Supporting The Troops, Opposing The War

Yesterday the Washington Post published an op ed by Rick Atkinson on the difficulty of separating support for the troops from support for the war. A key passage:

"While some voice private doubts, others insist -- often with increasing stridency -- that the war is justified, that the insurgency can be crushed and that naysaying undermines both national will and troop morale. I admire their steadfast faith, even as I recognize the dilemma. To disbelieve seems too much like betrayal. Skepticism and dissent appear inimical to service and sacrifice.

Keeping the warriors and the war untangled is extraordinarily difficult, intellectually and emotionally. All that most of us can do is to mean precisely what we say: We back you."

Phil Carter adds a thoughtful comment:

"This is a dilemma I've wrestled with since March 2003, if not earlier. I'm still not sure there's a way to coherently reconcile one's support for the troops with opposition to the war. This seems like cognitive dissonance in the extreme; to support the people who are laboring on one hand, but to oppose the purpose towards which they pour their blood, sweat and tears. On the receiving end of this speech, it's hard to see the line between supporting our soldiers while opposing the purpose for which they labor. It's not like we're talking about some corporate bottom line here. This purpose is used to justify great sacrifice by our soldiers, much more so than any employee in any other context. They face mortal danger every day; they miss their families; some will be wounded, a few killed — all in the name of this purpose. And you're going to come in and say that the war's being fought wrong — or worse yet, that this purpose isn't good enough? If that's true, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down — there's no more purpose to justify their enormous sacrifices.

Viktor Frankl wrote so many years ago that man will bear almost any hardship in the name of a purpose. If we oppose the purpose of this administration in Iraq, do we make it tougher for our soldiers to bear the hardship? On the other hand, if we remain mute, do we risk prolonging the hardship unnecessarily?"

Both the original op ed and Carter's commentary are extremely thoughtful, and very much worth reading. But on one central point I disagree with them: I have always found it both straightforward and necessary to separate support for the troops from support for the war they are fighting.

This is, I think, because I was a child during the Vietnam war. I remember seeing, on the news, video of people taking out their dislike for the war on the troops who had fought it, and being confused. I asked my very wise Dad about it, and I remember him impressing on me that the troops were just kids who had been asked by their country to go off and fight, at the risk of their lives; that many of them had done their best in an awful situation, and that it wasn't their fault. Being a child, I understood immediately how unfair it would be to hold someone responsible when they had just done what they were asked to do by someone who had authority over them. It wasn't that I didn't know that there were orders you shouldn't follow -- I had heard of World War II -- but I also knew that there were people, my parents for instance, who were in a position to tell me to do things with the presumption that their orders were legitimate, and that when I didn't know that what they were asking me to do was wrong, I should do it. My parents had never put me in this position, but I had read books in which kids had parents (or parental surrogates) who did: Oliver Twist, for instance. I was also old enough (nine) to know that however obvious it might seem to me that the war was wrong, it wasn't obvious to everyone, and certainly there was no reason to assume that an eighteen year old with no particular interest in politics would find this sufficiently clear to justify disobeying his country's orders. And, being a kid who could so easily imagine myself in an analogous (though much less extreme) situation (which, luckily, my parents never put me in), I understood in a very visceral way that it wasn't their fault. And since they had already suffered a lot more from the decision to go to war in Vietnam than I ever would, the idea of taking out my opposition to the war on them just seemed grotesque.

There are many things I thought when I was nine that I have since decided were wrong, but this is not one of them. Since then it has only been strengthened by the idea that civilian control of the military is both a very good thing and, in some sense, a very unnatural one. If you think of it, it's odd that the group of people whose job it is to fight and die in defense of the nation would accept the idea that someone other than themselves should decide what defending the nation requires, and thus when they should have to risk their lives and prepare to mourn the death of their comrades. But precisely because it's so odd, the fact that in our society they do this seems to me to be a truly wonderful thing. And when soldiers do go off to fight and die on orders from the civilian leadership, the knowledge that they do this, oddly enough, on our say-so makes me greatly admire them. It also makes me profoundly unwilling to hold them responsible for any problems with the policy they are carrying out, since it is our civilian leaders, not the troops on the ground, who decide what that policy is.

But for precisely this reason, I think that it is incumbent on each of us to think very seriously about who we elect to be those leaders, and to debate openly and seriously any wars they might propose. Civilian control of the military only works when that control is exercised responsibly. It is the responsibility of people like the President and members of Congress not to send our troops off to war lightly, just as it is their responsibility not lightly to dismiss threats to our nation. But it is also our job, as citizens, to do whatever we can to make sure that they live up to those responsibilities. -- When I was nine, it seemed to me that when Fagin sent Oliver out to pick pockets, it was something very good about Oliver that made him do what Fagin asked. That's why I always felt that it would have been just wrong to blame him for breaking the law. But for that very reason I also felt that Fagin's abuse of his quasi-parental status was a particular and deep betrayal: a way of turning something very good in a child to an evil purpose, and of putting that child in a position that no child should be put in. Obviously, I do not think our soldiers are children, but I do think that it is in a similar way a deep betrayal of an extraordinary trust when either our leaders or we as citizens fail to think seriously about what we are doing when we ask them to go to war, and to try to do whatever we can to ensure that we ask this of them only when it is truly necessary.

Because this is how I think about these things, I think it's clear that we should support the troops both materially -- by giving them what they need both to fight and survive, and also to make a good life when they return -- and emotionally, by being behind them. But because I think that supporting them also requires that we think as clearly as we can about when to go to war, I don't think that supporting them can possibly require supporting the war they fight in. If it's a just and wise war, we should support it for those reasons; if not, we should oppose it; in either case, we support the troops best by trying as hard as we can to be good and thoughtful citizens, especially when it comes to war.

I suspect the reason that this seems easier to me than it does to either Rick Atkinson or Phil Carter is that I don't know anyone who is serving in Iraq, and therefore the question of what to say to people I love about the war in which they are risking their lives does not come up for me. I can exercise what I take to be my obligation to support the troops both by supporting efforts to make sure they are adequately armored and by opposing the war itself, and I can do this without having to say to anyone, in an actual face to face conversation, that I think that the war in which he or she has risked her life and seen comrades die is not worthwhile.

However: while there are times when being closer to a problem helps you to understand it, I don't think this is one of them. Knowing someone who is serving in Iraq would help me to understand the sacrifice that person is making, the concrete feel of his or her life there, and in general to get a much more detailed sense for what we as a nation have asked our soldiers to do for us. It would also help me to understand more clearly why he or she might feel that to call the wisdom of the war into question is to fail to support the troops. But I do not think it would change my view on two points: first, that asking a person to believe that something is true when she thinks it's false is not among the many things one human being can legitimately ask another to do as a gesture of support, and second, that in this case it would not be a way of supporting the troops, since one of the best forms of support I can offer is to do what I can, for what little it's worth, to make sure that we only ask them to risk their lives for a very good reason, and this requires that I, like all citizens, should make the very best, most thoughtful judgment I can on the issue.

Or, as Phil Carter eventually concludes:

"I'm still unsure about my answer. But increasingly, I have come to the conclusion that we owe it to our soldiers, as the citizens who exercise ultimate control over the politicians who send them into harm's way, to question the purposes and means of our wars. True loyalty to the soldier requires we bear witness to their sacrifice, and that we honor their sacrifice by ensuring that their efforts are not wasted, let alone their lives. Our democracy depends on the willingness of each generation of young Americans to put themselves in harm's way. But those young Americans depend on us, as citizens, to ensure they go into combat with the right stuff, and for the right cause."

Comments

[Jesurgislac]

Hilzoy: and I can do this without having to say to anyone, in an actual face to face conversation, that I think that the war in which he or she has risked her life and seen comrades die is not worthwhile.

The only person I know at all well who is currently serving in Iraq is rather more bellicose than I am: while circumstances do not permit this soldier to be completely outspoken right now (it's a court-martial offense to publicly express doubts about the war), I don't doubt that we'll all be hearing a lot more from this soldier after March 2005.

I am immensely indebted to this soldier for sharing as much personal experience of what it's like to be in Iraq at this time: not least, what it's like to be a soldier who discovers that she has arrested people and sent them to a prison where they may have been tortured: and that no one in the chain of command, from the Commander-in-Chief downwards, is the least bit interested in remedying or apologizing for or even acknowledging this monstrous injustice and disgrace to her and to all other soldiers serving in the US army, who were caught up - however indirectly - with the Bush administration's pro-torture policies.

[LizardBreath]

Wonderful post. I have been having precisely this discussion with a Republican friend (actually a Gulf War I vet), and you've made the arguments that I was trying to make with limpid clarity. I now have something to send to him so that I can summarize my position as "What she said."

[Jadegold]

Phil Carter drives me up the wall.

Sometimes he writes with perfect clarity on military issues; other times, I seriously wonder if he spent a minute in the service.

He wrote eloquently about Abu Ghraib; he also mucked around in Michelle Malkin's pig pen WRT CAPT James Yee.

One can support the troops and be opposed to the war; anyone who tells you differently is seeking dishonest political leverage. After all, what could be more supportive of our troops than stopping a bad or misguided policy? That's why Vietnam vets were at the forefront of the anti-war movement. And we're beginning to see vets of this war take a similar stance.

Military Science 101: The armed services are an instrument of our foreign and national security policies. The military doesn't make the policy. As such, support of our troops can (and should)easily be decoupled from support of our policies.

[Ted]

There has been a worldwide consensus since the Nuremberg trials that soldiers, like the rest of us, are individually responsible for the things they do. No distinctionis made between crimes committed under orders and crimes committed on one's own initiative. Anyone on either side who has taken hostages, or cut off water supplies to civilian populations, or summarily executed prisoners, is guilty of a war crime, because those actions are prohibited by treaties and conventions that both countries are parties to. Some of our soldiers fall into that category and some don't. Ditto for the insurgents. I don't see what's so hard about that. I support the troops in the sense that I want them all to stay alive and come home soon, but nobody is going to get me to excuse war crimes because of some blanket loyalty to our side.

[LizardBreath]

>There has been a worldwide consensus since the Nuremberg trials that soldiers, like the rest of us, are individually responsible for the things they do.

I think you're missing something, probably because it's so obvious you just haven't formulated it explicitly. While soldiers are individually responsible for war crimes, they are not individually responsible for acts that would be crimes if not committed during war (e.g., shooting people), even if the war is a wrongful war. German solders in WW I were not individually morally culpable for machine-gunning French soldiers in the trenches of Verdun, despite the fact that (a) killing people is usually wrong, and (b) the German invasion of France in WW I was not morally justified.

In light of that, you can oppose the Iraq war, consider the killing that our troops are doing as wrong in itself, but still not consider them individually wrongdoers (other than the few criminals among them).

[TR]

Well, you now have the majority of Americans on your side. The Washington Post reported today that "56 percent of the country now believes that the cost of the conflict in Iraq outweighs the benefits, while 42 percent disagreed. It marked the first time since the war began that a clear majority of Americans have judged the war to have been a mistake."

[Jadegold]

While soldiers are individually responsible for war crimes, they are not individually responsible for acts that would be crimes if not committed during war (e.g., shooting people), even if the war is a wrongful war.

Exactly right. Conversely, war crimes can be committed in wars that are just and morally defensible.

[LianeR]

You quote Carter writing, "Our democracy depends on the willingness of each generation of young Americans to put themselves in harm's way."

I disagree with this premise. When was the last time our democracy was under such a threat that only military action could possibly defend it? (Hint: 9/11 is not the right answer, unless you're thinking about NORAD planes.) Not in the last 50 years.

Meanwhile, we have used our military to encircle the globe and solidify our empire. No, the soldiers are not to blame for that. But perhaps another de-coupling is needed as well. Separate the soldier's intention to fight "for democracy" from what they're actually being asked to do. It might help whack at the recruitment numbers a bit if we started to deconstruct this myth.

I for one would drop the euphemisms about "harm's way." We're asking our soldiers to kill and maim and to be killed and maimed. Let's not shy away from that fact. And we're doing much more killing & maiming than being killed and maimed. It may make people uncomfortable to state it in these terms, but it is the reality of war. Military euphemisms only serve to deny what war is so that we accept it more readily. We're putting our service members in atrocity-producing situations, as you can tell from some of their testimonies on the web. That needs to be said plainly again and again.

[hilzoy]

Ted: I wasn't talking about war crimes, but about soldiers who go off to fight in wars I think are wrong. Suppose they commit no war crimes: can I support them without supporting the war? I meant to argue: yes, and it's not as hard as the two writers I quote make it out to be. Of course if they commit war crimes, whether on their own initiative or under orders, they are culpable; that's what the line about 'of course, I knew that there were orders it would be wrong to obey' was meant to gesture at -- but if they are simply doing a good job fighting in an unjust war, I support them.

[dmbeaster]

What I want to know is why some cannot see the obvious difference between supporting troops and supporting the policy that commits them to fight a particular war.

This seems to be at the root of Carter's et al. dilemma. Their problem is that they can only see supporting the troops as being a cheerleader for the greater cause that they fight for.

It's as if all that matters is perception of reality, rather than the reality itself. Allegedly, the war becomes a problem and victory uncertain solely because someone says so.

If anything, the ultimate disrespect for troops is to ignore the reality of the fight, and commit them anyway. Reminds me of WWI generals commiting troops to frontal charges against machine guns. Who supports the troops -- the guy who criticizes that or the people who blindly cheer them on while stomping the dissenter for "not supporting the troops"?

[hilzoy]

dmbeaster: when I was thinking about this while writing the post, I thought: it probably makes a big difference how you arrive at this question. For me, I started with opposition to the Vietnam war and then asked: are the troops responsible for this? Clearly not. But I think Carter and Atkinson probably started with the thought: I support the troops, who are my friends and relatives, and who are dying for a cause that many of them believe in, and that it's important for many of them to believe in. (At any rate, I imagine it would be easier to think of oneself as risking one's life in a just war than to think of oneself as risking one's life for the principle of civilian control of the military.) Then, given both their doubts about the war and their need to support their friends, they asked: can I express these doubts? I think it looks a lot harder when approached from that angle than it does when approached from mine.

[Brock]

You read Oliver Twist at age nine? Precocious kid,
weren't you?

[votermom]

The question really boils down to what does it mean to support the troops, right?
Some answers are easy: it means giving them financial support -- not only in weapons and armor, but in health care and veterans benefits after they (some of them) survive the war. It means giving their families benefits.
For some of us, it means using the troops only in defense of national security.
For some of us, it means protecting them from the real psychological harm of of committing or being party to inhumane acts.
For some of us, it means respecting them by giving them truthful answers.
For some of us, it means respecting contracts about length of service.
For everyone, I would think, it means bringing them home as soon as possible and helping them re-integrate into civilian life.

[Jesurgislac]

LianeR: We're asking our soldiers to kill and maim and to be killed and maimed.

And the Bush administration is also asking them to commit torture.

[hilzoy]

Brock: yes.

[praktike]

For those of you seeking ethical guidance on this question, I do recommend Noah Feldman's book, What We Owe Iraq. It's a very nuanced book that takes opposing arguments seriously and considers them carefully.

[rilkefan]

god damn.

[dmbeaster]

I agree 100% Hilzoy.

Out of respect, I do not plan on seeking out people serving (I know only one -- the son of my step-mom) to let them know I oppose the war (his immediate family does that to him anyway, which I think is unnecessary) -- no matter how appropriate the anti-war argument, it must make them feel bad (unless they are already on board with the anti-war position -- in which case they probably loathe the rah-rah for the war crowd).

I rememeber a Fox agent provaceteur (can't call them reporters) pestering war protesters as the war began with the question of should they be protesting since they know it hurts the feelings of the troops.

But the question here, as put by Carter, is "I'm still not sure there's a way to coherently reconcile one's support for the troops with opposition to the war." He is assuming that "support" means 100% unconditional support for anything that would make troops feel better, and therefore anything less, no matter how principled, cannot be support.

By that measure, propoganda would be preferable to the truth.

At least that's how I understand his point of view. It makes sense if you are talking about helping a friend or loved one, but that is hardly a fair model if one is talking about the troops in general.

What is really annoying is the extent to which this issue has become propagandized by war protangonist, enabling them to demonize anti-war people. We already have enough politics by hate in this country.

[hilzoy]

Hasta la vista, italics!

[rilkefan]

persistence closing pays.

[felixrayman]

How long must we suffer from unclosed tags and unthreaded discussions?

Scoop is the one true path!

[Slartibartfast]

Seriously OT, rilkefan:

Does "KDD Cup" mean anything to you? Note to the uninitiated: this has nothing at all to do with undergarments.

[dmbeaster]

Preview is my friend. Must remember. (Meant to close those italics after "provaceteur.")