Category: Antiwar (vintage)

This is something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot recently… With regard to Obama’s step back (for now) from the brink of escalation in Syria and the rising possibilities of a negotiated de-escalation in Iran, some people here in America have lamented that these developments are “merely the result of war weariness”… As though being war-weary is some form of moral failing, and once Americans have just bucked up and re-gathered our national energies, we should all be “healed” of this war weariness and ready once again to ride off into yet another foreign war?

I demur. I am war-weary and proud of it. Indeed, I have been weary of all these wars since before they all started; and I only wish that more Americans– make that MANY more Americans– had also been war-weary back in those crucial weeks prior to the October 7, 2001 invasion of Afghanistan; those months of the buildup to the March 19, 2003 invasion of Iraq; and those crucial days and hours prior to the March 19, 2011 launching of the NATO air attack against Libya…

Not one of those wars brought a discernible net benefit to the people of the country in which it was waged. All three of those countries are still reeling today from the terrible and continuing aftershocks of the violence that the U.S. military visited upon them. All are still trapped inside pulsing circles of violence and counter-violence with no end in sight. Let’s not kid ourselves– either about the current situation of those three countries, or about the huge responsibility that the U.S. government bears for bringing them to their current plight… Meanwhile, here in the United States, every town and city is now haunted by the presence of the traumatized and often deeply troubled U.S. veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the social-service, physical, and economic infrastructure of our country has been ripped almost to shreds by the astronomical cost of the wars.

So yes, I am war-weary. Or maybe, since I don’t want to make this only a retrospective sentiment, let me use the term war-averse instead.

Please! Let us take advantage of the present moment of sanity (in halting the rush to U.S. military hostilities in and against Syria), to connect once again with the ancient wisdoms that time after time after time have told humanity that war is (a) always harmful to the civilians in the war zone, despite all the claims about “precise targeting”, “surgical” strikes, and such; (b) always unpredictable in its political course and outcomes; and (c) always inimical to basic freedoms at home… and that tell us, therefore, that we should exert every possible effort to use means other violence and war to resolve our differences.

Yes, I am a pacifist– and more convinced of this stance than ever, these days… so you could say I am an “ideologue” on the matter, impervious to counter-arguments and un-swayable by new facts. (But really, what new facts could anyone adduce today, to persuade any reasonable person anywhere that the U.S. war on Afghanistan was, on balance, a good thing; that the U.S. war on Iraq was a good thing; or the war on Libya… or, looking forward, that a U.S. war or escalation against Syria would be a good thing, or ditto against Iran?)

But you don’t have to be a complete pacifist to reach these conclusions. There have been many, many smart thinkers throughout history, people who may not have absorbed all the wisdom of the sages of nonviolence but who, while allowing for the possibility of “ethically” waging a war in some circumstances, have nonetheless cautioned strongly about the dangers that any war carries. I’m thinking about St. Augustine, a man who broke from the nonviolent teachings of the first 400 years of Christianity and for the first time posited the idea of a “just war”– but who was so intimately familiar in his own lifetime with the destructive animal spirits that any warfare unleashes that he defined many layers of conditions and prohibitions that would be needed if any war could earn his label of “just”. Or more recently, the framers of the U.N. Charter– men reeling from the effects of two global wars within just one generation, who had seen the damages that both those wars (and also the obsessively punitive “peace” of the Treaty of Paris) had wrought. And thus, while the U.N.’s originators allowed for the possibility of some “legitimate” wars in the order they sought to build, they too defined their own tough layers of conditions that should be met if any war fought in the post-1945 world could meet their standard of “legitimacy”. And equally importantly, they issued passionate pleas for the nonviolent, negotiated resolution of international conflicts and built whole edifices dedicated to providing the mechanisms for doing so.

So yes, let’s hear it for war-weariness once again. And this time, please let the sentiment last a long time. And let’s start seriously planning how to divert all the efforts that have until now been directed to designing and building machines of destruction, control, and war into building structures of peace and human development– for all the world’s people– instead.

I’ve recently been devouring Evan Osnos’s brilliant piece of reporting in The New Yorker, on the exciting, now-underway, negotiated transition to much greater democracy in Myanmar/Burma.
Huge kudos to Osnos for doing this great research and reporting, and to The New Yorker for, presumably, funding his lengthy reporting trip to the country, and then publishing the lengthy article. (Sadly, only an abstract is available free at the link above. I hope you can find the whole, long paper version in your local library.)
Osnos’s report is full of fascinating details– about the calculations that Aung San Suu Kyi and her allies in the NLD were making as they decided to give the democratic opening process a chance; and about the deliberations and discussions that occurred deep inside the ruling junta that led to its participation. U.S. diplomacy, in the person of Secretary Clinton and some of her key aides, also played a role.
This is a major story of our time! It affects the future of all of the country’s 60 million people– and, of course, their neighbors. So why do the U.S. and ‘western’ media in general give it so little play and so little prominence, compared with the story of the tragic and violent continuing events in (much smaller) Syria?
It is, sadly, the violent aspects of the events in Syria that have been garnering by far the most attention in the western MSM over recent months. That is, both the violence of the regime, and its tragic effects– which are often waved in front of the western public like a bloody shirt, with the intention being to whip up western opinion against the regime– and the violence of the opposition, which is far too often romanticized and condoned, with the inevitable effects of opposition violence almost never being shown.
I believe there are two factors which explain the difference between the coverage of Syria and the coverage (or lack thereof) of Burma. Firstly, the sometimes almost pornographic fascination with violence and its representations in the western media, in general– as opposed to the much more visually ‘boring’ events that make up the day-to-day grind of diplomacy in a place like Burma/Myanmar; and secondly, the fact that there is huge buy-in from the vast majority of corporate owners and journos in the western MSM to the goal of violent regime change in Syria– but almost complete indifference to the fate of the 60 million people in Burma.
Not all is roses and honey in Burma yet, I know. But I find the story of the democratic opening there really engaging. I wrote a whole chapter about Aung San Suu Kyi in my 2000 book ‘The Moral Architecture of World Peace’. She is an amazing woman, and by all accounts the NLD, that she heads, is a sturdy, resilient, and visionary organization.
In addition, the careful, nonviolent, and negotiated way the transition there is being pursued by the local participants, and supported by external actors, like the United States, is an exemplary way for transitions from authoritarian and/or minority rule to democracy to be undertaken. As in South Africa, 1990-1994. This is exactly what we should be advocating for regarding Syria! If Sec. Clinton can be pursuing these policies of careful diplomacy with respect to the junta in Myanmar that has committed atrocities on a truly massive scale– some of which, truth be told, continue to this day– then why on earth has the Obama administration and so much of the rest of the U.S. political elite adopted such a belligerent and escalatory policy toward the regime in Damascus?
By far the best explanation for this contrast is, I think, the role played by the unremitting campaign of anti-Damascus agitation undertaken by pro-Israeli forces in American and other western societies for several decades now. There has been nothing like that agitation maintained against the junta in Burma. And this year is, remember, an election year in America…
It is not too late for the Obama administration to turn away from the path of escalation regarding Syria. Up until now– and especially with Sec. Clinton’s most recent visit to Turkey– there is no sign that they are doing so. But if they continue along this path, the fallout from any large-scale explosion of hostilities in Syria could well be massive.
Lessons from South Africa and Burma, please!

The NYT has a very important piece today reporting that the head of the military history program at West Point has openly stated that the United States gained “not much” from 10.5 years of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The program head, Col. Gian Gentile, concluded– presumably in light of the cost of these wars in both blood and treasure– that they had been “Certainly not worth the effort. In my view.”
A sobering assessment. Especially since the NYT has published it on Memorial Day, the day on which U.S. citizens remember their (our) war dead, a remembrance that can have different emotional overtones depending on whether or not you supported the decisions political leaders made to send those military personnel into action against (and in many cases, in) the targeted foreign countries.
For those who by and large supported those war-initiation decisions (which I did not, in either case), I imagine it might be hard to hear that all the effort and sacrifices that members of the military and their families made may actually have ended up as “not worth the effort.”
However, if we are to prevent our political leaders from ever again making quite avoidable and extremely destructive and counter-productive decisions to launch wars against other countries, I don’t think we can afford to sentimentalize the human losses that U.S. military families have suffered to the point that we cannot make (or even really hear) the kind of clear-headed assessment that Col. Gentile made in that interview:

Certainly not worth the effort.

Worth noting there, too: The fact that Col. Gentile is no merely academic egghead. Before serving at West Point he commanded a combat battalion in Baghdad.
Maybe now is a good time for the U.S. public to look back over these past 10.5 years of war-making and consider what might have been done differently, and what the probable or possible effects of such alternative, non-war-based policies might have been… And also, to look at the various hotspots and issues around the world where the (still fairly heavily bellophilic) U.S. political class is still, today, actively discussing the possibility of war or other forms of serious escalation of tensions, such as might very easily lead to war… And to redouble our efforts to explore alternatives to war as a way to meet the security or other forms of concern we have about the behavior of other governments, and the kind of responses our government might make that would aim centrally at de-escalating rather then escalating tensions, and resolving outstanding issues through negotiation, rather than war.
The two main places where people in that toxicly bellophilic space “inside the Washington Beltway” are currently actively discussion escalation and possible war, or “interventions” leading to war, are, of course, Iran and Syria.
It is obvious that regarding these two countries, as regarding the situation in Iraq leading up to March 2003, one of the major forces stoking the bellophilia of members of Congress and its suffocatingly incestuous helpmeets in the MSM has been the pro-Israel lobby. The lobby has effortlessly demonstrated its power in Washington in recent years– most notably when its shills in Congress orchestrated 29 standing ovations for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year– at a time when Netanyahu had come to Washington to openly confront President Obama’s policy on a settlement freeze.
For many months now, the advocacy efforts of the lobby’s main arm in Washington, AIPAC, have been strongly focused on stoking tensions with Iran, and ramming through Congress bills mandating an ever tougher U.S. posture toward the country, that have the effect of making the conduct of normal diplomacy with it ever harder and harder… More recently, AIPAC’s website has also started to feature the issue of Syria as one deserving of U.S. “intervention”. In this latter campaign, AIPAC and the other pro-Israel organizations have been joined by many apparently “liberal” and human-rights-focused organizations, who have been pushing for the kinds of policies “safe havens”, “humanitarian corridors”, etc, that sound as if they are only humanitarian and dedicated to saving lives but whose major effect would be to further stoke the tensions among the Syrian people that are already running high, and to give a green light and considerable de-facto support to the members of the country’s completely unaccountable and deeply Islamist-dominated armed opposition.
Ah, that old illusion of a “war for the sake of human rights”… Where has that led us, before?
Well, back in the 1880s, it led King Leopold of the still-infant “nation” of Belgium into a campaign to conquer and control the whole vast area of what became known as “the Belgian Congo”– a campaign carried out in good part in the name of “saving those native people from the ravages of the Arab slave traders.” Yes, there may well have been some Arab slave traders operating on the far margins of the area that the Belgian forces brought under their control. But the Belgians then instituted in Congo a system of extremely rapacious forced labor and prison camps that led to the death of an estimated 10 million Congolese people over the 23 years that followed…
Indeed, very many wars have been justified by their authors, either at the time or shortly after their initiation, as having a clear and present dimension of the enhancement or protection of rights. (Nobody ever launches an avowedly unjust war, remember. All wars have to seem to be “just” to their authors and supporters.)
In Iraq, as soon as it was clear that the U.S. military were not going to find any actual evidence of the (as it happened, quite illusionary) “WMDs programs” whose presence had been the ostensible cause for which the U.S. public was jerked into the war, Pres. G. W. Bush almost immediately started to rebrand the invasion and war as having been all about human rights.
In Afghanistan, as the war dragged on and on with no clear “victory” in sight, many efforts have been made to rebrand that whole conflict and the United States’s huge and expensive military presence there as being in good part an effort to assure the rights of Afghanistan’s people, especially its women.
Perhaps people who still have that illusion should read some actual testimonies about the situation and thinking of actual Afghan women, like this poignant and timely one published today by the great, heroic antiwar activist Kathy Kelly, currently in Kabul.
She writes about a meeting at a small, volunteer-run tutoring center with three Afghan mothers– two of whom have to try to raise their children almost alone while caring for husbands who are disabled..

Fatima recalls the past winter which was particularly harsh. They couldn’t afford fuel and had to find other ways to keep warm. But Nuria adds that all the seasons present constant problems, and it is always difficult for the family to make ends meet. Asked whether they could recall ever getting a day off from work, the women answered in unison, – “No.”
Asked about the notion that the U.S. is protecting Afghan women, Nekbat said that whatever officials claim in this regard, they are bringing no help. These women have seen no improvement in Afghanistan, and neither, they claim, has anyone they know. They don’t travel in the circles of those most likely to meet and speak with Western journalists, and poverty and the uncertainties of war seem to dictate their lives more surely than any government. They tell me all foreign money is lost to corruption – no one in their communities sees it going to the people.
Although no government official or journalist ever asks them about the conditions they are facing, they know the West is curious; the mothers are aware of the drone aircraft – planes without pilots, some of them armed with missiles, with cameras trained on their neighborhoods.
The drone cameras miss a lot. Nekbat adds that even when people come through to witness firsthand the suffering of common Afghans, she is sure this news never reaches the ears of Karzai and his government. “They don’t care,” she said. “You may perish from lack of food, and still they don’t care. No one hears the poor.”
One hospital in Kabul, the Emergency Surgical Center for Civilian War Victims, serves people free of charge. Emanuele Nannini, the chief logistician for the hospital, reminded us, the previous day, that the U.S. spends one million dollars, per year, for each soldier it deploys in Afghanistan. “Just let six of them go home,” he said, “and with that six million we could meet our total annual operating budget for the 33 existing clinics and hospitals we have in Afghanistan. With 60 less soldiers, the money saved could mean running 330 clinics.”

These kinds of calculation about costs and opportunity costs are, within a slightly different framework, exactly what the U.S. public needs to consider as it looks– as Col. Gentile has– at whether any particular war is “worth the effort.”
Strategy, Gentile reminded the NYT interviewer, “should employ resources of a state to achieve policy aims with the least amount of blood and treasure spent.”
The NYT article also has, as an intriguing footnote, a quote from Col. John Nagl, who was one of the earliest adopters of, and avdocates for, U.S. use of a ‘COIN’ (counter-intelligence) strategy in Iraq, and probably elsewhere. Nagl currently teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis.
U.S. foreign policy, Nagl tells the reporter, should “ensure that we never have to do this again.”
The reporter then apparently asks him whether COIN works:

“Yes,” he said. “Is it worth what you paid for it? That’s an entirely different question.”