|
Volume CXXXII, Number 20 |
 |
War at any cost? Questioning the pro-war position
PATRICK RAEL
FACULTY CONTRIBUTOR
Professor Potholm makes some important points in the April 4 edition of The Orient ("Despite our most humane objections, this is still war"). Americans have indeed come to believe that we are "beyond all the implications of war;" we seem to expect (if not demand) our conflicts to be largely safe and painless-at least for us.
Our own leaders have conditioned us to such beliefs. Internal dissent over Vietnam has haunted U.S. policymakers since the 1970s, and continues to play a key role in the formation of U.S. strategic (and even tactical) doctrine. Our government has become highly sensitized to the connection between war and society.
Karl von Clausewitz, who Professor Potholm cites, was among the first to understand the significance of this relationship. He believed that society provided the "passion"-in today's parlance, the political will-necessary to prosecute and sustain war. Clausewitz was a prophet, for no other aspect of war has attained such prominence in the modern era. In a highly affluent, technological, and democratic society, it is difficult to maintain political assent for war-especially wars in far-away places for principles not deeply felt or objectives well understood by all Americans.
Modern information technology has made the government's job of attaining and maintaining political assent immeasurably more complex since Clausewitz's day. Back then, the terrible face of battle was known first-hand only to those unlucky enough to fight wars or to suffer as a direct result of them.
The technological capacity to bring war's terrors into private homes through the news media has vastly altered the calculus of war making. Volatile public opinion--Clausewitz's "passion"-has become a necessary consideration for all who seek to pursue policy by "other means."
During the Vietnam War, the consensus in America over the war broke down. Many Americans came to believe that the sacrifices necessary to prosecute the war successfully were not worth the vague objectives for which the war was supposedly being fought. The images Americans saw each night on their television screens had much to do with the erosion of support. Support for the war faded, and we left Saigon in defeat.
That was the lesson of Vietnam. If the public cannot sustain the political will for war, it does not matter how much military might we possess. We will lose.
The government has learned its lessons well since Vietnam. The U.S. military arsenal-from stealth bombers to smart bombs to special forces to satellite reconnaissance-has been engineered with this goal in mind: to be able to fight limited, sanitary wars with minimum loss of American or civilian life.
Starting with the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, the government has also perfected its media policy for war. Now we have "embedded" reporters who offer amazingly rapid coverage but are so "in bed" with the military sustaining and censoring them, that their credibility is questionable.
Technology lets us see and discuss the war with unprecedented speed. The Administration can respond to overnight polls in its daily press briefings, but protestors can use the internet to organize almost as quickly. In each new conflict, the war of information-for the political assent of society-looms ever more significant.
In Iraq we can start to see how information technology has altered the Clausewitzian calculus of war. The public's taste for sanitized wars has grown, but out of all proportion to the government's capacity to deliver.
As Professor Potholm points out, war is, of itself and by its very nature, messy, horrible, deadly, and unpredictable. Clausewitz is noted for his great insight that "war is a continuation of policy by other means." In short, war is (or should be thought of as) an instrument of statecraft. But, as Clausewitz understood, there is a big difference between war and other tools of policy. War is far deadlier, and far less predictable. War, as Clausewitz argued, tends toward "totality," or complete destruction.
There is thus a kind of inexorable internal logic of war, which threatens to escalate conflict out of all bounds. The trouble with war as an instrument of policy, then, is that it is by its very nature difficult to control, and hard to subordinate to the political aims for which it is invoked.
I think this is Professor Potholm's point-that war is by its nature messy and unpredictable, and that we can expect this regardless of how technologically advanced we've become. Many proponents of the war thus conclude that when we engage in it we must remain committed to it, despite what happens in the midst of it. As we have been constantly reminded, it is, after all, war.
But it does not follow that simply because war is messy we must therefore commit to it regardless of cost or consequence. Clausewitz may tell us how to fight wars, but he cannot tell us why.
There is an alternative to Professor Potholm's conclusion. Perhaps, given that war is so terrible, it should not be resorted to so casually as an instrument in the pursuit of policy objectives. Perhaps the horror of war and the difficulty of subordinating it to our ends should make us think twice about invoking it. And, once wars start, perhaps our increasing intimacy with the face of battle can keep war from escalating beyond all bounds-of sane policy formation and of human decency.
The alternative is unthinkable. A war started that we must not stop, to stop someone from starting a war? Leaders who begin wars and then demand assent simply on the basis that the war has begun? Dissent over a war for foreign oil considered treason? Is this the way for a rational and open society to contemplate visiting the horrors of war on innocent civilians and American troops?
For the public to question this war is a good thing. One even wonders if there might come a day when a democratic people will no longer permit its government to fight unjustifiable wars like the present one. Would that be such a bad thing?
|
FastCounter by bCentral |