Responding to Robert Kaplan, Reach for the Civics, Not Psychology, Text Posted by David Shorr

With all due respect to both Shadi and Heather, the issue at the heart of Robert Kaplan's "Modern Heroes" piece really boils down to the basic concept a military mission, and how a small 'd' democratic nation sends its sons, daughters, wives, fathers into battle. It's not, as Kaplan claims, Americans' discomfort with traditional warrior virtues that is troubling us; it's our slowly dawning sense of responsibility They are there on our behalf. Yes, the choice to serve was (is) theirs, but the choice of the fight, this fight, is ours. Through the lens of the civics book, the duality of heroism and victimization is clear. This isn't cultural ambivalence, it's the political system righting itself.

Kaplan is correct that respect for skill and professionalism in the art of war, rather than appreciation for sacrifice, is in some ways a more appropriate form of honor. But if, as the old saying goes, "theirs is not to reason why," then whose is it? Who decides the tasks to which these skills are applied? We do. Ultimately, we're the deciders. [Just to avoid confusion, let me be clear that I mean the nation as a whole. In one sense, the war is fought 'not in our name' for the war's opponents -- in another sense it's in all of our name (about which more below).]

Kaplan resists the sentimentality that seems to pity the troops, but gets so wrapped up in his own romantic notion of valor that he misses the central issue: have we sent the troops into a battle that's winnable, no matter how great their professionalism? At root, the public's reaction isn't pity; it's buyer's remorse. The point isn't the hardship the troops are enduring. The point is that we put them there, and does what we've asked them to do make any sense??

A few last words about civilian casualties and detainee abuse. Again, there are important issues regarding the relationship of the nation and its people to such misdeeds. National Journal last week had an excellent Sydney Freedberg cover story about rules of engagement and proper use of force. We cannot absolve fighting men and women of their duty to conform to the rules of engagement and obey the laws of war (I suspect Robert Kaplan would agree, on the grounds of respecting rather than pitying). But it must also be said that there are heightened stresses associated with being an occupying force surrounded by guerrillas and militias -- again the issue of the situation in which we have placed our troops. Finally, I am perplexed that Kaplan is perplexed by the focus put on the detainee abuse committed by US troops. Here there is the added issue of the ramifications for the United States' standing in the world. We believe in individual rather than collective guilt, but again, the troops represent the country (and maybe even official policy). I didn't think it needed pointing out, but, to put it mildly, this is a really big deal. Do we really think the media has overplayed this? Really?

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

I am often filled with admiration for some of the people fighting in Iraq. Many show high degrees of tenacity, skill, resolve, courage and professionalism. Some have shown an admirable capacity to react with improvisational intelligence to complex and rapidly evolving conditions. I don't think pity is a prominent emotion in my attitudes. In some cases, I might think that the soldiers' dangerous labors are exploited, and that they have been used for purposes that they don't understand, and of which they wouldn't approve if they did understand. But for the most part, I'll pay these guys the respect of thinking that they are not dunces and suckers, and participate in the US military and its operations with their eyes wide open.

I agree with David that negative public feelings toward the war are based in good part on a sense of responsibility for the war. But I disagree that the central issue is whether the war is or was "winnable". The war itself was a horrible error to begin with, whether or not it could have been won. In fact, "error" is too weak a word. It was a fraud and a crime. If the US did not occupy the privileged position it does in the international order, if its leaders were not shielded from justice by the potent ring of our defenses, we could fully expect that our leaders would now be under indictment and hunted down for war crimes - for launching an illegal war of aggression.

Some of us believed from the beginning the war was a fraud and a crime; others came eventually to see it as a fraud and a crime. But the reason that, outside of the FOX newsrooms, there isn't a lot of that rah-rah war spirit Kaplan longs for is that a large number of Americans simply don't think the war is anything to be proud of. They are increasingly ashamed of it. And rightly so.

We're way past the time for reasonable people to hold that our warlord leaders were duped by bad intelligence. Most of them weren't duped; or if they were duped, it was irrelevant since they were determined to launch the war anyway for strategic reasons, and the stovepiped intelligence and fishing for pretexts was just a sideshow. They actively participated in a public relations snow job. They had a strategic plan for the Middle East that involved conquering Iraq, converting its government into a US client, and turning the country into a base for further aggression. The official pretexts were just designed to garner public support.

Now while these sorts of strategic rationales for a war are ho-hum in cynical imperial Washington, wars fought for such motives are illegal under international law, and also under the religious and common-sense moral codes under which most Americans were raised. Most decent people think it is just wrong to intentionally kill people who are not trying to kill or injure you. They think it is wrong to shock and awe others into abject submission to the national will via a spectacular televised display of killing of innocents and destruction of homes and cultural riches. But for vandals like Dick Cheney, the display of barbarian might and sheer philistine insouciance was the whole point. That shows the natives not to count on any delicate America sensibilities about precious historical artifacts or trebly precious human beings.

This war was just an act of two-bit aggression, not much different in kind from similar criminal acts in the recorded and unrecorded past. That's why people aren't tooting the national horn and parading the heroes. The war was a deeply wrong and wrongheaded endeavor carried out in support of deeply wrong and wrongheaded national policy objectives. It was conducted for reasons of state that are no different in kind from the reasons that have propelled most empires in the past. Sadly for Kaplan, many American remain at bottom, hostile to imperialism. And once the morally dubious nature of the war was revealed to them, it was no longer something they could support.

Kaplan no doubt hates all this whiny moral stuff. He thinks it is weak and pathetic, an unnatural triumph of the perverted outlook of the downtrodden over the hardy guilt-free will to conquer of the ubermenschen. Kaplan thinks war itself is glorious, and is its own justification. Conquest and power and domination are noble. Blasting things and people is the health of the state and the apotheosis of manhood. That is part of the pagan Nietzschean ethos that Kaplan has extolled in print. But most Americans are not Nietzschean pagans - they are Christians, or observant Jews, or descendants of Christians or observant Jews who still hold onto much of their ancestral moral codes, even if not all of the theological trappings.

It would be nice to be able to separate our soldiers and their many virtues entirely from the war itself, and to honor the soldier fully while disdaining the soldier's civilian commanders. But this involves an effort of conceptual distinction that is too high for humanity, at least where issues of war and peace are concerned. How much honor can one give to those who carried out a criminal act against the Iraqi people? How much glory can one bestow for showing doggedness and professionalism in killing hundreds of thousands of people who never attacked us? One can, to a limited extent, hold that the soldiers did not fully understand what they were doing. But the shame of the war falls over all of us, soldiers included. I think Kaplan and others will be forced to face the fact that Americans increasingly cannot and will not feel good about the war, because they increasingly believe we do not have right on our side.

We have seen the likes of Kaplan before, in every powerful country. The cult of Mars, the worship of the nation, an admiration for the practitioners of ruthless statecraft, a call for loyalty and boosterism among the talking and scribbling classes, and a preference for a system of government based on command, secrecy and noble lies: where have we heard all this before?

Kaplan and other would-be lords of war always overestimate the power of arms. The lovers of peace are more powerful than Kaplan and his prideful clique, because true human brotherhood and universal decency live on in the lives and recollections of the living even when its exemplars die, and spread easily from one nation to another. Kaplan's objects of value rise and fall with the rise and fall of the nation-states and war cults he worships. They are feared in life, loathed in death, and their power is thus pathetically mortal. We peace-lovers will always be around to throw monkey wrenches into the grandiose martial adventures of Kaplans now and Kaplans of the future.

[Bob Narus]

"...so wrapped up in his own romantic notion of valor that he misses the central issue: have we sent the troops into a battle that's winnable..."

No, no, no, no, no.

The central issue issue is, Is it just? Is it legal? Is it moral?

[Mike M.]

I wonder why we ignore a whole other group of modern heroes -- the people who were against the Iraq war before it began, who said so, voted so, and demonstrated against the war. Kaplan thinks the media is catering to the whims of a war-weary public when it should be selling us on the image of the soldier as hero. I think Kaplan's spent too much time teaching at the Naval Academy. He's forgotten about the citizen hero. The ones who were ignored in favor of this mess.

[Cal]

As Kaplan says, a few years ago the media did play up the soldier as hero. Remember Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch?

If the media is more cynical now, it might have more to do with the Army public relations office, rather than the 60's counterculture.

[Zathras]

The American media and public have shown what I would think anyone can see as a proper regard for the heroism of American soldiers in the field over the last four years. Kaplan's critique to the contrary sounds to me like a critique of the public morale, which ought to raise a red flag right there.

Americans with confidence in their political leadership have borne greater burdens of lost blood and treasure than the ones imposed by the Iraq war. Americans with shaken confidence in their political leadership have grown impatient. Sometimes their confidence has been shaken by having found their country in a novel international environment; this helps explain disillusion with the Truman administration over Korea. In Vietnam official optimism was contradicted by events, undermining the public's faith in whether the Johnson administration knew what it was doing. But even Johnson's administration, let alone Truman's, were not so obviously and hopelessly at sea as President Bush's administration has been over Iraq.

It is inevitable that public discontent with the nation's political leadership will bleed into disenchantment with the way military spokesmen justify the war. For the last two years at least the main part of the American military's mission in Iraq has been an effort, somewhat less than successful, to keep the Sunni Arab insurgency and Shiite Arab militias from slaughtering one another's civilians; Operation Iraqi Freedom has become Operation Keep Arabs From Killing Arabs (complete with catchy acronym), and Americans wonder why this should be their problem.

The Bush administration addresses this wonder with less than persuasive rhetoric about 9/11 and terrorism. Its chief spokesman, President Bush himself, weakens its case nearly every time he speaks, lurching from one sentence to the next like a penguin on roller skates. He gives every impression of not being up to the job, and since he is Commander in Chief this has implications for public support of our troops' mission.

The thought occurs that Robert Kaplan may be less than properly sensitive to this because such influence as he has on public policy depends on his connections with Bush administration officials. It doesn't depend on the troops, and it certainly doesn't depend on the public. An article under his byline that attributed waning public enthusiasm to the Iraq war to the inept senior officials he has advised, to a President wholly out of his depth, and to the inadequacies of his own analysis wouldn't do him much good at all. So one is left to draw that conclusion for him.

[Dan Kervick]

Zathras, I don't think Kaplan's disappointment has much to do with the political or strategic context of the Iraq war, or that his failure to criticize Bush's leadership is due to his personal dependence on the Bush administration. In his eyes, strong nations don't require inspiring or particularly competent leaders or to keep the martial fires burning, or to sustain the perpetual public celebration of heroism in battle. His beef is with the media in large part, but primarily with the American people themselves, whom he no doubt believes are weak, decadent and faithless. He is also disdainful of the national elite - a target audience of Wall Street Journal op-eds - who are participants in the "crumbling of the nation-state at the upper layers of the social crust."

Kaplan's time in the Israeli army seems to have thoroughly imbued him with the sabra ethos: its love of the warrior spirit of the "new Jew"; its faith in the supreme importance of the nation; it's contempt for victims, reflected in sabra contempt for the weakness of holocaust victims; it's political model of a Spartan warrior society permanently mobilized for conflict; its rejection of internationalism, especially as the international community grew increasingly critical of Israel.

Kaplan believes countries should fight wars, and win them, because wars are good and keep the nation strong. It doesn't really matter to him whether the Iraq war was a good cause, or whether George Bush is a great wartime leader. In a healthy nation, as Kaplan would see it, public morale and warrior spirit are perpetual, and supported by a "national media", group solidarity, a widespread zest for combat and the ritualized singing of the songs of heroic exploits.

[David Shorr]

I should offer a few words on 'winnable' v. 'wrong.' I agree that invading Iraq was wrong. The question of winnable arises post-invasion. Until Fall '05, I supported a continued presence, based on a sense of responsibility to leave it better than we found it. Perhaps the American occupation's ability to help stabilize Iraq was doomed from the outset, but I held out hope for those first 2-1/2 years.

If nothing else, this blog is a place where VSPs can be held accountable, and that's a good thing. So here's a what-did-you-do-during-the-war-daddy full Monty. The record of my public statements is limited to two items: an immediate post-invasion LTE in the NY Times taking Rumsfeld to task for saying the US wouldn't bear reconstruction costs (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F06EED61739F93AA15750C0A9659C8B63) and an article in the Connecticut Journal of Intl Law written in Fall '03 roundly condemning the Admin's what-we-say-goes approach (kinda like Ron Suskind's excellent NYT Magazine article a year later, but without the reporting and amazing 'reality-based' quote). My defense for not having been louder sooner is that five years ago, I was a specialist in humanitarian affairs and not yet a full-fledged VSP.