For Shame

Shame, boatloads of shame/Day after day, more of the same -- The Avett Brothers

Loath though I am to besmirch the good name of one of my favorite bands, that couplet does a nice job of describing the state of our once-proud nation. I've tried to refrain, with varying degrees of success, from running into this space to loudly rant about each degradation of our norms, each gross abdication of duty, each rationalization of egregious conduct in the name of power. But news comes this week of a potential act by the President* so beyond the pale, so outrageous, so disgusting, so damning in its indictment of his addled faux-macho worldview that I can't sit silently by.

According to multiple outlets, Corporal Bone Spurs is seriously contemplating issuing pardons in time for Memorial Day to several American soldiers and contractors (read: mercenaries) accused or convicted of war crimes. These brave war heroes are alleged to have stabbed an unarmed and injured Iraqi to death, shot young girls and elderly Iraqis with a sniper rifle, opened fire on a crowd of unarmed Iraqis, killing 14, and desecrated the corpses of enemy combatants by urinating on them.

Our best and brightest, as you can see.

War is, as the hoary cliche goes, hell. I can't for a moment imagine the adrenaline-fueled fury that rises in a person in the midst of active combat. I'll never stare down an enemy who seeks to take my life, and never know the guilt, relief, and anger that comes with living through a firefight. U.S. servicemen and women are often heroic, and nearly always driven by a sense of duty to a cause greater than their own. I witnessed a version of this daily growing up in an Army household.

That sense of duty extends to the way we fight our wars. We're taught that Americans have to be better, to uphold our nation's values, to fight with honor lest we lose our command of the moral high ground. By pardoning crimes like these, even those committed in the midst of the fog of war, the message to the rest of the world is that our word is not to be trusted.

And the message to the overwhelming majority of American servicemen and women who fight our wars honorably amidst the most challenging of conditions is perhaps even worse. National security journalist Jonathan Ackerman, who tweets as @attackerman, posted this yesterday: "Those without honor esteem those without valor, and consider those who didn’t dishonor their uniform to be irresponsible. To excuse war criminals is to insult everyone who survived war — war, which, when not a matter of liberation, is a crime — with their humanity intact."

Excusing the illegal, immoral, and cowardly actions of the few in the name of some misguided tough-guy might-makes-right ethos is the apotheosis of our Commander-in-Chief's abjectly irresponsible approach to policy. He dishonors us every day. But in this instance, he dishonors some of the best among us.