vile weed

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims

--Rabindranath Tagore

I recall a comment made near the beginning of the Iraq war by Fred Thompson, former Senator from Tennessee, now an actor on the TV series Law & Order. Thompson opined that it was ridiculous for war protestors to claim that they "support the troops": how can you support the troops without supporting what the troops are doing, that is, making war?

In a sense Thompson is right. I, an opponent of the war, support our troops only insofar as I feel sympathy for them: they are being misused, abused, and ought to be brought home immediately. I don't support them in their mission. Not in the least.

For saying this of course I will be accused of ingratitude, "the vilest weed that grows." Yet why should I be grateful to the troops that are prosecuting an unjust war, a war that hurts my country more than helps it?

Let me offer an analogy. Suppose you decide to remodel your kitchen, hire a contractor to carry out this work while you are away on summer vacation. You give the foreman detailed instructions on what you want done, then leave. A few months later you arrive home to find the laborers in the last stage of the project. To your astonishment the kitchen looks nothing like the kitchen you requested, in fact is a disaster. You question the laborers about this, and they convince you that the work they've done follows exactly the plans given them by their foreman -- which plans differ entirely from the directions you had given him.

Now, it would be illogical and unfair for you to resent the laborers for the disaster -- it was the man giving them orders who is to blame, not they. And yet neither should you feel obliged to be grateful to the laborers for the work they have done. What they have done is create a disaster -- even if they did so in good faith, following the orders of their boss.

So, why should I feel gratitude toward the soldiers who are creating the disaster that is the war in Iraq? I don't blame them for the war -- they are merely following orders, as good soldiers must do. Yet I refuse to be bullied into the position that I should not be critical of the war because I might hurt the feelings of the men and women fighting it. If my opposition to the war appears ingratitude to some of the soldiers and their families, then so be it.

Still, some might say we should be grateful to those serving in Iraq, not for what they are doing, but for what they are: good and dutiful soldiers. We should be grateful to them for the same reason Tennyson was grateful to the men of the Light Brigade, for their absolute devotion to duty: "Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die."

Yet according to this logic we should also be grateful to the soldiers of the Third Reich, of Imperial Japan, for what they were during World War Two. They, too ( many of them, anyway), were paragons of duty -- men who followed the orders they were given without question, even unto death. On what reasoned principle can we deny them our gratitude, if what they were doing is irrelevant? Although we may feel a good deal of sympathy for them, I doubt that many of us would feel grateful to those German and Japanese soldiers, given that we consider the cause for which they fought unjust -- indeed, positively evil. Why, then, can we not take into account our view of the war in Iraq, whether it is a just or unjust war, when considering a proper attitude toward our troops? There appears to be a double standard at work here, one that cannot be logically or ethically defended.

By the way, the Charge of the Light Brigade was, tactically speaking, a disaster. It essentially destroyed the Brigade, made it unusable for the remainder of the Crimean War. ("C'est magnifique," noted a French commander of the brigade's suicidal charge, "mais ce n'est pas la guerre.") Only in Tennyson's heated romantic imagination could the charge become glorious. For a latter-day Tennyson, we have (alas!) the con man Ahmad Chalabi, who, in the period after the invasion, when it became clear that no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (the original casus belli) were going to be found, remarked defiantly, "We are heroes in error."

Should Ahmad Chalabi also be an object of our undying gratitude? Only, perhaps, in the superheated imagination of a Richard Perle.