In respond to Bobbie Morgan’s ‘One Young Hero Versus the Mighty Military,’ (26 January 2006).
The article link above does not present a logical argument as it is emotionally based and does not take into the laws and norms of war. Bobbie Morgan uses the term ‘Just War Theory’ to avidly support Lt. Watada’s declaration that he would not fight in Iraq as it was an illegal war.
Briefly and simply, Just War Theory is primarily broken into two parts: jus ad bellum and jus in bello. According to jus ad bellum, it is a government that wages war, not individuals; and jus in bello drives the fair treatment of noncombatants in a war through international monitoring of the actions of the combatant government policies and individual soldiers’ actions.
What Morgan does not acknowledge is that legally, the soldier does not have the ‘right’ to deny his deployment. Lt. Watada believes that the Iraq war is illegal, however, it is the government, his employer, not the individual soldier that decides if a country will go to war. It is up to the state to justify its declaration of war to the international community. Soldiers can decide their individual behavior during war, such as restricting excessive force and fair treatment of the noncombatants. For example, if Lt. Watada had seen Abu Ghraib human rights violations, and had spoken out against his peers, then he would be justified according to the principles of jus in bello for speaking out. However, Lt. Watada freely signed up to the US military, which meant that he agreed to the job of being a US soldier, which means carrying out assigned missions. There have been and will continue to be many military people that do not want to be deployed on missions. However, it is their job. If this man wanted to retain his decision making abilities about whether the US was making accurate decisions about jus ad bellum he should have become a politician, not a soldier.
The military is an organization structured on a hierarchical structure with the decision making at the top of the pyramid, the President. A military would not be able to function if it allowed its soldiers to declare that they thought the military's actions were illegal.
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4 comments:
However, if a soldier is ordered to do something clearly illegal, he must not do it. For example, murder of a civilian is fairly clear. Certainly there have been such orders even on a grand scale, if perhaps anachronistically illegal(say Fat Man and Little Boy). The crux of the argument is that we hold people who commit war crimes responsible individually, and sometimes, without regard to whether they followed orders in carrying out acts, and yet, we expect them, indeed require them, to act as automotons when we strap them in kevlar and saddle them with munitions. -JQ
The point you make here is a very valid point. But, let’s look at it on a smaller scale. What if the soldier was ordered to kill a village of people by his commander lets say a Lieutenant. If the soldier follows the order and kills the residents of the village is he guilty of war crimes, or is the commander the only person with culpability in this case.
Critics of the Bush administration claimed that President Bush should be tried for ordering the military action in Iraq, because as many of the people in these blogs have already said, it was not a sanctioned military action, nor was there an imminent threat to the USA.
Lt. Watada is going to come down to a legal decision that will probably come from the US Supreme Court. Considering today's terrorist fueled fear, I would not be at all surprised if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the military.
That Lieutenant was convicted of 109 counts of murdering innocent Viet Namese citizens, in 1969. However, a sympathetic President Nixon commuted much of his sentence. These were the times in the 60's and 70's. I don't think President Bush would be as sympathetic today with the terrorist fueled climate that exists today.
This is something I've wondered about with this case - can a soldier truly decide their own individual behavior during war? Jamey and Jim's examples of outright killing obvious innocent civilians are clear situations where a soldier would be committing a war crime and should disobey the unlawful order. But what about those situations where it's less clear if that order is truly unlawful? Then it's a situation of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you obey the order, you've just committed what some court later on will define as a war crime, but if you disobey the order and the act is never defined as illegal then you've just disobeyed direct orders from your commanding officer and will be punished by the military. I guess that's why we hope these young battle-naive soldiers are commanded by an officer with vast experience, knowledge and wisdom. Perhaps there needs to be more training for soldiers on the laws of war.
In some ways it is a damned if you and damned if you don't scenario, however, Nueremberg has shown us that soldiers cannot simply rest on the notion that they are part of a "hierarchical structure" and follow commands blindly. There comes a point when somethings are just fundamentally wrong and I applaud Lt. Watada's courage to stand up for his conviction.
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