Some Anti-War Thoughts on Memorial Day

I don't like Memorial Day. I hate all things military and to me, nationalistic holidays like that glorify people who are trained to be killers.

We call them heroes, speak of them as defending their country, and say that they sacrifice themselves.

Why do people enlist in the military? (Since the US has had no military draft, everyone who enters the service does so voluntarily, and I devote some thought to why they do so.) First, I'm pretty sure that no one who enlists in the armed services does so expecting to be harmed in any way. It's kind of like smoking: no one believes that he or she will develop lung cancer as the result of smoking. These things always happen to the other guy: This seems to be a chronic tendency in human thinking. I don't know whether it's optimism, denial. . . .

Furthermore, I am going to espouse the undoubtedly very unpopular idea that people who enlist in the military services are misguided. If they think they are doing a duty or otherwise a benefit for their country, I believe they have been misled--at least arguably so and/or sometimes. And sometimes they are just trying to be macho. (Can anyone deny that the Marines—the whole aura or mystique of the Marines—is other than machismo?)

Okay. let's examine recent US wars. If you look at Iraq, over the years since the US's second invasion of Iraq, it's become more and more clear that there was little or no justification for it. We were told that Saddam Hussein, then the ruler of Iraq, was developing "weapons of mass destruction" (and thus adding that term to our vocabulary); and that turned out to be incorrect. (I won't go into whether the mistake was well intentioned or a deliberate lie; it's evidently a complex question.)

More recently it's come to light that there was no discussion of whether to attack Iraq in the White House. Evidently it was a foregone conclusion. It looks as though (then president) George W. Bush wanted a war and no one was going to even argue with him.

It's always the politicians and military leaders who make the wars; and the young men—the common soldiers—who have to suffer. Not to mention innocent civilians who get killed (more about this later).

Now, the Afghanistan war. If the syllogism is as follows:

• The United States was attacked on its own soil (9/11, that infamous day/event)
• Al Quaida planned and organized the attack
• There are important, or even main, al Quaida groups in Afghanistan
• Therefore: for US security, and to prevent another such attack, we must try to wipe out al Quaida bases and personnel in Afghanistan

If, as I say, this is the rationale, then maybe US actions in Afghanistan have some reasonable rationale. On the other hand, a few thoughts, all of which probably have the tendency of showing that US objectives in Afghanistan are impossible to attain:

• The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan before the US, was there for a number of years, and finally pulled out, more or less in frustration--perhaps very much like the experience of the French in Indo-China (later Viet Nam), who were there before the US and withdrew in failure. In our hubris, we did not learn from the French experience in Viet Nam and we did not learn from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
• Afghanistan has a very weak and corrupt central government (which we are implicitly and materially backing and trying to prop up). A lot of the country is in the hands of war lords who gain their power from growing opium. The US has even armed some of these war lords—and, any efforts made (and I don't know if there have in fact been many or even any) to suppress the opium supply have not made much of a difference.
• This is more or less a guerrilla war. Again we have not learned from the experience of Viet Nam. That was a guerrilla war and–though nobody wants to very bluntly say so—we lost that one.
• Not to mention that the US presence in Afghanistan looks like American imperialism, just as the Soviets being there was Soviet imperialism. I don't recall that the Afghans invited us.
  

Okay, now back to war in general and high-ranking military officers. When the Soviet Union was collapsing, Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts at reform--which involved permitting the dissolution of the Soviet Union and a whole series of events including allowing the satellite countries to break away and the Berlin Wall to fall—had to be done in defiance of so-called hard-line military leaders. And what I would call "right" ideas and events and progress must always be done in defiance of military leaders. Whether they are on one side or on the other, these are people whose profession is war and they tend to like and want wars. Our Pentagon is full of grown-up boys who must have their toys; and their toys are ever-more destructive weapons capable of killing more and more people, more and more easily, more and more impersonally. (In the "progress" of our civilization we keep getting further and further away from the situation where your enemy had to be killed more or less face-to-face.)

Aside from the sacrifice that soldiers make—which means to them not only the end of their lives but grief to families and other loved ones, loss of childrens' fathers—I don't need to enumerate what has been said so eloquently, so often—think about the lot of civilians in modern wars. Again—ever since the advent of aerial bombing—we have moved "beyond" (I hate to use a word which might imply positive progress) war which involves only soldiers. As one example: In World War II, in March and again in May of 1945, Allied bombers rained incendiary bombs on Tokyo. One-quarter of Tokyo was burned and upwards of 1 million (estimates go as high as 1,200,000) people lost their homes and tens or hundreds of thousands were killed.

These were not soldiers. These were not politicians. These were not the people who had made the war. It's impossible to know how many of them did or did not favor the war that was going on; but there is no doubt that they suffered. Imagine just one woman grieving over the loss of a father, a child, a sister—and multiply that scene a hundred thousand times. (And, by the way--to get back to Afghanistan--we've been killing civilians in Afghanistan. Not calculated to gain good will toward the US in the Islamic world--apart from the inherent evil and human tragedy of it.)

I don't want to argue here the question of whether the US had to fight in World War II. Whether Germany and/or Japan had to be "stopped." But even, if you take that as a given, I think that quite another question to think about is the morality of raining incendiary bombs down on civilian populations. Or atomic bombs.

I think that some WWII airmen regret their role in what occurred. It's clear that many do not. And that may be due to how, in time of war, we brainwash soldiers and civilians alike with a dehumanizing, demonizing view of the enemy. (I've talked about this before.)

Update.
Additions made May 27 and May 28, 2012.

Update, May 31, 2012
I don't want to imply for a moment that I don't have any feeling for our soldiers. It is very saddening to me when one is lost. And it makes me, if anything, even sadder to think about those who come home scarred or maimed, physically or psychologically--all the more so because I'm not totally convinced that these tragedies are necessary.


Copyright © 2012