Second, orders to torture prisoners are illegal orders. Soldiers are not required to follow them and many have not, including the people who turned in the Abu Ghraib perpetrators. In the planning for the war, any offensive act that was deemed likely to kill 30 or more civilians had to be signed off on directly by the Secretary of Defense and thus became the direct order of the duly-elected civilian government. Again, we don't want soldiers disobeying the direct orders of people we elect. Thanking soldiers for following the legal orders of their government in a difficult situation seems to me common courtesy at the very least.
This does not mean that I don't value the contribution of conscientious objectors. I do. I thank them, too. But conscientious objection to a war and lawless desertion or disobedience are two very different things. One respects the law and the other does not.
The idea that lawlessness is "radical action" is a plague on the Left and puts us in the same league as the Religious Right, who want to substitute religious law for democracy. So called "vanguardism" is so much childishness, the desire for people to do things simply because you say it's right. That is a stupid, careless substitute for serious political thought and action. Like the Religious Right, so many Leftists don't understand or respect the law so they just dismiss it. They don't understand finance so they dismiss that, too. I thought this list was a place for more serious debate.
Falling back on Bolshevik thinking leads to ruin for the Left. We are left with a model of society that inevitably degenerates into a military government where soldiers and civilians alike are ordered into jobs and provided for with rationing. The decisions of state are arbitrary exercises of the single-party "vanguard". It's a worthless model.
Not only that, it only leaves the Left one practical option in a democracy: the kind of endless, mindless compromise that we see from the Democratic Party. With no serious proposals to move our society towards socialism, the ideology of the Left is empty and provides no serious, rigorous, robust arguments for people to use. Thus we are left with fucking KERRY and CLINTON. I can't tell you how many times I criticized Kerry (among friends, of course) and was given a clucking lecture by some baby-boom lefty about how I must not question whether the coronated Emperor of Liberalism had a full compliment of clothes. Such questions, I was knowingly told, would lead to the unimaginable possibility of the election of the dreaded Bush. Forget the fact that I was, at the time, working 100 hours a week at the prevailing wage of Honduras for that jackass' campaign. (I still can't believe I worked for that idiot. God, I'll do anything a cute, intelligent girl asks me to do. I really will. It's a sickness)
Well, here we are, reaping the rewards of our strict policy of alternating weak-minded Leninist blather with craven compromise.
Socialism will be the triumph of LAW. I am a socialist and I LOVE the law. I have violated the law in the cause of democracy and it makes me love the law even more. I love politics and economics - democracy - and I believe that if we make the right arguments and take the smartest actions WE WILL WIN. So I engage. If I'm walking through an airport I don't hesitate to go up to a group of jarheads lining up to get on a plane for their base, shake their hands and tell them "Hey, I'm on the Left and I thank you for your service. It's the wrong war to fight. I wouldn't have you fight it. I will do everything I can to defeat the people who sent you, but thank you sincerely for doing your duty." Good citizenship matters, dammit. Civil disobedience is a great and honorable choice but so is the choice to do the lawful thing. The choice to disobey has to be scrutinized and the person who disobeys has to meet a high ethical burden to justify his actions. If you can't meet that burden, you should act lawfully - especially when - uniquely when - as a soldier, you have sworn an oath to be exceptionally lawful.
The short version is this: it would be damn hard for ME to follow orders and do military duty in Iraq, and I have no right to assume any worse of any soldier. So I thank them for doing something I would find it hard to do.
peace
boddi