Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance is taking Democrat vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz to task for his military “service” with respect to the 2003-2011 U.S. war on Iraq. He says that Walz ended his 24 years in the National Guard early to avoid being deployed to Iraq. For his part, Vance, who was in the Marine Corps for four years, “served” a year in Iraq as a military journalist.
Vance stated, “When the United States Marine Corps, when the United States of America, asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country I did it. I did what they asked me to do, and I did it honorably and I’m very proud of that service.”
Walz responded to Vance’s attack by complimenting Vance and thanking him for his “service.” His campaign put out a statement stating that Walz “thanks Senator Vance for putting his life on the line for our country. It’s the American way.”
Unfortunately, both men are operating under a severe moral blindness when it comes to Iraq, a country against which the U.S. government initiated and waged a brutal, vicious, deadly, and destructive war in contravention of the U.S. Constitution and the principles set forth at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal.
Where is the “service” to one’s country in that type of war? It is nowhere to be found. Instead, such “service” involved obedience to illegal orders to attack a country, kill and injure untold numbers of people, and destroy property and infrastructure all across the country.
When a foreign regime like Russia invades Ukraine, U.S. officials, U.S. politicians, and the U.S. mainstream press are somehow able to recognize the wrongfulness of such an invasion. But when it’s the U.S. national-security state that is doing the invading, it’s considered to be a “patriotic” act intended to protect U.S. “national security.”
The U.S. Constitution requires a congressional declaration of war as a prerequisite to waging war against another country. The Constitution is the highest law of the land. It is the law that we the people place on federal officials. They are supposed to obey it.
It is undisputed that the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA never secured a declaration of war against Iraq from Congress. That means that the war that the U.S. government initiated against Iraq was illegal under our form of constitutional government.
The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal held that any regime that initiates a war against another regime is guilty of the war crime entitled “waging a war of aggression.” It is undisputed that Iraq never attacked the United States and that it was the U.S. government that attacked Iraq. That makes the U.S. government, with respect to its war of aggression against Iraq, guilty of the war crime enunciated at Nuremberg.
It is the duty of every U.S. soldier to refuse to obey illegal orders. Even though Vance and Walz were both enlisted men rather than officers, the moral duty to disobey illegal orders applied to them just as it applied to officers. Thus, both of them, like every other soldier, had the duty to refuse orders to deploy to Iraq, as Lt. Ehren Watada did. (See my article “Lt. Ehren Watada, War Hero.”)
Now, it’s very possible that youthful ignorance and false “patriotism” blinded Vance and Walz to the U.S. government’s illegal war on a country that had never attacked the United States. That happens with lots of young people, especially those who are indoctrinated in America’s public (i.e., government) schools.
But what about today, when both men have had some twenty years to recognize the truth about the U.S. war on Iraq? Youthful ignorance can no longer serve as a valid excuse for supporting an illegal and immoral war, one in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed and injured and the country of Iraq was entirely destroyed with U.S. bombs and missiles.
Both Vance and Walz need to come to terms with the Iraq War. No soldier who participated in the U.S. war on Iraq was “serving” his country or fighting to protect the rights and freedoms of the American people. Instead, soldiers who participated in that war were simply following illegal orders — orders that violated the U.S. Constitution and the principles set forth at Nuremberg. How can such a war legitimately be considered “the American way”?