Working it out

Squawkbox.txt Comments
If anyone notices that their/others comments are gone, it is because of a change I made for the squawkbox.txt comments. There was a problem with posting and seeing comments from different browsers. FYI, I needed to add single quotes around where the BlogItemNumber was specified in the squawkbox.tv javascript. I think it fixes the problems. But now the comments I had are gone.

Supporting Our Troops
When discussing the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan, many people seem to equate supporting our troops with supporting these war efforts. These are separate issues. Unless you are left-wing liberal wacko, you probably support our troops. How could you not? These are young people with a strong sense of patriotism. Most are willing to die to defend our country and freedom. When they are given an order, they obey. Nobody should fault them for that.

But what about the orders they are given? Are they always right or just? We need look no further than what is all over the news lately, the mistreating of prisoners. I don't have all of the facts to know whether or not these soldiers who committed these acts were acting on their on or just following orders. Let's say hypothetically, they were just following orders. We can support our troops and still say this mistreating was wrong. Furthermore we can also say that these soldiers, even if they were just following orders, are culpable for these wrong actions. If you know something to be immoral, you are not to do it, regardless of being ordered by a superior. Were not individual Nazi soldiers culpable of evil war crimes?

But another issue that can be raised is the justness of the war itself. One can support our troops and still believe the war in Iraq is unjust. Now here there may be a difference in the individual soldiers moral culpability. Since the decision to go to war based on just war criteria is a prudential judgment for those who are charged to make that decision(in our case the President and Congress), then the justness of a war is not always clear-cut. Individual soldiers most likely do not have the information to decide if a war is just or not. Therefore a person could believe a war to be unjust and still support our troops. Our soldiers are acting in good faith that their mission in some way is in the best interest of our national security. If a person does not believe this to be the case, that does not mean they don't support our troops. I think it is clear we can support our soldiers and not think that everything done by our military is right, just, and willed by God. I am tired of hearing people who don't think the war in Iraq is just, being accused of not supporting our troops. These two ideas can be mutually exclusive.