War on Demand

I was born into a world delirious with a sense of hope and possibility. I was born on November 9th, 1989, the night that the Berlin Wall came down. It seems unlikely that my parents could have imagined a more hopeful world for their son, after decades of Cold War. Indeed, for most Americans, the wall came down unexpectedly, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire came as even more of a surprise. The twentieth century had been marked by war, both hot and cold, from its inception. The collapse of the Eastern bloc, and the largely peaceful revolutions that followed, gave many hope that the twenty first century might be one of peace.

The first President Bush proclaimed a New World Order. Francis Fukuyama famously quipped that we might be at the end of history. With no major geopolitical rival, it seemed that the U.S. was prepared to usher in a uni-polar world-system. If you were to have told my parents on November 9th, that our country would stay locked in a state of near constant war for most of my life, they would not have believed you. Who would we be fighting, and why?

But any hope that this new global age might be a peaceful one evaporated during the first Gulf War. Some of my earliest T.V. memories are of grainy footage showing tanks and soldiers in a far-off, somehow, abstract, desert. I didn’t register the American involvement in Somalia, but I was keenly aware of our part in Bosnia and Kosovo. By then I had developed a rabid, adolescent-boy interest in planes, tanks and anything that exploded. I watched with glee as I saw the little model planes scattered around my room come to life, streaking across lead-colored European skies in the soft concave glow of our primordial Mitsubishi tube TV. I saw F-15s, F-16s and even Stealth Fighters head out to bomb, who or what I didn’t know. I wasn’t really interested in why they were there. I liked the hardware. Though thousands of human beings died, I remember being particularly disturbed by only one news story. I had heard that the bad guys had somehow shot down an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter. This, my nine year old self deemed impossible and absurd. I had put so much faith into America’s invincible machines, that to see one of the black titans fall was somehow more disturbing to my young mind than any number of bodies that flashed, mud-caked across screen.

9/11 seemed strangely, apart from all the war and violence I had already seen. It was unfair, a cheap shot, underhanded. Like all eleven-year olds, I was quite vengeful, so I was happy to hear that our army was striking back at the “terrorists” a new word, that invaded our national discourse and our psyches, around that time. I didn’t know what we were striking or where Afghanistan was exactly, but I was glad we were at least doing something. I didn’t know much about geopolitics, but I knew we couldn’t just take it lying down.

I was much more aware during the second Iraq war, and I followed it with intensity that surpassed my interest in Kosovo. I can remember poring over a special edition magazine called “21 Days to Baghdad,” with a friend, as if we were reading the latest edition of Sports Illustrated. And at that point in our lives, it really was just another form of entertainment for us. For adolescents raised on TV war, video game war, and war-games like paintball, and even cowboys and Indians, this was it. This was the show, the game after so many practices. We were going to get to see all the machines do what they’d been made to do. We marveled over that tiny figure and gloated. Just twenty one days to steamroll a country. They didn’t even put up a fight. We pored over charts and diagrams, troop movements and strategy. Little armchair generals that we were, we wondered about how it could have been done better, but eventually gave up to go play in the snow.

In a sort of cosmically ironic, and sad twist of fate, my generation, the one whose parents thought might know peace, has known little but war in our short lives so far. Every generation knows war and violence, and many of us have been insulated from our wars’ direct effects. We do not have shells screaming into our homes, or the staccato clack of gunfire to punctuate our sleep. But almost all of us at least know someone lost forever in all these wars. War for us has become normalized, because it has been pervasive. Our government may cloak them in the language of “police action” or “limited strike,” but they’ve all turned into wars. This disassociation, by language, and by great distance, has contributed to war becoming the status quo. Because we don’t always see the effects of our wars right away, they become even more normal. But the effects are there. War is poisonous to any society. Keeping those wars at a safe, antiseptic, televised, distance, only serves to delay, not stop, that poison. The economic drain that the wars have had has been detailed elsewhere. The toxic psychological aspects of a permanent war society have been less well documented. Consider that a twelve year old today has not known an America without war.

Up through the second Iraq War, I was a spectator. More than that, I was a fan of war. I invested in it the same type of interest that I did in watching the Patriots. I kept score, to see how we were doing, I stayed abreast of the new acquisitions. I was captivated by war. And there was no shortage of stuff to be captivated by. War was constantly on my TV screen, in the newspapers, and on the minds of adults. I even began to catch snippets on the screeching incarnation of the internet that was AOL. For the first Iraq War I can even remember a series of trading cards, just like the baseball cards I treasured.

I was totally entranced by the spectacle that was being beamed into my developing brain. The “Shock and Awe” campaign was not only meant to affect Iraqi morale. It had a deep and indelible impact on me, as well as the rest of the American people. It was hard not to be captivated by the sheer power of the spectacle before us. It should come as no surprise that the word “spectacle” itself comes from the Latin spectaculum, or show. These shows were frequently the circus portion of the famous bread and circuses meant to distract the Roman populace as the Empire crumbled.

Somewhere along the way, I shook free of the powerful spectacle set before me. Perhaps it was the inherent difficulty of sustaining a ten year spectacle, or glamorizing house to house fighting, and kids, both ours and theirs, blown apart by roadside bombs.

Perhaps I just grew up.

In any case, as we approach what could be our next war in Syria, I am no longer a spectator. First, we should be clear that so-called “limited strikes” would indeed be a war. Listen to Secretary Kerry’s closing statement in front of the House on September 4th. It would almost be comical to hear him play fast and loose with language the way he does, if the consequences weren’t so dire. He admits that military strikes might “technically” be acts of war. I can assure you, that missile strikes against Washington, or Westminster, or Moscow would be considered acts of war. Why would Damascus be any different? Syria may not have a democratically elected government, but they remain a sovereign nation. Just because the West deems Syria a pariah state, does not mean that its sovereignty evaporates in a puff of smoke. If we judiciously apply our own rules of engagement to our own actions (a core tenet of any morality) we can arrive at no other conclusion than that any military strike on a sovereign nation is an act of war.

Kerry’s defense is truly, mind-numbingly asinine. He claims:

“I don’t believe we’re going to war… I just don’t believe that.  Going to war is mobilizing a force, asking people to join up, fighting a long campaign, committing your troops on the ground, fighting to win and so forth… The president is asking for permission to carry out a limited, military action, yes, but one that does not put Americans in the middle of the battle, no boots will be on the ground, whereby we enforce a standard of behavior that is critical to our troops, critical to our country, critical to the world and most importantly, if you look at what the option is, if, if, if, you don’t want more extremism, you should vote for this.”

While it may be interesting that Secretary Kerry lets us know what he “believes” constitutes a war, his beliefs count for very little. Unfortunately for his argument, the UN Definition of Aggression, from 3314, Article 3, section b) states that aggression can be defined as: “Bombardment by the armed forces of a State against the territory of another State or the use of any weapons by a State against the territory of another State.” Kerry seeks to assuage the public’s fear of “boots on the ground” after nearly a decade of horrific fighting in Iraq. But even the “limited strikes” he advocates constitute acts of war. It is truly ironic that Kerry suggests that these strikes would “enforce a standard of behavior.” What standard of behavior do we enforce by committing acts of war and washing our hands of them by cloaking them in deceptive language?

I applaud Kerry for wanting to keep American boots off the ground and keep American soldiers out of danger. However, American soldiers are not the only actors at risk in wars. Our leaders seem to have the same blind faith in our weapons of war that I had in the stealth fighter as a young boy. They assume missile strikes against Assad would be surgical and precise. While our guided missile technology is impressive, there will be collateral damage, in terms of innocent Syrian lives. I understand that Syrians are already dying by the score, but the fact that Kerry does not even acknowledge the potential drawbacks of these surgical strikes is telling. It shows a major hole in his thinking, and indeed in the thinking of many U.S. military planners, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of civilian dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Finally, it is laughable to hear someone advocating for a war in the Middle East to suggest that we will see a reduction in extremism with a civil war blown wide open. Kerry is delusional if he cannot read the recent history. All of our police actions have lead to an upsurge of extremist activity, and even the democratic revolutions of the Arab Spring have seen extremist parties come to power. To assume that an intensified civil war in Syria will reduce extremism, especially with a rebel coalition comprised of elements of Hezbollah and Al Qaeda is irrational and dangerous.

The Obama administration has maintained that the rationale behind a limited strike will be to send a message to the Assad regime. That message, should be that chemical weapons are not to be used. President Obama claimed that he wanted to make sure: “the norm against the use of chemical weapons is maintained.” While we certainly cannot hold President Obama responsible for the actions of his predecessors, the simple fact is that there is no norm against chemical weapons. At least, not when Western powers benefit from their use. The U.S. Air Force dropped thousands of tons of defoliant on Vietnam. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons in both the Iran-Iraq War, and against his own Kurdish citizens, to relatively little Western backlash. The West clearly picks and chooses when it will enforce this “norm” and whatever Assad’s crimes may be, we should not delude ourselves into believing that we maintain a benevolent world order for the good of all. Ultimately, a strike by the U.S. and allies might encourage the Assad regime to use more chemical weapons, if they sense an existential threat with no other options.

The United States would do well to heed the warnings and cautionary advice of other nations. The EU has decided to wait for UN weapons inspectors to issue their reports. We know chemical agents were used, but not by whom. The Russians have argued for even more caution. It is easy to brush off Russian protests by suggesting that they “always” act as a geopolitical counterbalance to the U.S. It is also true that the Russians have their last non-Soviet foreign military base in Syria, and that Syria is a large customer of the Russian arms industry. But a failure to fully engage with Russian concerns over intervention in Syria, is actually a failure to fully engage with history. Russian foreign policy has been marked by ant-interventionism above all for almost a century now. After the Russian Revolution, the Allied powers sent expeditionary forces to fight on the White side of the Russian Civil War. Consequently, Soviet, and Russian foreign ministers may seem almost obsessively pre-occupied with foreign intervention. However, a close look at their national history shows a pattern of pernicious Western intervention and invasion. The Russians know, historically, exactly how horrible it is to have foreign powers intervene in a civil war. We would do well to at least heed their concerns. Though the Russians have their own interests in Syria, their opposition to a strike is just the latest manifestation of a nearly century long policy of historically rooted non-intervention.

I grew up with war. It has pervaded American society for most of my life. Just as the spectacle of war wore off on me as I matured, I believe it has also worn off on the American public. As I’ve called or written my Congresswomen to express my concern over another war, I’ve seen others do the same. Americans areengaged over this war. I only hope fatigue does not make us forget. If we steadfastly tell our representatives to do what is best for America, to wage peace not war, then we may yet recapture some of that jubilation, and sense of possibility, that was there the night the Wall came down. A hope for a new age, not locked in ideological conflict, and chopped up into cold iron blocs.