Civil Military Dilemma and War Crimes

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There's a complex way in which this discourse about the civil military divide. The question of who is entitled to speak about it has this effect of silencing a political conversation. Nobody has been called to account for having gone to war, right? We turned against it. Whoops, it was a lie, is not a political critique. So is Iraq. You cannot start a war on a pretext under international law. That is a war crime. There is no call into account. And we can't really get to that if we can't take account of American militarism.

Featuring Nadia Abu El-Haj on Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America. How the civil-military divide makes troops into super citizens and what it means that agents of state violence are turning to the grammar of identity politics—and more. The second in a two-part interview. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Subscribe to New Left Review newleftreview.org/subscriptions/new Buy My Country is the World: Staughton Lynd’s Writings, Speeches, and Statements Against the Vietnam War haymarketbooks.org/books/1956-my-country-is-the-world