Politics and Philosophy (please sample, but do
not reproduce w/o my permission):
Can You Hate a
Stop Sign?
Once
again we are being asked the specious question: can we be against the war in
Iraq
and still support the troops? And once again the
real issues are being obscured by this category mistake. The question assumes
that the concepts “war” and “troops” fall into the same category, when
it is patently clear they do not. True, they do have something in common: to
have a war, nations need troops. But the converse does not hold true: to have
troops does not require a nation to be at war.
What
is posed as a political question should be reconsidered as a philosophical
question: what is the relationship of soldiers to their nation?
For
the sake of brevity, let us concede at the start that “fighters” and
soldiers are not synonymous. Fighters may share many of the characteristics of
soldiers; that is, they may be well trained, highly organized, dependent on a
chain of command, dedicated to an idea, inspired by a cause, and willing to give
up their lives in pursuit of this cause. All soldiers are fighters, but not all
fighters are soldiers. The key difference is that soldiers are formally
recognized by their nation literally as embodiments of that nation, its laws and
its (other) citizens.
Whether
citizens volunteer to become soldiers or whether they are drafted, the covenant
is clear. Although they may have been induced to sign up by promises of a career
or an education, the covenant is at root this: each recruit agrees to be wounded
or to die for the country. Military service is not democratic. The soldiers do
not propose war and do not vote for or against war. They go to war when and
where they are ordered.
It
is this formal (i.e., legal) designation that distinguishes soldiers, not just
from fighters but from the rest of the citizenry. This realization makes the
category mistake in the original question even more clear. The soldier is the
nation, embodied; the war is merely one of the activities a nation engages in.
High altitude bombing, laser-guided missiles notwithstanding, war is waged by
and on human bodies.
Monarchies
have historically invested their heads of state with the same status impressed
upon soldiers. The king is the country. We, in the
United States
, however, are at our least democratic when we
treat our president as an embodiment of the country. Because it is only the
soldiers who embody the country, a special obligation to represent our ideals
and our laws falls on their shoulders. By the same token, a special obligation
to take care of the bodies of our soldiers falls upon their country, an
obligation that does not end with the conflict. Having once embodied the country
as soldiers, these men and women do not relinquish this special status as
veterans.
If
soldiers embody the nation at war, those who have tried unsuccessfully to end a
war might, in their growing feelings of helplessness, conclude that they have no
choice but to attack those whose bodies have fought it. But, of course, this is
misguided nonsense. Still, it is easier to attack individual soldiers than to
attack the government.
Those
soldiers who commit crimes should, of course, be held responsible for their
lawlessness. But none of them can be held responsible for the war. The
responsibility for war lies entirely with the government. If the soldiers are
not responsible for the war itself, it makes no logical sense to be against
them. To be “against” them would be like being against stop signs. The signs
represent the traffic laws; they are themselves without power.
Yet
no small number of soldiers and their families express dismay that they are
being betrayed by anti-war protestors. Such opposition, they assert, is bad for
troop morale. They have agreed to sacrifice their lives for the country and,
therefore, they reason, the country should support the war they are fighting.
Fair enough. But they are caught in the category mistake with which I began this
essay. And they have confused the strictly hierarchical institutional structure
of the military (which governs their lives while they serve) with the democratic
institutions of the country (whose interests they serve). It is something of a
paradox that to defend the democratic institutions of this country we must deny
democracy to those who defend them.
What
particularly offends many protestors is that the government seems more than
willing to define any military action as being undertaken in defense of our
democratic institutions. Alas, that is what government seems to do best: so the
philosophical question inevitably has political consequences. Which is why we
need to ask the right questions in the first place.
Katherine
Fishburn
11 November
2004
,
10
December
2005
Shock
and Awe Revisited
As
we in the
United States
wait to see what brutal military action our government has planned for the town
of
Falluja
in retaliation for the grotesque murder of our fellow citizens at the hands of
Sunni insurgents, it is important to remember that we as individuals have
responses available to us other than violence. We can write about our anger and
revulsion, send letters to the editor, post comments on the web, vote out the
administration that took us into this war, and so on. We can write letters to
our senators and representatives urging them to seek either an early withdrawal
from
Iraq
or a resumption of hostilities. Should we chose the latter and urge armed
combat to resume we would, of course, enjoy the blameless luxury of violence by
proxy. But how would we feel if we had none of these options from which to
choose?
War is, by definition, the killing and maiming of bodies; we send the bodies of
our citizens into a war in the full knowledge that they will be killed and
maimed even as they kill and maim the bodies of our enemy. There are certain
rules and protocols we have agreed to follow as we wage war, but the human
decency these regulations demand pales in the face of the widespread death,
destruction and human suffering war entails. What has become increasingly
apparent in the past month alone is that this administration has led us into a
war without rules, a war where suddenly we, and not the enemy, are the victims
of “shock and awe.”
Whatever the motive of the insurgents, whether it be resentment and hatred of
their occupiers or their otherwise unchanneled envy of the powerful and wealthy
Western infidels, one could argue that they committed these atrocities because
they feel, correctly or not, that they have been backed into a corner where the
only response left to them is the destruction and mutilation of American bodies.
Crucial to our understanding of their actions in dragging the bodies of their
victims through the streets and hanging their charred corpses from a bridge is
the fact that these Muslims have violated their own religious tenets that forbid
the desecration of the dead.
Without question these horrific acts have compelled us to look, not just at the
mutilated bodies of our dead, but at those human beings who are responsible for
taking the lives of American civilians and gleefully displaying their charred
corpses as though they were trophies to be admired and celebrated—as, of
course, they were by many other Iraqis who have felt vindicated by the
insurgents’ crimes. If they wanted to get our attention, they succeeded. But
what are the insurgents saying to us and to the rest of the world? And how does
the fact that, in their own system of belief, they had to sin to get our
attention help us understand behavior that is so repellent we want nothing more
than to avert our eyes and have our military wreak our own form of revenge on
the perpetrators?
Our ambivalence about the war and its consequences is evident in the letters to
the editor that followed the atrocities in Falluja. Some Americans expressed
gratitude that their newspaper had printed pictures of the dead bodies; others
expressed anger and disapproval, apparently preferring not to look at what is
happening in
Iraq
as a result of our occupation. But it is our moral obligation to look because
in doing so we see, not just how our citizens suffer from this ill-considered
and poorly-executed war, but how a large majority of Iraqi citizens suffer from
it too. Their rage, desperation, and shame run so deep that they have violated
the very principles that once gave them not just a sense of identity but also a
sense of hope and honor. Turning away from the images of our dead will only
further the cause of hatred and lengthen
our occupation of
Iraq
. The insurgents have spoken and we best listen.
Katherine Fishburn
2 April 2004
