by John Mattingly
Note: This is the second in a three-part series that looks at the current cultural sausage being made by our U.S. military, starting with the curious case of the American Sniper, followed by the troubling question of military honor and why our high-powered, big-dollar U.S. military keeps losing wars. The final piece will offer sensible and novel ways we can actually Make Peace on War.
Part Two: The Horror of Honor
Because we really can’t thank our U.S. troops and military for losing the Middle East wars, might we honor them as public servants? It’s a fair question. Can defeated troops at least hold a position of honor in our society as they return from failure?
No. Reasons: The troops fought an offensive war against a false enemy based on fabricated evidence and a botched exit strategy. Unlike Desert Storm, in which the U.S. had a clearly defined enemy, objective and exit plan, the Iraqi and Afghan wars were, and are, fully the opposite. It is now clear that “Why We Did It,” included a tangled web of self-serving, nationalistic motives that had little to do with Saddam Hussein and a nuclear bomb. It was a war of choice, a war to project, rather than protect, U.S interests.
The collateral damage to Middle Eastern citizens – to their stability, culture and population – is unconscionable. To honor our troops for this unjustified, and unjust, war would not only be inappropriate, it would challenge our moral credibility as a nation. Comparisons to German aggression in the 1930s are perhaps overdrawn, but not irrelevant. It was former U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, together with a tribunal of Allied judges, who adjudicated at the Nazi war crime trials of 1945 at Nuremberg:
“[c]rimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.”
The ruling of the tribunal was clear: ideology (claiming superiority based on race, form of government or God) and/or ignorance (just following orders) are no defense for war crimes, and the individuals who participated are guilty. Our entire U.S. military that engaged in the Middle East wars, from commander in chief down to every private first class offering first salute, is fortunate the U.S. has selective amnesia about the international legal precedents set at Nuremberg.
The fact is, most of us in the U.S. want to thank the troops as a way of dismissing them, and in some weird, ineffective way, absolve ourselves of our guilt for having tolerated leadership and execution of a war that few of us want to acknowledge or remember.
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From a historical standpoint, the U.S. troops of the Middle East wars are fortunate that they are not being disassociated from our culture for being losers, or brought up on charges for participating in war crimes. It is frequently argued that the troops are innocent because they were commanded by incompetent and deceptive, if delusional, leadership, and therefore get a pass. But neither the troops nor the brass of the Middle East wars would get a pass if the U.S. or Nuremberg prosecuted the case.
Notwithstanding the utter improbability that anyone from the Middle East wars will be held accountable, it remains a thorny problem for all of us in the non-military community to figure out how, exactly, we should relate to the troops. It appears that the actual response will be a denial-gratitude cover-up: (a) lots of indiscriminate, uncritical praise and talk, coupled with (b) various laws that provide more help to veterans, like beefing up the VA system while (c) passing token legislation like the Clay Hunt suicide prevention bill together with (d) all-in spending of over $10 trillion on the war on terror between 9-11 and the next presidential election, and (e) continuing the “new” war on terror with bombs rather than boots, a strategy that has the hygienic appeal of burning people to death from a relatively safe altitude rather than putting them in a cage. But neither bombing nor burning alive is proving a winning strategy, as both ISIL and the U.S. Air Force are now learning.
So what does it take, or mean, to “win”?
Given that the U.S. is the world’s only superpower, backed by super military spending, why do we continue to lose these wars in faraway places with radically foreign cultures? Eisenhower, the last American general to serve as president, now appears very prescient in his warning against the persistence of a military-industrial complex. It is here today, having morphed into a military-industrial-political complex that is doing very well, thank you. And the MIP complex offers its deepest thanks to the troops who suffer death and injury and very special thanks to the congressional representatives who continue to appropriate military contracts from sea to shining sea to increase earnings for the multitude of corporations, large and small, whose paychecks and dividends provide income for workers and retirement money for the boomer generation. A counter-cyclical irony.
The blood, guts and feathers of how it works is this: military contracts for everything from child care to armored tanks, meals to fighter jets, is spread out over at least 400 congressional districts every year, so the incentive is not to win wars, but rather create an international environment in which war never ends and the flow of money into the MIP complex never stops. Even Bernie Sanders, the wily dove, brings home billions to his state for the F-35, a $1.5 trillion fighter plane that has yet to fly. With every congressperson getting a piece of the action on war machinery and services, the terrorists are the perfect enemy. There is no end to them, and thus no end to the military spending necessary to engage terror in perpetual war. Even though our troops have, in most cases, the highest and best technology and arms, they engage in campaigns that have a strategic financial structure that is designed, from the start, to lose.
Note: Events that have occurred in the month since the writing of the first part of this series confirm both the logic and persistence of the Perpetual Losing War (PLW) premise. Netanyahu (aka Nuthin’ But a Yahoo) came to the U.S. Congress and received fifty-some standing ovations for warning Congress about the existential threat of Iran. As if they didn’t know. But wait, Mr. N gave sworn statement to our U.S. Congress in 2002 that there was “absolutely no question” that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were the “end of the word” combo. The U.S. took out Hussein and the Sunnis, which was a strategic gift to Iran and the Shiites, so now Mr. N offers no solution to the problem he endorsed, other than, apparently, more war, as in PLW.
This was followed by nearly half the U.S. Senate sending a contentious, condescending letter to Iranian leaders stating that Congress will likely do anything to stop the nuclear proliferation negotiations with Iran and take all options off the table except war: make that PLW.
And while all this hawkish huffing and puffing was going on in Congress, 11 U.S troops, including seven marines, were killed in an accident during a training mission, the Secret Service crashed forth with a drinking problem, a U.S. drone was shot down over Syria, and revelations continue about aging and deteriorating stockpiles of mustard gas, explosive accelerants and fungus on nuclear warheads. It has to make a young, war-worthy, enlistable person in America wonder: am I more worried about Iran, or about the incompetence of U.S. military and security professionals?
Stay at peace with war, my friend.
– The Most Troubling Man in the World
John Mattingly cultivates prose, among other things, and was most recently seen near Poncha Springs.
