Bush, et al require training in ethics

GLASGOW, Scotland -- At first, as news of three new alleged atrocities by American soldiers in Iraq took over the headlines of the world, I was gratified by Washington's response: We are going to give additional "ethics training" to those responsible.
Good, I thought: Maybe at last George W., Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and all those powdered warriors will have to sit down and ponder why they got us into this mess.
Then came the dawning. It was the soldiers who were going to get this "core warrior values training" -- all 135,000 of them -- in a slideshow, yet. Just as the poor saps at the lowest levels of the military are going to jail for every sort of offense, so now the wrong people are going to be lectured about what war is all about. First, of course, the president was described in the White House as "troubled" by the stories of al-Haditha, Ishaqi and Hamandiya. Then he uttered more of the usual recusals, in effect asserting that the atrocities did not make one inferior; that, in fact, the investigating of oneself made one superior.
"The world will see the full and complete investigation," he stated with unmistakable pride. "The United States of America has got a willingness to deal with issues like this in an upfront way, in an open way, and correct problems. And that's what you're going to see unfold."
Moral rock bottom
One wonders whether this administration can hit moral rock bottom any more forcefully -- and then it does.
Can the president of the United States really think Iraqis care anymore about American self-righteousness, after all the misery we've brought to the country? Can he still believe that American troops, who allegedly handcuffed children before shooting them in one of these cases, are just a few drops of "bad blood" in an ocean of American purity, rather than the fault of his own deluded initial and continued decisions?
Here in Europe, and particularly in a courteous and stately country like Scotland, Europeans hardly mention the war to Americans. It is as though the average European simply accepts that the Americans they used to so admire have "gone bad," and that's that.
But Gerard Baker, writing in The Times of London last week, came to an important conclusion about the real reasons behind the recent allegations. "There is a gathering sense that the outrages of al-Haditha and elsewhere," he wrote, "are not just simply isolated examples of bad behavior but the almost inevitable consequence of deploying the U.S. military to a task for which it is ill-equipped and poorly trained -- policing and pacifying an alien people."
True, this is a volunteer army, and it goes where it is sent. But these volunteer servicemen and women are not America's Hessians (at least, not yet). They, their families and American citizens in general have the right to expect that the decisions made by their civilian leaders are responsible and sound, and that they take into account the historical cultural realities that too soon become inevitabilities. Everything that has happened and everything that is happening in Iraq was inevitable from the beginning.
And so the true guilt lies with our leaders, who capriciously sent American boys and girls and men and women to the one country in the world most ready to reject and revile them. They sent them, purposelessly, to kill people the soldiers had not even secondhand knowledge of -- and the worst hatred in a war comes when fighting against people you do not know.
Hypothetical war
They pretended that Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Lebanon and Bosnia -- all those places we've retreated from because we went in thoughtless of reality and of culture -- had never existed. And so, we have another hypothetical war: It could, would and should work because we said so.
A responsible leadership would never have involved America -- and, indeed, the world -- in such a torment. A responsible leadership would understand that its soldiers would be brutalized by such a contact, and that a great part of its own job was to protect its servicemen from such inevitabilities.
And so, as militias and death squads more and more rule that destroyed country, as once-peaceful Basra implodes into hopeless violence, and as America now faces more atrocity charges, the only real hope comes, ironically, from the new Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. He says that there have been so many killings by Americans of innocent Iraqis (a "daily phenomenon & quot;) that he must think seriously about demanding the Americans leave. (Dare one hope?)
Universal Press Syndicate