the good war?

there's a great piece in today's smh by richard drayton, senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University, called War's moral compass is flawed and points in all directions (originally published in the guardian as An ethical blank cheque).

drayton mentions taken by force, a book by robert lilly which is a study of the rapes committed by american soldiers in europe between 1942 and 1945. lilly suggests a minimum of 10,000 rapes (which is probably a conservative estimate). elsewhere in the essay, drayton talks of crimes committed by allied soldiers in the pacific against japanese captives, quoting edgar james, an 'embedded' pacific war correspondent:

"We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments."

the point of bringing these things up is primarily because they are never mentioned or talked about, and thus largely unknown by the general population. we very readily remember the atrocities committed by the 'enemy' but sweep our own shameful actions under the carpet. once again marx's adage that history is written by the victors is proved correct. it's not just an issue of good guys and bad guys, needing to believe your side is right in order to sustain the will to win the war. as drayton says, the effect is much farther reaching:

"All this seems innocent fun, but patriotic myths have sharp edges. The 'good war' against Hitler has underwritten 60 years of warmaking. It has become an ethical blank cheque for British and US power. We claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism.

When we fall out with such tyrant friends as Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam we rebrand them as 'Hitler'. In the 'good war' against them, all bad things become forgettable 'collateral damage'. The devastation of civilian targets in Serbia or Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the war crime of collective punishment in Falluja, fade to oblivion as the 'price of democracy'."

i find this all very interesting, and i'm not just trying to wack the purpetrators and supporters of the iraq war over the head once again (no matter how much i enjoy it :^). at the least i think we need to keep being reminded that, especially with issues of war, there is no black and white, right and wrong. not for the first time, bruce cockburn puts it perfectly:

God, damn the hands of glory
That hold the bloody firebrand high
Close the book and end the story
Of how so many men have died
Let the world retain in memory
That mighty tongues tell mighty lies
And if mankind must have an enemy
Let it be his warlike pride
Let it be his warlike pride

(from It's Going Down Slow, Bruce Cockburn, 1971)