Their War, Our War

I have to disagree with your views on pacifists. I don't agree with them and their world-view, but let's not forget the story of Army medic Desomnd Doss, WW2 veteran and recipient of the Medal of Honor. He refused to take up arms or kill his fellow man (even at the risk of his own life, he shielded wounded men with his body and took a Japanese bullet for it), yet readily laid his life at death's door for his fellow soldiers.

http://www.homeofheroes.com/profiles/profiles_doss2.html

Simply an amazing man of principle and a true hero. I'm not comparing him to the writer of that comment, but let's not paint an entire group with a wide brush either.

As for the question how do you sustain a war when only a tiny fraction of the nation are involved in it... my answer is that you can't. No epic struggle this nation has undertaken has ever been won upon the backs of so few of its people. This one won't be different.

The Bush administration ignored much more than just Arab history when it chose to invade Iraq. It also ignored history in general. By not encouraging or requiring sacrifice from the general population, even in the form of a tax, it condemned the endeavor to ultimate failure. Our military is strong, yes. Our men and women faithful and hardworking. Miracle-workers they are not.

The burden of war is not between a tiny fraction of Americans in the military and the rest of Americans. There certainly are two communities, but the community of Americans involved in the war directly or indirectly is large. Read the obituaries of soldiers killed. In town after town, suburb after suburb, city after city, each funeral or burial observance draws hundreds of attendees who wish to pay their respects for the ultimate sacrifice. For each soldier, there is the soldier's families and kin network, there are the soldier's friends and former school mates, there are the veterans of other wars who stand morally and emotionally beside him or her, and there are the sympathetizers, who want by their presence at a funeral to show support. Notice also that "military" includes the National Guard and Reserves, who are home based. When a Guard or Reserve unit goes for training and is called for duty, entire communities and counties are affected. To see the sociology of this community involvement, read any of the suburban daily newspapers or weekly newspapers in the country outside of major cities (whose newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, seldom notice what most Americans feel or do). A purported division between a tiny fraction of Americans in the military and the rest of Americans is simply in error.

Man, people like that make me glad I'm 4F. Because I'd be really annoyed if I had to fight for them.

Pacifists deserve everything they get. Somebody that isn't willing to defend himself doesn't deserve to be defended.

Obviously, Spade, you didn't read my comment.

Spade,

Just to emphasize the point, two classmates of mine, one from high school, one college, served as combat medics in SVN. Both refused to carry arms; one received the Silver Star, the other the Bronze Star, for in-combat actions. (A third spent the same period at Ft. Sam Houston in the White Coats program, getting injected with various potions.)

Sometimes life is more complicated than you thought.

Well, I think the problem with a pacifist is not that they aren't willing to fight for their own country, but that they are perfectly happy to stand by and watch while millions of people in another country get slaughtered. And not only will they not do anything about it, many of them actively sabotage the attempt of others to intervene.

I lost many family members in the Holocaust, and we said "never again". And now we just sit here and watch while people are killed by the tens of thousands in Africa, and so many people advocate pulling out of Iraq, fully knowing how many will likely die, not just in Iraq but region-wide?

That isn't pacifism, that's a lack of empathy for the fellow human which sends a chill down my spine. I wouldn't want to kill anyone but if I saw them mowing down innocent civilians I'd grab a gun and get cracking. Some things we should just not put up with, and violence is not only a reasonable response, it is the only effective response. As unpalatable as that seems, I think it's simply immoral to refuse to intervene.

Joel and SteveH (et al.), my mistake. I did not mean to sully their memories, and I regret the broad brush. My ire was still subsiding.

However, I think we have precious few of them around. Nicholas hit the X-ring... "the problem with a pacifist is not that they aren't willing to fight for their own country, but that they are perfectly happy to stand by and watch while millions of people in another country get slaughtered. And not only will they not do anything about it, many of them actively sabotage the attempt of others to intervene."

"The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security."

--George Orwell

Wow, some of the comments in the Post Q&A were absolutely the most ignorant, inane comments and questions I have ever read.

Apparently people forget the disconnect from the military and society was imposed by society itself. Not only did we reject wholescale participation in the services by amending the draft, (so college kids didn't go to war) we eventually scraped it entirely. Furthermore, many elitist intellectual universities have forced off the ROTC. While many may provide transportation and support to those who choose to enroll in ROTC classes at nearby univesities, the severance is nearly whole. You cannot even find a class that teaches any military science, much less military history at any elite institution. I know at my school you cannot.

Society has distanced itself from the military.

I always remind myself of the difference between a pacifist, and a man of peace.

A pacifist will let someone hit him (or you) in the face until he/you fall(s) down.

A man of peace may let you hit once, but will put an end to the hitting soon thereafter.

Pacifist is another name for Coward.

I know some will take me to task for this opinion, but that's just the way it goes.

Who would you rather stand with? My choice is obvious. The examples of combat Medics are examples of men of peace in a time of war. They are NOT cowards.

However, a person who refuses to defend himself, his family, or his nation in ANY way is, in my opinion, a pacifist/coward.

GregS

When the book, "Decline and Fall of the American Empire" is finally written, I believe the gap between the military and society at large will be a central theme.

I wonder how it is that people can be so aloof... aloof about the threat of terror and Islamic fundamentalism and aloof of the dangers of a million men and women with guns who are growing more and more distanced from the civilian population.

Do these same people ever read about pit bulls that attack their owner?

I thought that on the whole it was a fair article. To me it highlights 3 things:

1) The nation is not being asked to sacrifice (e.g. in terms of paying the bill) so people don't.

2) Without some sort of National Service the gap will grow. I support a draft-but only if there is a meaningful basic training with emotional hardness of earlier years. The will never do that because they want to continue social experimentation.....

3) Eventually-the folks serving are going to get tired of getting 15 months out 9 months back and are going to vote with their feet. People who are being lulled into a false sense of security by high retention rates now are going to be shocked when it happens. There is a train wreck coming in terms of personnel and equipment that DOD refuses to address.

Bottom line was and is the military needs to be larger and if it takes a draft to get MEN to serve-so be it.

(No I do not support drafting women...)

For point #3... this is VERY true. Some people in this country are in for a rude awakening when this happens.

"Pacifist is another name for Coward."

I don't think this is necessarily true. It seems to me, it has more to do with moral cowardice than physical cowardice. That is, it's much easier to think "all violence is wrong" and therefore the answer to everything is to just talk about it, rather than to think that "sometimes the answer is diplomacy, sometimes the answer is violence, and sometimes it's somewhere inbetween". Because once you think that, you open up a whole can of worms about determining when it's valid to use force, how much, whether merely the threat of force is enough, etc. etc.

So, I'd say it's more laziness than cowardice. Perhaps there is a strong correlation between pacifism and cowardice. But I don't think there's much evidence of that. A lot of pacifists lent themselves to people like Saddam to be used as "human shields". That either takes bravery, or incredibly stupidity, or both. They clearly believe in their philosophy and are willing to put themselves at risk for it. That doesn't make it right, though.

I'm not a violent kind of person, but I recognize that there are circumstances where talk is pointless and counterproductive. I wouldn't negotiate with anyone while they were committing genocide. I'd send in the Marines. Saving innocent lives is sometimes more important than eschewing violence. And yes, those things aren't necessarily incompatible goals.

What interested me about the article is it's counterpoint in Mr. Dean Barnett's essay on the 9/11 generation - the WashPo seems to have a distinctive generational conflict running throughout its narrative.

Perhaps the military can use the following for what will the world's greatest recruiting slogan: "Do you REALLY wanna piss off Mom and Dad?" Before they steal it, where do I go to copyright it? With such a slogan, we really won't need a draft.

On a more serious note, the other string of comments, on the nature of pacifists, is a bit of chickens coming home to roost.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, many Americans labeled themselves as pacifists and then made their way to Iraq to offer themselves as weapons to Saddam Hussein. Little Old Ladies from Peoria guarding powergrid facilities and palaces and the like.

After the invasion, Americans labeled themselves as pacifists and regularly carried out activities meant to disrupt the logistics of the war in Seattle (and lest we forget that servicemembers were likely to be ambushed and beaten to within an inch of their lives by the same self-described pacifists).

There have been Americans who label themselves as pacifists who call for the murder of officers (commissioned and non-commissioned).

There are Americans who labeled themselves pacifists, after signing up and after serving, who just rather took the law into their own hands and headed to Canada.

So my beef with American Pacifism as it is defined by too many of my fellow citizens is it is neither peaceful nor law-abiding. American pacifists are incredibly violent and willingly disregard the rule of law to further their own ends.

This makes, in my own mind, for the grand confusion - are American Pacifists my fellow Americans, or Al Queda? It's all in the deeds, not the words. No American Pacifist should be surprised by my contempt for them as human beings.

There's a vast confusion about what constitutes Pacifism and Non-Violence. To my taste, many who claim one or both of those labels are actually cowards. I'm not the only one. M. Gandhi:

"The strength to kill is not essential for self-defence; one ought to have the strength to die. When a man is fully ready to die, he will not even desire to offer violence. Indeed, I may put it down as a self-evident proposition that the desire to kill is in inverse proportion to the desire to die. And history is replete with instances of men who, by dying with courage and compassion on their lips, converted the hearts of their violent opponents.

Nonviolence cannot be taught to a person who fears to die and has no power of resistance. A helpless mouse is not nonviolent because he is always eaten by pussy. He would gladly eat the murderess if he could, but he ever tries to flee from her. We do not call him a coward, because he is made by nature to behave no better than he does.

But a man who, when faced by danger, behaves like a mouse, is rightly called a coward. He harbors violence and hatred in his heart and would kill his enemy if he could without hurting himself. He is a stranger to nonviolence. All sermonizing on it will be lost on him. Bravery is foreign to his nature. Before he can understand nonviolence, he has to be taught to stand his ground and even suffer death, in the attempt to defend himself against the aggressor who bids fair to overwhelm him. To do otherwise would be to confirm his cowardice and take him further away from nonviolence.

Whilst I may not actually help anyone to retaliate, I must not let a coward seek shelter behind nonviolence so-called. Not knowing the stuff of which nonviolence is made, many have honestly believed that running away from danger every time was a virtue compared to offering resistance, especially when it was fraught with danger to one's life. As a teacher of nonviolence I must, so far as it is possible for me, guard against such an unmanly belief.

Self-defence....is the only honourable course where there is unreadiness for self-immolation.

Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenceless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission. The latter befits neither man nor woman. Under violence, there are many stages and varieties of bravery. Every man must judge this for himself. No other person can or has the right." from http://www.mkgandhi.org/nonviolence/phil8.htm

Perhaps the military can use the following for what will the world's greatest recruiting slogan: "Do you REALLY wanna piss off Mom and Dad?"

I think the generation coming up will become more defense- and service-minded. Anecdotal evidence: one of my nephews, 14, plans to attend the USAFA; another one, 15, says that if the Iraq War is still going on when he's 17, he'll become a Marine.

BTW, good Op-for friends, please change my URL to http://www.luoamerican.com/baldilocks.

Thanks.

Skippy-san, I agree we do need a larger military. However, I would point out that we had a significantly larger military not so long ago (before we decided to cash in the "peace dividend") and we sustained that force without a draft.

As to "...the world's greatest recruiting slogan: Do you REALLY wanna piss off Mom and Dad?" it is not a new idea. I remember reading a magazine article in the early '80s (I think it was New West magazine) that described what was happening in the People's Republic of Santa Monica. Certain teenagers there had figured out that if they shaved half their heads, dyed the remainder purple, stuck a couple of safety pins thru their noses and maxed out the stereo playing thrash metal all they were likely to get out of their parents was indulgent chuckles. However, if they cut their hair in a high and tight, put on a "I Rather Be Killing Communists!" T-shirt and announced that they would be meeting Sgt. Rock the Marine recruiter to go running it guaranteed major parental angst and hysteria.

There is a division, yes...but part of it is the military's own doing.

Since the abolition of conscription and the shift to a professonal force armed with VERY advanced hardware, the services have stressed career troops over short-service, one-hitch troops. They haven't WANTED people signed up for "the duration of the war", they want a decade or two.

From a purely military perspective, this makes sense. Training costs money. Training to use advanced weapons costs more money. Train a career troop once, and you don't have to pay that training cost again. Short-timers soak up a lot of training money.

On the other hand, the non-financial price of this policy is terribly high. A public that has NO role in fighting the war will have little interest in winning it. And we are growing a generation of political leaders who have little to no comprehension of military affairs.

It's kind of like the BRAC mess....DOD saved money, but hemmoraged political support as well. If anything, DOD came out losing its shirt through BRAC.

It's time to rethink the entire affair...and perhaps accept the military and fiscal inefficiencies of a short-service force in exchange for better military-civil relations.

Mike, I'd have to disagree. Of ALL U.S. veterans, the VAST minority of them are retired. Most did one or two terms and then got out.

The military is, by and large, a pyramid-shaped organization. There are few sergeants major and generals. There are many privates and lieutenants.

There are a lot of awfully young supporters of the war in college who decided to be pacifists when it came to actually joining the fight.