We Need to Change

I'm not angry, comparing anger to what I feel is like comparing a guttering match to the sun. I'm not enraged, that's entirely too polite a term. I am well and truly pissed off.

We capture terrorists, without uniforms, we fly them to a Caribean island where they get three hot meals a day that meet the requirements of their religion, prayer mats, Korans and when we try to extract information from them by depriving them of sleep we're called torturers. When three of them decide to hang themselves we're held responsible for their deaths.

Then two of our soldiers, in uniform, completely identifiable as American soldiers and perfectly distinguishable from any civilian in the area, are captured. They have their genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths. They have their eyes gouged out. They have their heads cut off. Their mutilated corpses are intentionally left in a place where they'll be found by other Americans and their bodies are booby trapped as is the area around them in hopes of killing yet more Americans. There's no outrage flowing from this. Two men died a horrible death at the hands of monsters and there's no outrage, while terrorists are photographed with underwear over their heads and we're called brutal.

Yet we have people insisting that we must play by civilized rules in dealing with the terrorists. We have people claiming that the terrorists must be treated according to the Geneva Convention, ignoring the fact that the Geneva Convention allows combatants without command structure, who don't carry arms openly and who wear no identification to show that they are in fact legal combatants to be shot on sight. They ignore the fact that the Geneva Convention is intended to be adhered to by BOTH sides of a conflict, otherwise the agreement is void.

We need to change how we fight the War on Terror. First, we need to get rid of the imbedded reporters. Why? They lead to too many Monday Morning Quarterbacks. When one of our warriors has to make a decision in a matter of seconds, when making the wrong decision could kill him and his comrades, but then that decision is endlessly analysed in slow motion by people in safe, comfortable offices to see if he may have been able to decide otherwise, well as they say that dog just won't hunt. I'm not a veteran, I've never been in combat. I, unlike so many of my self-proclaimed intellectual betters in the news media, won't second-guess anyone for what they do in the heat of combat. The grunt on the ground doesn't have the advantage of all the information that will later be gathered after the smoke clears, he doesn't have access to video tapes and satelite images to tell him exactly what's happening around him and, even if he had access to all this information, he wouldn't have time to sit down and analyze it to make a completely informed decision before he and his buddies are killed. He has to make a decision now, not tomorrow, not in ten minutes, but right this very second. In combat the best thing you can do is the right thing, the second-best thing you can do is the wrong thing, and the absolute worst thing you can do it nothing.

Second, we have to put the blame for civilian deaths exactly where it belongs. Few German civilians were killed by American troops on the ground during World War II. Why? Because when the German army occupied a town to set up a defensive position the civilians moved out, and because the German military wore uniforms so that the Allies could tell at a glance if a person running across the street was a soldier (and thereby a target) or a civilian (and therefore not a target). The Germans didn't fire from civilian occupied buildings while dressed as civilians themselves so that when the Allied troops entered the building they couldn't tell who fired on them. If the terrorists don't want their civilians killed they have to stop making themselves look like civilians while attacking American troops. They have to clear the civilians out of an area before setting up shop. We, for our part, need to support those warriors who make these difficult decisions, stop insisting that they do the impossible and spare civilians while killing the indistinguishable terrorists, and stop blaming our troops when it turns out that someone they killed wasn't a terrorist.

Lastly, we have to stop insisting that our troops fight a civilized war when their enemies are anything but civilized. This war isn't a football game where both sides fight according to previously agreed upon rules and where some impartial third party determines when a foul has occurred and what the penalty shall be. From the very start the terrorists have failed to fight according to any recognized standard, targetting civilians, murdering prisoners, and disguising combatants as non-combatants. Spare me the argument that acting in a similar manner will "bring us down to their level". We are at war, war is organized barbarism, and the nation that's more efficiently barbaric will not only win, it will bring a speedier end to the war. Kim Du Toit gave the best analogy I've seen yet, we can't insist that our boxer go into the ring and fight under the Queensbury rules and watch helplessly as his opponent enters the ring armed with a flamethrower.

Yes, I know, it took me over a week to write this. Part of me was processing the events and trying to make something coherent out of a white-hot cloud of pure emotion. Another part was hoping that the media would respond with some outrage, but instead (and predictably) they responded with stories about Abu Gharib and Gitmo. They responded by saying that our men and women in uniform are no better than the animals who castrated, mutilated, and decapidated two of our citizen soldiers. They drew a moral equivalence between those who broke the rules, in a rather mild way really, and were punished for their transgressions, and those who committed attrocities and who are hailed as heroes. The only outrage I've found has been by my fellow amatuer journalists in the blogosphere and by the common folks I've spoken to. So much for the relevancy of the mainstream media.