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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (134979)	5/30/2004 4:56:48 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

<...we are all grateful for the men and women who fight our wars- even if the wars are bad wars, the men and women who fight them have no control over that.> Doesn't anybody, liberal or conservative, militarist or pacifist or anywhere on the continuum, believe in individual responsibility anymore? Yes, they do have control. Anybody, at any time, can make the choice, to stop killing. From 1989-1991, the soldiers of all the Warsaw Pact nations, almost unanimously made the choice not to fire on their fellow citizens who were protesting in the streets. This was several million individual choices, by people with guns in their hands, trained to obedience by totalitarian regimes. Over and over, units were ordered to clear the streets with machine guns and tanks. Over and over, they refused. American soldiers could make the right choice too. They could refuse orders to commit war crimes. They could insist, when given such orders, that the orders be put explicitly in writing. And then they could email copies of those orders back to their hometown newspaper, and say to their superiors, "I don't want to be making the same excuses at my war crimes trial, that the Germans made at Nuremburg: I was just following orders." American soldiers could refuse to wage wars of aggression. They could cite the treaties we have signed, which our Constitution make the "highest law in the land". Treaties like the UN Charter, which outlaw wars of aggression. They could cite military law, which requires soldiers to disobey illegal orders. The Constitution, the law, and signed treaties trump Presidential orders, and also trump the chain of command. I am not grateful to people who torture, and carry out collective punishment of cities, and run a Gulag, and wage wars of aggression, in my name. And I hold everyone personally responsible for their own actions, and all the consequences of those actions.