War and the United States
P. Schultz
Rosa
Brooks, a sometime employee of the Department of Defense, sometime lawyer, and
full time mother, has written a book entitled: How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales
from the Pentagon. It is an interesting book, whose argument may be summed
up as follows: Due to advancing technology, the boundary or boundaries between
war and peace have been or are being erased. This is, Brooks argues, both an
advance – now we can wage “humanitarian wars” and pinpoint those enemies we
wish to assassinate – and a threat – overuse of the military promises to render
it incapable of protecting us. So we had better come to grips with our new
situation and make things right.
A couple of
thoughts struck me as I read Brooks’ monograph. First, there is no or little
mention of politics throughout her book. That is, according to Brooks, we are
in the midst of situation that has undermined the boundaries between war and
peace but this has nothing to do with politics or, put differently, politics
has nothing to do with the situation we are in. So, it’s as if all our
politicians can do is to react to forces that they have had nothing to with
unleashing. Which isn’t all that persuasive insofar as it is our politicians
who have built, willingly and even eagerly at times, the military-industrial
complex or the warfare state in which we are living. For example, the
Department of Defense was created after World War II, despite the opposition,
often intense and thoughtful, of conservatives. Meaning that it wasn’t
necessary to create that department or to build “the Pentagon,” from which
Brooks’ tales come. And if we as a nation hadn’t decided to create the
Department of Defense – replacing what was called “the Department of War” –
would the boundaries between war and peace be as blurry, as amorphous as they
are today? In other words, we just didn’t “fall into” our current situation; we
and our politicians chose it.
Secondly,
it seems to me that Brooks’ argument that our situation is new or significantly
different today than in times past is questionable. As Brooks knows, Thomas
Hobbes, whose political philosophy is connected to, underlines our political
order, viewed the world as characterized by “a war of all against all,” that
is, a “state of nature” in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short,” or something like that. So, governments are created to render life more
livable, to make human beings relatively free, prosperous, and secure. But
Brooks does not recognize that this just means that “the state” doesn’t
eradicate war; it merely manages war, tries to contain it, as best it can.
Hence, at a very deep level, the boundaries between war and peace have always
been unclear, with the phenomenon of “peace” being less real, more ephemeral
than the phenomenon of “war.” It is not for nothing that our highest political
office is occupied by one labeled the “commander in chief,” and not the
“caretaker in chief.”
So, if the
lines between war and peace have always been less than clear, as we view our
world, and if politics has something or should have something to do with
clarifying these lines, then it would seem to me that without a consideration
of the political choices that have been made in the name of the United States,
e.g., the choice to create a Department of Defense and a Pentagon, any attempt
to ameliorate our current situation for the sake of securing more peace and
less war, as Brooks claims to want to do, is bound to fail. If, as I suspect,
we as a people have embraced war as the means to improving the human condition,
the cascade of war and, worse, of militarism will continue, destroying in its
course those attempts, such as the laws of war, to limit or even humanize war.
As an
addendum, consider the following analysis by Jonathan Schell, as it seems
appropriate here:
The Military Half
by Jonathan Schell
“Like most
of the American military in Vietnam, the Army men who evacuated the villagers
from Tuyet Diem and then destroyed the village saw what they were doing as only
the first stage of a long-range benevolent plan for all of South Vietnam, in
which the country would be rebuilt and then would develop a free and democratic
government. The first stage of the plan – the destruction of the villages –
usually went smoothly and gave rise to considerable optimism….But the second
stage – the stage in which the Vietnamese and their American civil affairs
advisers were to rebuild and reorganize….and were to stitch the whole society
back together again – was infinitely more difficult… [A]nd the people who were
to carry it out could not even begin to match the scale of destruction with
their construction….Many optimistic Americans, including reporters as well as
military men and civilians…, tended to set off the destruction caused by the
military effort against the construction resulting from the civil affairs
effort, seeing the two results as separate but balanced ‘sides’ of the war;
and, looking at our commitment of men and materials, they were often favorably
impressed by the size of the constructive effort, almost as though it was being
carried out in one country while the military effort was being carried out in
another. But, of course, the two programs were being carried out in the same
provinces and villages, and the people who received the allotments of rice were
the same people whose villages had been destroyed by bombs. The Vietnamese…felt
the effects of the two programs, not as two abstract ‘sides’…but as a
continuing experience… and, from their point of view, the aid given them …
amounted to only a tiny measure of compensation … for enormous losses and
suffering. Civil affairs officials … were puzzled when these hungry, tired
people showed little gratitude for the help that the Americans and the GVN were
giving them….” [196-98]
“Because along with the destruction
of villages, American military operations brought death to many civilians,
American civil affairs workers, no matter how well intentioned, no matter how
well supplied they might someday become, could never, from the point of view of
the villagers, ‘balance’ the sufferings caused by the military, or undo what
they had done, which was often absolute and irreversible …. American civil
affairs officials and workers faced a situation in which the cumulative effect
of many abortive programs – all of them accompanied from 1965 on by the full
force of the Americans’ overwhelming fire power – had been to bring disruption,
destruction, and death to the country side on an immense scale and to leave
among the people an indelible bitterness that no new program – unless it was a program to raise the dead –
could hope to overcome.” [205-206]
Absent the power to resurrect the
dead, as Schell puts it, the use of military power for humanitarian purposes is
bound to fail, is bound to become inhuman.
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