{"id":307,"date":"2008-01-20T14:56:01","date_gmt":"2008-01-20T21:56:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=307"},"modified":"2008-02-15T18:24:12","modified_gmt":"2008-02-16T01:24:12","slug":"moral-qualms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=307","title":{"rendered":"Moral Qualms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gwen, one of my regular readers, alerted me to\u00a0this story<\/a> about Pentagon and pharmaceutical industry efforts to create a\u00a0drug to suppress soldiers’ moral qualms over killing.\u00a0 Psychological Kevlar, in other words, to reduce or eliminate growing mental health problems in troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

That’s the trouble with traditional methods of overcoming our\u00a0aversion to killing: as good as we are at dehumanizing enemy forces and civilian populations, most soldiers can’t help suspecting that the other guy or girl isn’t all that\u00a0different.\u00a0 Few of us are spring-loaded to kill . . . oh, we’ll do it, especially if we believe there’s a good reason to kill, but we do it reluctantly and suffer for it afterward.\u00a0 Unless, of course, there’s race or tribal emnity involved, which there almost always is.\u00a0 Nevertheless.<\/p>\n

From the point of view of the fat cats who send the\u00a0rest of us off to\u00a0fight their wars, wouldn’t it be cool if we could turn humanity off for the duration of the conflict?\u00a0 An ancient trope of science fiction, to be sure, but so was cloning, once.<\/p>\n

What I wanna know is, if we do find a drug to do this, what happens when we get what we want in Iraq and Afghanistan, and start bringing our troops home?<\/p>\n

And by the way, what is it that we want in Iraq and Afghanistan?\u00a0 We routed the Taliban.\u00a0 We established that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.\u00a0 We killed Saddam and his sadist sons.\u00a0 We kicked all the\u00a0Baathists out of government and the military.\u00a0Now that we’ve been there almost five years, it’s clear we’re not trying to get Osama.\u00a0 Al Qaeda and the Taliban are swarming back into Afghanistan.\u00a0 We’re not eliminating poppy production in Afghanistan or corruption anywhere.\u00a0 We’re standing by, even assisting, as Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds prepare\u00a0for a bloody civil war.\u00a0 Shit, we’re not even going to get the oil.\u00a0 So just what the fuck is it we do want, and how will we know when we get it?\u00a0\u00a0But that’s fodder for another entry.<\/p>\n

What I wanna know is, if we can figure out how to turn humanity off, can we figure out how to turn it back on again?\u00a0 ‘Cause these men and women are going to come home afterward, and we really don’t want people who can kill without compunction wandering around our neighborhoods, marrying our sons and daughters, teaching our children\u00a0. . . do we?<\/p>\n

I have\u00a0a better idea.\u00a0 Call in the Air Force and let them do\u00a0the killing<\/a>.\u00a0 As we all know, well-educated commisssioned officers launching precision-guided munitions from 30,000 feet don’t face the same stressors as boots-on-the-ground soldiers being shot at from doorways.\u00a0 Although I must say, when you land after two grueling strike missions in uncontested airspace, it’s somewhat annoying to find your orderly forgot to place the chocolate on your pillow, or that the chef at the officers’ mess used Idahos rather than russets in the vichyssoise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gwen, one of my regular readers, alerted me to\u00a0this story about Pentagon and pharmaceutical industry efforts to create a\u00a0drug to suppress soldiers’ moral qualms over killing.\u00a0 Psychological Kevlar, in other words, to reduce or eliminate growing mental health problems in troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s the trouble with traditional methods of overcoming our\u00a0aversion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,14,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flying","category-military","category-war"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}