Casualties of War

Here’s an interesting point about some of the more and less obvious losers from the war:

  • The domestic peace movement: The general proposition that war is bad is correct, but the peace movement’s specifics are horrible. Don’t oust Al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan? Arguing that Bush is worse than Saddam? Puke-ins and street theater? Their credibility is gone.
  • American restraint: War, American-style, in terms of American costs, is not a hellish affair. Given that the costs of war are relatively low, would we be more willing to engage in more wars and adventures? With the previous point about the discredited peace movement, the answer is quite possibly yes.

Reading that blog post made me realize why I’m so irritated by many of the anti-war arguments that get passed around, and why I really, really want the left to come up with arguments that aren’t slogans:

There’s an anecdote about a Canadian professor discussing American power with his students. One student asks, what, with America being so powerful, can constrain it? The professor replied, 250 million Americans.

Yes, American power is constrained by the American people. Cynics may argue that this is a poor constraint, that Americans are ill-informed and easily mislead by their leaders. I don’t believe this is true, certainly not over the long term: Americans may take a while to do the right thing, but the right thing does get done, even if it takes decades. I think Churchill has a quote along those lines.

The problem right now is that constraint on the left has been discredited; it has self-destructed through its own self-righteousness and shallow arguments and genuine glee at American failure. I was appalled by DeGenova; I cringed at Michael Moore at the Oscars. How are these slogan-arguments going to sway America? How are these going to rally mainstream America to your side? Quite possibly, these antics will remove some of the constraints on American military action, leading to what you oppose. And that really would be a danger.

So, you may ask, what anti-war arguments would I agree with? They’d probably be along the lines where interests and costs (human, financial, moral) would be weighed. War with North Korea? Right now, the costs far, far outweigh any possible benefit that can be achieved with war; and diplomacy hasn’t been to be a failure, like it had been for Iraq. Syria? Assad is quite possibly a moron, but it hasn’t been shown that military action is required to make him realize where his self-interests should lie. Elsewhere? We’ll have to judge these case by case. War is bad, but not categorily the worst thing. At times, the soft powers of diplomacy and moral suasion reach their limits, and hard power, if the cause is right, must be used.

Update: I came across this piece about a frivilous case being submitted to the International Criminal Court, accusing the US/UK of commiting war crimes. Again, we see self-righteousness and an inability to think clearly about matters of war and peace. The result, the author fears, is that idiotic stunts like this will only give ammunition to the Republicans who want the ICC to just go away.

Michael Tomasky in The American Prospect has a similar point, invoking De Genova specifically, among others. The right will use De Genova and his ilk to caricature their critics on the left, leaving the policy debate far poorer (if there is a debate at all). And, really, it’s in our common interest to see a liberal, free state arise in Iraq, even if the necessary precondition was a war formulated by the neo-cons. The left’s cause should be to help make sure that the United States keeps its promises to the Iraqi people; the left’s cause must not be to hope for American failure.

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