American Sniping

“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.