Are the soldiers the war?

In the previous post, I talked again about the notion that critics of the Iraq War were somehow hostile to soldiers.  The war's fans have been trying very hard, and using quite a bit of imagination, to make that case against today's opponents of the war. 

The idea of soldiers and their sacrifices becoming a justification for further war and sacrifice is, of course, nothing new.  Abraham Lincoln's brief and immortal speech at Gettysburg on 11/19/1863, made good use of the idea, putting it in semi-religious terms:

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate - we cannot consecrate - we cannot hallow - this ground.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.  The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never foreget what they did here.  [There is certainly some measure of irony now in that comment, since Lincoln's speech has become iconic.]  It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It's worth noting here that, though most Americans probably think of this as a tribute to all the soldiers lost, North and South, he was making a tribute to the soldiers of the North.  The "unfinished work" of which he spoke was certainly not the unfinished work of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy nor of the men who fought for it, the work of destroying the nation and making slavery and white supremacy permanent and inviolable institution.

In fact, I wonder how much the postwar, anti-Reconstruction, anti-democracy "Redemption" movement in the South, with its all-too-successful ideology of the Lost Cause, may have contributed to the particular forms this debate over "honoring the soldiers" takes in the United States.  Neo-Confederates today promote rightwing and racist politics under the pretence of "honoring their ancestors" who fought for slavery in the Confederate army during the American Civil War.

But the cold reality is that that some wars are not worth the lives expended in them.  And to send more and more people to die heroically for their country in such a war is not a good thing in any sane view.  Outside the persecution fantasies of our superpatriots, very few people blame ordinary soldiers for the policies of the government that decides on wars.  But responsible citizens in a democracy have to take a critical attitude about what policies are being followed in wars - whether we support the particular war or not.  To pretend that doing this is "dishonoring the soldiers" is simply an effort to stigmatize criticism as unpatriotic.

The First World War is worth remembering in this regard.  Though today, most Americans think of that war as at leaast somewhat of a positive thing (to the extent they think of it at all!), especially after the later conflict with Germany in the Second World War, that was not the general impression in the years following that bloody conflict.  Other wars have also note fared well in the public memory, though of course there will always be those who romanticize war.  John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Culture of Contentment (1992):

World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter.  The party victoriously in power at the time, the Democrats, was rewarded in 1920 with a stern defeat at the polls.  World War II, made inescapable by Japanese and German initiation or declaration of war, has survived with better reputation.  However, the Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejections of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible.  In the longer run, it cannot be doubted, serious war deeply disturbs the political economy of contentment.

In his valuable book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998), Jerry Lembcke talks about how Bush the Elder used the idea of soldiers as the meaning of the war in a particular way in the buildup to the Gulf War of 1991.  In August of 1990, as a buildup of American troops began in the Gulf in response to Iraq' invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein announced that foreigners in Iraq would be held there as hostages (although of course he did not use that term).  The senior Bush used the image of the hostages to suggest to the American public that our soldiers were being held hostage to Saddam in a similar way.  As Lembcke writes:

Headlines declaring that Saddam Hussein was taking hostages dominated the news of the war for the next several days.  The hostage stories were combined with stories about troops in the Gulf in ways that, at times, conveyed the impression that it was U.S. troops who were the hostages. Goerge [H.W.] Bush abetted the comingling of images by choosing the Veterans of Foreign War (VFW) convention on August 21 [1990] as the occasion on which to declare the beginning of the "hostage crisis."  Other than making the declaration and saying that he would hold the Iraqis responsible for the safety of Americans in Iraq, Bush was noncommittal with regard to the so-called hostages.  His speech ... moved seamlessly from hostages to troops, to whom he also pledged his support.  Then, in a manner that echoed the news media's profiling of civilian individuals and families in Iraq, Bush read family profiles of U.S. soldiers already in the Gulf.  This was very personal and moving, but was this supposed to be a speech about civilian hostages or military troops?

And then came the yellow-ribbon campaign:

The ultimate comingling of hostage and troo-support symbolism was int he use of yellow ribbons - the quintessential hostage/prisoner symbol [my emphasis] - for a support-the-troops symbo.  Still, it was not a given that Americans would transfer their emotional support for individuals to support for policy.  Someone would have to say that the two were linked - or that they were not linked.

It's well worth noting, given today's Republican posturing that only pro-Iraq War Republicans "support the troops" that the critical support in that regard came from the Democratic National Committee (DNC):

On September 16, the DNC expressed support for the American troops in the Persian Gulf while criticizing the Republican administration that put them there...  This support-the-troops-but-not-the-policy statement signaled to the public that there was a debatable issue while evading the important question of how one could oppose the policy without opposing the troops.  Therein was the rub.  On the surface, the statement legitimized opposition to the U.S. military role.  But it did so in the context of hysteria over hostages and troops-as-hostages that was several weeks in the making and already had a gripon the emotions of the American people.  Could opponents of the policy voice their opposition without appearing to be attacking the troops?  Not likely.  Nor was it likely that the yellow-ribbon campaigners would translate their support for the troops into oposition to the war and demand that the troops be brought home.  In reality, the DNC had constructed a one-sided discourse that mobilized the pro-war sentiments of the American people.

I don't mean to suggest any direct analogy to today.  In the case of the invasion of Kuwait, even Democrats who opposed immediate military action in early 1991 saw the invasion as an act of war and a legitimate cause of war to free Kuwait from Iraq.  As did virtually the entire world.

But part of the reason that "support the troops" so easily equates to "support the war" in the minds of many Americans is that one side-effect of the all-volunteer army of the last 30 years has been a sentimentalization of soldiers that makes many people too willing to give them chances to die heroically for their country.

Wesley Clark made this point very well in an interview with Duncan Murrell, published in "The Art of Politics," Oxford-American May/June 2003.  Murrell writes:

The irony, as [Clark] sees it, is that while the relationship between the military and the general public has improved since [the] Vietnam [War], the experience of actually serving in the military has become less common.  The result is a perception of soldiers as the embodiments of ideals - duty, honor, country - reinforced by a sentimentality unsullied by first-hand knowledge of soldiering.  Such admiration for the military is powerful, but not quite powerful enough to drive the sons and daughters of the middle and upper classes into recruiting offices.  "We've been the beneficiaries of that lack of familiarity," Clark says, which has allowed the leadership of the United States to use the military as a symbol, sending soldiers off to wars that don't affect most American families directly by putting their children in harm's way. [my emphasis] ...

[A]n ambivalence toward leaders, Clark says, is common in any organization, including the military.  But such healthy, educated skepticism is missing when Americans make soldiers into symbols, or when political parties make generals into saviors.  This naivete is symptomatic of something very dangerous, in Clark's view.  "The paradox is, or the danger is, that when everybody doesn't have an obligation to serve, the costs of service can become disconnected from the rhetoric of governments. [my emphasis]

And from the policies of governments, as well.

Finally, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who has studied, among many other things, the My Lai massacre, wrote in Made In Iraq: The New Antiwar Veteran Boston Globe 08/25/04 (link here is to CommonDreams.org reprint):

[I]t turns out that Iraq veterans have much in common with their older compatriots who fought in Vietnam. Both groups were involved in a confusing counterinsurgency war conducted in an alien, hostile environment against a nonwhite enemy as elusive as he was dangerous. The result in both cases was an atrocity-producing situation -- one structured militarily and psychologically so that ordinary soldiers with no special history of violence or antisocial behavior were suddenly capable of killing or torturing civilians who were loosely designated as "the enemy."

A significant number of Vietnam veterans found meaning in opposing their war while it was in progress. The hearings on American war crimes and the throwing away of medals were their way of rejecting the war and holding not just themselves but their country accountable.

Their impact on the nation was different from that of other antiwar protesters because they were able to bring the Vietnam death scene directly to the American public, as John Kerry did in his 1971 testimony before a US Senate subcommittee, when he asked, "How we can ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

What Kerry and other antiwar veterans were contesting was the wartime tradition that in order to make sure the fallen did not "die in vain," one must rally round the flag, assert the nobility of the cause, and prosecute the war ever more vigorously.Instead, they invoked the authority of the dead to oppose rather than perpetuate the war. [my emphasis]

This kind of alternative is byno means new -- it was powerfully expressed by writers surviving World War I and goes back as far as Homer.