Exactly, Brooke! Bravo. I too have been very uncomfortable with the “Support our Troops” mantra. You mention “only following orders”, of course, deliberately evoking Nuremburg, but the better analogy would be Vietnam. It took courage for segments of the peace movement then to demand moral conscience (read: noncollaboration) from the troops, but it was the right thing to do. Rather than the gospel which said that returning Vietnam vets suffered from their nonrecognition and abandonment by the American people, many suffered more from their own ethical misgivings about what they had been forced to do in the name of justice and freedom (just as heads of state and military leaders find the courage, when retired and no longer ’embedded’, to become peacemakers). If there were a way to communicate some pressure of conscience to the ethically unformed and challenged 18- and 19-year-olds who are dying and killing in Iraq, that would be “supporting our troops.”
Here’s more on ‘following orders’, relative to the US POWs shown to the media by Iraq:
Al-Jazeera satellite channel showed a US soldier lying prone on a camp bed in a bare concrete room, his face covered in blood, wounds in his side and arm.
He was propped up for the interview by a reporter from Iraqi television. Asked his name, he replied haltingly: “Edgar, my name is Edgar.” He said he was from Texas.
Another who identified himself as “Private First Class Miller”, was asked why he had gone to Iraq. In a strained voice he said: “I was told to come here.” They were from the 507th Maintenance Company, from Fort Bliss, Texas, rather than a combat outfit. “I just followed orders,” he said. “I came to fix broke things. I don’t want to kill anybody.” Guardian/UK
On the topic of the media display of the POWs, US officials lost no time arguing that it was a violation of the clause in the Geneva Convention proscribing humiliation of prisoners to show them on television (whereas, our televising the long lines of Iraqi POWs the prior day was not?). The indignity to which they were exposed, however, was not by the Iraqis but the indignity of war itself and, moreso, of a war with only the thinnest veneer of a lying rationale, if that is becoming clear to our forces there. (Can you imagine that US infantry forces might start scratching their heads about why the Iraqis are not welcoming us as their liberators? why, if we were in such imminent danger of a CBW attack fro Iraq that we had to preemptively disarm them, there has been no deployment of CBW on the battlefield yet?) I would think US families and authorities would actually want visual confirmation that missing soldiers were captured and alive when that was the case. The ICRC agrees that media display of POWs does not automatically amount to indignity:
Amanda Williamson, a Red Cross spokeswoman, said it would not automatically be a contravention. “There’s an article that prisoners should not be exposed to public curiosity, but this was not envisaged to include the media, so it’s not a violation per se to put them on TV.” Whether they were being exposed to public curiosity would depend on how they appeared on TV’ [via also not found]
