Hat tip to Consul-At-Arms
POW Claims Bump Into Foreign Policy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23576-2005Apr3.html
On Jan. 19, 1991, in the opening days of the war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, Air Force Maj. Jeffrey Tice's F-16 was shot down over Baghdad. Over the next six weeks in Iraqi captivity, Tice was repeatedly beaten, subjected to electric shock and left in a dirty cell with meager rations.
To this day he suffers from nerve damage to his hands from being tightly handcuffed, and he still has occasional nightmares and flashbacks.
In April 2002, Tice, now a retired lieutenant colonel, and 16 other former POWs and their families sued the Saddam Hussein government in U.S. District Court in Washington. Iraq refused to contest the charges, and in 2003, Judge Richard W. Roberts determined that the plaintiffs were entitled to $959 million in damages, which would have to come from assets now controlled by the new U.S.-backed Iraqi government.
The good Consul seems to be of the opinion that this massive award is a good thing, I argue the contrary.
1. The award is either a. compensatory, intended to restore the status quo ante or b. punitive, intended to teach the government of Saddam Hussein a painful economic lesson about hurting people or both. In the present instance the status quo ante cannot be gained by any amount of money. A tenth of that amount would suffice to do all that can be done for these people. Saddam Hussein is being taught a lesson of another sort. I do not see the point in penalizing an entire nation once the offending individual and his regime have been forcibly removed from power; if anything, go after his family wealth and that of his cronies.
2. Granted that the US has not been most generous to ex-POWs, nor even to it's own military veterans in general. Making 17 of these poor devils obscenely rich does nothing to ameliorate the situation of thousands of others. If vast sums of money are to be expended let them be expended to expand the common good.
3. Foreign policy objectives are important, but so are our veterans (I should hope so, I'm one of 'em). Small unit actions such as the one mounted by these 17 individuals in the courts should not be permitted to adversely jeopardize the outcome of an effort in which hundreds of thousands of men and billions of dollars are dedicated when doing so adversely affects the national interest. No, that does not mean that they should simply sit down and suffer in silence, it means that a conscientious government ought to take their welfare in hand until such time as adequate compensation can be obtained from the proper source without undermining the national goals. If the government is unwilling to do that, take them to court.
1 comment:
Thanks for the hat tip.
You make excellent points.
Certainly, the better part of a billion dollars, split 17 ways, goes a bit overboard in the compensatory sense.
Which leaves the punative sense.
And I'm fine with that.
This should be seen as a deterrent action that we fully intend to exercise through our courts in accordance with our democratically-arrived at laws.
It's our own government's fault that this case languished this long so that the originally offending government isn't around to pay the damages. I'd much rather have seen a billion or so deducted from the U.N.'s Oil-For-Food slush fund, er, operating budget than from the reconstruction budget.
But that's how deterrents work sometimes. The successor government and the people of Iraq get to take responsibility for allowing themselves to be the playground for a murderous butcher (is that redundent?) decade after bloody decade.
Not to imply that they haven't already paid heavily in quite bloody coin, but this is for offenses against us, not their own government's crimes against themselves.
No pretty answers here, but perhaps a bit of tough love.
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