Okay, so this kind of stuff used to go up on my old blog. Or at Catallarchy. Or even in an academic paper, if I were really serious. But with the official assumption of neutrality at FactCheck, the whole Catallarchy thing had to go. Of course, nothing says that I can’t still have opinions about things. Or that I can’t still write those opinions. I just can’t really publish them. I can, however, share them with friends. And since only friends can view my stuff here, well, you’re getting stuck with it. ‘Course, it’s easy enough to avoid it. Just don’t say that you haven’t been warned.

So there I was on Thursday morning, eating my breakfast and trying not to think too hard about Mitt Romney or tax policy (my current projects at work — and yes, I really am that much of a nerd). I flip open the NY Times and see this headline:

Lawyers on Haditha Panel Peer Into Fog of War

So I’m not sure how many of you realize this, but before I left academia, I specialized in just war theory and military ethics. Well, okay, actually I specialized more broadly in moral and political theory, but most of my recent work had been in JWT. The interest in such topics, of course, came about because I was (un?)lucky enough to land my first teaching job at West Point — a job that I started in August of 2001 and left in May of 2003. Interesting times to associated with military ethics and just war theory.

So anyway, the Times article discusses the trial of a Marine lawyer whose alleged crime is his refusal to launch an investigation into the Haditha shootings. Here’s some background:

It turns out that details of the massacre (there’s really no other way to describe it) made their way up the entire chain of command within just a couple of hours. It also turns out that no one seemed much to care. Here’s a telling exchange at the aforementioned trial:

On Friday Major McCann, an experienced Marine lawyer, interjected some unsettling questions about how many civilian deaths it would take to constitute a violation of military regulations.

Alluding to Haditha, he asked, “At what point do we have to scratch our heads that we killed a lot more civilians than enemy?”

Because so many witnesses had testified that civilian deaths from “combat action” need not be investigated, Major McCann said, “I’m trying to figure out what authority they are citing.”

The witness testifying then, Col. Keith R. Anderson, a senior Marine Reserve lawyer now with the Department of the Navy, delivered a succinct and telling answer. “There is no authority,” he said. “I think it’s just a mind-set.”

It’s a mindset for sure. And it’s one that I saw all too frequently at West Point, too. Call it the “all’s fair in war” mindset. Or maybe just the “whatever it takes to protect my soldiers and accomplish the mission” mindset. Either way.

Now I don’t mean to criticize the general sentiments here. Accomplishing the mission is way important. And protecting one’s soldiers is almost as important. But the thing is, those two things don’t always win out. You see, strange as this may sound, it turns out that people have rights. Shocking, I know. And among those rights, it seems to me, is the right not to be killed at random. This is just a basic human right. Indeed, it’s the fact that this sort of right was violated routinely that still constitutes the best (and this is relative here, but that’s another post) available argument for being in Iraq in the first place.

Okay, you say. Why mention this at all? It’s pretty obvious, after all. And, yes, it is obvious. Except that you have to remember that people in Iraq have exactly the same rights. Indeed, the only people who lose those rights are, well, combatants. People who aren’t combatants — loosely defined as people who don’t have a weapon — have the right not to be killed at random. Haditha, however, quite simply was the killing of noncombatants pretty much at random. It was a refusal to pick targets discriminately. The marines in question simply shot everything that moved. Including people who were clearly in submissive positions and who quite obviously constituted zero threat.

And that shows, really, the limitation of the “whatever it takes” mindset. Because certain actions are off-limits to soldiers. And those actions are off-limits even if it increases the likelihood of getting soldiers killed. It may suck, but it is, quite simply, one of the requirements of soldiering. In truth, it’s no different from the requirements that we place on the police. A cop has to be sure that his target really is a threat before he can fire. And the cop has to choose targets carefully. Cops who just burst in and shoot everyone in the room find themselves on trial for murder. Marines have to meet those same standards.

Unfortunately, this fairly basic principle of morality doesn’t seem to be much on display in the Marine Corps. The Army has spent lots of time and even more money trying to figure out how to instill a sense of moral responsibility into its officers, to varying degress of success (see Abu Ghraib). But the Army, at least, recognizes that said sense of responsibility ought to exist. What does one do in a Marine Corps that seems to think that they don’t need to be bothered with it in the first place?