Tuesday, October 05, 2004
The comprehensive armed forces post
After reading Marmaniac's Band of Brother post, Derek's comments on the Pat Tillman post, reading a bit of Catch-22, and seeing the uproar about Kerry and Bush's service, I've decided to do a post detailing my feelings about armed forces from the perspective of a civilian who has no intention of serving.
Firstly, I want to clarify my previous post. What I essentially wanted to say in my previous post, but was too ineloquent to say was that I don't agree with Tillman's belief that joining the army was the right thing to do, although I wanted to make sure I complimented him for his strength of conviction. Basically, I would have felt similarly about him had he decided to become a missionary trying to spread christianity to Afghanistan, or if he decided to quit football and work for the Bush campaign.
Enough of that. What I want to discuss here is whether or not the armed forces really are a noble or worthwhile institution. On the surface, almost certainly not. They are a group of people designed and trained to kill and make war, and the age-old argument is that if nobody fought, there'd be no war. Well, I'm not going to pretend that it is that simple, because sometimes wars do need to be fought and regardless of what one person wants, other people are going to want to fight. But that doesn't excuse most wars in human history. As Marmaniac pointed out, WWII was not fought to prevent or stop genocide (maybe the only good reason to go to war, human rights violations) but really to stop an a landgrab by the Germans and prevent a fascist rise to power. But have we ever gone to war to stop human rights violations? Arguably, in more recent times, maybe in Bosnia. But why not Rwanda, why not Darfur, why not in various regions of South America? No, more often that not, armies and war are a tool to promot genocide and murder than to stop it.
So I will give credit to the US armies in that regard. As far as armies go, they're pretty benign, and most of the soldiers in the armed forces are in there for the right reasons: (including Tillman) they believe that they can help promote peace in Iraq, Afghanistan, stop terrorism, etc. At least those are partly the reasons. Obviously many of the soldiers in the armed forces are there for their careers and scholarships. But I'm talking about how they feel about their service in the armed forces. And barring a few bad eggs, like the ones that humiliated the prisoners in Iraq, most are probably more aware of human rights than any other soldiers in the past.
But the fact remains; they're still allying themselves with an institution that in theory, kills people, and in practice, kills people. And the US army, more than ever, is being used as a political tool rather than as a group that is only used in the most dire circumstances. So in one regard, the US army is shifting away from the traditional role of conquerors and murderers, which is good, but also shifting away from the ideal role of armies, which is to be used only in self-defense. With the US sending its armies pre-emptively and into countries which are of no threat to the US, it's hard to see the armed forces as that noble.
Another thing I want to talk about is the public perception of wars. Two good cases in point are WWII and Vietnam. The perception of each was/is vastly different; WWII being the good war and Vietnam being the bad war. Yet somehow the Bush campaign has turned Kerry's war protests as unamerican and disrespectful. On one hand, the Vietnam war was more recent, and veterans and contemporaries of that war are in power, but on the other hand, it has been largely blasted on all sides by anybody with a brain. But WWII was a war that was deemed good, necessary, useful. Our boys didn't kill too many innocents, they sort of helped the Jews (a little late), and we asserted ourselves as the dominant nation in the world. Vietnam, we committed massacres, we fought against people that had done no wrong to us, and we involved ourselves in a civil war that we really had no business in. It was a largely political war, designed to give us a military foothold in a region with an uncertain future and where the US thought its interests should be protected. Sound familiar? Oh yeah, and of course, we lost.
The armed forces are neccessary in the world today, unfortunately. As I see it, there should be two acceptable ways to use an army- 1) Use them only defensively and when your own country's security and safety are threatened, and 2) Use them offensively to protect human rights.
But the US has instead gotten a weird perversion of the two. We don't defend human rights, as is evident in Rwanda and Darfur. But we did use them offensively, ostensibly to protect our security... in Iraq. Afghanistan would have fallen into use 1. But Iraq and Vietnam reeked of political wars that were done to do preemptively protect our interests. And we violated the sovereignty of those nations.
And why I am discussing all these past wars with respect to the nobility of joining up? Well, that's the nature of the beast. When you join up, you're beinc controlled by a bunch of politicians who may or may not be using the soldiers for the right reasons. If you don't agree with the war in Iraq, then it's too bad. You don't get to make the decision to go to war. Some suits in Washington do. And they probably don't care about nobility and the individual soldier's values.
So that's what you're joining when you ally yourself with the armed forces: something useful, practical, necessary probably not evil, but not noble, at least not by my standards.
Firstly, I want to clarify my previous post. What I essentially wanted to say in my previous post, but was too ineloquent to say was that I don't agree with Tillman's belief that joining the army was the right thing to do, although I wanted to make sure I complimented him for his strength of conviction. Basically, I would have felt similarly about him had he decided to become a missionary trying to spread christianity to Afghanistan, or if he decided to quit football and work for the Bush campaign.
Enough of that. What I want to discuss here is whether or not the armed forces really are a noble or worthwhile institution. On the surface, almost certainly not. They are a group of people designed and trained to kill and make war, and the age-old argument is that if nobody fought, there'd be no war. Well, I'm not going to pretend that it is that simple, because sometimes wars do need to be fought and regardless of what one person wants, other people are going to want to fight. But that doesn't excuse most wars in human history. As Marmaniac pointed out, WWII was not fought to prevent or stop genocide (maybe the only good reason to go to war, human rights violations) but really to stop an a landgrab by the Germans and prevent a fascist rise to power. But have we ever gone to war to stop human rights violations? Arguably, in more recent times, maybe in Bosnia. But why not Rwanda, why not Darfur, why not in various regions of South America? No, more often that not, armies and war are a tool to promot genocide and murder than to stop it.
So I will give credit to the US armies in that regard. As far as armies go, they're pretty benign, and most of the soldiers in the armed forces are in there for the right reasons: (including Tillman) they believe that they can help promote peace in Iraq, Afghanistan, stop terrorism, etc. At least those are partly the reasons. Obviously many of the soldiers in the armed forces are there for their careers and scholarships. But I'm talking about how they feel about their service in the armed forces. And barring a few bad eggs, like the ones that humiliated the prisoners in Iraq, most are probably more aware of human rights than any other soldiers in the past.
But the fact remains; they're still allying themselves with an institution that in theory, kills people, and in practice, kills people. And the US army, more than ever, is being used as a political tool rather than as a group that is only used in the most dire circumstances. So in one regard, the US army is shifting away from the traditional role of conquerors and murderers, which is good, but also shifting away from the ideal role of armies, which is to be used only in self-defense. With the US sending its armies pre-emptively and into countries which are of no threat to the US, it's hard to see the armed forces as that noble.
Another thing I want to talk about is the public perception of wars. Two good cases in point are WWII and Vietnam. The perception of each was/is vastly different; WWII being the good war and Vietnam being the bad war. Yet somehow the Bush campaign has turned Kerry's war protests as unamerican and disrespectful. On one hand, the Vietnam war was more recent, and veterans and contemporaries of that war are in power, but on the other hand, it has been largely blasted on all sides by anybody with a brain. But WWII was a war that was deemed good, necessary, useful. Our boys didn't kill too many innocents, they sort of helped the Jews (a little late), and we asserted ourselves as the dominant nation in the world. Vietnam, we committed massacres, we fought against people that had done no wrong to us, and we involved ourselves in a civil war that we really had no business in. It was a largely political war, designed to give us a military foothold in a region with an uncertain future and where the US thought its interests should be protected. Sound familiar? Oh yeah, and of course, we lost.
The armed forces are neccessary in the world today, unfortunately. As I see it, there should be two acceptable ways to use an army- 1) Use them only defensively and when your own country's security and safety are threatened, and 2) Use them offensively to protect human rights.
But the US has instead gotten a weird perversion of the two. We don't defend human rights, as is evident in Rwanda and Darfur. But we did use them offensively, ostensibly to protect our security... in Iraq. Afghanistan would have fallen into use 1. But Iraq and Vietnam reeked of political wars that were done to do preemptively protect our interests. And we violated the sovereignty of those nations.
And why I am discussing all these past wars with respect to the nobility of joining up? Well, that's the nature of the beast. When you join up, you're beinc controlled by a bunch of politicians who may or may not be using the soldiers for the right reasons. If you don't agree with the war in Iraq, then it's too bad. You don't get to make the decision to go to war. Some suits in Washington do. And they probably don't care about nobility and the individual soldier's values.
So that's what you're joining when you ally yourself with the armed forces: something useful, practical, necessary probably not evil, but not noble, at least not by my standards.
# posted by Stuart @ 3:49 PM 
