Daily Times

Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl has pled guilty to charges of desertion and misbehaviour before the enemy, though there have been hints that a plea deal may have been struck. Bergdahl is facing a possible five year sentence for desertion as well as a potential life sentence for misbehaviour before the enemy. While much of the ongoing commentary focuses on why Bergdahl is doing something which instant amount to committing a suicide, the entire story is thought provoking in a different way.

‘Misbehaviour before the enemy’ is a formal name for endangering troops. Now, endangering the troops is interesting, which I will return to. The prosecution is determined to punish Bergdahl for both charges. They are saying that troops were wounded and career ending injuries were suffered by troops while they were looking for Bergdahl. The defence team is arguing that the troops were wounded on other missions and not specifically during the manhunt for finding Bergdahl.

Let us assume that Bergdahl is actually guilty of endangering the lives of troops looking for him. Limited space allows me to quote one example; President Bush endangered the lives of American soldiers by sending them to Iraq based on a lie. Remember no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) were ever found in Iraq. Many US soldiers lost their lives, while others sustained career ending injuries. Apart from battlefield casualties, over 600 US soldiers were exposed to sarin or a sulfur mustard agent in Iraq, which were leftover from the chemical weapons stockpile from the Iraq-Iran war.

Bush endangered the lives of American soldiers by sending them to Iraq based on a lie. Remember no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) were ever found in Iraq. Many US soldiers lost their lives, while others sustained career ending injuries

The sad part is that the US had helped Iraq build these weapons and the CIA knew about their existence. However, it chose to stay non-committal, endangering American lives by creating politicized intelligence to support the view that Saddam did possess WMDs. The worst part is that those affected soldiers were not given treatment by Veterans Affairs so as not to disclose this harsh fact. Nobody is saying a word about prosecuting President Bush, his cabinet members, or his CIA chief. Historically, low level soldiers or officials have been punished for crimes committed by White House big shots.

During the 1980s, when CIA Chief William Casey got intrigued by the idea of using local hitmen to kill Lebanese terrorists, his deputy John McMahon-who bore the scars of congressional investigations in the 1970s, objected to Casey. McMahon told Casey that any blowback resulting from a decision to kill terrorists abroad would not be felt at Pennsylvania Avenue but rather at Langley. McMahon said, ‘To the rest of the world, it’s not an administration policy, it’s not an NSC idea, it’s those crazy bastards at the CIA.” The psychologists who helped label torture as ‘Enhanced Interrogation’, thereby rendering it legal by equating it to the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training program given to American soldiers, civilians at the Defence Department, and private military contractors certainly deserve punishment and are undergoing a trial but the men who actually authorized and gave permission for such brutal torture are on book tours.

It is worth reminding ourselves how the conduct of generals was evaluated in Athenian democracy. They adhered to ‘looking backward not forward’ as explained by Scott Horton in his impeccable book Lords of Secrecy. Horton explains that in Athens, leaders and generals were not evaluated based on whether or not the war was won.

They were rather evaluated based on whether their actions were illegal, dangerous to the lives of soldiers, and so forth. It didn’t matter if the war was won. The leader could still be punished if his policy and actions were wrong during the war. Athenians didn’t rejoice in victory; rather, they looked back and debated their leaders’ policies and actions. Had the United States been a democracy like the Athenian one, President George W Bush would have been punished today for putting troops in danger by putting them in harm’s way based on a lie.

Bergdahl risked his life and spent 5 years in brutal torture and abuse at the hands of the Taliban. Yet, there is a certain hawkish constituency in the United States, mainly the Republicans who want to hang him. The leader of this lunatic constituency happens to be the president of the United States who called Bergdahl a ‘dirty rotten traitor’ and a ‘no good traitor who should have been executed’ during his campaign trail. Nikolai Ryzhkov, a Soviet soldier who deserted and went to the United States, returned home to the Soviet Union despite knowing that he would be prosecuted. He was sentenced to 12 years in a labour camp.

His sentence was later commuted and he was freed in July 1988. Ryzhkov chose to move to the US. Freedom House, the New York based organization involved with Soviet defectors, told him to make up stories about Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan as part of his deal to stay in the US. Bergdahl didn’t choose to live a torturous life under than Taliban. He merely made a mistake. Yet, those who claim that they don’t leave their men behind, that theirs is a just society where human rights are respected, that they don’t give cruel and unusual punishment make the Soviet Union look like a city on a hill.

The writer is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Houston, and he teaches political science at the Lone Star College in Houston

Published in Daily Times, October 28^th 2017.