A DIFFERENT PROVOCATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON PARDONING WAR CRIMINALS
This article by Matthew Farwell in the November 19, 2019 edition of The New Republic, explicates the paradoxes of the “rules of war”, what constitutes acceptable violence, and what war behavior has to do with public image.
Obviously, Farwell’s thoughts were provoked by the current controversy about Trump’s pardon of the Navy Seal for war crimes. The article adds a useful counterpoint to the military “experts” who pontificate and lament the scrambling of “military order and discipline” by Trump’s actions.
While we believe that there is justification to the criticisms of Trump, we also believe that Farwell calls needed attention to the manufacture and execution of endless war, not just the impossible positions it puts combatants in, as described below.
“It is hard for me to see much difference between the crimes of Gibbs and his kill-team and those of the two soldiers and one sailor the president just pardoned, other than the fact that Gibbs is still locked up and these guys aren’t. But again, that’s war for you. It’s random and unfair. It’s also hard for me to see why I should be any more upset about these men’s crimes than the criminal decisions of their leaders: What’s the difference between a soldier’s extrajudicial killing of an Afghan civilian with a grenade and a president’s extrajudicial killing of an American child with a drone? What’s the point of holding someone in uniform accountable for abusing a prisoner in Fallujah, when we’ll never hold anyone in the depleted uranium ammunition sales division accountable for abusing a whole generation of Iraqi children?”