Training soldiers on “core warrior values”?

As most people who are paying any attention know, the US military in Iraq is about the get entangled in yet another scandal, this time much worse than the mistreatment of prisoners. It's beginning to look (though the proper investigations are far from complete) that a group of marines (yes, “the few, the proud”) back in November of '05 executed several Iraqi civilians, unarmed and opposing no resistance, because the soldiers lost their nerve after a bomb attack on their convoy.

As a preemptive measure against the repeat of such instances in the future (or is it perhaps a not-so-clever public relations maneuver?), Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli today ordered all sub-commanders stationed in Iraq to give their troops training in “core warrior values,” to emphasize the importance of “legal, moral and ethical standards on the battlefield.” I guess killing unarmed civilians isn't a core warrior value, though it has in fact been regular practice since the Peloponnesian War.

The issue, in part, is weather the words “moral” and “war” may in fact be used in the same sentence without fear of oxymoronic contradiction. I am not a pacifist, as I believe in the possibility of just wars within exceedingly restrictive circumstances (much more restricted than those encompassed by the ever-shifting “justifications” given by the Bush administration for the mess they are making in Iraq). However, as the saying goes, all is fair in love and war, no? War is by definition the abandonment of civil way of resolving disputes, it is sheer might trumping over whatever rights there may be. Especially when troops face a guerrilla war, rather than a clearly defined enemy that they can defeat in open combat, civilians do (logically, though not justly) become targets, since it is (some) civilians who are engaging the invading army. Indeed, it was precisely when the Peloponnesian war became guerrilla rather than pitched battle that attacks against civilian populations became increasingly frequent and accepted.

There is another angle, of course, which is that neither the US army, nor Bush have a trustworthy record when it comes to “legal, moral, and ethical standards.” The army has committed atrocities in, for example, World War II (the bombing of Dresden, at the center of Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five) and, of course, Vietnam (dropping napalm on undefended villages). Why should we trust them to change their behavior now? As for Bush, who today actually had the gall to say “One of the things that happens in a transparent society like ours is that there will be a full and complete investigation,” someone should remind him that we are still waiting for the firing of Donald Rumsfeld in conjunction with the Abu-Grahib prison abuses, not to mention the dismissal of Dick Cheney and the resignations of Bush on the ground of lying about WMD to get us into a war. Then again, Chiarelli said that the troops needed ethical training, he never mentioned the commander in chief and his close associates.