War is hell; hell is other people
One frequent criticism of the warmongers currently running this country revolves around how few of them ever served in the military. In fact, a large number of them actively avoided it. George Bush, of course, famously got his dad to get him into a Texas Air National Guard unit stocked with the too-rich-to-fight-in-Vietnam (then skipped out on that). Dick Cheney has said he had "other priorities" during Vietnam; his wife also gave birth to their first child exactly nine months after Dick's type of draft deferment was ended. Rush Limbaugh had a cyst on his butt. Tom DeLay's excuse is that there were too many minorities serving, and they'd taken up all the slots (I swear I am not making this up).
I could go on.
There's nothing inherently wrong with supporting a war if you yourself have never been in the military. I myself have never been in the military. Not only that, I'd probably dodge the draft so hard I'd get motion sick, if it came up. (I can't imagine it would. I both ask and tell, among many other disqualifications.)
Nevertheless, I reluctantly supported the invasion of Afghanistan. Reluctantly not because of my own failure to serve, but because, well, any time you support a war it should be reluctant. Once again I find myself pointing out the bleedin' obvious, but war is bad. If war is sometimes necessary--and, sadly, I guess it is--that's because we have failed at preventing it. War is the breakdown of everything that makes humanity worthy of this earth.
Lao Tzu wrote that the best soldier fights without anger, and in fact goes into battle as if he were going to a funeral. I really believe in that. Which brings me to my personal issue with the supporters of this war. It's not just that they want other people to die in wars but skipped town when their turn came along. It's that there's this football spectator quality to the whole thing.
You know what I mean? That "we're goin' in there to kick some ass! Wooooooooooo!" quality of much of the original support for our current military engagements, most particularly Iraq.
My distaste for that sort of jingoistic cheerleading goes back to when I was a kid and the first Gulf War broke out. From how most people, on TV and on the radio and around me, reacted, you would have thought we were playing Iraq in a football game, instead of killing people (and getting Americans killed). I remember a Saturday Night Live sketch from the time, in which Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" character has Saddam Hussein on her show, and he starts explaining why he felt he had a right to invade Kuwait, and the Church Lady gets up and starts kicking Saddam's ass, and the audience goes "WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" and apparently I'm the only one who's not happy.
Even when you think a war is necessary, you should conclude that sadly and reluctantly. You should not enjoy war. Ever.
That's why my contempt for George Bush was solidified when I learned that, in 2002, a full year before he stopped pretending he might not invade Iraq, he flippantly told some senators "fuck Saddam, we're takin' him out." Of course, he couldn't act like that in public, and he went around for a full year after that playing the part of a Very Serious Person who was only going to go to war if he was forced to to protect American lives. Which was always ridiculous; American lives were never on the line in Iraq, and the war was never avoidable once the neocons saw their moment to wage it. But a lot of people were duped into thinking we had no choice.
In a way, it's hopeful, to me, that what sold the war was the idea that there was no other choice. That tells me that even the casual warmongers were aware that most people don't view wars as a spectator sport. But there were people running around making arguments that made me really want to hurt them. Like the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, arguing that, after 9/11, we needed to start a war because it would be "therapeutic" (did Richard blink and miss Afghanistan?). Or Dennis Miller, who has really become a smug waste of space, grinning a shit-eating grin and declaring that, well, we had to go over there and mix it up with somebody to show we were tough, you know?
There's an obvious racism to both those arguments, at least in my mind. They seem to boil down to "we got attacked by brown people, so if we go attack some other brown people, that'll be a good response--they're all pretty much the same, right?"
And then you had the essential neoconservative argument, which, really, is what got us into Iraq to start with. All the talk of WMDs was pretty much a sales job; the Project For a New American Century, featuring such intellectual lights as Cheney and Wolfowitz, had been arguing since the early 1990s that if we knocked over Saddam and installed someone like Chalabi in his place, pro-western democracy would break out in the middle east.
Apart from being unrealistic, this has the distinction of being an argument for war as a first resort, war as a good thing in and of itself, put forward by a bunch of guys who mostly say they believed in the last war but avoided serving in it any way they could. When war threatens them, it's real. When they're not personally at risk, it's at best a pet ideological theory, and at worst a cheesy spectator sport.
And that's the part I find contemptible.
I could go on.
There's nothing inherently wrong with supporting a war if you yourself have never been in the military. I myself have never been in the military. Not only that, I'd probably dodge the draft so hard I'd get motion sick, if it came up. (I can't imagine it would. I both ask and tell, among many other disqualifications.)
Nevertheless, I reluctantly supported the invasion of Afghanistan. Reluctantly not because of my own failure to serve, but because, well, any time you support a war it should be reluctant. Once again I find myself pointing out the bleedin' obvious, but war is bad. If war is sometimes necessary--and, sadly, I guess it is--that's because we have failed at preventing it. War is the breakdown of everything that makes humanity worthy of this earth.
Lao Tzu wrote that the best soldier fights without anger, and in fact goes into battle as if he were going to a funeral. I really believe in that. Which brings me to my personal issue with the supporters of this war. It's not just that they want other people to die in wars but skipped town when their turn came along. It's that there's this football spectator quality to the whole thing.
You know what I mean? That "we're goin' in there to kick some ass! Wooooooooooo!" quality of much of the original support for our current military engagements, most particularly Iraq.
My distaste for that sort of jingoistic cheerleading goes back to when I was a kid and the first Gulf War broke out. From how most people, on TV and on the radio and around me, reacted, you would have thought we were playing Iraq in a football game, instead of killing people (and getting Americans killed). I remember a Saturday Night Live sketch from the time, in which Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" character has Saddam Hussein on her show, and he starts explaining why he felt he had a right to invade Kuwait, and the Church Lady gets up and starts kicking Saddam's ass, and the audience goes "WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" and apparently I'm the only one who's not happy.
Even when you think a war is necessary, you should conclude that sadly and reluctantly. You should not enjoy war. Ever.
That's why my contempt for George Bush was solidified when I learned that, in 2002, a full year before he stopped pretending he might not invade Iraq, he flippantly told some senators "fuck Saddam, we're takin' him out." Of course, he couldn't act like that in public, and he went around for a full year after that playing the part of a Very Serious Person who was only going to go to war if he was forced to to protect American lives. Which was always ridiculous; American lives were never on the line in Iraq, and the war was never avoidable once the neocons saw their moment to wage it. But a lot of people were duped into thinking we had no choice.
In a way, it's hopeful, to me, that what sold the war was the idea that there was no other choice. That tells me that even the casual warmongers were aware that most people don't view wars as a spectator sport. But there were people running around making arguments that made me really want to hurt them. Like the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, arguing that, after 9/11, we needed to start a war because it would be "therapeutic" (did Richard blink and miss Afghanistan?). Or Dennis Miller, who has really become a smug waste of space, grinning a shit-eating grin and declaring that, well, we had to go over there and mix it up with somebody to show we were tough, you know?
There's an obvious racism to both those arguments, at least in my mind. They seem to boil down to "we got attacked by brown people, so if we go attack some other brown people, that'll be a good response--they're all pretty much the same, right?"
And then you had the essential neoconservative argument, which, really, is what got us into Iraq to start with. All the talk of WMDs was pretty much a sales job; the Project For a New American Century, featuring such intellectual lights as Cheney and Wolfowitz, had been arguing since the early 1990s that if we knocked over Saddam and installed someone like Chalabi in his place, pro-western democracy would break out in the middle east.
Apart from being unrealistic, this has the distinction of being an argument for war as a first resort, war as a good thing in and of itself, put forward by a bunch of guys who mostly say they believed in the last war but avoided serving in it any way they could. When war threatens them, it's real. When they're not personally at risk, it's at best a pet ideological theory, and at worst a cheesy spectator sport.
And that's the part I find contemptible.
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