Comment on the Iraq War AOL Journal

I see that the Iraq War AOL Journal by frosty40m is featured (as of Friday evening) on the AOL Election Page Sideshow.  This is one of the best AOL political blogs.  I just wish frosty40m would post more often, because he has worthwhile things to say.

I wanted to comment on his post of 07/29/04, Why I Support the Troops but Not the Commander-in-Chief.

In it, he's explaining how he got from the place he was on 09/11/01 to where he is now in his attitude toward Bush's handling of the Iraq War.  I think many, many Americans have made a similar journey in their attitudes.  Including me, to a large extent, as far as the specific issues go.

No, I don't mean that I was a Bush fan in 2001!  The spirit of Old Hickory would haunt my dreams every night if that had been the case.  I'll partially explain in commenting on his post.

Frosty40m explains that he supported the Afghan War, hoping there would be a quick and effective strike targeting Bin Laden's forces in particular.  My attitude toward that war was pretty much the same.  Strange as it may seem now, I was worried that the Bush administration would fail to act in Afghanistan out of some isolationist instincts or a scrupulous adherence to the Powell Doctrine which had been so influential in the military up until that time.

Frosty40m explains his disappointment with what happened, a disappointment I share:

Then, almost as suddenly as the war began, it seemed to be over and bin Laden, many of his deputies and Omar were still alive and at large. They had escaped into Pakistan. No one knew where they were and worse yet our Commander-in-Chief did not seem to care. After all, he is known for his short attention span.

And he expresses well his criticism of the Iraq War, which I also share:

It soon became clear that we were being rushed into a war in Iraq that was neither necessary nor in the best interest of our nation. Instead of strengthening our hand against terrorism, this war was exactly what bin Laden told the Islamic world would happen. America would invade and occupy a Muslim nation. We were playing directly into bin Ladenhands!  This war would not make America safer or prevent us from being attacked again. In fact, it created more recruits for al-Qaeda and practically guaranteed we would be attacked again. This was when I stopped supporting our Commander-in-Chief. I began to see and hear Americans protesting this war called “traitors,” “idiots,” “leftist,” “left-wing liberals,” “immoral,” “disloyal,” and “untrustworthy” by members of the administration and the Republican Party.

It was then that I realized I had to exercise my First Amendment rights and speak out against the invasion of Iraq and against the efforts of the government to mislead the American people. That is when I started writing commentaries and emailing them to my friends and family. After, our president and the Commander-in-Chief of our military mislead the American people about the end of the war on-board the USS Abraham Lincoln, while soldiers were being killed every day in Iraq, I knew we could no longer trust this president to speak the truth about this war and what was happening.

But something else that struck me in this post was the image that he had prior to the Iraq War of what antiwar protesters were about, largely based on his impression of the anti-Vietnam War protests.  I was reminded again of the book I've been quoting repeatedly, Jerry Lembcke's The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998), which deals with how the reality of the antiwar movement of the 1960s was corrupted in popular culture, assisted by some very conscious ideology beginning in a major way with Richard Nixon and his odious vice president Spiro Agnew - corrupted to the point of being a caricature of reality.

Now, I don't want to romanticize the antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.  Anyone who's been around activist movements - and I do have some personal experience in that regard - knows that along with great seriousness of purpose comes a lot of silliness, faction fighting, egotism, and the same bitching and moaning and miscarried and/or misguided ideas that even the most mainstream political organizations experience.

I know that there have always been those who thought the singer Jackson Browne was hopelessly corny (I've never been one of them).  But his song "Before the Deluge" gives a pretty good image of what I'm talking about:

Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
And for some of them, it was only the moment that mattered

I thought in reading Frosty40m's post, that in reality, most people who came to oppose the Vietnam War, whether or not they marched and carried signs, came to that conviction through some process not terribly unlike the one he describes for himself on the Iraq War.  It's just that the Texas tall tales (aka, lies) that Lyndon Johson came up with pale in comparison to the Bush administration's mega-scam about the non-existent WMDs.  So the process has happened a lot faster for a lot of people on Iraq.

Also, this was a much more straightforward, conscious decision to go from peace to massive invasion, whereas the Vietnam War war was a much longer process of escalating direct involvement in the war there.

And largely what he describes in that post does involve a reality that, despite his previous views of what antiwar protest had been, he came to the conclusion that there were very strong reasons that serious, patriotic Americans feel the need to object to what Bush has done in the Iraq War.

I also wanted to comment on something he says in a thoughtful way about pacifists, but I believe he misunderstands the viewpoint:

I knew there would be the pacifists, who always oppose the use of military force regardless of the reason for its use. Pacifists usually base their objections to war upon religious or moral arguments against killing other human beings and believe the moral thing to do is to “turn the other cheek” when confronted with a conflict or threats to national security. Such views are well-meaning but sorely misguided in my view.

There aren't that many serious pacifists, though some religious groups like the Quakers are.  (Richard Nixon was a Quaker.  But don't blame the Quakers for him!)  Their views don't get much publicity.  You won't hear much about them on Fox News.

But it's too much of an oversimplication to think that serious pacifists are simply about "turning the other cheek."  For one thing, when you look at well-known pacifists like Mohatma Ghandi, Cesar Chavez or Thomas Merton, they held a strong sense of duty to change unjust and destructive social conditions and to remove the sources of violence.  Genuine pacifists are usually anything but passive in their attitude toward society.

Pacifists also are as capable as anyone else of seeing differences in belligerent parties.  Theydon't imagine that the governments of a Saudi Arabia or an Iran are as conducive to freedom and justice as those of a France or America.  (Oh my God!  I listed France before America!  Who knows what sinister signficance that might have!)  But partly because of that, pacifists aren't as easily suckered by war propaganda that stresses, say, the brutality of Saddam Hussein's internal regime as a justification for war.  They don't forget that war itself is a destructive thing.

Pacifism is also not a matter of rejecting personal defense.  Pacifism is not about refusing to defend oneself against a physical assault.  I've never heard of a pacifist advocating such a thing.  What pacifists focus on most of all is the reality of war. Politicians cutesy analogies aside, war is not about standing up to schoolyard bullies.  War is about governments mobilizing armies and killing people on a massive, organized, systematic scale with the best weapons their science can develop and the most expensive forces they can squeeze their taxpayers to provide.

Everyone says that war should only be waged when it becomes the lesser evil to some greater harm.  What pacifists never forget is that even when it's lesser, it's still evil.

I'm not a pacifist myself.  I'm still holding on to the Christian Just War theory, though I'm not sure it can last much longer.  But I want try to get into that particular theological discussion here.  But I'm saying that the pacifists are usually worth listening to seriously, because they take the issues of war far more seriously than just "turn the other cheek."  Which, by the way, is a quotation from Jesus in the Gospels.  So anyone who is trying to refer their choices to Christian principles should be prepared to justify why in some instances we should blow off that particular observation of the man Christians hold to be the Savior of the World.

But since God speaks directly to George W. Bush, he at least doesn't have that problem.