Moral responsibility for American war

Everybody knows America has been at war overseas for nearly a decade. The bodies of innocents are stacking up. But most people don't think it's their fault. They don't feel guilty the same way they would if they had just knifed those Iraqis/Afghans/Pakistanis/etc. to death.

Who's to blame then?

Political executives like Commander-in-Chief Obama, Defense Secretary Gates, etc. and military brass like Petraeus --- yes. The soldiers, pilots, and military people who carry out the orders they craft --- how not? Their fingers are on the triggers and buttons.

The military-industrial corporations, who buy politicians to ensure demand for their instruments of destruction --- undoubtedly.

Those who support the war, who agitate for war, who vote for war --- certainly. They enable the war machine. Without them wars could not be fought. These are the likes of Bill Kristol and Christopher Hitchens, and the multitudes who take their arguments to heart and come out in support of war candidates.

Now we come to trickier creatures. What about those people who say: I don't support the war. I voted against it. But we live in a democracy, and even though I don't support it, the war was legitimately democratically decided. "Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy."

These people in their own minds would never accept any responsibility for the heaps of corpses baking in the desert or strewn among boulders.

But aren't they also to blame? They accept as legitimate a democratic process that results in the slaughter of people on the other side of the planet. They uphold a money-bought democracy knee deep in blood.

Though they would never admit it, these people are also war enablers. They let fealty to our anti-democratic democracy pull them in line with perpetual war. As if our democracy, even if it weren't controlled by money, should be legitimately able to violate human rights, international law, and ultimately human life by unilateral military action!

They bear moral responsibility as well.

The only ones who are not to blame are those who reason: a system that produces such carnage so regularly is broken. I do not uphold such a system; I actively oppose it. I seek to change it or overturn it.

Only these people, who are not deceived by money-bought democracy, who are not monstrously arrogant enough to think that by right of being American they have the right to kill by bombs whoever they decide to, deserve moral absolution for the national crimes.

They say "the system that produces regular slaughter is broken" and carry that conviction into practice. If everyone who opposed the wars came to the same conclusion, the human devastation could finally come to an end.