- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Yeah, I remember that ... as well as North's comment about obeying a 'higher law', or however he put it. Ollie was not a West Pointer (neither was I), but it feels like a corruption of the WP concept of the 'harder right', i.e. it's easy to be narrowly right and just do what you're told, but sometimes you have to look at the big picture and exercise broader judgment ... within the confines of your own legal obligations and responsibilities.
IMNSHO, (some) military officers get confused about their professional and ethical obligations for the same reason other human beings do; egotism, lack of clear thinking (for whatever reason), ideological blindness. Some would do what these guys have done in response to what they preceive as wrongs. The media has always done a crappy and even insulting job of covering the media; it's not hard to think they are intentionally hostile, as some have at times been. If you watched pundits throw around the word 'quagmire' in the first two days of the Iraq invasion because the advance had stalled, you might think you're justified in 'countering enemy propoganda' with some of your own (which you would assure yourself would be accurate, but given a properly supportive spin). You might think it's important to preserve respect for the institution by countering negative reporting about war crimes, for example, in order to avoid a repeat of the post-Vietnam experience. You'd be wrong in thinking all this, but it's understandable why one would fail. Gen. Vallely (in the NYT) seems to believe that it's okay to do psyops on the American people in support of the war; I find that appalling, but I understand that he thinks he is just defending them from 'enemy propoganda'. Either way, he still fails the ethics test, and he must have willfully ignored what he learned about it (esp military-civilian relations in war time) at the War College.
Unlike civilians, though, they don't have the excuse of not having been rigorously trained in such ethics, or being part of a culture that encourages both ethical behavior and accountability. In my experience, it can be pretty effing hard to apply those lessons when you hang up the uniform, and very costly when you do ... and your colleagues are more than likely going to dismiss you as excessively rigid when you do the right thing. You have to rely on your own ethical foundations, and maybe imagine yourself standing in a roomful of your former peers in uniform and having to be accountable to them for your decision.
Which is why I take this story very personally; when an officer lies to the public like this to shil for a war based on lies, s/he has compromised a scarce and precious resource that I rely on, and fucked me in a very personal way. Since the military belongs to the American people, and it's credibility and quality, the care with which it will handle the sons and daughters it takes on loan, are public assets, I would expect some other 'civilians' to feel the same way ...
