I personally share a sense of outrage, but what sense of outrage do you think the Bush administration would base anything on at this point? They’re going out of their way to advocate torture.
February 28th, 2008 at 5:08 am
Where was the “parading” of prisoners? What violations of the Geneva Convention are you specifically talking about? Do you even know that most elements of the Geneva Convention specifically do not apply to unlawful combatants? The Bush Administration has actually been quite accommodating in extending protections meant for actual EPWs to unlawful combatants where there was no legal requirement for them to do so.
And then you have the gall to equate waterboarding or whatever it is that you’re whining about with strapping a bomb to the wheelchair of a innocent disabled man? Have you no sense of proportion or decency?
February 28th, 2008 at 7:24 am
That’s my point. I do. But we seem to have collectively lost ours. In my opinion, we should be striving to set a noble tone for how we treat all prisoners and process them lawfully. We should not be striving to demonstrate how tough we are and how anyone who screws with us will be humiliated.
I’m well aware that the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to unlawful combatants, but we’ve expanded the notion of what that is. I know I’m not going to win any points for condemning the public treatment of Saddam Hussein after his capture, but that was extremely problematic. And I’ll concede that this is much, much worse than Abu Ghraib, but I think there’s a fine line between asking for our administration to condemn things that are cruel and inhuman and not recognizing that we have very often treated people inhumanely since hostilities began after the bombing of Afghanistan.
War is messy.
February 28th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Anyway, as I make my points (probably with futility), the bottom line is that I think this tactic is horrendous. I denounce and reject it. But that doesn’t prevent me from criticizing American tactics when they offend me, even if they’re offensive at different orders of magnitude.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:15 am
That’s been the problem with this administration from the very beginning, both with foreign and domestic policy. They do not sell and defend their policies well to the American people.
They are always on the defensive and not on the offensive. They allow their policies to get defined and do not get out and define the way the Administration wants/needs them to be framed.
March 17th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
[...] less-militarily-experienced individuals, with the fact that several times this year AQI has used unknowing disabled civilians to conduct bombings, and what we see is an enemy on the verge of [...]