[moptar]

I don't understand why there's such unanimous words of support for someone who directly contributed to the half million deaths in the Iraq war. I know it's unrelated to his case, but perhaps his prison sentence and current predicament can be seen as karmic retribution. I know that's not how justice works, but I don't think we'd see such enthusiastic support for a serial killer who had trouble supporting himself after getting released.

[ClintEhrlich]

Maybe you will experience some "karmic retribution" for rationalizing an innocent man's wrongful imprisonment and equating Ray with a "serial killer."

Ray enlisted in the Army National Guard in the 90s when he was 17. Do you think that was morally reprehensible? If not, when did he lose your respect and sympathy?

He followed orders to deploy to Iraq once the United States had already invaded the country and deposed its government. The missions he carried out were intended to find bombmakers who were indiscriminately slaughtering civilians and soldiers with IEDs.

He never took the life of a single Iraqi. His main priority was ensuring that the young men under his command came back alive to their families in the United States. Was that not a task that justified his presence and his best efforts?

Individual soldiers are not in a position to judge the merits of foreign military interventions. They do not have access to the intelligence that political leaders rely on in order to make those decisions. A military can only function when soldiers fulfill their responsibility to carry out all lawful orders.

The responsibility for holding our political leaders accountable for improper military interventions falls on the PEOPLE of the United States, not the soldiers who have taken an oath to serve their commander in chief.

Equating an average American soldier serving in Iraq with a Nazi war criminal is not only disgusting but counterproductive. It erases the moral culpability of the latter for willfully carrying out genocide.

The Iraq war was a horrifying mistake. But our leaders' misjudgment doesn't entitle you to slander the names of the men and women who risked (and gave) their lives in that conflict.

[brbsix]

The way society is presently arranged, military personnel are absolved of (a great deal of) their moral agency. They have surrendered it to a higher authority, to the state. You can see it experientially in the Milgram experiment. It's incredible more people don't find this troubling, it has me at a loss for words.

[moptar]

It seems to be that way. Weren't the Nuremberg trials supposed to have established the idea the soldiers, or at least officers passing orders along can be guilty even if they're following orders? I suppose those were for more clear cut war crimes and the Iraq soldiers were mostly quite removed from the actual killing they triggered.

[auganov]

I don't think most people mind killing that much. It's only murder that makes [most of] us uncomfortable. And given that no society can afford great compensation for every soldier, extreme reverence is all we've got.

And in regards to other states it's pretty much a Prisoner's Dilemma.