No, I'm not trying to minimize the awfulness of what is said to have happened at Haditha. But I don't care, either, for the lip-smacking, self-flagellating tone of some of the coverage. Frank Schaeffer's WaPo column offers a corrective with the help of quotations from the war diaries of travel writer Norman Lewis. Here's part of Lewis's account of events in Italy in 1944:
"What we saw was ineptitude and cowardice spreading down from the command, and this resulted in chaos . .
"I saw an ugly sight: a British officer interrogating a civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with the chair; treatment which the [civilian], his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called on a private and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, 'Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?' The private's reply was to spit on his hands, and say, 'I don't mind if I do, sir.'
"I received confirmation . . . that American combat units were ordered by their officers to beat to death [those] who attempted to surrender to them. These men seem very naive and childlike, but some of them are beginning to question the ethics of this order.
"We liberated them from the Fascist Monster. And what is the prize? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared to us."
Depressing, no? Yet Schaeffer - whose son served in Afghanistan and Iraq - asks us not to leap to simplistic conclusions:
If Lewis's account were the only surviving document from World War II, we might assume that
allied nation-building ended in catastrophe. We would wonder why a morally outraged peace movement didn't stop our troops from carrying out their failed and brutal campaigns...
Judging by Lewis's diary -- and many other accounts -- the so-called Greatest Generation of World War II was often badly led and worse-behaved, and was certainly less merciful than our present-day soldiers and their leaders. We haven't carpet-bombed Baghdad or nuked Fallujah to spare the lives of our troops. Yet most Americans are glad we forced Italy, Germany and Japan to become democracies, however brutal our means.
The flag-waving boosters of our current war and their critics all seem to forget that war really is hell. Proponents sweep the inconvenient dreadfulness under the carpet (no photographs of coffins, please) while opponents are shocked, just shocked, at the nastiness. All sides seem to forget that there are no good wars, only morally ambiguous conflicts that lead to better or worse outcomes.
[Hat-tip: MB]
BTW, in case anyone thinks I'm playing the wide-eyed optimist over Iraq, I've just been reading Zeyad's gloomy report about the creeping influence of fundamentalists in Baghdad. [Via Belgravia Dispatch] Not good at all.
