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September 11, 2003
Mark Shea wants to know...
Now, my question: How far are you willing to go to defend America? It's best to mull these things over now when things are relatively quiet, because crisis moments, in the heat of passion, are lousy times. The Extremist's views are a living laboratory demonstration of the reason for the lex talionis or "eye for an eye" law. Most moderns think that law brutal. In its day, it was intended as a *restraint* since, as Extremist shows all too well, the natural response to great pain is "A life for an eye, a life for a tooth." In his rage at 9/11, Extremist thinks saying "In case you've forgotten, Mark, we are at war. The object of war is to destroy the enemy's capability to make war" is the moral solvent that justifies *any* war crime we may commit, up to and including the pre-emptory annihilation of millions of innocent men, women and children in countries with whom we are not at war.
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Heck, this topic has my interest so I'll post my reply here too. I think that we as Americans are way too caught up in staying #1. I find it disturbing that so many theological conservatives talk about how unclear Just War theory can be. That sounds like the excuses for behavior that liberals usually get accused of. I think that Mark's Extremist is an example of just how much we as Americans lust for power. I think if we look in the mirror, we will see that we fear not being in control. The Drum Major Instinct homily by Martin Luther King helped to solidy my position on Iraq, before invasion, and it has helped me to keep my eyes on being a servant. It's a great read.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/sermons/680204.000_Drum_Major_Instinct.html
Posted by: Patrick Quinlan at Sep 11, 2003 4:21:08 PM
I think many people don't reflect on what a disaster it would be if the U.S. were not "#1." I don't know if it's an accident of history or Providence that created this point in time, when the last superpower left standing happens to be a constitutional republic with deep traditions of liberty, freedom, and justice.
Now, living here on planet earth, the relevant question is, Compared To What?
So yes, I fear the U.S. not being in control when I look at the alternatives. As a serious matter those alternatives include China, and until recently it included the Soviet Union. If representative governments continue their slow decline, other alternatives include both the European Union, where it may be illegal to quote the New Testament, and Canada, where it already is (on homosexuality today, and on who knows what tomorrow.)
As for the war, I, too have posted over on Mark's blog. Taking a slightly different tack here, I'll make the non-brilliant statement that I don't support the Extremist view of just randomly nuking cities.
But in the absence of another 9/11, people are backsliding into complacency.It is easy to forget that some of the enemy now blowing up Humvees in Baghdad would just as soon, and with as little care, detonate an atomic bomb in the U.S. And they may. And then, I wonder how nuanced our discussons will be. I wonder if there will be any discussion at all.
That may be the best reason to support the American project in Iraq, if you ask me.
Posted by: Christopher Rake at Sep 11, 2003 4:56:10 PM
That's precisely why I'm asking now. I too fear that we may face something that will dwarf 9/11. If we've given no thought now to our response, we will react then. And we could well commit crimes against humanity that would dwarf Stalin's, in our rage. Technology is a wonderful amplifier of human evil.
Posted by: Mark Shea at Sep 11, 2003 5:03:27 PM
That the object of war is to destroy the enemy's capacity to make war is not a carte blanche for wiping out the enemy etc. etc. It is a limited war objective in keeping with self defense. It need not involve the destruction of the enemy's government let alone his state. Per se, it makes no judgment about the enemy's ideology or value system. It does not require nation building. In American history this doctrine of limited war was tossed with Wilson's pronouncement that World War I was a war to make the world "safe for democracy." Before Wilson it was no such thing. Roosevelt continued Wilsonianism with the doctrine of "unconditional surrender."
A return to wars only to incapacitate the enemy from making war would be a step forward, not backward. I anticipate the argument that eternal vigilance would be needed. Of course. And likewise eternal strength and nerve. That's the world we live in. As Plato said' "Only the dead have known the end of war."
Posted by: Caroline at Sep 11, 2003 5:09:00 PM
Christopher, everyone fears not being in control, but the sad truth is that we are *not* in control, certainly not of China, not of North Korea, Iran, or lots of other countries and situations that present scary possibilities. We tell ourselves (or are told) constantly to accept that we are not in control, that God is, and that we should therefore not engage in sin when it is attractive to us in an attempt to maintain control over our lives, as witness, abortion, euthanasia, and other issues that don't raise questions of life and death. There cannot be an exact parallel to this standard when we act on a collective basis, but certainly, it should be part of our analysis.
I am not advocating complacency, but taking preemptive action should be based on something more than fear of loss of control we can never really even hope to exercise in the first place, in parts of the world we barely understand -- and in so doing, maim or kill large numbers of innocent people.
Peace.
Posted by: Barbara at Sep 11, 2003 5:30:19 PM
Mark Shea and Christopher Rake anxiously suggest that a more calamitous attack on the U.S. than 9/11 would inspire completely savage and unconscionable retaliation by the U.S. "with no questions asked." I'm afraid that they are right. In the wake of 9/11, the rhetoric and expressions of intent of acquaintances and family, not to mention at work and the local bar, resembled that of Mark's Extremist Double Plus, and certainly not JPII. Americans are truely self-deluded if they think that they do not have the same fallen natures as Germans, Russians, or Cambodians and are not fully capable of similar atrocities, given sufficient provocation - especially if it means just pushing a button. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden bear witness.
But this is why one ought to resist moral laxity when it comes to war and regard as presumptively self-serving any attempt to fudge on Just War criteria to suit our purposes or desire for retaliation. Above all, one must be prepared to "lose" rather than do evil in order to "win."
Posted by: T. Marzen at Sep 11, 2003 5:35:33 PM
I don't know how far I'd go to defend America because warfare and military strategy are not my business. At the same time, I do know that it is not just America that is under attack. It is what we like to call "Western civilization," that combination of Judeo-Christian religious beliefs and practices, Roman law, Greek philosophy, and the arts and sciences of two millenia. Our enemies want none of any of it. The former cultural attache of the Saudi legation in Berlin wouldn't get into a car with the radio playing. Why? He might risk hearing music. Music - all music - is proscribed by the Wahabist branch of Islam. Folks like this are absolutists who will stop at nothing. We are not, thank God. Our responses, I hope, will be measured and focused, not aimed at junior secretaries eating breakfast at their desks and traders getting a leg up on the market. When you have an enemy who hands out candy when innocent civilians are killed, you need to understand their perspective and hang on tight for a very rough ride. They're playing for keeps.
Posted by: Mary Jane at Sep 11, 2003 5:56:26 PM
The purpose of the military is to kill people and destroy things, but that's not the purpose of war. The purpose of war is to impose conditions on the enemy -- 'the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means'.
But if you start using wood screws, ya oughta put down the hammer: different tools have different results. (Hammering screws often splits wood.) When Sherman used total war tactics on the South, he had a specific goal in mind: destroy their capacity to make war. What on earth would the specific goals be, to use countervalue tactics against terrorists?
The first principle in a military action is the OBJECTIVE -- what do you want to do? The more specifically defined it is, the more likely you are to achieve it, viz, "take and fortify that hill", rather than "inflict casualties".
So it's just a stupidly phrased question to ask "how far will you go to defend America?" It's an accelerator without a road, much less a map. It would be better to ask what exactly we are trying to achieve, what our OBJECTIVE is.
Anne Coulter, bless her anorexic ignorance, actually said something plausible: some folks want to invade their countries, kill their leaders, and (forcibly) convert 'em to Christianity. A time honored tradition, but it didn't work then and won't work now.
Nuking Mecca, or something, the extremist idea (once raised by the National Review in the Corner), is even more stupid. So the whole discussion starts out ill-conceived and then gets dumber.
I did a piece for NRO long ago, about the need for a THEOLOGICAL strategy for the war against Al Quaeda and their ilk, so I won't link to it here. (About the Muslim Martin Luther.)
But that theological strategy is still missing -- Islam does not mean "peace", it means submission to the will of God. We had a fully developed ideological alternative to Communism -- what's the fully developed THEOLOGICAL alternative to Al Quaeda's garbled Islam?
FWIW, I think Catholics have a special duty to shun the dumb-ass militarism of this sorta question. Arguing over whether nuking Mecca fits the 'just war' criteria, or something similar, isn't as valuable as changing the subject to something intelligent.
The purpose of big explosions, even nukes, is to kill people and destroy things. But it simply won't work, to try to destroy terrorism's capacity to make war the way we destroyed the Confederacy, or Nazi Germany or Showa Japan. The world is even more full of box cutters than it is of radioactive materials and nitrogen fertilizer. The half-baked approach to military thinking in "how far would you go" is false.
It isn't a question of "how far" to go -- but IN WHICH DIRECTION.
Posted by: theAmericanist at Sep 11, 2003 6:32:11 PM
My puny dumb-assness stands rebuked under the majestic greatness of your superior intellect. Dolt that I am, I still think it's worth asking people to practice a little self-examination concerning what depths of evil they might be capable of choosing when they are not in the heat of having to make the choice.
Thank you for stooping down from Olympus to sneer at your inferiors. We do not deserve your kindness but shall endeavor to be worthy of you someday.
Posted by: Mark Shea at Sep 11, 2003 6:52:34 PM
Which direction?
Posted by: theAmericanist at Sep 11, 2003 7:38:40 PM
I am not advocating complacency, but taking preemptive action should be based on something more than fear of loss of control we can never really even hope to exercise in the first place, in parts of the world we barely understand -- and in so doing, maim or kill large numbers of innocent people.
Barbara, taking preemptive action is based on a fear of being the victims of mass murder. Well-founded, as it turns out.
Posted by: Christopher Rake at Sep 11, 2003 7:47:33 PM
Americanist:
You're asking an entirely different question than the one that concerns me. (And, by the way, I'm not asking "Does nuking Mecca fit just war theory?" It's self-evident to all normal people that it doesn't. My question is, "What do we do to make sure that we don't find voices like Extremist's to be tempting and sane-sounding, should the day come when something more awful than 9/11 happens?"). I think even you are capable of understanding that and might even have done so if you were not out to do your patented strawman schtick in the effort to make somebody you dislike look stupid.
Your question "Which direction?" is a perfectly good one. It's just not my question at the moment. Why not get your own blog and ask it if you like? It's a free country.
Posted by: Mark Shea at Sep 11, 2003 7:55:58 PM
How far would we go to defend America? Well, how far are we going now to defend America from the enemies from within...like all our activist judges calling evil good and destroying our traditional freedoms? If we can't muster the courage to defend those rights and stop the flow of garbage into the minds and hearts of the younger generations then if we're hit again it will probably only be a panic response which will do us more harm than good. BTW, just when are we going to have our anti-missile missiles up and running? or.. after so long, when will we decide to permit ourselves to be less dependent on foreign energy sources? The PC nuts have prevented us "brave citizens" from forming any kind of preparation for some bigger hit. In many ways it seems the "enemy" has already won.
Posted by: Chris at Sep 11, 2003 8:40:10 PM
Is the question Would, Could, or Should?
Could is the easy one. Depends on how much power you have. Should is the one we can decide on in advance by consulting ethical teachings. But Would we can't know till it happens and all we can do now is pray that then God will give us the grace to do the Should.
Posted by: Caroline at Sep 11, 2003 8:46:51 PM
I answered your question, but since it isn't phrased so as to accept your premise, you didn't notice. Bear with me a second: the classic Western rap on military force is Clausewitz's "On War", which (radically oversimplified) takes the view that war is simply policy with force -- persuasion with artillery.
The American rap on war is more practical, e.g. Sherman: "War is all hell..." Marvelously effective.
Every ROTC manual for the past 80 years or so (that I know of, anyway) has focused on 'the objective'. It's very Clausewitzian -- and it has often failed, because politicians rarely understand it. They tend to use the military to communicate, rather than achieve.
Then came Vietnam. The most widely used strategic study of Vietnam was done by the late Harry Summers, a very Clausewitzian guy. But most scholars recognize there are limits to this 'policy with force' approach, particularly since (as Summers notes right at the start of his book), we LOST in Vietnam, even though we won every battle. It wasn't the "other means" that failed -- we blew hell out of Vietnam -- but the policy.
John Keegan is the most famous post-Clausewitz rap -- the view that war is cultural: that lots of cultures have militaries which aren't actually the applications of policy, but more like expressions of culture.
(I had a couple conversations with Colonel Summers, urging him to write about Keegan -- but in the end, he never did. All he told me was that he was a damned Brit, and thus couldn't understand the relationship between the American people and our military.)
Which is why your question is dumb -- and no, it IS the same question: you want to know how moral considerations can dilute or divert the urge to smack somebody, when (God forbid) the next 9-11 happens. The question itself misses the point.
There is a kind of moral rationalization that goes on, which is either after the fact (Hiroshima and Nagasaki pays for Pearl Harbor, so therefore they must have been both moral AND effective), or completely beside the point (don't we become just like them, because civilians die when we blow up Iraqi bases?).
It's essentially the poseur approach of some abolitionists before the Civil War -- rather than fight to preserve the Union (without abolition), some said: "Wayward sisters, go in peace." When Shiloh alone killed more than all the wars in American history to that point, abolitionists like Garrison got downright bloodthirsty -- but not for the Union, only for abolition. It all but completely escaped the abolitionists that the ONLY way to preserve the Union was to abolish slavery -- which is also the means by which Lincoln not only justified the slaughter, but got the army that was doing the killing and dying to re-elect him.
If you truly want to avoid letting "nuke 'em" sound sane, then start making sense. Civil War tactics were stupid, they wasted lives by the thousands -- but the OBJECTIVE of all that slaughter made perfect sense: to save the Union by abolishing slavery.
The key to your question isn't "how far", but "in which direction", which you didn't ask. But without it, you're simply rolling around: incredible, even criminal levels of violence, including violence against civilians, SOMETIMES achieve good objectives. And sometimes the mere threat works, and sometimes, surgical strikes actually remove the threat.
BUT YA GOTTA HAVE AN OBJECTIVE.
Plainly, there is a cultural, even theological aspect to Al-Quaeda terrorism. It has a lot to do with young men without women, culturally, and theologically with the notion of "Dar Al-Islam" against Christendom.
So - what's the objective? What's the direction in which you ask, "how far"?
Posted by: theAmericanist at Sep 11, 2003 8:49:28 PM
Rather than see America, this finest earthly creation of man perish, there is little I would not do short of murder and outrage to innocents or listening to the collected speeches of Bill Clinton.
Posted by: Donald R. McClarey at Sep 11, 2003 9:01:08 PM
What Mark is basically asking is "do we want to be like the Jews?"
It bears on this discussion that Israel has shown far more forbearance under awful strains than we might have. If you want a model for how to defend righteously, there's one.
The majority -- the majority! -- of Palestinians want nothing other than the slaughter of every Jewish man, woman, and child; they preach such violence daily in their mosques and schools and television; they celebrate in the streets when Israeli civilians are deliberately murdered in miniature 9/11s. This has been going on for years, and yet Israel has long possessed the ability to forcibly expel them, even to annihilate them.
The Jews must be special recipients of God's grace, because I don't see how anyone else would take this for so long. Also, it's possible that once Iran or somebody gets the bomb, Israel will be no more and all their forbearance will have meant nothing in this life. So we have the whole scenario Mark outlines in microcosm already.
Discuss.
Posted by: craig at Sep 11, 2003 10:32:38 PM
One bright spot I haven't seen anyone mention in this thread is that current military theory does include the concept that it's harder to win if you're not on the moral high ground compared to your enemies. Just war is not simply a good idea, but a victory condition.
John Boyd, whose theories are _extremely_ influential in the US military, specifically states that war takes place on three planes: physical, mental and _moral_.
From a slide in his famous presentation _Patterns of Conflict_:
"Break guerillas’ moral-mental-physical hold over the population, destroy their cohesion, and bring about their collapse via political initiative that demonstrates moral legitimacy and vitality of government and by relentless military operations that emphasize stealth/fast-temp/fluidity-of-action and cohesion of overall effort.
"*If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides."
So nuking Mecca is not just a bad idea; it's treachery against your own side!
The other Maureen
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Sep 12, 2003 6:32:43 AM
Christopher, (1) we did not preemptively avoid the mass murder of which you speak and (2) we retaliated against the wrong guys, assuming you are referring to 9/11. There is nothing just about that. Sorry, the terrorists are Pakistanis, Egyptians, Saudis, etc., and so far we have given them no reason to fear us. To my sorrow.
Posted by: Barbara at Sep 12, 2003 7:34:01 AM
I can see theamericanists point if you look at this from a just war doctrine standpoint alone and very nearly out of context. You can't judge the justness of a conflict till you know how the conflict will materialize. The odd thing about this, from a historical standpoint, is that we're holding each campaign of a greater war up against Just War Doctrine to see how it fits, rather than the overall war itself. I don't think this has ever been done before (nor has there ever been a prior need).
Having said that, That-Other-Mark-Over-There makes a point that shouldn't just be run over with a bulldozer. Anybody read The Atlantic's cover story; "The Dark Art of Interrogation"?
Maybe a side question could/should be something like: how far are we willing to go in the war on terrorism in-between engagements on the battlefield?
No matter how moral the conflict, immoral actions are bound to occur in the course of combat. Fire-bombing Dresden was an immoral act that did not detract from the overall morality of the conflict. The question is, in round 3 of the war on terrorism, how close to fire-bombing Dresden do we want to get?
Everybody keep in mind, because of the nature of this war on a lot of different levels, we are in completely uncharted waters here.
Posted by: Mark Windsor at Sep 12, 2003 9:22:50 AM
Here's a thought: Maybe the yellow journalists, policy pundits and election minded pols could tone down the jingoism for a minute so we can take stock of where we are, and where our interests lie. Between sophistical "wars on terrorism" to "axes of evil" to clashes between "civilization and chaos", asking people to make moral, dispassionate decisions (i.e. eschewing revenge) is pretty difficult if the unscrupulous render fear the predominant currency in our national discourse. "Be not afraid" someone said. . .
Posted by: al at Sep 12, 2003 9:52:15 AM
Al,
Much as I would love to see that happen, don't hold your breath. They can't "tone it down," because the frenzy is their raison d'etre.
Catherine
Posted by: Catherine at Sep 12, 2003 10:24:23 AM
To make it a bit more personal and not just "over there", how many would be for bringing back the draft? Obviously if this continues the way it is, our troops are going to need to be relieved - and then shouldn't we have a number ready in the meantime for such erruptions as N. Korea may bring on suddenly?
Posted by: Chris at Sep 12, 2003 10:31:42 AM
To throw something else into theAmericanists point -
The actual quote by Clauswitz is "war is simply diplomacy by other means."
I don't think Mark Shea's question is too abstract to make sense in the modern world.
Fredrick the Great did miraculous things while outnumbered and outgunned by simply disguising his objectives via indirect approach. theAmericanist-ever read B.H. Liddel-Hart's "Strategy"? It's been a long time since I've read either it or Keegan.
Posted by: Mark Windsor at Sep 12, 2003 10:56:50 AM
One thing that dismays me about Mark's talk is that he always says things like "...including the pre-emptory annihilation of millions of innocent men, women and children in countries with whom we are not at war." When have we done this? Does he really expect us to do this? And I have noticed, too, that he has a very narrow view of our current situation. He cannot seem to understand the nature of Iraq as a *battle* in the larger war. It's a front. We didn't invade Iraq out of the blue; nor did we kill millions pre-emptorily or the like. We went out of our way -- despite our anger -- to kill only the guilty.
Posted by: Louder Fenn at Sep 12, 2003 11:53:30 AM
