[From the NY Times article on the non-binding House Resolution against a troop increase in Iraq]:
Despite the emotions on both sides, there were moments of agreement. Ms. Pelosi drew sustained applause when she said that everyone in the chamber praised the valor and sacrifice of Americans serving in Iraq.
Only in a Christian nation like America could there be such a "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude, unquestioningly and nauseatingly repeated, always for political purposes, and without any real meaning.
What does it mean to "support" American troops in Iraq?
- To fund the brutal war of racist occupation they are waging?
- To praise those who continue to enlist after all pretense of the original (even then dubious) motive for the war has been dropped?
- To hope that "their guys" get killed when they come up against "our guys"?
Now, I'm not completely naive. I understand the political meaning behind saying "We support our troops"--and as long as that is a completely meaningless sound-bite, I guess I don't mind. But the second it actually comes to wanting an American soldier to "do his duty" and kill an Iraqi, or valiantly give up his own life, or have expensive new equipment, or even report for duty in the morning--then I am against such support. The only troops I "support" are those who desert or refuse to serve. This war is bullshit and anyone engaged in it is bullshit and I don't support the individuals without whose participation it could not continue.
[And to those who will say, desertion and subordination are hardly options, Ben!; I say: if someone told you, either you go out and kill in the name of a bogus cause, or spend time in jail and possibly ruin your life and bring disgrace upon your family---to me, there is no excuse for saving one's own skin* by shooting other people; it's disgusting.]
*= And I hardly imagine it comes down to this moral dilemma for our valiant troops--and why should it, when they are so kindly praised and supported in their execution of duty?
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17 comments:
What is surprising, I think, is the universal apologism for "supporting our troops"--which is inevitably racist or otherwise horrible in the ways I described--from all sides of mainstream American life.
Our sociologically-minded liberals will remind me, no doubt, that not everyone has as much of a CHOICE when they join the army as I like to think--that the propaganda and promise of college money are too overwhelming to people without better opportunities--and whatever, that's fine. Join the army. But this excuse loses all validity the moment you are asked to carry arms against fellow human beings. No sociological claims can justify killing--in my humble opinion. And yet have we seen mass desertion from your beloved troops? No, and I think this has to do with the unequivocal "support" they receive from home.
As for the hawkish justifications, well, if someone needs this spelled out, I'll type it up, but..really...I think this one we all know.
... or maybe you should grow the fuck up and stop sneering at the people who make rhetorical compromises in trying to stop the war.
I shouldn't be so hard on you: I'm sure it's taxing to read the news from your armchair. The troops should take more risks to end the war? What risks have you ever taken? You're cushioned by a middle-class safety net, studying for a fucking Ph.D. in literature (and readying yourself for a life lived off the fat of grant money), making no constructive contributions to the countrys political life, and no doubt feeding your sense of moral superiority by calling for more courage from the ones who signed up for ROTC to struggle through schools a tenth as fancy as yours -- peh, pipe down and stop making the rest of us look stupid.
Oh, and the apostrophe was left out to piss you off.
I wonder if when Anonymous reads a negative review of a movie (s)he liked, (s)he gets really defensive of it and starts saying things like "Oh yeah?! Well I don't see YOU making a better movie!" to the non-present reviewer. Probably.
To "armchair war supporter":
I hope you are sending gallon of gallon of your own blood fed-ex to Iraq to support the gallant risk-takers over there and maintain a coherent argumentative position.
My great moral position comes from not shooting other people on a daily basis. As I wrote, "No sociological claims can justify killing--in my humble opinion." That is, just because someone doesn't have an Ivy league degree does not evacuate them from responsibility to not gun down their fellow man.
And if you had read my post carefully, you would see that I think that what you call a "rhetorical compromise" runs dangerously close to canceling out what it intends. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.
Thank you also for contributing the dismissive "peh!" to our lexicon.
hi Ben,
I think this is one of those situations where it's your premise, not your argument, that's flawed.
while your post rhetorically limits the case under consideration to Iraq, your follow-up comment makes clear your general denial of the necessity of maintaining a large force of soldiers trained to kill for the purposes of maintaining/enhancing a nation(/kingdom/tribe/etc)'s security. this wishful premise has no basis in reality, as any cursory examination of the past several thousand years of human history shows, and stances based on this idea seem irrelevant to any really interesting discussion of the dilemmas at hand.
this fundamental reality of the political - as in Schmitt (if you want a more academic citation than simple history and common sense), who convincingly argues that the threat of existential conflict is the very substance of what we call politics - underlies the quite sound and widely understood logic of "supporting the troops," in this and any other situation. essentially, it acknowledges the general, historically-validated desirability of maintaining a capable and well-equipped military even if one doesn't agree with one of the missions for which the it is currently being used.
that's the most direct answer; your post and comment also beg questions about your conceptions of the current nature of the conflict in Iraq, the experience of 'history' and military history more generally, your awareness of the many tens of thousands of troops stationed in other countries overseas, etc. it's not easy for anyone to draw clear or otherwise useful conclusions about the hellish mess that is Iraq these days, but this kind of moralistic posturing based on no recognizable reality is even less convincing, interesting, or helpful than it was four years ago.
Well, as Kant would say, it is morality which has "no basis in reality," not just my pacifism.
As for your citation of Schmitt, well, I am not sure that I am so in love with "what we call politics," either, so I am not so interested in its "substance" or origins.
[This not being to refute your point or Schmitt's, but it is not a fault of my argument--existential (usually class or race-based) conflict is not something I am interested in preserving; cf: Derrida's comments on a politics of "friendship" rather than of enmity. Your comment, while useful, assumes an interest in preserving the Schmittian political which I lack.]
Basically, and this will be a VERY un-nation-friendly statement, I don't care who gets killed when a US soldier meets an "insurgent." I think that is the moral basis of supporting the troops ("our guys") versus what I think is a farther-ranging and "friendlier" idea, that while undoubtedly unrealistic, at least is not bloodthirsty.
Also, not that anyone could have known this, but I am VERY well-read in military history (thanks, high school!)---but that has not convinced me that either our universal "othering" of our all opposition as "terrorists" NOR our previous universal "othering" of all opposition as communists, is in any way productive. That would be my rebuttal to Schmitt=that it ends in the threat of nuclear war or in terrorist acts like 9/11 (for it is obvious that there is a Schmittian constitution of radical islamic identity at stake here as well, contra us).
there's an enormous difference, normatively and otherwise, between bloodthirstiness and the simple recognition of the bloodiness of the world, which pertains throughout all of history and across all species for reasons that are widely understood. I've never really grasped the value of pretending not to understand this (reality of existential conflicts, which in Schmitt includes your existential struggle against the 'bloodthirsty' 'racist' etc warmongers you politically oppose) or otherwise insisting that it's not true or could not be true if we just refused to accept it.
that said, it's entirely possible (though v challenging no doubt) to have a coherent, ethically-anchored discussion about Iraq that also pertains to recognizable realities 'on the ground' - uncool moral philosophers like Walzer et al make decent-seeming academic careers out of it, and anyone with common sense (in the Arendtian sense, if you prefer) can engage with these issues pretty intuitively. you're obviously allowed to argue and not argue whatever perspectives you want on your blog, but using a Kantian (Derridain, etc) soapbox as a platform for throwing rhetorical firebombs like 'racist' and 'bloodthirsty' at those deigning to argue in the non-Kantian, reality-based arena of more commonly recognized moral precepts seems pointless at best.
and, sorry to impugn your knowledge of military history! I brought it up as a reminder that all wars have been fraught with difficult ethical questions, all wars have been bitterly and immediately opposed by pacifists, all wars have been accompanied by appalling expressions of religious/ethnic/racial/ideological hatred, all wars have required the killing of men, women, and children, sometimes horribly - and *some*, even many of these wars have been widely judged ex post as morally just (World War II being the easiest example, where America doubted the morality of the cause and refused to join for years, despite seemingly clear signposts like the Holocaust). this war is 'different' but every war has been different, and, especially given the nature of the US mission in Iraq today (which is essentially trying to prevent mass-scale sectarian killing and full fledged civil war), it seems obvious why the troops especially don't see things with your piercing Kantian moral clarity.
finally, while I've, uh, never read Derrida (maybe THAT explains my unreconstructed bloodthirstiness), the idea of a politics based on 'friendliness' instead of enmity seems nonsensical or useless in the many demonstrable cases where concrete enmity exists. asking Iraq's Sunnis and Shia to be 'friendly' to each other seems even more outlandish than asking you to practice friendliness towards die hard, 'bloodthirsty', 'racist' etc war supporters in the US.
1) I remain doubtful that the discussion about the war in Iraq is (or has ever been) a "reality-based arena"
2) The Politics of Friendship is basically a book-length commentary on (or "reading of") Schmitt
3) You will pardon me for calling your insistence on existential conflict in "reality" unreconstructedly Hegelian (j/k)
4) If you will recall YOUR military history, you will remember Clausewitz's phrase, "War is politics continued by other means," and then perhaps doubt the statement that our presence in Iraq right now is to prevent mass killings and sectarian violence. It may be that that prevention occurs. I don't know. But that is not "why we are there," because the US is not on a worldwide humanitarian quest to prevent violence in other countries (see: East Timor, Sudan, etc). Rather, we have seen it as tied to our "national interests" to prevent such violence there, and moreover it is tied to our current whack "Enemy," the Muslim Terrorist, as well as our concerns about Israel, Oil, etc.
Also, John, it is astute of you to notice my disinterest in "real politics," but here would be my foray into it:
The reason we are in Iraq right now is so that Iran won't be.
our presence in Iraq in the first place and in the current circumstances is no doubt motivated by wider regional concerns (touched on in part below re: Iran) and a certain (perhaps misguided) conception of the national interest, as in the somewhat tautological Clausewitz reference. but in this case, it seems pretty clear that the objective of preventing civil war dovetails entirely with the US interests, both in Iraq (securing an at least 1/3 friendly ally in the region, more efficient exploitation of oil resources, preventing the emergence of even more of an Al-Qaeda-harboring failed state) and in the region more broadly (rise of Iran, Turkey freaking out about the Kurds, Arab countries freaking out about Iran). even for those of you/us that have bravely stepped, in theory if not at all in reality, into the post-nation state future, it also seems to dovetail with 'friendly' or otherwise humanitarian concerns. it's not at all clear whether the US and Iraq are capable of achieving any kind of peace - and in the event that we can't, we should probably cut our losses and get the worst over with - but it isn't clear either, to me at least, that we aren't.
and yes, so much of our involvement in Iraq (and Saudi Arabia, for that matter) over the past 28 years has to do, directly or indirectly, with our relations with Iran. the Revolution led to our support for Saddam, and I think the desire to be able to threaten and/or invade Iran from Iraq was definitely a major driver for the 2003 invasion. and, in these less hubristic times, (fairly reasonable) fears of total Iranian domination of Iraq certainly make a withdrawal more complicated. my unreconstructed Hegelian hope for a silver lining in all of this is that our miserable time in Iraq will leave us so hamstrung, and Iran so empowered, that we will be forced to pursue some kind of detente. wishful thinking, but not outside the realm of possibility, especially if something resembling the current status quo outlasts the Bush administration.
Much of this debate seems to come down to antagonism between Kantian morality and gritty, common sense Reality. While I opposed the invasion of Iraq from the first time it was mentioned and could barely believe it was actually happening once it started, it seems perfectly clear to me that it is our absolute moral obligation to remain in Iraq.
My trouble with Kant and like philosophers is that they treat morality as if it is a point in need of defense--as if a world, turned over to common sense, everyday language, would be amoral. Untrue. We cannot escape morality. Nietzsche can declare it dead, our contemporary will to hedonism can challenge it, and our invasion of Iraq can certainly violate it. However, it remains with us. It is part of our language, part of our way of discussing and making judgments, and it does not simply go away when we stop actively protecting it (Actively Being Kantians).
Politics is indeed conflict. Whenever people share a space, a culture, a language, conflict is born. Politics manages conflict. When conflict is smothered, when hard-fast rules of pacifism or anything else, are adopted, political debate is displaced by authoritarian control.
It is not up to a Kant to decide the rules of morality, which we can never violate. It is up to us in our language, our politics, in our struggles of one set of interests against another, to determine what we are to do. In this sense, standing for Kant is standing against democracy--the radical sort of democracy that demands different ideas, different points of view.
Pacifism forecloses all debate. It amounts to an appeal to a higher power (Morality) in true George Bush fashion. (For that matter, so do expressions such as "stay the course," "support the troops," etc.). I'm not sure what we should do about Iraq, but it seems to me that pacifism (i.e., let's not do anything, or even say anything about this issue other than "killing is wrong") is NOT the correct response.
why pacifism? why not... smashifism? i just don't see anything to recommend pacifism more highly. sure, it harkens to universal morality, but smashifism harkens to meritocracy, which is no less universal.
(and therefore satisfies the kantian imperative)
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