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Regarding the prisoner abuse in Iraq, it is funny that it’s being spun as a mirror image of the ongoing insurgency: “just a few bad apples”, but even army-adorationist Ralph Peters understands that it’s disastrous. Wasn’t it just last week Dave posted that foreign policy review mentioning the symbolic blindness of using a hated prison for essentially the same purpose it had under Saddam? “Meet the new boss: same as the old boss.”
Still, while I’d like to see the Geneva Convention as humane and progressive, there’s a sense in which it’s just a way of legitimating war. One of the great American myths I heard as a child was about how the clever colonial revolutionaries defeated the effete British who were so stupid that they just marched up in well-ordered lines presenting our crafty (guerrilla) sharpshooters with easy targets. In fact, the Brits were practicing “civilized” and “honorable” war as it had been developed in Europe over centuries, ameliorating the martial chaos of the Dark Ages, and they thought that the colonists weren’t playing fair or going by the “rules of war.” (In keeping with the May Day theme, it may be noted that to the Europeans it was evident that the colonials had lost touch with the cultural values of their motherland, having been made wild by living in a wild country.) But what’s with the notion of “we’re going to kill you, but we’ll be polite about it”? When push comes to shove (comes to shoot) this stuff always goes out the window, and there’s a certain level of hypocrisy in pretending otherwise. Being nice about killing is not to be decried, but it’s just a small step on an old road; what we need is a quantum leap. War crimes is a redundancy.
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