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About Me
- eudaimonia
- As noted on my bio page, along with the fact that I will occasionally wear a scarf, I work in the communications/media industry. In my other life, I am a grad student and (eek) poet. I live in state-sanctioned holy matrimony with a person of the opposite gender, but we find it more romantic to play like we're just shacking up. Actually, we've been together about 10 years as of today. Politically, I'm a registered Democrat who sometimes votes Libertarian, still mourns the death of the socialist project and thinks Arlen Specter is kind of cute (in that curmudgeonly grandfather kind of way.) Metaphysically speaking, my closest fits right now are secular humanist/religious trivia buff/failed mystic. Re: all this about the Golden Mean, etc., I wish I could say I knew my Classics (much less geometry) inside and out, but what I dig I dig.
4 comments:
He should be convicted. The position he takes makes sense, but he's not in a legal position to be taking it.
He hasn't been asked to obey a specific illegal order and service members can't call into question the whole conflict.
I defer to your legal judgment on whether or not he has a case, although I still admire the stance.
There's a moral issue here too. He signed up, voluntarily, for a fixed length of military service. To morally renege on that commitment, you'd need to show that that his superiors are asking him to do something reprehensible.
Deployment to Iraq, while ill-advised, dangerous, and precipitated by a war founded on falsehoods and half-truths, does not seem to be morally reprehensible to me. Watada has no problem being in the military or fighting, presumably, but doesn't want to show up for this particular fight. Not because he's going to have to torture or rape people or violate the rules of war (all valid reasons to disobey an order), but because he feels that the Executive tricked the Legislative into starting the war.
What happens if we allow junior officers in the armed forces to choose which conflicts they will serve in, or even fyrhter, as in Watada's case, to decide which conflicts are legal?
It's civil disobedience, but I find his arguments weak.
I agree that Watada is on shaky ground with his claims, in terms of both the letter and the spirit of the law. I wish he had included the examples of alleged war crimes (Abu Ghraib, the cases of civilian rapes and murders and various other disturbing anecdotes) in his argument because that would have made it stronger for me, but I still find his grounds for civil disobedience convincing from a moral standpoint.
Where should an officer draw the line at following the commander in chief (whom he's obviously singling out here for purposely deceiving Congress) into battle, if there is blatant manipulation of intelligence, which in this case has been fairly well documented?
If Congress is going to rubber-stamp the whims of the executive branch against their better judgment, sending thousands of young soldiers to die, somebody needs to step up and say something, so I admire Watada's impulse to do so at risk of imprisonment, even if it's perhaps foolhardy, given the holes in his legal case.
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