redblueamerica.com

Over the weekend, 14 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan gathered in Maryland to recount their experiences -- and allege that the U.S. is routinely engaging in war crimes in both countries. Spencer Ackerman reports:

Washborn was one of 14 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who testified at the Mar. 13-16 Winter Soldier investigation—an eyewitness indictment of what was called systemic brutality in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The veterans declared that permissible uses of force in the wars became more and more broadly defined in response to the strength of the insurgencies there over time. The investigation, sponsored by Iraq Veterans Against the War and held in Silver Spring, Md., was intended, according to a background briefing, to "mobilize the military community to withdraw its support for the war and occupation in Iraq." It featured photographic and video evidence of potential war crimes and proved to be an emotionally grueling experience for both testifiers and witnesses.

The investigation took great pains, as IVAW’s Jabbar MacGruder said during Friday’s panel on the rules of engagement, not to blame any soldier or even policy-maker. "It would be a mistake to blame any individual soldiers or individual leader," MacGruder said. "This is not a failure of leadership… but the consequence of the nature of occupation."

My critique of the war in Iraq usually rests on two planks:

* It's fiscally unsustainable -- we simply can't afford to keep it up.
* It's not accomplishing what we want it to accomplish -- that is, we're probably creating more terrorists than we're eliminating.

There's a third point I don't raise very often: The question of whether a war is worth the damage it invariably does -- whether it's a "good war" or not -- to the men and women who experience it.

The damage takes various shapes. There are the deaths, of course -- nearly 4,000 on the American side alone -- that leave families devastated in their wake. There are the maimings, of which there are considerably more. And there is the psychological damage.

I do not know, as the Winter Soldier witnesses testified, if the chain of command encourages or condones war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. In some respects, it may not matter: War, once unleashed, is notoriously difficult to contain to the parameters we desire. When war happens, war crimes invariably follow -- on both sides of the conflict. And telling the difference between the war and the war crime is seldom easy.

Given those dynamics -- put in motion by a president who still speaks, misguidedly, about the "romance" of war -- we should be asking ourselves, every day, whether Iraq (in particular) is worth the damage it is doing to the men and women in our military, their families, and the men, women and children of Iraq.

I think the answer is no.