The marine

The defenses of the marine are the worst thing. His defenders are using the exculpatory arguments that validate the wrong premises. The fundamental thing wrong is the unit of analysis. The unit of analysis is not the individual but the side.

The Americans fighting the Japanese had a problem with fake surrenders. The solution was to machine gun the wounded. There was no outcry at the time. And you don’t hear the Japanese whining about it either. The reason is that the object of justice in this case, the like which should be treated as like, is the group. The group that uses the other side’s willingness to care for enemy wounded as a way to kill has no claim on that willingness. At the individual level it might be very unjust—there were plenty of Japanese that wanted to surrender as much as their American counterparts but were never given a chance—but that is irrelevant. War is about justice between groups, not individuals. The individual soldier has nothing against his individual enemy. It is a relationship between two groups, not a individuals. The Japanese side was not extending the rights of soldiers to our side and was abusing the privilege on theirs and therefore had no claim on the right themselves. To their credit the Japanese have seen it largely that way (or at least I haven’t heard otherwise if they don’t).

By defending the individual marine on the basis of these individually exculpatory factors like how tired he was or how he had been wounded are in fact reinforcing the very premise that will damn him.

What is the real problem is that the other side are not seen as moral agents. What they do is not something they are responsible for and therefore they are not help liable for the clear consequences of their actions. They are allowed to breach the rules of warfare all they way with not consequences. The world that is so quick to judge us has no interest in the torture chambers that were uncovered, the dismembered female bodies that were found in the lair of the scum. Only the actions of Americans are liable to moral condemnation because only they are moral agents. They rest of the world is just a passive victim and any atrocity committed by them is merely evidence of past or current American mistreatment.

Attempting to extend the rights accorded civilized combatants to a side that is systematically exploiting these rights for military advantage is going to result in dead Americans. The only question is how many dead Americans you think the rights of a side to surrender to kill soldiers are worth. In the eyes of the world the answer is apparently quite a few. In mine it is none. The only crime committed there was that they didn’t machine gun those bastards the moment they walked into the place, like they used to in WWII. But of course in that conflict the freedom of Europe was at stake. Now it is only the freedom of Iraqis and the lives of Americans, two commodities which Europe is willing to spend freely.

It is wrong to extend the protections of civilization to combatants who don’t respect them in return. Not just morally but practically. The incentive to follow the rules is lost if you get the benefit of the rules whether you follow them or not.