Wikileaks: Agression is The Stem of Massacre

BLOG POST posted on July 27, 2010 by Greg Dean

There is a reason that both the U.S. and Canadian governments have barred the coverage of soldiers' funerals and don't bother counting civilian deaths in their theaters of war - they know the reality of war is repugnant to everyone, even Canadian and U.S. populations who are heavily influenced over many decades to accept the use of disproportionate aggression. And that to engage in war at all is to choose a path of great violence and initiation of suffering against all human rights and basic moral norms. Indeed at the Nuremberg trial for the Nazis, all the great horrors of the Nazis were not the primary crime in the courts' eyes, the primary crime was the act of aggression (invasion) in the first place: "it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." - was the basic position of law.  

No one can argue any longer that Iraq should not have been invaded, nor that the permanent U.S. installations should remain there. And although people still argue that Afghanistan could somehow be justified, when one applies proportionality and considers alternatives to invasion for counter-terrorism, such as using more investigative and international policing techniques, these arguments clearly fall down. 

Many have pointed out - to imorally engage in the rationales of aggressive war myself - that terrorists are mobile and that to be bogged down and spending hundreds of billions in Afghanistan reduces our ability to have mobile investigations and civil operations, which could rapidly nullify terrorist networks and actions from wherever terrorism may be initiated.

When people engage in normalizing our political and military aggression, all people are left with is empty apologism for politicians that they identify with on ambiguous levels. Providing excuses for them leaves the apologist complicit with these war criminals. The crimes are so grand and appalling that to do anything but actively oppose these criminals is to abdicate one's own firm grasp of humanity: have you abdicated your humanity to these war/massacre makers? 

The only thing that is left to be done with Bush, Chretien, Obama, Harper, Cameron, etc., etc., is to haul them off to a war crimes tribunal. There are no ifs or buts about the moral course of response to these power brokers: trial, trial, trial. To continue as bureaucrats, tax collectors, legislators, etc., or really almost as Canadian or U.S. citizens, under the service and apparatus is complicity to some of the worst war crimes in history. The U.S. lead prosecutor Justice Jackson, established that even membership in national organizations is complicity and aid of the illegal, invading regime, and was the the basis for all subsequent mass trials of members of the German national war apparatus. Immunity from guilt only came to a citizen who joined in and acted within the apparatus under forced duress. At this point, many peoples' minds turn to the holocaust and say well compared to the war crimes that killed 6 million + in the concentration camps, etc., our crimes of killing 400,000 in the blockade on Iraq and 1.5 million in the 2nd invasion of Iraq are much more banal (when you include the thousands of years of deformity and cancer of Depleted Uranium on generations yet unborn, I don't think we can say it is necessarily that shade better)... When you see the reasoning actually drawn out for that thinking, no further critique of it is required: it is obviously a cynical and immoral comparison to make... That because others have committed even worse horrors that one can be complicit in these somewhat less horrific crimes.

Canadians and USamericans are responsible for what we can affect. We can affect the policy of our own governments, we can stop working at the ports exporting war on planes and ships, we can occupy legislatures filled with war criminals until they put an end to their crimes. We can spend trillions of dollars on food shipments and the civil support of democratic organizations (democracy is a civil process not a military process) instead of on aggression. 

Nuremberg established that all war crimes start with aggression itself. Because the initial act of aggression has been committed there is hardly further required analysis to establish that there are many war criminals in our midst (9 years is a big net). In fact, I think the moral logic can argue that any further analysis of the aggressors' reasoning for continued aggression is tantamount to glossing over the basic standard for humanity as set out at Nuremberg and in numerous trials since, like those for Rwanda and Serbia. Do you really want to spend your valuable time listening to and repeating the splitting of hairs on a criminally-insane head?

Many forget that Bush refused to talk with the Taliban or Saddam, that it was impossible for them to discuss how they might meet the terms of the aggression. But that ignores the fact that the U.S. had no right to demand the dissolution of the sovereign policy processes of those countries. Or that the U.S. helped create the miserable situations that so many liberals thought justified regime change (and thus the deaths of millions 'because women prefer having their families bombed than the Taliban regime'). These apologist rationales ignore the fact that the Taliban represented some order that the population embraced with open arms after a decade of truly chaotic and arbitrary violence by war lords that the U.S. established by giving massive amounts of armaments to fight the Soviets... The U.S. then left a huge vacuum for Afghanistan to deal with after the Soviet withdrawal, with no further support of civil society or infrastructure. But, again, I digress into arguments that ignore the basic moral responsibility that we have - not to commit aggression that will clearly lead to grand scales of violence. We can only affect our realms, we can't force the Afghan culture and polity into our standards of responsibility: to use force clearly cancels out our claim to any moral aid that might help evolve others' (countries) own moral orders.

WikiLeaks dresses down all the political spin and glossing over of war with high-flying geo-politics and the twisted rationales of privilege, high flung arms technologies, power and violence. The leaks simply show war as the horror that it necessarily is. 

So as more and more stories come out about the war from these leaks, the first and primary context is the continued aggression and occupation as the ongoing crime, not whether Obama's strategy is less violent than Bush' or some things have changed in the mere months since the end period covered by the leaked documents.

The only thing that is keeping them from trial is their position as supreme power brokers and purveyors of violence. But all empires fall, and certainly we can call see the waning of U.S. neo-imperialism. Trials of war criminals, such as the ones going on in Cambodia as I write, often take place much later in history, and we, the young, must remember this and commit to arresting the criminals of our own countries when their (and our countries' stars by extension of their ignoble actions) stars have waned.