Letters to the Editor

• Gloating, winning, and when war is "right"

  [Read the article: Good riddance to John Howard ]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  ...gloating decrees that war opponents were proven wrong because of how fast and cleanly we Won in Iraq without any of the problems the "naysayers" predicted...

  All else aside, anyone who gloats about anything in war is sociopathic enough that those who wish to retain any claim to reputability will at once cease giving them a public audience. That should go without saying.

  But given that, there is something worth examining here that's important for the anti-war movement. We know that the mainstream press, and (many of us argue) mainstream liberals, were responsible for ignoring or squelching the embarrassingly off-message protests of the early opposition to the Iraq war. But there is also an extent to which the progressive antiwar movement itself failed, and I fear continues to fail, to be able to speak to the reality of American military power in the post-cold war era.

  At the risk of being reductive, the issue revolves around the difficulty American liberals have with getting out of a Vietnam mentality. The failure of the American effort in Vietnam had many reasons, some it shares with the current debacle in Iraq but some it does not. The thing that it's important to realize is that between the 1960s and the 1990s the United States acquired an ability to concentrate and project military force that is so vastly different from anything seen before in modern history that it puts the US military on par, with respect to its rivals, with the most extreme examples of imbalanced powers throughout the history of warfare — the Mongol horde or even the Spanish conquest of the New World.

  Thus the stand-up battlefield of the Iraq invasion was not, as it was in Vietnam, a question of a nation with more and better guns, tanks, and planes versus a nation with fewer and worse ones. It's a question of a nation with guns versus a nation with bulletproof armor, not to mention lasers, robots, satellites, and computerized missiles.

  There was, or should have been, no question that the main American offensive in Iraq was going to be utterly unlike the slogging maneuvers of Vietnam, and a lot of the weight that anti-war activists put into the argument that it would be was counterproductive.

  Why? Who cares what arguments you make against something which you disagree with?

  Well, in a larger sense, that's exactly one of the questions that Glenn Greenwald explores in his commentary. Offhand it's easy to list three important reasons why:

  1. Employing a bad argument to a good end is bad ethics, and if practiced widely weakens the fabric of legitimate discourse. This principle has been well-understood, and widely exploited, by right-wing extremists over the past quarter-century.

  2. Opposition to war on purely pragmatic grounds — "this war is bad because we'll lose" — is a Faustian bargain, a convenient argument only so long as you are losing. Sooner or later you will have to contend with the moral implication that once you're winning it's not bad anymore.

  3. If the goal of protest is to influence policy, the people making the policy need to be receptive to the message. By telling military planners and their civilian overseers something that they knew to be untrue — namely, that the US military offensive was going to stall before it ever reached Baghdad or achieved rapid, complete victory over the organized armed forces opposed to it — anti-war activists blunted what should have been their message.

  So, then, what should their message have been? Maybe ironically and probably inadvertently, Colin Powell answered that question very well — that we learn to articulate an opposition to American military adventurism in ethical terms, rather than pragmatic ones. "You break it, you buy it," he said. In other words, let's not ask ourselves "Will we be successful in taking over Iraq?" but rather, "Are we prepared to take responsibility once we've done so?"

  Many people were saying just that all along, of course, and many people who incorrectly predicted that the Iraq invasion would be a tactical disaster from the moment it began, rather than focusing on the more subtle transition from offensive to occupation, have recanted and moved on. Clearly what happened in the first 15 days of the invasion is all but irrelevant now anyway, from a practical point of view.

  But we're still at risk of sweeping those early misjudgments under the carpet. There's still a tendency among many antiwar activists to say, essentially, "Well, okay, but now we're losing, so see? It really was wrong all this time."

  It's worth remembering what we ought to have known all along — that opposition to war is a moral stance, not a pragmatic one. The fact that any particular aspect of a military invasion does or does not go well has no bearing on whether or not the operation as a whole is just or unjust. (That goes for pro-war conservatives, too, of course, but I don't know how many of them read Greenwald, let alone his letters — let alone one this long!)

  Permalink Saturday, November 24, 2007 04:14 PM