The Real War Crimes
Deborah Venable
06/08/06
Everything
in and on this earth is cyclical in nature.
Some things take thousands of years and some things only take minutes or
less, but it is sad when one person, who is getting on in life, such as myself,
must witness a painful cyclical political occurrence in half a lifetime. That is how I feel as I witness the “war
crimes” scenario being lobbed at our military troops just as it was thirty plus
years ago – for purely political reasons – make no mistake about it!
When
modern day America gets tired of supporting military activities during a war,
it is like a petulant child that get gets tired of playing with a particular
toy and proceeds to try to break it so he won’t have to play with it any more. The “petulant children” are proceeding to
try to “break” the American military.
Sad. If there is one thing we
should have learned from history, it is that great cultures with great intentions
have never gotten anywhere from backing down from a fight. Unfortunately war is a part of the human
condition. It happens when envy and
greed overcome innocence, or the yearning for liberty overcomes a false sense
of security. It ceases only when one
side gives up or is forced to surrender.
Politicians can start wars, but they cannot honorably stop them, and
they certainly can’t win them. The
winning of wars is up the soldiers and the citizens that back them up. The results of a dishonorable surrender or
loss to an honorable cause is devastating and only lays the groundwork for more
and sooner wars.
Every
soldier we have fighting “on our side” is not honorable, but the great majority
of them are. Defining “honorable” is
something that many of the politicians and misguided citizens seem to have a
hard time doing. A soldier’s actions
cannot be judged in civilian courts or even in the court of public
opinion. Not really. Even if military personnel or ex-military
personnel attempt to judge the actions of soldiers in the courts of public
opinion, their testimony comes off skewed.
That is why we have military courts for trying individual military
actions. What has happened lately is
that civilian judgment has been injected even into the military courts’
decisions to such an extent that the only court operating to the fullest extent
is the court of public opinion - and public opinion contains far too many
“petulant children.”
A
little background on the making of a soldier, if you will: Soldiers are made from every kind of
ordinary person. They are all taken in
their various shapes and sizes, and psyches, and forced into the same mold of
behavior modification. This is quite
necessary, because certain things must be learned and un-learned for an
ordinary citizen to become a soldier.
For some, this process is much harder than for others, but the end
result should be that the ones who make it through are at both the top and the
bottom of human enlightenment. Yes, the
top and the bottom. Ideally, their moral character will be
unimpeachable, but their abilities for great destruction finely tuned. That is what a soldier is – a killing
machine with a brain and emotions that cannot be totally stripped away. A soldier sent into a war zone will never
come out the same person that he was before he went in. We should all know that. War is a significant emotional event, and
psychologically speaking, the only way to permanently affect emotional change
in a human being.
Some
of the soldiers who get to come back home are stronger in many ways than they
ever were before, but all of them are changed for life, and some of them are
irrecoverable in their fragile psyches and broken bodies. When those who have sent these soldiers into
war, or allowed them to be sent, refuse to insist on an honorable outcome to
the war they were fighting, they commit a far greater sin against humanity than
the war itself. That is what happened
half a lifetime ago in Vietnam, and that is what the petulant children would
see happen once again.
If
the current war were not such a reminder of Vietnam, so many references and
correlations would not be made with that war.
They are vastly different, yet all too similar because of the attitudes
being projected by the politicians and the media. This is not a police action to be tried in civil courts. It is a war with the only meaningful outcome
to be decided by victory. Victory
requires winners and losers, and these soldiers that we are sending into battle
need to be winners. We need them to be
winners. The future of America depends
on it.
The
statistics of the war in Vietnam are sad when you
consider the misconceptions that exist about it. Too many Americans think of that war as a totally botched effort
for no good reason and accept it as a black mark against the American
military’s abilities. That is
appalling. What should be considered as
nothing other than treason was tolerated and even heralded as heroic resistance
to an “unrighteous” war. The only thing
unrighteous about it was the outcome.
Most
of the blame must rest with Congressional buck passing instead of
Constitutional duty. We have bred a
Congress that would rather bypass its duty to declare war so that it can duck
responsibility later when the petulant children tire of it. Take a good look at the War Powers Act, enacted by Congress in 1973, supposedly to
keep any future president from being able to “declare war” except in dire
circumstances, and then only for a very limited time and under constant
reporting scrutiny. This bit of
legislation is a direct result of Vietnam and was totally unnecessary since it
only reiterates the responsibility of Congress as outlined in the Constitution,
albeit with a lot of unnecessary language.
Just as Johnson thought he had a blank check for the use of the military
in 1964, so have presidents since then circumvented Congressional resolutions,
(including this one), and the Constitution itself to act as Commander-in-Chief
whenever they felt it necessary, knowing that getting Congressional approval
for anything quickly is like getting immediate service in a crowded
restaurant. Scholars and politicians
alike have sounded off about the War Powers Act for over thirty years now, and
we still have Americans calling “foul” every time military action is
ordered.
Taking
an in-depth look at what it takes for America to stay involved in any war where
soldiers are deployed might clear a few things up for those who wish to shoot
poison arrows at the troops and their Commander-in Chief. It is time that the citizens do a lot more
thinking and stop taking the easy way out of the blame game. Once American troops are deployed via an act
of Congress or Executive Order, no one in government, and that includes all
citizens in a self-governing society, can shirk responsibility for the
deployment or the reason for it. It
takes full cooperation to keep them there because it takes a lot of
“appropriations” to pay for it. This is
elementary stuff, and I, for one, am sick and tired of all the responsibility
for America’s military actions being shuffled off on everyone but those most
responsible – the American people and our elected servants. Those who march in the streets with anti-war
signs, rush before T.V. news cameras to complain about “wrong wars in the wrong
place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons” and demean American foreign
policy and the actions of our troops in theaters of war on every continent,
including this one, may as well take up arms with our enemies – at least that
would be honest and prosecutable.
Looking
back at Vietnam, veterans of that war fall into four categories. The ones that are dead, the ones that are
alive and still suffering terrible physical and psychological effects from it,
the ones who have managed to live with their devils because they still believe
in the cause for which they were sent to fight, and finally, the ones who have
transferred their devils to the country that sent them for what they have been
convinced were flawed intentions. I am
not a soldier, so I cannot sit in judgment of any of them, but I have lived and
had to deal with examples of all of them.
This was an up close and personal war for me because it was my
generation’s war to fight. We were not
allowed to win that one, and the petulant children tossed those broken soldiers
away like so many broken toys. Above
all else, this must not happen again.
If the citizens of this country believe they can continue to enjoy their way of life, any of their remaining freedoms, any hope for a bright future for their progeny, without America finishing this war in victory, they are badly mistaken. While the war against Communism is ongoing and still not won, the war against terrorism should be fought with the clear intention of nothing less than total victory. That will take a renewed interest in reviving the American spirit that was once so evident and is now lost in the squabble – all too often – of the petulant children.