Advocating War If You Haven’t Served
by tristero
When nations decide whether to go to war — or whether to continue an existing war — everyone in a democracy is entitled to a view and everyone is entitled to be taken seriously. But if non-veterans, by virtue of having never served, are denied the moral authority to advocate in favor of war, their views will quite rightfully be entirely marginalized. After all, why should anyone care what they think if, as O’Donnell suggests, their non-serving status predetermines their only honorable opinion?
I’m not willing to leave decisions on the use of military force solely to combat veterans, but that’s where this sentiment leads us. It leads to a place where military veterans are put on a pedestal and anyone who hasn’t served is ipso facto less qualified to hold an opinion on isssues of war and peace than someone who has.
Sounds reasonable, but I think Kevin’s reasoning is out of context and flawed.
First of all, the objection is not to everyone who hasn’t served expressing an opinion about war, but only to those who haven’t served who also are advocating war. I do not believe that it is necessary to experience war in order to oppose it.
Furthermore, I don’t object in general to people who advocate war who haven’t served. I object to the specific situation we have in regards to Bush/Iraq. I strongly object to the chickenhawks for their warped attitude in regards to this particular war. It is not merely that they are advocating war without having suffered the consequences. It is their loopy, ungrounded-in-reality enthusiasm for this war that I find revolting, an attitude that minimizes war’s horrors rather than focusing on them, as any responsible person would.
Chickenhawks rarely if ever try to make the case that as awful as the sufferings of war are for everyone involved, reluctantly, this war is necessary. That is because there simply is no case to be made, never has been. Instead the chickenhawks are happy to go to war; rather than acknowledge that sometimes war is a solemn, unavoidable obligation, we hear about Grand Global Strategies or that Saddam was working with al Qaeda, or war is some kind of of post 9/11 therapy. And the chickenhawk discourse descends rapidly to the moral sewer, where a demented John Podhoretz will blithely talk about how the biggest mistake at the beginning of Bush/Iraq was that “we” didn’t kill enough young Iraqis. (The biggest mistake at the beginning of the war was starting it.)
But the chickenhawks go even further than just excitedly embracing the prospect of waging war against Iraq for no reason. They have the unmitigated gall to denounce everyone who opposed Bush/Iraq as naive, as traitorous, as third-rate minds, as not really comprehending the nature of the threat, and so on. They are perfectly willing to describe the tens of millions of people who marched in February ’03 in opposition to the war as “objectively pro-Saddam,” a remark as utterly ignorant as high-five enthusiasm to fight a war is.
In short, it is the lack of even the slightest comprehension of what war really is, combined with their belligerent, dismissive arrogance that makes the question of the chickenhawks’ own willingness to serve in the Bush/Iraq war a more than fair question.
Again, the question of happy-war advocates being willing to serve is specific to this war, a war which has never been a legitimate cause, either strategically or morally. In contrast, while I strongly opposed the invasion and conquest of Afghanistan in 2001,* I certainly understood that a legitimate case could be made for it (and that war was inevitable no matter what I, or anyone else, thought). The lack of experience of war advocates never entered the equation.
It is the hysterical, clueless, and reality-free warmongering over Iraq that makes the question, “Well, since you feel so strongly about it, why don’t you enlist and go fight? ” an inevitable one. The question is really another way of saying, “You don’t know a damn thing about what you’re talking about, or you wouldn’t talk about Bush/Iraq in such a foolish, callous way.”
For my own part, I strongly believe that those advocating this war must, in some meaningful sense, get involved in the war effort. That doesn’t mean staying in your pajamas and typing on a blog that your smarter countrymen are traitors. Nor does it mean that you have to volunteer for night patrols in Sadr City. But if you are as gung ho for bang bang as the National Review gang was, it behooves you to support the war in an active manner, by enlisting, by joining USO, by volunteering in hospitals, and so on. It is simply disgraceful how little responsibility or involvement the chickenhawks have. If the threat is that serious that you think your neighbor has to be willing to die to meet that threat, then the least you should feel obligated to do is to help confront that threat. That, my friends, strikes me as close to a moral absolute.
By focusing on what really is a non-existent issue, one that no one really disputes – who in general has the moral standing to advocate war rather than the obnoxious attitude of the Bush/Iraq chickenhawks – Kevin missed the important point of O’Donnell’s post, namely the enormous, unjustifiable distance between the people fighting the war and those empowered to figure out what to do about it now. O’Donnell, in defending Rangel’s call for a draft, gives us a very telling anecdote:
In my one conversation with Kissinger, which occurred on TV, I asked him if he knew anyone who got killed in Vietnam. He was completely thrown. He doesn’t go on TV to be asked such small-minded questions, he goes on TV to pontificate and TV interviewers are happy to let him do it. Kissinger sputtered and ran away from the question, leaving the distinct impression that he did not know anyone who was killed in the war he managed. His memoir of the period does not mention a single casualty. If you have ever stood at the Vietnam Memorial and run your hand over the name of a relative on the wall, as my mother and I did last month, you can get as angry as Charlie Rangel does about people like Kissinger deciding how long our soldiers should be exposed to enemy fire in a war we know we can’t win.
Of course, Rangel doesn’t want a draft. But somehow the reality of this war must be made palpable to the American people. It is not, and as a consequence, the drooling warlust on display by the chickenhawks attains a credibility it doesn’t deserve. It is a lot easier for a lunatic like Cheney to sound like he knows what he’s talking about when he lies that the war is going “remarkably well” when there are no photos of coffins of American soldiers, no tally of Iraqi deaths, and no images of what war really looks like to the people unfortunate enough to be caught up in it.
*My objections to Bush/Afghanistan were both tactical and moral. A few reasons. First of all, it was patently obvious that bin Laden, for a variety of reasons, was trying to provoke precisely the kind of invasion and slaughter that took place. One should never do what an enemy wants you to do but what is in your best interest. It was not in America’s best interest to get quagmired in Afghanistan. Related to this is the fact that no one in the American government knew enough about Afghanistan to wage an effective war, ie, one that would end with a positive outcome. In regards to the morality of Bush/Afghanistan, I simply didn’t understand how killing thousands of innocent Afghans “in revenge” for 9/11 could be justified. I still don’t. The 9/11 attacks were bin Laden’s doing, they were not even the Taliban’s doing, let alone the majority of Afghans.
While in a normal discourse the following would go without saying, we don’t have a normal discourse here in America in the 21st Century. Sooo…. the Taliban were, and still are, exhibit A for the obscenity of theocracy. I need no lecture from a rightwing apologist for James Dobson to know that. To oppose the Bush/Afghan war in no way implied an endorsement of Talibanism. Likewise and just as obviously, I strongly believe that bin Laden and his henchfolk must be brought to justice which, not being naive about such things, means he will be killed – no country would dare imprison him. As Afghanistan gets worse and worse, and bin Laden remains on the loose, I see no reason to revisit my initial opposition to the Bush/Afghan war. In 2001, I saw a moral and strategic disaster in the making and sadly, I was right.