They’ve finally done it. After more than 30 long years, the American and Israeli neoconservative blob has finally succeeded in declaring all-out war with Iran. Dick Cheney must be grinning like a Cheshire cat from downstairs, he has finally succeeded from beyond the grave to reach the apotheosis of his wretched and evil legacy.
It is the early days of the war and many have already died, most notably over 160 murdered at a girls’ elementary school in Iran, the majority of whom were students, and Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. However, the aggressors have not been spared casualties either, with four Americans killed. It is clear, both from the scale of the operation, and the encouraging words of Donald Trump, that more American soldiers are going to die in Operation “Epic Fury” before the war is over. Some readers may feel sympathetic towards the soldiers that have and are going to lose their lives.
It is quite common in the West to hear people express a ‘don’t hate the player, hate the game’ approach to being both anti-war and also having positive attitudes towards soldiers. This is best summarised with the phrase ‘support the troops, not the war,’ a statement just as ubiquitous as it is incoherent. Support the troops is a phrase so benign and vague that prima facie it’s always going to sound nice. Of course you should support the troops, they’re defending our freedoms!
What is less clear is how someone can oppose the bombing, pillaging, murder, and destruction of an entire nation, but remain steadfast in their support for the people that are doing the very thing they claim to so vehemently oppose. At the end of the day, American (and British) soldiers are not drones, and they are not conscripted. Many of them may be stupid, with US Marines having a reputation for being especially dim, but dim as they might be, they still have brains, and they choose to sign up. Every American soldier in Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE etc. who may find themselves on the wrong end of an Iranian ballistic missile freely chose to put themselves into that position.
Now of course, the most common reply to that is that I’m oversimplifying – don’t you know that many soldiers come from bad backgrounds? How could you not know that this is the only way they could go to college? According to this argument, saying that these soldiers have done something wrong is, at best, ignorant of the conditions they grew up in, or at worst, if the sophist making the argument is particularly clever, classist!
Now I am writing from the privileged position that is being a student at the University of Edinburgh, and I am very grateful and very glad to be here, but if someone were to tell me when I was younger the only way I could go to university was by killing other people, I would have become an electrician. Because that is what it means to be an American soldier, you are either killing people for money, or being paid to help those who kill people for money in some secondary or ancillary capacity. As a matter of fact, the myth of the ‘poverty draft’ is just that, a myth.
Enacting violence on innocents is not justifiable, even if you have a sob story from your childhood you can appeal to. Mad Frankie Fraser, a key member of London’s notorious Richardson Gang, liked to torture people by pulling their teeth out with pliers. I’m sure he turned to a life of crime in an attempt to escape the poverty that characterised his childhood, but that still doesn’t give him a right to do non-consensual amateur dentistry with hand tools. I can’t for the life of me see any moral difference as to whether the teeth are being pulled out in South London, or in Guantanamo Bay. I also struggle to see how such a case could be made without making the racist argument that the lives of the (mostly) non-white victims of the American military are less valuable than those of our compatriots.
“Public Domain: U.S. Soldiers in Iraq, March 23 2007 by Master Sgt. Andy Dunaway (DOD)” by pingnews.com is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.