Saturday, May 05, 2007

It's starting to look a lot like Brezh-nev . . .

If George Bush has been doing his best impression of a doddering Soviet dictator overseeing a Near Eastern debacle, and an increasingly beleaguered U.S. military is starting to develop Red Army ethics . . . does that make us the new Evil Empire?

After reading
this Associated Press account, you have to wonder. That is, after you read it and, first, weep:

In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, fewer than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.

More than 40 percent support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10 percent reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Friday in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.

"It is disappointing," said analyst John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank. "But anybody who is surprised by it doesn't understand war. ... This is about combat stress."

The military has seen a number of high-profile incidents of alleged abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of 24 civilians by Marines in Haditha, the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the slaying of her family in Iraq and the sexual humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

"I don't want to, for a minute, second-guess the behavior of any person in the military — look at the kind of moral dilemma you are putting people in," Christopher Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank said of the mission in Iraq. "There's a real tension between using too much force, which generally means using force to protect yourself, and using too little and therefore exposing yourself to greater risk."

The overall study was the fourth in a series done by a special mental health advisory team since 2003 aimed at assessing the well-being of forces serving in Iraq.

Officials said the teams visited Iraq last August to October, talking to troops, health care providers and chaplains.

The study team also found that long and repeated deployments were increasing troop mental health problems.

But Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, the Army's acting surgeon general, said the team's "most critical" findings were on ethics.

"They looked under every rock, and what they found was not always easy to look at," said Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health.

THIS UNJUST, UNNECESSARY WAR has tainted everything it has touched. The home of the free -- this "nation of laws" -- tortures "enemy combatants" to dubious effect.

The "war on terror" has been a boon for . . . terror. The "freedom" we brought to those once oppressed by Saddam turned out to be the freedom of the grave. And the peace? That of the dead.

Iraq is a bloody debacle. Our military is broken -- materially, bodily, ethically and spiritually. Some 3,358 American soldiers have died.

At home, we are less free and dubiously secure.

Iran is gonna get The Bomb.

BACK IN 2000, a lot of us voted for George Bush, and prayed for his victory in the disputed election because, frankly, we despaired over abortion and our country's worsening embrace of the Culture of Death and desperately wanted to buy ourselves some time via the shortcut of presidential politics.

Judgment is nigh, we thought. After all, God is just, we are wicked and He could not and would not forever stay our comeuppance when we'd sooooooo been asking for it. At least that was my metaphysical reasoning.

I wasn't thrilled about Bush, but he was spouting the social-conservative party line. Maybe he could hold the line on depravity. Maybe he could appoint the justices needed to start rolling back Roe v. Wade.

Maybe if in politics we trusted, we could be a little less death loving. Maybe we could stay God's hand. Buy some time for turning around the culture. ("How?" you ask? I dunno. Politics? More Catholic and evangelical media projects? Blowing up MTV? I dunno.)

In hindsight, it all sounds pretty damned stupid and presumptuous. Now, it sounds like we "saints" were tempting the Almighty as much -- if not more -- than all Planned Parenthood's shrieking pro-abort storm troopers.

But that's what I was thinking, and that's what millions of others will admit to thinking, if they're honest. Redemption through politics was tempting when you looked at the long, hard and dirty slog required to effect true cultural change.

Give us another chance, Lord. See? We'll elect this nice Republican man. Well, yeah, he'll probably suck up to the rich and do nothing for the poor, but he talks right about abortion and sodomy!

WHOM DID WE THINK we were fooling? Obviously not God.

And, I fear, in trying to stave off judgment by voting right, instead of by living right and witnessing right, we brought upon ourselves the very instrument of divine judgment.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion . . . .

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