Hitting the Streets

So, I was watching the news this evening, and caught the coverage of the anti-war protest outside of a DC-area recruiting station. And all I could do was chuckle at all those folks of military age chanting in the streets that they don’t want to go. No problem. I’ve got a news flash for them; military service in the United States is entirely voluntary, and there hasn’t been a draft since 1973. So don’t sweat it, I don’t think you’re going to be packed off to Iraq any time soon.

I also kind of appreciated the chants of "We want our Constitution back!" It was a catchy little ditty, if completely meaningless in this context. As far as I’m aware, no one has made off with the Constitution; after all, this isn’t National Treasure, and that was the Declaration of Independence, anyway. No, I’m sorry, but this was all aired out and Congress consented, so find something else to chant about.

What really caught my eye, however, were all the signs and banners that read "War Is Never the Answer." That one made me pause and think. Really? Never? I’m sure that the peoples of Europe, who were overrun by Germany in 1939 and 1940, would have been interested to hear that. As a matter of fact, some of them are still alive; why don’t you ask them how they feel about that philosophy? I’m guessing here that our Civil War also falls into the "never the answer" category; then again, and it could just be me, but I don’t think that the antebellum status quo was an acceptable alternative. And I guess that when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, the correct response would have been to do . . . nothing.

Okay.

The problem with blanket statements is that, well, they’re blanket statements. They make great sound bites, I suppose, but they have little to do with reality. Guess what, folks. War is messy. War is inconvenient. It is also sometimes necessary. That is reality, and it doesn’t care one whit for catchy little protest chants.

You can argue all you want that the fighting in Iraq, for example, was an unnecessary war. That is certainly your right under the social contract we’ve set up for ourselves. But if you are going to accept the argument that toppling the pre-war Iraqi regime was the ethically and legally wrong thing to do, then you must perforce accept the flip side of that. Which is that the ethically and legally right thing to do was leave a regime in place that slaughtered its own people, threatened its immediate neighbours, and destabilized the region. This really is an either-or situation; for the former to be the incorrect action, the latter has to be correct.

Let’s leave aside legalisms in this - while we do have a concept we call "international law," it’s nothing of the sort, and any "international lawyer" who is being honest with both himself and you will tell you that international law is whatever the strongest power says it is - and deal only with the ethical issues. Nor does it matter if you want to choose either Iraq or Afghanistan as your model, though the latter would seem to be a more clear-cut case.

In the case of Afghanistan, we know that the Taliban was a hideous regime. They executed out-of-hand anyone who did not profess their particular version of Islam. They denied education, medical care and basic human rights to females in their society. They sponsored and harboured the organization responsible for perpetrating 9/11. Through Al Qaeda, the Taliban sponsored terrorist organizations who’s sole purpose is to kill as many "infidels" - meaning anyone, including us, who don’t share their particular religious beliefs - as possible.

Is Afghanistan a case of "war is never the answer"?

Compare that to Iraq. I am not one of those people who believe that there was a connection between the pre-war regime and, say, Al Qaeda, though there certainly is an Al Qaeda presence there now (and of course there is, since they view it as just another theatre in their wider war against us anyway). But that connection was never a condition for our going into Iraq in the first place, no matter how much the anti-war folks try to revise history.

We know that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, used chemical weapons in quantity on numerous occasions, both against its own people and against the Iranians. We know that Saddam Hussein repeatedly carried out bloody purges to eliminate both real and imagined internal opposition. We know that the Ba’ath Party brutally repressed and massacred such divergent ethnic groups within Iraq such as the Kurds and the "Marsh Arabs"; since the war, we’ve uncovered the mass graves of hundreds of thousands. We know that that regime tortured its own people. We know that the pre-war Iraqi government did, indeed, sponsor terrorist organizations and provided both money and training. We know that the pre-war Iraqi government repeatedly and flagrantly defied both the U.N. and the various agreements it pledged to abide by. We know this, because we watched it happen. We also know that it has been the policy of the U.S. since the Clinton Administration to effect "regime change" in Iraq, which is a clinical way of saying "topple Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party."

Are we still in the territory of "war is never the answer"? I don’t think that anyone can argue that the pre-war Iraqi government was a particularly pleasant thing. But I also think that through the twelve years of fun and games between the end of Gulf War I in 1991 and the start of the current war in 2003, it also proved that it wasn’t going to go away absent a nice, hard shove from the outside.

I’ve heard it argued by those who oppose the war in Iraq that what a government does inside its own borders is none of our business. That is, I think, an empty argument, and one of convenience. After all, if that were indeed true, a principle that we should hold as inviolate, then we all should have kept our mouths shut about apartheid and let the South Africans do whatever they wanted. After all, that was a matter internal to South Africa and thus, according to that theory, none of our concern. I suspect, however, that the proponents of the "internal matters are none of our business" theory would object to that, and rightly so, I think. But there’s an even more sinister side to that theory. If you believe that idea to be true, then you must also accept this idea, that Hitler would have been completely acceptable had he only limited himself to killing German Jews.

Again, it may just be me, but I can’t accept either of those notions as being the ehtical choices. The mass murder of people who’s only "crime" happens to be that they exist is, I think, one of those situations that demands war, and I don’t care if that genocide is taking place in Iraq, the Balkans, Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur or in the Germany of the Nuremburg Laws.

War is inconvenient, but we live in a fractured world, and that isn’t likely to change any time soon. It certainly won’t change so long as we continue to pretend that such things are "none of our business." It is, of course, a far easier thing to worry about Johnnie’s soccer game, Janie’s piano recital and wondering how you’re going to meet that deadline at work and still find the time to go grocery shopping and fill up the SUV while barely paying attention to the latest sound bite on the evening news about which tribal group is now killing who. You can shake your head and say, "Isn’t that a shame," and go on with your daily life. It’s easier to do nothing than it is to do something, and you can tell yourself that it’s simply none of your business. It doesn’t directly impact you, not really, so it isn’t your responsibility to do anything, right?

If so, then we’ve learned absolutely nothing from history. As Edmund Burke said, "All that it takes for evil to triumph is for men of good will to do nothing." It would seem that we would become masters of doing nothing. After all, "they" aren’t doing anything to me, so why should I care what "they" do to each other? Except that having the power to prevent something implies the responsibility to do so, does it not? Or are the people living in the Balkans, or Darfur, or Rwanda - or Iraq, for that matter - not deserving of the same "right" to life that we hold so sacred for ourselves?

War is inconvenient. War should never be the item of first recourse. War is never the answer. Except when it is.