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

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (135517)	6/4/2004 11:50:41 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Maurice, I enjoy reading your posts because you write so well and have tremendous insight. I'm not sure, however, of the precise point you're trying to make with respect to your two posts on the issue of "trigger happy" Americans. I think what you mean is that American culture places more emphasis on violence as a means of resolving conflict than do many other cultures and that emphasis is reflected in the tendency of our soldiers to be "trigger happy." I'm not sure I accept all of that but you must be at least partially right. We're not a nation that is "Ghandi like" even though most of our people seem to worship Jesus and purport to follow the New Testament. Oddly enough for many of our Christians it seems that being deeply religious, being deeply and unquestioningly patriotic and being hawkish on the war seem to be internally consistent. I guess if you're intellectually geared to being dogmatic on one issue, you're just as likely to be dogmatic on a bunch of others. But I don't think we're more trigger happy than many other nations and your example of pulling people out of huts in Vietnam villages and killing them; while factual, doesn't represent many soldiers and has happened in many instances where the soldiers of many other cultures were the killers. I know there are some who are trigger happy and want to be where they can kill someone, just as there are some who are sadists and who will gravitate to jobs that give them control over prisoners. My point wasn't that such people don't exist, just as your point wasn't that all soldiers are trigger happy. My point was that war will eventually make you "trigger happy" because when you draw the line between being careful you don't kill the wrong person and being careful you don't get killed, the line moves toward being careful you don't get killed. That's a natural thing and it is, I believe, more instinctual than intellectual. When that happens you'll be likely labeled as "trigger happy" by those who can afford to review your actions from the safety of their perspective, but maybe not by those who have faced that life. When I see something like the Tillman friendly fire tragedy I don't think that was criminal or stupidly wrong; I think of it as though a batter missed a hanging curve ball with the game on the line. He shouldn't have missed it but that's baseball and it WILL happen as long as you're constantly coming to bat. As I've said, and as Hawkmoon has so clearly pointed out, the blame undoubtedly lies more in those who had the responsibility to be careful that the two patrols or units were kept apart or at least informed of their proximity. On a separate point, you may be right about the importance of distinguishing sympathy from empathy. You cannot, of course, have sypmathy without having empathy but you may be able to have empathy without having sympathy. I can't do it, but some people may be capable of that. I guess that's why I'm so in favor of sending those hawks that decide wars are justified and also their children to war in the same, or greater, proportion than the general population. Let them eat their cake too and maybe they'll have real sympathy....for themselves. When that happens in wars of choice like Iraq, I'll be a believer in the fact that THEY really thought it was a war worth dying for as opposed to a war worth sending strangers to die for. As far as using machine guns on golf courses, if we did that all we'd have left would be bad golfers. The good golfers wouldn't shoot as often and eventually they'd all perish at the hands of the bad ones. Maybe we'd end up with one last golfer standing and he or she would be so bad that on every golf shot there'd be tremendous firing. Maybe there'd be tremendous firing in the parking lot in anticipation of another horrible round. If I was a golfer that last one standing would be me. I've always been a bad golfer and a good shooter. But why stop there. Why not give the ducks guns, and since the ducks would have air superiority we'd find out how many duck hunters were devoted enough to risk dying for the "sport?" The birds would risk it, but then they already are. I can see the hunters in the blind calling, "here they come" and then, "good God, don't shoot, there's just too many of them." Still, it would make more sense than real war cause you could at least eat a duck now and then.