I think one of the major problems is arguing this with a soldier is that they see it as self-defense when somebody is shooting at them (irrespective of property rights). I made this argument to a Turkish friend of mine, when she asked me if I thought our occupation of Iraq was OK (I said it was not, but I defended soldier’s individual actions without really thinking about it). This argument I made would be akin to saying that a crook would be acting in self-defense if he broke into a house, the owner shot at him and he killed the owner. No, the crook broke into somebody else’s property with the intention of doing harm. It’s a question of who initiated the violence, and in the case of Iraq it was the soldier by deploying. The act of that soldier stepping on Iraqi soil could be seen as the initiation of violence. Since Iraq is not privately owned, the concept I think is nebulous to most, but it is, in the end, true.
I think you are spot on. The US government and its military forces are aggressors in this situation, and Iraqis have every justification to shoot, stab, explode, poison, or otherwise put paid to invaders and occupiers until the offenders pack up and go home. That they might continue doing the same to each other in factional strife when the Americans are gone, if ever, is irrelevant to the morality of their resistance to the present occupation.
I live in Chicago. If, contrary to all expectation and likelihood, a foreign power were able to pull off an invasion and occupation of the United States (as in the fictional Red Dawn situation), Chicagoans would be killing occupation troops left and right, I can assure you. And they would also be killing the collabo Chicagoans who would inevitably cozy up to the occupation government to help it with its work of oppression.
In what material way do these hypothetical acts of resistance by Americans differ morally from the actual acts of resistance by present-day Iraqis?
I really detest this argument from the right. This phrase, “Defending Freedom” has been used to justify everything BUT actually defending freedom. For example, war on terror has nothing to do with freedom.
So it depends on if the phrase is taken literally or not. It’s more often then not a propagandist argument. Still if you look at freedom on an individual level. If an individual is forced to defend his freedom that would ofcoarse mean that someone else had initiated prior aggression onto him. That would mean that he has all the right in the world to defend himself and his property. This is known as self defense.
No, they’re not “defending their homes and families”; but the thing is, they’re told that they are.
Sad.
This raises another issue. Does being ignorant mean your are innocent? And what about intentional ignorance? I would say that ignorance is not fair justification.
I never deployed, but I did go through infantry OSUT in Georgia. You’re not even told this, anymore. My sixteen weeks there were about “killing hadji”. Hadji is a general term for an Arab now. There is no distinguishing. Iraqis are dehumanized. It disgusted me, and was one of the reasons I went AWOL before going to airborne training (I really lied to myself before enlisting, and I am guilty for that). Many soldiers (more than you might expect) enlist to “kill people”. It is made acceptable by the State.