Imagine my shock when I learned on a guided tour of the Gettysburg battlefield last week that General Meade, Lincoln's commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, issued an order the day before the battle that any soldier who refused to commit suicide was to be shot. That is, any soldier who refused to participate in one of those Napoleonic charges into the teeth of a vastly larger, entrenched army equipped with hundreds of canon and thousands of rifeleman, would be shot on the spot. A little context: The same army tried that tactic THIRTEEN TIMES in the December, 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, seven months earlier, and no man made it within 50 yards of the Confederate position. It was a massive slaughter, with moutains of bodies littering the battlefied.
I bring this up because I can clearly recall the outrage expressed by American military officials, Bush, and the entire neocon establishment, over the outragous news that Saddam Hussein had personally -- personally! shot some of his own soldiers who refused similar suicide missions.
I guess it's ok to order a subordinate to murder a draftee who refuses to kill himself, as long as you don't do it yourself.
Our federal bureaucrat battlefield guide, a retired army colonel, used Meade's order as an example of how to "motivate" soldiers.
