Freedom Isn't Free!

At the RNC last week Mike Huckabee made a speech about how great veterans (and therefore John McCain) are (/is). He told a story about a teacher who taught her students that their education had been earned by veterans who fought for the country. Here's the YouTube video. Its a standard sort of story to tell about veterans, and I must admit, there's a part of me that appreciates this sort of unthinking hero worship, both purely for the social approval and also because I suspect that, the more widespread this sort of emotional reaction to the concept of fighting for one's country is, the more likely I am to wrench a disability stipend large enough to live off out of the VA. However, as selfish as I feel about the topic, there is something very wrong about framing military service this way.

First of all, its just not accurate to say that all the good things in our lives, our freedoms and privileges and so on, are due to the heroic efforts of American soldiers. Most countries in the world have schools with desks in them. When I was fourteen, I went with a group of teenagers to Kenya for the summer to build an addition to a school building way out in the bush, and even there, in a place where some families had to walk hours each way to bring drinking water back to their homes and plenty of families had to choose one of several children to send to school because they couldn't afford the $1-2 for uniforms and books for every child, once the kids got into school they had desks.

Even when you look at things less easy to identify than school desks, things like freedom and prosperity and other abstract nouns, its hard to imagine an alternate history that would have resulted in a nation that was completely unrecognizable. If, for example, the colonies had lost the Revolutionary War, there would never have been a United States, or a US Army, but there would still be people living here where we are now, and are Canada and Australia so alien and oppressed? Or maybe if we had never entered World War II- Europe would be a somewhat different place, and so would Southeast Asia, but does anyone seriously think that the North American continent would have been invaded with any success? Or if we had declined to fight the Cold War, does anyone really think that people in Kansas would be speaking Russian now, let alone learning Russian without the benefit of a school desk? There are a multitude of factors that contribute to a nation's identity. Military action is only one, and probably not even the most important when considered against things like basic geography. Attributing everything great about America to our military is just incorrect, and that irritates me.

However, there is a result of this attitude that is even worse than being factually wrong. When people believe that our comfortable American lives are directly due only to the action of our military, it is too easy to slip into thinking that any action our military takes benefits our comfortable American lives. Saying it like that makes it seem like a ridiculous belief, but people hold onto it. For some, it is even an essential part of patriotism. Freedom isn't free, you know, so if we're spending trillions of dollars and unmeasurable human agony in a foreign country, we must be paying for freedom. The military takes action to protect us from threats to our way of life, so if the military is taking action there must be a threat to our way of life. Fight them over there because the fight is all that stands between us and Iraqi tanks rolling down the streets of Wichita and Seattle and Houston.

Of course this is logically ridiculous. The only direct relationship between the occupation of Iraq and school desks in Tennessee is the lack of funding for school desks due to the cost of body armor. John McCain served honorably at great personal cost, but the war in Vietnam, like the war in Iraq, was not in any sense necessary to the survival of the United States and had nothing to do with the opportunity to attend middle school in homey, small town America. Anyone with a grasp of the most basic details of history should be able to see that. This particular brand of fuzzy thinking is so prevalent, though, that Huckabee gave his silly speech and got all kinds of applause for it.

Liberals, at least of this generation, tend to feel just as obliged to engage in this silly soldier worship as conservatives. This last Sunday afternoon I attended a meeting at the local library of a group of anti-war activists, and when they found out I was a veteran they all made a point of thanking me for my service. I really wouldn't prefer to be spat on and called a baby killer, but there must be a middle way. Deifying soldiers is barely a step away from mythologizing war, which is a direct cause of violent atrocities orders of magnitude worse than being insulted by some random jerk, and until these attitudes change I can't help but think that an anti-war group isn't going to be successful at all.

Pacifism and Genocide

My sister and I have both been reading War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. I'm not done with it yet, and I'm not usually ready to write about a book before I've finished it, but I thought I would post this here, basically because I would put it on Facebook for my sister, but I talk way too much for that to be practical. Here's what my sister said that got me thinking about this:

S., Mom, and I actually had a little debate/discussion about war and pacifism the other night. S. is a straight up pacifist, because he doesn't think Jesus would ever have killed someone. Idealistically I would be a pacifist, but the world's not that perfect, you know? Sometimes you have to intervene, or choose a lesser evil, so to speak. In the book, and in some of my econ stuff this quarter, it talked about all the times peacekeeping troops could have intervened and didn't, and how they could have saved lives and all.

My view on the morality of war has changed a bit since I joined the Army. I used to think that fighting a war after another country attacks your country is fine; wars of aggression are generally immoral, but the one exception would be when you start a war in order to prevent a greater atrocity, for example if a country had intervened in early Nazi Germany, or Rwanda.

From a utilitarian moral viewpoint (which, while we might disagree on its applicability to ‘victimless’ crimes, I think is uncontroversial here), in a situation where war might break out, one ought to act in a way that will minimize human suffering. Generally this means doing what you can to see that a war isn’t begun, but if you know that the alternative to war will produce more suffering than the war would, then you ought to choose war as the most moral thing to do.

In theory I still agree with this view. War is a horrible thing, but it’s not the only horrible thing. However, one of the lessons I’ve learned from the fiasco in Iraq is that, as an outsider looking into a foreign situation, I know a great deal less about what’s going on than I think I do. A situation might look like the beginnings of a genocide, or like a mad dictator loose with nuclear weapons, or like the end of the world in fire, and then turn out to be something completely different. Even as an insider in a volatile situation, I don’t think it’s possible to have the kind of complete information that the utilitarian choice for war requires. No one can tell the future, or read the minds of the other people involved. Theoretically, I could see a situation where choosing to start a war, or intervene militarily in a conflict, would be the moral choice, but practically it’s wiser to just not start wars.

A good metaphor would be my view on capital punishment. I have no problem in theory with executing a murderer. I think there are crimes for which the only truly just punishment is death. However, I don’t have faith that our judicial system is able to determine guilt or innocence with perfect accuracy, so I think it’s wiser to only impose punishments that are more or less reversible. It’s a problem of information.

That doesn’t mean accepting no action at all in the face of genocide, though. If you take Rwanda as an example, one of the major factors that led to the genocide was the radio stations that broadcast racist programs urging people to kill their neighbors. The United States could have exerted political and economic pressure to shut down those radio stations, and replaced them with different programs. There are often political and economic steps that can be taken to improve a situation.

In Iraq, over the past couple of years, there has been a slow ethnic cleansing in some areas, so that neighborhoods that used to be mixed Sunni-Shi’a are now only Sunni or only Shi’a. The US military presence hasn’t been able to stop this. From what I know (although again, as an outsider looking in my knowledge is incomplete) it would probably be more effective if the US withdrew our military forces while at the same time offering refuge to anyone who would be the victim of ethnic cleansing or genocide. So if you’re wanting to prevent genocide, which is a good goal, military intervention may not even be the most effective way to do that.

I guess what I would advocate is practical pacifism, through the adoption of a different paradigm for international intervention. Here in the US, we tend to think of our options as either a) do nothing and pretend that everything is fine, or b) storm in with guns blazing. We see our role in the international community as that of a police officer. I think what we ought to do is acknowledge our inability to be effective police officers, and instead take on the role of the battered women's shelter: we can't arrest the abusers and put them in prison, we can't put them up against a wall and shoot them for their crimes, but we can shelter their victims and do our best to mitigate the damage that has been done. This is a lot more complicated, and time-consuming, and requires a greater commitment to long-term, practical action that isn't flashy and doesn't get the adrenaline pumping, but I think it's more moral.