I’ve just
finished reading an article called “What Happened to the Anti-War
Movement?” http://www.nationofchange.org/what-happened-anti-war-movement-1378477752
The author, David Sirota, was lamenting the lack of any serious demonstrations
against intervention in Syria, and suggesting that the problem was
partisanship: Democrats are against Republican wars, Republicans against
Democratic wars. “An anti-war movement,” Sirota said, “is
supposed to be a check on such reflexive bloodlust. It is supposed to be a
voice of reason interrupting the partisan tribalism.”
Aside
from the simple fact that the current Syria debate seems to be making unlikely
bedfellows at both ends of the mattress (John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi siding
with Obama; John McCain wanting him to be even tougher?), Sirota’s view, and
that of most current voices, suggest that not partisanship, but a decline in
the ability to think about complex issues, is an element of what is happening.
The
first question is, how can anyone seriously use the phrase “the Anti-War
Movement”? It never occurred to me that
the anti-war movement was an enduring and consistent entity, like say, the
antislavery movement. If the anti-war
movement seeks to eliminate all war everywhere, then it’s properly called
pacifism, and it’s always been around, but I don’t think that’s what we’re
talking about here.
If
“the anti-war movement” is the grandchild of the anti-Vietnam War movement and
the anti-Iraq (II) movement (with some distant relatives like the
anti-invasion-of-Grenada movement), then it’s almost entirely an American
phenomenon, and it crosses party lines: LBJ and Nixon were equally its targets,
while 43 was excoriated and 41 pretty much given a pass for Desert Storm,
suggesting a variety of nuances.
If
the anti-war movement is local, it may be have any of three roots:
anti-jingoism rooted in skepticism about American motives; isolationism, based
on a historical “no foreign entanglements” philosophy or a simple lack of
concern for whatever happens elsewhere, or not-quite-100% pacifism.
To
be truly anti-war (and yet not a pacifist) would be to condemn many wars, even
to the point of being willing to fight some wars to avoid worse
consequences. In my own life I have been
strongly anti-war during Vietnam and Iraq II, but not during Desert Storm, NATO
in the former Yugoslavia, or Libya.
Looking further back, I have no idea how I would have felt about Korea
(though the thought of a Kim-Kim-Kim dynasty ruling over the whole peninsula is
not very appealing), pretty sure I would have been pro-World War II (but
against the bombing of civilians, and for the bombing of the rail lines leading
to the death camps), and against the Spanish-American, Mexican, and First World
Wars.
Should
we fight against a leader who has violated the Geneva Conventions, whether he
has acted against his own people or another country? Morally, I lean toward yes. (If we had actually taken on Saddam and
“chemical Ali” when they were slaughtering Kurds, we would have had much better
grounds than when we actually went to war against Iraq.) Can we do so and still keep our hands clean,
or at least cleaner than the hands we are slapping? Not sure, but I’d like to hope so.
But
the idea that War is a single entity (as, say, land mines, nuclear weapons, or
probably genocide are) is absurd. There
are limited military actions, there are wars between formal armies with little
or no “collateral damage,” there are wars that have initial moral justification
on at least one side, and wars that have none.
There are wars that begin for defensible reasons, and move beyond any
reason into disasters even worse than the one for which they were originally
fought.
As
a young man I was horrified at the tanks rolling into Budapest, and later at
the crushing of the Velvet Revolution, and much later at Tiananmen Square, but
I accepted that there was no way to stop these evils without bringing on much
worse suffering to many more people. I
was also shocked at the horrors of Rwanda and Darfur, and thought there was at
least a possibility that forceful intervention might diminish the sum total of
evil. And in Syria, where we have strong
reason to believe even the minimal standards of war conduct set out in the
Geneva Convention have been callously violated, it seems more than a little
likely that intervention could do more good than harm.
So
I’m not pro-war or anti-war, not this to me
and not in general, and I suspect millions of us feel the same way. But simplistic thinking – are you for or
against – seems to be driving out deeper reasoning, as cheap coinage drives out
good. Partisanship is one contributor to
that sort of thinking, but many other causes in our society, from poor education
to sound-bite news also contribute.
It
may be true that standing in the middle of the road too long can get you run
over, but it’s the only place where you can look both ways and consider where
you should go next.
