“American Sniper” is a movie about Navy Seal Chris Kyle, who
had 160 confirmed kills as a sniper during four tours of Iraq. It’s a well-made movie, directed by Clint
Eastwood, and judging by the box office records, a very popular movie. Nevertheless, it has attracted its fair share
of criticism.
Many critics refer to Chris Kyle as sociopath. Comedian Bill
Maher referred to Kyle as a psychopath.
Some referred to Kyle and the other servicemen who fought in Iraq as
murderers. Political cartoonist Ted Rall called our servicemen “government’s
poorly paid contract killers”. Others
derided Kyle’s “racist tendencies”.
Many of the comments I’ve seen online paint our servicemen
and women as murderers and warmongers for not refusing to serve. Some even went so far as to state that true
justice would be served if the servicemen in Iraq turned their weapons on their
superior officers. But most lamented
about the number of innocent civilians killed by our forces in Iraq. What really caught my attention was the
comments that our troops don’t deserve our support.
Was Chris Kyle a sociopath?
I never met the man. He did write in his book that everyone he shot was
evil and that he had a good cause for shooting them. But, since he cared deeply
for his family and his country, as well as his fellow warriors, he doesn’t seem
to fit the definition of sociopath or psychopath. Was he racist? Perhaps.
But in a war zone where inhumane conditions exists and other humans are
trying to kill you, maybe the only way to save a modicum of your own humanity
and sanity is to dehumanize the enemy.
If that means you call them racist or other despicable names to cope, I
certainly can’t judge, I haven’t walked in a soldier’s shoes. I’ve never been in combat, never had another
human being trying to kill or maim me, so I don’t know how I would
respond. But I know good, moral people
who have been in combat who’ve used that coping mechanism and I don’t believe
them to be racist.
Should our servicemen and women have resisted serving
overseas? The assumption is that they
knew the war was wrong, yet failed to resist. How would they know the war was
wrong? The fact of the matter is, we were all told that Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction. We were told that Iraq
had both chemical and biological weapons.
In 2002, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing military action
against Iraq and among the reasons for war in Iraq was Iraq’s “brutal
repression of its civilian population”, its “continu[ing] to aid and harbor
other international terrorist organization”, and that it posed a “threat to the
national security of the United States.”
Those all appear to be valid reasons to go to war. If our duly elected leaders, who have access
to intelligence assets that the general public doesn’t, say we should go to
war, how are we to say whether Iraq is truly a threat to our national security
or not?
I would expect most of those who went to Iraq saw themselves
as fighting to secure our country as well as being liberators of the Iraqi
people. In hindsight, we now know
Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. And we know that the Iraqi people, by and
large, didn’t want or weren’t ready for a democratic government. Hussein held
the country together by force; a Sunni Muslim, he brutally repressed both
Shiite and Kurdish uprisings with chemical weapons and killing more than
100,000 Iraqis. The enmity between Iraq’s
ethnic groups is deep-seated, and much of the US efforts in Iraq were spent
quelling sectarian violence. And given
that Islam, the major religion of the Middle East, touches nearly every aspect
of life and society, conflicts with democratic ideals thus making it unlikely to
survive in Iraq.
Were innocent people killed during the Iraqi War? Without a
doubt, yes, there were innocents killed and wounded. But innocents were killed by forces on both
sides of the war. One scene in the movie
illustrates how ruthlessly the Iraqi insurgents treated their own people who
were suspected of talking with the Americans.
US servicemen had to abide by rules of engagement (ROE) in Iraq. Those rules, sometimes to the detriment of
the safety of US personnel, were meant to protect innocent civilians. Maybe the
rules weren’t affective but at least it shows that the US values lives. While we no longer have forces in Iraq,
innocents are still dying. The Boko
Haram, al-Qaeda, and ISIL Islamic terrorist organizations are still waging a
campaign of violence against innocent civilians. Beheadings, mass executions, and kidnappings
are occurring in central Africa and the Middle East. Muslims, Christians, men, women, and children
are all victims of the violence.
President Obama is planning to seek a formal war
authorization to fight against ISIL and al-Qaeda forces in Syria and the Middle
East. If our duly elected leaders choose
to grant these powers to the President, then our troops will go into harm’s way
once more. Should we expect our troops
to refuse to go? Do we want them to
demand proof of reason why force is necessary before they head out to the
warzone?
I think we have to accept that there are those out there
that want to do harm to the US and other peoples, regardless of what we do. And we have to accept that sometimes, the
only way to stop those that would do evil is through force. When this happens, we have to understand that
there will be a loss of innocent lives, regardless of how hard our troops try
to avoid it. We also shouldn’t label our
soldiers sociopaths for performing the job their government has assigned them
to do. Regardless, if our leaders say
that force is required, we should pray for the safety of our troops and support
them. They are the shepherds that
protect the rest of us from the wolves of the world.
