http://gegenstandpunkt.com/english/war-morality.html
"International outcry over torture in American military prisons Morality in Wartime and its Use as a Weapon of Critique
[translated from GegenStandpunkt: Politische Vierteljahreszeitschrift 2-04, Gegenstandpunkt Verlag, Munich]
When the German foreign minister regrets the loss of moral leadership on the part of the United States of America, and demands that it be immediately reinstituted; when Italian politicians from the opposition call for a withdrawal of their troops in view of the published cases of abuse; when Polish members of government contemplate the same, and when in the eyes of Bush’s rival for the presidency, the honor of the military is impaired by the wrong leaders, then it is quite obvious that a moral scandal is being turned into a political means. Everywhere in the world, interested parties are seeking to exploit the affair. Yet the attention paid to discovering and revealing the hypocrisies on all sides all too easily fails to take notice of the very matter that is being exploited. The outcry over the scandal which can be triggered off nearly automatically has as its very premise that the torturing of war prisoners is the very fine line at which inhumanity begins.
By letting the accusatory “power of images†speak for themselves, such as that of a naked man on a dog leash or a wired man with a hood over his head standing on a crate as if crucified, or by showing themselves speechless from shock and dismay, the mass media calculatingly appeal to a direct human feeling that does not require any further reasoning. The facts now publicized in and of themselves make the point, simply because they are perceived from the biased point of view of a violation of recognized standards. Sensitive humanists in front of, and behind, TV screens are not bothered by the fact that those are rules and norms of warfare, which were set up to distinguish between the necessary, hence licensed butchering of the enemy’s soldiers, and excesses that no longer are condoned. It requires a fine skill, however, to accept the killing and injuring of people when there is a good reason for it, and to distinguish it from unnecessary and hence intolerable barbarity, a skill that the human feeling is only capable of when it observes guidelines: in doing so, the innate human feeling follows nothing but legal guidelines set by the state — in the case at hand, rights between states. The governments of diverse nations, eventually all nations, which insist on war, have found it expedient to set up quasi-legal rules for the time when sheer force is exercised between their noble communities, rules that distinguish legitimate from illegitimate actions in war. At any rate, the limitations and sanctions provided by the law of war, which is part of international law, don’t arise from a moral feeling but from political calculation. It is the self-limitation ensuing from such calculations to which the sovereign warlords on the killing fields promise to adhere."
Full article at: http://gegenstandpunkt.com/english/war-morality.html
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com