Sometimes it is difficult

Sometimes it is hard to find the time that I need to write a daily blog. Either there are not enough hours in the day or more likely I find it hard to manage my time efficiently. The more things that you have to do (or that you feel you have to do) the less time you have for reflection and a great advantage of my daily blog is that while I am writing it I have time for reflection. 

I need to reflect on one item of news that has caught my attention. In 2005 about 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed in Haditha by eight US Marines. After six years the trial of the last marine has ended. One of the eight was acquitted; six had the charges against them dropped and the remaining marine, a sergeant Wuterich, achieved a plea bargain and has pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty, which carries a light punishment when you consider what the dereliction resulted in.

The killings were wrong, and killing unarmed civilians should be punished. In war many bad things happen. We send our young men and women to fight in wars that are unjustified and where there is very little moral high ground for them to recognise. We fill them with propaganda. We train them so that their minds are largely devoid of independent will, free will, in battle conditions where they must subsume their free thought into the conditioned reflex of obeying orders.

We send them to do terrible things; were the killings in Haditha by US marines are worse than the killing of other civilians who have lost their lives from bombs dropped at them from great heights, by “accident” or as a result of collateral damage, that euphemism for unlawful killing?

The second hardest thing is to know the rules of law; the hardest thing is to obey them. We put our soldiers into a frenzy, falsely convincing them that the enemy is evil and that one of our soldier’s lives is worth any number of the lives of the enemy. When something happens that results in the murder of innocents we struggle to find the right solution. We cannot bring the dead back to life. These issues are complex, perhaps the responsibility for the killings does not lie with those who killed but with those who put the soldiers into a condition where they killed civilians.

As I said, sometimes it is hard. I need to reflect.