The nature of modern complex organizations like the United States is that no one person is responsible for everything. You can't so much as get $600 checks to e

The nature of modern complex organizations like the United States is that no one person is responsible for everything. You can't so much as get $600 checks to every American without the support of a sizable bureaucracy, let alone single-handedly wage a land war halfway around the world and remake the government of 40 million people. But that doesn't mean we have to let our sense of morality hold nobody culpable, as if everyone is part of a firing squad and you can't prove who had the blank. Merely signing up for the firing squad shows that you intended to kill, and the responsibility for the death falls on all the people in the squad (as well as all the people who organized it and decided to put a particular prisoner in front of it, etc.), not none of them. "The US" was only going to war in Iraq because a lot of people arranged things so that it could happen. It's probably true that if any one person decided not to participate, it would still have happened. But if enough people decided not to participate, it wouldn't. And we saw clearly in the last months of the previous presidency that one high-ranking individual can certainly make things a lot more difficult for a president who wants to wage war and that more generally "resistance inside the administration" can be at least partly effective. I think if we're going to say that an illegal war happened, that people lost their lives because of it, and that it would have been good and moral to try to stop the war, we also need to say that it was bad and immoral to go along with making it happen.