War and those who wage it

I hate war. I loathe the people who support war as much as I do the people who participate. That’s a psychologically complex thing for me to say because I am a volunteer veteran of war myself. So by simple logic I should hate myself too. I put on a military uniform of another nation and went to battle in a country that had nothing to do with my own. Maybe I hate myself some, but I forgive myself in the same way that I forgive the dead and those veterans who speak out against war, protesting in favour of peace and non-aggression. Forgiveness and compassion are not the same thing, though.

COMPASSION and NATIONALISM.
Why should I feel compassion for American soldiers dying in Irak? On the same token why should I not? I could tell you that I feel no compassion for them because I’m not an American - and most all of you would accept that explanation. But that’s a huge load of the bull’s most foul excretion, and it goes both ways.

The national news will report about a plane or bus crash (or some other catastrophe) in some part of the world and then tell me whether or not any of my countrymen were involved and how many. Who is it that decides that I should care about the death of my countrymen more than the victims of any other nationality? Whoever is responsible for that immoral sentiment, let him be damned. None-the-less, I must be a grave minority on that score because I doubt that many will agree with me.

The thing is this: The people on this board, who have scolded me for being calloused about the death of Americans in Irak, are foolish from my point of view. Yes, they are, because none of them have said anything about all of those Iraki soldiers who died fighting the American invasion. For my fellow, American forum-members, those dead Irakis mean very little, while the death of a handful of Americans is “tragic”.

One often says that we should support “the good guys”, and indeed the whole idea with solving Irak’s problems was based upon that “good guy/bad guy” theory. So who were these Irakis who fought and died against the American invasion force? Did Irak actually have those dreaded Weapons of Mass Destruction, making it “necessary” to brush aside all political discussion/negotiations and take to armed intervention? No, they didn’t. So all of those dead Irakis died at the hand of the American “bad guys”. The Iraki soldiers were the “good guys” (Lo! And behold!) and they all had families who mourn them, but some of my forum “colleagues” here aren’t concerned about them because they weren’t Americans.

FINAL ANALYSES
I see the situation from two separate perspectives. From a completely compassionate point of view I sympathize the death of the Americans in an equal measure with the death of the Irakis - but from a political “good guy/bad guy” point of view, I have much less sympathy for the Americans than I do for the Irakis and for that reason I feel that dying Americans is a necessity. Does that make me calloused? It shouldn’t, because I’m neither American nor Iraki and yet I feel compassion and sympathy for both sides. If you still think I’m a nasty guy though, well ….. then I’m sure that I don’t care.

I’ve come to see my own personal experience in the very same way. I have less political sympathy for my fellows-in-arms and myself because we also served with “the bad guys”. We took an enormously disproportionate amount of lives from those who only wanted freedom for their people.

Live and learn, it is said. But do we?