CONTINUING TO ARTICULATE AN ALTERNATIVE TO WAR: Today, I wrote my column on “comparative military occupations” for the Christian Science Monitor. Once again the writing went more quickly because I’d thought most of the text through beforehand. It’ll be in the paper Thursday.
Meanwhile my visa-ed passport arrived back from the Tanzanian Embassy. Next task: figure out getting the Mozambique one. Plus, where to stay in Maputo, Jo’burg, and Cape Town. I love planning trips!
Anyway, last night, Bill, three other U.Va. profs, and I were all on a panel discussion organized by the university’s African-American studies center. About the war. Slightly last-minute organizing, so not huge turnout. But definitely bigger than what the Charlottesville Daily Progress (Daily Regress?) reported.
The reporter there was correct that the panel had “most of the weight on the left side of the table.” But I learned afterwards that at least one other faculty member who would have anchored the other end of the table declined to appear with the rest of us.
By the way, the Prog also had a nice report on the High School walkout I wrote about here yesterday. Again, the number of participants was underestimated there.
Anyway, in the course of our panel discussion, I really reached some clarity on something I’d been worrying about since the war began. Yes, we know we failed to prevent the war being launched, but what can we in the antiwar movement plausibly say right now?
Well, for starters, I already knew that the argument that dissent at home “can harm our troops abroad” is a very dishonest one. It was not us who placed the troops in harm’s way. That significant feat was achieved the moment the President decided to launch the war.
But of course I care about the wellbeing of the US troops– as I do for the wellbeing of everyone caught up in that hellzone of war.
Now, one thing I did during the 1991 Gulf War, that later I came to think was a mistake, was to adopt the argument that, “since I know that war is brutalizing and ugly, then the best thing all round for minimizing the total amount of harm caused by the war is to hope for a rapid and decisive outcome.”
I heard that precise same argument being voiced last night by Jim Childress, a distinguished professor of medical ethics here at U.Va. And a version of it also by my spouse.
So that reminded me of the many concerns I have had about that argument ever since I used it in 1991.
Firstly, it sort of “assumes” that the US is going to win. So one ends up cheering on the effort for a rapid and decisive US victory. That felt strange enough for me to be doing when I did it back then– yes, I actually wrote columns to that effect, not necessarily with much cheering, but making that exact argument. But at least then, the US war effort had a much stronger basis in international law. The present one doesn’t, so cheering it on in any way involves supporting what I see as forces of global vigilanteism.
Secondly, it means that one gets emotionally into the danger of eliding the nasty reality of the war, and one gets caught up in planning for the after-war.
But I think it’s important to resist those temptations In particular, it’s important to continue being able to say, today, tomorrow, or any other time before the “end” of this war, that THERE IS STILL AN ALTERNATIVE TO WAR. Even today. Even any other day, whether the news from the battlefield is “good” or bad” from the US military viewpoint.
And what I feel quite comfortable saying is that on any one of these days, President Bush can still call for an immediate ceasefire-in-place, and call on the United Nations to help negotiate a resolution to the imbroglio in Iraq.
Why not? There is an always an alternative to violence, and I think it is up to those of us in the peace movement to be able to propose what that might be. And we are lucky, oh so lucky, that we still–even if only barely– have an international body like the United Nations that has the international legitimacy and global networks capable of taking over such negotiations.
I should imagine Kofi Annan and the leaders of the vast majority of the world’s countries would be delighted to have the U.N. play such a role. (Well, okay, maybe Kofi wouldn’t be “delighted”, since dealing with the massive pol-mil-humanitarian mess inside the country will be a horrendously difficult task. But I imagine that he would, at least, be ready to shoulder this task; and he’d presumably see that as a course far preferable to watching the violence and destruction just continue.)
Of course, I fully recognize that for Prez Bush to make such a turnround is, in the present circs, fairly unlikely. I realize that for the hawks in his administration, such a decision would represent the ultimate defeat of their world-defying strategy.
But just because it’s unlikely that Bush would heed our call that he stop fighting and turn the issue over to the UN for a negotiated settlement, does that mean we should not utter it, should not organize around it?
Of course not! It’s equally unlikely in my humble opinion that he’ll heed our calls to do the right thing by the health, education, and other social programs inside this country. But does that unlikeliness prevent us from organizing around our demands for the fulfillment of urgent social needs? No, of course it doesn’t…
So anyway, I was glad to have that bit of clarity come to me last night. Today, though I was writing something I consider to be important (for the CSM) about the after-war, I made sure to put in at least a couple of sentences about the fact that we still, even now, don’t need to just stay fatalistically on the war-wagon. And I articulated my still-valid, proposed alternative to continuing the war.
