"You" do what you're ordered to. Whether it's droning weddings, occupying entire countries, black site torture or fabricating reports to congress or whatever. You're trying to conflate morals and ethics to the armed forces. We should never have been in Afghanistan in the first place, all else after that is fruit from a poisoned tree.
How many civilians and or freedom fighters are dead because of direct or majority indirect actions taken against them by the west throughout the ME because of Western adventurism? It's far too late in the day to be saying shit like "No man left behind" with a tot of whiskey and a watery eye. Hundreds of thousands are dead as a direct consequence of being there in the first place, that some couple of thousands are summarily executed on the way out is caring about a grain of sand on the beach.
Hundreds of thousands in Iraq, hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan, scores of thousands in Pakistan, God only knows how many in the uprisings of Egypt and war in Lebanon and Libya. Yes the crimes and malfeasance against those left behind is horrendous, it is. And yet at this point it's still just crying over spilt milk. That is the scale of how bad the past decades have been and for the armed forces to even pretend to "care" and be humanist about it now is grossly absurd.
If they cared, they'd have refused deployment. That's all there is to it.
"You" do what you're ordered to. Whether it's droning weddings, occupying entire countries, black site torture or fabricating reports to congress or whatever. You're trying to conflate morals and ethics to the armed forces. We should never have been in Afghanistan in the first place, all else after that is fruit from a poisoned tree.
How many civilians and or freedom fighters are dead because of direct or majority indirect actions taken against them by the west throughout the ME because of Western adventurism? It's far too late in the day to be saying shit like "No man left behind" with a tot of whiskey and a watery eye. Hundreds of thousands are dead as a direct consequence of being there in the first place, that some couple of thousands are summarily executed on the way out is caring about a grain of sand on the beach.
Hundreds of thousands in Iraq, hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan, scores of thousands in Pakistan, God only knows how many in the uprisings of Egypt and war in Lebanon and Libya. Yes the crimes and malfeasance against those left behind is horrendous, it is. And yet at this point it's still just crying over spilt milk. That is the scale of how bad the past decades have been and for the armed forces to even pretend to "care" and be humanist about it now is grossly absurd.
If they cared, they'd have refused deployment. That's all there is to it.
We are now going in circles.
Thanks for the discussion and debate.