Finding Meaning From War

Tom has a splendidly written piece on art, literature, and the meaning of war over at The New Criterion. Go read it and pass it along.

Stuff to Read

I'm on my way to the American Historical Association annual meeting in Chicago (I'm going to be pretty scarce, but if you want to connect, track me down via email, my cell number if you have it, or in the comments and we can get a drink) but one of my resolutions for the next year is to post more frequently here at dcat. In that spirit, here are a few things you should read:

One of the most celebrated books of recent months is John Lewis Gaddis' long-awaited biography of George Kennan, which came out at the end of the year and will stand as a landmark work for the next generation. Of the many reviews of the book that you will want to read (reviews being vital to larger conversation that books should inspire) put Lon Hamby's Wall Street Journal review at the top of your list.

And since you're in a reading mood, go read Tom Bruscino's excellent Claremont Review of Books essay on Vietnam War historiography. You'll find much to agree with and possibly as much to dispute, the sign of a provocative argument. (Hint: He's not a fan of the baby boomers.)

The end of the year produces more than enough best-of lists to fill up your time. I thought Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2011 would have a little something for everyone -- loads of pretentious rock-crit scribbling for those of you not inclined toward quite so much obscurantism, and a pretty good list of stuff to track down for those on the other side. I feel as if I buy loads of music and try to keep up on as much new stuff as possible and I only own 6 of the top 50. I'm sure I'll catch up (I'm sometimes a somewhat late adopter) but I like lists like this because I get sick of hearing those regular pronouncements about the death of music.

Finally, when does a writer become a writer? It's a good question, especially for those of us who consider ourselves writers and who don't fully earn money from our publications. Seek solace in the fact that the majority of us have to bring in dirty cash money through more than the power of our words.

On Heroes and Heroism

This post from the "At War" Blog of The New York Times has revived some thoughts that I've been having over the last decade. These two paragraphs get at the gist of the argument:

I understand the sentiment, and I trust that there are those who truly believe that all service members are heroes, simply for signing up. But I can’t help think that for some, “hero” is a throw-away word, designed to demonstrate a “support the troops” position or guarantee applause at an event.

and

I don’t feel comfortable being called a hero. In fact, my brow furrows and my mind sharpens when I hear it. Words matter, and “hero” is so loaded and used so frequently that it stands to lose its meaning altogether. Maybe this is just New York cynicism, but I know I’m not the only veteran who feels skeptical when he or she is placed in the hero bin along with every other service member from the past 10 years. I admire the fact that men and women with whom I served chose a dangerous profession for their country – often making the decision after 9/11. But, these are soldiers. Soldiers are human beings. There are good ones and bad ones. A few do amazing, heroic things. The rest do their jobs – incredible, unique jobs – but jobs, nonetheless. Some perform happily, others grudgingly. And I argue that most feel embarrassed when lauded as heroes.

I have also felt the same about the profligate use of the word "hero" to describe every single police officer or firefighter after 9/11. Of course to say as juch seems like an implicit criticism -- to say that they are not all heroes is to say something dark and nefarious rather than to make a statement of interpretation. Is eery single person who has served in the military a hero? If so, don't we need another word to describe the valour above and beyond simple service that so many engage in? And doesn't that then devalue the word to begin with?

This "hero dilemma" strikes me as a function of two issues. The first stems from Vietnam, when the treatment of many vets ranged from indifference to hostility, neither of which was justifiable and both of which we as a society have studiously tried to avoid.

The second issue ties into cultural politics, however. For to question anything about the military, which includes not granting the highest possible form of praise at every turn, has become a reflection on one's patriotism. This leads to a knee-jerk politics about issues that ought to require more seriousness.

It is a good and sometimes great thing when men and women join the service. But it is also a good and sometimes great thing when men and women go to universities, or enter the work force, or engage in some other form of service. It seems to me to cheapen a word we ought to take at great value to toss it around for everyone who fits into a certain category. I simply do not believe that every cop in New York is a hero. It ought to be not only ok, but perfectly unobjectionable, to say as much.

Waterboarding = Torture

Let's say it all together, kids: "waterboarding is torture." Justify it if you want. Present your 1% doctrine arguments, discuss necessary evils, present your case for the ugliness of war. I'll tell you why I think you are wrong. But don't dismiss the reality: Waterboarding is torture. (So is sleep deprivation and a host of other stuff, by the way.)

Waterboarding By Any Other Name

In a convincing op-ed at The Washington Post Evan Wallach, a former JAG and currently a judge at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York and adjunct professor of who teaches the law of war at Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School, wants us at least to call a spade a spade in the debate over waterboarding:

That term is used to describe several interrogation techniques. The victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the practice as "simulated drowning." That's incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death. That is,the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. According to those who have studied waterboarding's effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years.

The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government -- whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community -- has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.

There can be little doubt that these forms of water-based interrogation are torture. We have always known that they are torture. And arguments of convenience to try to argue otherwise are little more than intellectual chicanery and amoral, indeed immoral, posturing.

The Definitive Case Against Waterboarding

Small Wars Journal blogger Malcolm Nance has what I would hope is the definitive argument that waterboarding is torture. Nance's bio is impressive. He is "a counter-terrorism and terrorism intelligence consultant for the U.S. government’s Special Operations, Homeland Security and Intelligence agencies" as well as "a 20-year veteran of the US intelligence community's Combating Terrorism program and a six year veteran of the Global War on Terrorism."

This should be a no-brainer. In my own work in South Africa I have seen how simulated drowning and suffocation were a popular means of inflicting pain and suffering -- of torturing -- alleged enemies of the state. Examples abound of other totalitarian regimes -- regimes against which the United States has always tried to define itself -- engaging in similar behaviors. I can see no justification for waterboarding and its ilk, and I do not see how illegitimate, indeed evil, means help us fight legitimate wars, never mind highly contested ones.

Hat Tip to Christopher Orr at The Plank

Avoiding a Fight?

Is it possible that with his choice of Michael B. Mukasey as his nominee to be the next attorney general President Bush has decided to avoid a fight with the Democrats in the Senate? Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen posit as much at The Washington Post.

These must be exhausting times for the President. His popularity has sustained lows like no other in history. His Iraq War has foundered on the shores of incompetence and mismanagement. His approach to the war on terrorism has been characterized by cynical political machinations, his own party keeps him at arms length. It is widely presumed that in January 2009 the government will be firmly back in the hands of the Democrats, an outcome that is almost wholly attributable to his administration's incompetence on a host of issues, and thus to him.

Almost all of this is President Bush's own fault, and more than six years of smugness and arrogance mean that almost no one will sympathize with him. But surely it is not good for America when presidents leave office broken men. The two most recent examples, Nixon and Carter, found redemption in their post-presidential lives, but the America they left was almost inarguably worse than the one they inherited even if the fault was not always theirs entirely. Democrats have much reason for optimism within the party. But the reason for the party's ascent should give all of us, including and maybe especially those of us who live in a Blue State of mind, pause. These are times of great opportunity for those of us on the left side of the American political spectrum. These are not, however, good times for America. I hope that my party is able to recognize the difference.

The Unbearable Lightness of Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn is probably the best selling historian of all time. And yet many of his supporters (rarely the professional historians who write in the areas about which Zinn has written) like to pretend that he is a maligned outsider who has been ignored by all but a brave, enlightened cadre willing to speak truth to power. While his books have sold a gazillion copies, I do not find him to be an especially good historian. By wearing his ideology on his sleeve, some might see Zinn as ruthlessly honest, but he lets his politics drive his historical work in a way that warps and twists his interpretations and makes his work tremendously dishonest. Or at least uninteresting for those of us who are not interested in creating a usable past to confirm rather than challenge our own prevailing worldviews. Zinn has served as a fairly good polemicist at times, and his reportage on, say, the Civil Rights Movement helped me to shape some of my own ideas about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee early on, but on the whole, I have little use for him. I can almost always anticipate what he is going to write before I’ve completed reading the first paragraph, and I’m rarely surprised by what follows.

Thus when I came to Zinn’s letter to the editor in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, I could see what was to follow. Let’s just parse the letter paragraph by paragraph. I’ll place Zinn’s words in quotation marks and will precede my own with *** in customary dcat fashion:

“Samantha Power has done extraordinary work in chronicling the genocides of our time, and in exposing how the Western powers were complicit by their inaction.”

*** In approaching his letter this way, Zinn is setting Powers up in order to knock her down. But let’s keep in mind who the respective writers – Zinn and Powers – are and their relative status not in book sales, but on the actual issue of global genocides and the Western responses to them. Oh, and I am curious what action, in light of what follows, Zinn would have advocated Western powers taking in the face of the genocides Powers has chronicled so well.

“However, in her review of four books on terrorism, especially Talal Asad’s “On Suicide Bombing” (July 29), she claims a moral distinction between ‘inadvertent’ killing of civilians in bombings and “deliberate” targeting of civilians in suicide attacks. Her position is not only illogical, but (against her intention, I believe) makes it easier to justify such bombings.”

*** One can only assume that in what follows Zinn will try to claim that intent does not matter, that intending to kill someone is no different from unintentionally killing someone. I really hope I do not have to explain to any sentient person why an unwillingness to distinguish between the two is monumentally stupid.

“She believes that ‘there is a moral difference between setting out to destroy as many civilians as possible and killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a military objective.’ Of course, there’s a difference, but is there a “moral” difference? That is, can you say one action is more reprehensible than the other?”

*** Yes, you can. I’d like to be more snarky about it actually, because the question is so obtuse, reveals such sophistry, that it warrants little more than scorn. But the answer to the question is so patently clear that I’m at a loss for snarkiness except to say that yes, intending to kill someone is worse than inadvertently killing someone in almost any imaginable case. Morally worse. Or, as he’d have it for reasons I cannot quite divine, “morally” worse.

“In countless news briefings, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, responding to reporters’ questions about civilian deaths in bombing, would say those deaths were ‘unintentional’ or ‘inadvertent’ or ‘accidental,’ as if that disposed of the problem. In the Vietnam War, the massive deaths of civilians by bombing were justified in the same way by Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon and various generals.”

*** Look, I loathe Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. I think they have been irredeemably terrible public servants, and though I will never know them personally, their public personas are to me disgusting, self-important, arrogant beyond words, and dangerous. I would not trust either of them to shit competently after a bran binge. But simply mentioning their name and halfheartedly using them as the spokesmen for a complicated idea (and for historical analogies that obscure more than they reveal) such as civilian deaths in war is simply shoddy argumentation.

“These words are misleading because they assume an action is either ‘deliberate’ or ‘unintentional.’ There is something in between, for which the word is ‘inevitable.’ If you engage in an action, like aerial bombing, in which you cannot possibly distinguish between combatants and civilians (as a former Air Force bombardier, I will attest to that), the deaths of civilians are inevitable, even if not ‘intentional.’ Does that difference exonerate you morally?”

*** Leaving “inevitability,” a concept of which good historians are always wary, aside for a moment, that “inevitability” still does not erase the difference between intending and not intending to kill people in war. And it does not elide the fact that targets can be chosen so as to minimize damage. It certainly does not address the issue of whether when countries go to war, they tend to be asking for moral absolution or exoneration. But that sidesteps the actual question, which is whether all deaths are morally the same or whether they are not. Zinn’s assertion is that intentionality does not matter. Ultimately, “exoneration” is not the issue, though invoking it represent a clever sleight of hand to try to obscure things.

“The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.”

*** I am going to say otherwise. I am going to assert that there are morally superior stances to make, morally superior stances that when he has believed the morality to be on his side, Zinn has not ever been afraid to make. Indeed, Zinn’s career is nothing more than a series of moral judgments. (“You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” That was the title of one of Zinn’s books.) The terrorist chooses to target innocents. Their death is his goal, and the overarching objective beyond that goal is to instill fear ina population and their leaders so as to accomplish a political objective. I am willing to grant that aerial bombardment is problematic. But so too is manslaughter. The difference is that I’m not about to assert that manslaughter and murder are morally equivalent just because manslaughter is unpleasant and I wish it did not exist. More to the point, perhaps, I wish no one would have to kill another out of self- defense. But I’m not naïve or blinkered enough to argue that there is no difference between murder and a killing done in self-defense. Regretting some bad things does not make all bad things equal. Zinn is too smart not to know as much, but too fatuous a thinker to care.

Iraq: Who's Winning, Who's Won?

Foreign Policy has a special feature on who is winning in Iraq. They provide a list of ten, with Iran at the top. Some of the individual articles are subscriber only, but you get a pretty good sense of the whole from what you can access. Suffice it to say, the United States does not slip into the top ten.

A Donnybroook at the Plank

I'm in the middle of a good old fashioned donnybrook over at The Plank. In comments related to a post about Lieberman, things have turned heated about the old "chickenhawk" meme. While I'm not defending the administration I am trying to get people to clarify some of their thoughts. And maybe not to refer to everyone in the administration as "pussies' and "cowards." Go see for yourselves.

"West Point Gently Weeps"

In case you missed it, the Sunday New York Times had a powerful feature in the sports section on the death of former West Point athletes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever your thoughts on the war, Juliet Macur brings home the sacrifices of these remarkable men and women and the ripple effect their lives and deaths have on an elite fraternity.