I understand why Americans respond with a certain level of skepticism to folks (politicians and outspoken pundits) whose philosophy seems to include pacifism-at-all-costs.
I mean, the problem with that sort of philosophy is twofold. First, of course, is that there are certainly times when going to war is merited, but the second, and to my mind more important reason, is that if your philosophy has one answer no matter what the question or circumstances surrounding it are, then you’re basically unnecessary as a thinker.
Plug In Question A. Get Response B.
Plug In Question Z? Get Response B.
Human input unnecessary.
So yeah, I do understand the skepticism that greets most reflexive doves, though I lean that way myself.
What I do not understand is why these folks opposite number, the ‘war is always the answer’ folks, the reflexive hawks, are taken the least bit seriously. Their philosophy has all of the problems of the previous philosophy, as well as the added problem that, in order to go to war, we ought to actually pass a somewhat more stringent test than in order not to go to war.
Clearly, a Very Serious Person.
They have the burden of proof, in other words, and judging by recent history, they’ve seemed both unwilling and unable to meet that burden without Making Shit Up.
Somehow, however, these folks are not given the scorn they so richly deserve, but are instead treated as very serious thinkers, foreign policy analysts of the highest caliber. I suspect that a lot of this is because something in the American psyche seems to automatically offer more credence to macho thuggery than it does to caution, viewing caution as a sign of weakness, rather than the sign of intellect it actually is. Which, yeah, this is also why there’s so much railing against ‘intellectuals’ … because thinking before you act is for wusses!
In any case, all of this is by way of saying that Bill Kristol is a big stupid monkey.
UPDATE:
Back in 2007, Kevin Drum put it like so:
The Bill Kristol phenomenon is a stellar example of what a nice suit and a sober tone of voice can do for you. When Curtis LeMay suggested bombing North Vietnam into the Stone Age and getting over our fear of using nuclear weapons, everyone saw him for what he was: a bellicose nutcase. Kristol is barely any less bloodthirsty, but he’s smart enough to talk in more soothing tones. As a result, he gets columns in Time magazine, edits his own widely-read magazine, and shows up constantly on television.
Underneath it, though, he’s every bit the bellicose nutcase that LeMay was. His answer to every foreign policy problem is exactly the same: a proposal to use the maximum amount of force that he thinks elite opinion can tolerate. But Kristol is well dressed, soft spoken, and a lively dinner companion. So everyone just sort of shrugs their shoulders at the fact that he basically wants to go to war with the whole world. It’s a nice gig.
My point here is that, yes, Kristol and his ilk are bellicose nutcases, and should be treated as such. The fact that Russ Feingold was right about Iraq (opposing invasion) has been, recently, enough to convince many pundits that he would be an inappropriate pick to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee . . . but those who were gung ho to invade would be perfectly appropriate, of course.
There’s this perception that those who oppose a war, even if they are later proved 100% right, are crazy far-left hippies, and I don’t see a similar stigma on the other side.
Don’t comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.
Maybe because they don’t exist?
Hawks and warmongers are (unfortunately) taken more seriously than are doves, because hawks are not the polar opposite of doves. They don’t suggest invading Europe or Canada or solving problems in Mexico by dropping bombs on it. They don’t literally have a default “go to war!” answer to any problem.
They do have the wrong answer to many problems. But unfortunately that is generally a more logical position than is the one of “war is categorically never the answer.”
Agreed with Sailorman. Kristol is an idiot, but I haven’t seen him advocating a U.S. ground invasion as a solution to, say, female genital mutilation in Africa. Of course, what you probably mean is that certain hawks consider war the solution to any very serious problem. Kristol doesn’t regard FGM as a threat to U.S. well-being, so war obviously isn’t the answer there. However, he does consider Somali pirates such a threat, so just as obviously, let’s send in the Marines. (Which is a time-honored solution to a pirate problem: “to the shores of Tripoli…”
Disagree with PG and Sailorman because I think what Myca was talking about is people who see war as the only means to resolve international conflicts of interest. (There is probably a quasi-Machiavelli test that could be applied here, about people who see war as what to do when politics has failed vs. people who see war as a normal political action).
I wonder if hawks are taken more seriously because of the myth of the military-industrial-complex – that foreign wars can be an economic good, which if it was ever true seemingly no longer is.
Myca,
I don’t have much to say about the idiotry you link to, but the first half of your post is brilliant. That describes exactly my problem with people who are always pacifists. It’s not that I think they won’t come out to be right 99.9892% of the time anyway, it’s that “I oppose war” by itself doesn’t tell me what someone’s foreign policy actually looks like. “I oppose war in all instances, and have a history of understanding foreign policy issues well enough to be sure I’m correct about what will minimize bloodshed,” I buy. But a lot of the “reflexive doves” I’ve met don’t seem to me to be knowledgable about policy in this way, but rather seem to be committed to pacifism as a personal commitment or an ideological bedrock.
That also unnerves me because I wonder if they can hold to it at all times in all ways. Let me give a parallel here: I am viscerally bothered by the idea of abortion, but one of the most compelling pro-choice statements I hear is that this does not mean I know what I would do faced with such a choice. The possibility of having one’s life utterly transformed, as it would be for many by bearing a child, is just not something most people can be sure of.
I feel similarly about war. If my home were invaded tomorrow, would I believe that ’tis nobler not to shoot back? From my comfortable sofa, I’d like to think so. But I don’t know that. I can know that, say, the Iraq war is an unjust, foolish, farcical waste. But I can’t know how America felt the day of Pearl Harbor. I wasn’t there.
So for me, people who proclaim Eternal Pacifism, I’ll Never Have To Consider The Issue Even For A Moment strike me as… well, maybe they know for sure. Maybe they’re so centered, so lacking in desire for revenge, so willing that they and theirs should die so as not to be complicit in killing, that they know they are doves, when it comes to it.
But as for me? I do not know. I do not pretend to know.
But Thene, I don’t think these people exist either, at least not in any real numbers.
What the hawks are, to me, are people who have significantly higher willingness to go to war than I do. Just like the rules of driving: “Everyone who drives slower than I do is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster than I do is a maniac.”
It’s a scale. Even hawks don’t generally want to get the country involved in war, because war sucks. It isn’t that they would rather go to war than not. Simply put, hawks have a much easier time reaching the point of “well, to me it looks like we going to war is the best option.”
That is why dove’s positions are easier to attack. A true dove who believes no war is ever acceptable, like those who believe violence is never acceptable, are generally beset with hypotheticals of increasingly problematic circumstances until they either fold or become unconvincing.
Hawks, OTOH, have more in common with us than we think.
here’s an interesting example, though i will need some help.
Take an example of a few wars and conflicts that we have been involved in (feel free to add to the list); I have also included some specific actions:
WW1
WW2
Hiroshima
Nagasaki
Vietnam
Korea
Iraq 1
Iraq 2
Bosnia
Afghanistan
Revolutionary War
Civil War
Let’s say that a hawk would think all of those were justified.
How many of those would you think were NOT justified? The commonality explains why hawks are accepted.
Thene,
But FGM in Africa, or China’s dubious currency policy (artificially holding down the value of their money to maximize exports and minimize imports), ARE international conflicts of interest. It conflicts with our humanitarian interest for FGM to occur; it conflicts with our economic interest for currencies not to be freely traded and fluctuating in value.
Japan’s trade policies in the 1980s conflicted with our interests, and having gutted their ability to maintain a military after WWII, we could have squashed Japan in a war. But no one thought the way to fix our trade deficit was bomb Tokyo (again). We have international conflicts of interest all the time that even Kristol probably doesn’t think are best addressed through force of arms. I personally think the EU is going the wrong way in antitrust policy, which affects American companies like Microsoft and Apple. But no one wants the U.S. to go to war with the EU over competition law. It’s logically erroneous to equate hawks with pacifists, because while it’s possible to be at war with nobody, it’s impossible to be at war with everybody.
I’m not sure if I agree with Myca’s basic point — I’m still thinking about it — but I think it’s clear that she’s (he? I’m sorry, Myca — I just realized that I have no idea what your gender is. Apologies!) captured the way itseems, a lot of the time, to those of us on the sidelines.
If you follow the news at all, there seems this group of people who, as Myca says, seem to believe that the only possible solution to any problem is to go forth, kick ass, wave our finger in the defeated foe’s face, and say “Never fuck with us or our interests again. Be told,” as if that’s going to work outside of a movie.
Negotiation and cooperation are, in this viewpoint, for cowards and those who aren’t strong enough to do what they “know” they should.
Like I say, I’m still not sure that I agree, as such, with Myca’s posit. But I think there’s a definite perception that needs to be explored here.
A few points.
1) I’m a dude, but it makes me happy that people would have trouble guessing that.
2) I think that there are obviously people who respond reflexively ‘go to war’ in situations where there’s a questions about whether to go to war or not … questions about an international conflict, in other words. I don’t think that they’d say ‘go to war’ to FGM, because there’s not really a question there. It’s not a conflict between nations. I also don’t think that their opposite numbers would vociferously advocate peace in those situations either, because, hey, it’s not an issue.
3) I specifically used Bill Kristol as an example here and linked to a post about him, because he’s been loudly and publicly in favor of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Sudan, and (most recently) war against Somali pirates. At that point, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to criticize him for being reflexively pro-war.
—Myca
I think the problem is one of no-action versus action.
When you get a large group of people (like the American majority) and tell them to follow someone, and the large group is already letting fears and tensions get the best of them, it logically follows that they will want solutions.
So, if you take 911 and the subsequent Iraq conflict, for example, the hawks were the ones who looked like they had the solutions. They told everyone they were going to go into Afghanistan and clear out the bad guys, then the told everyone Iraq was a part of the equation and had weapons of mass destruction and they were going to clear out the bad guys there, too, thus making America safer and better off in the process.
This provided a sort of instant gratification that one gets when faced with the “let’s think and talk about this” approach you get from the doves, and humans are usually fans of instant gratification.
It isn’t that they would rather go to war than not!?
In the case of Bill Kristol? Yes, it really is.
Do you have evidence (2001 or later, please) of a war he’s opposed? I honestly can’t think of one. If there is a split in public debate over whether or not to go to war, we know which side he’ll come down on.
—Myca
Furthermore, Sailorman, I don’t think it’s fair to discuss only the extreme position on one side (people who feel that the use of force is never justified and would rather surrender without a fight than to commit violence, even were we being invaded by hostile aliens or something), but to decry the extreme position on the other side as fiction, when Bill Kristol is actually a pretty good example of it.
Sure, it’s always a matter of degree, on both sides, at least when you’re discussing public figures. There’s always the ‘would you still favor/oppose war if X’, discussion, but once again, that applies to both sides.
My point is, Dennis Kucinich is treated like some kind of far-out hippie for opposing Afghanistan and Iraq, while Bill Kristol is generally treated as a mainstream political pundit, despite arguing that we ought to be conducting six or seven wars simultaneously.
I don’t think that that makes Dennis Kucinich the unreasonable one.
—Myca
Sure, it’s always a matter of degree, on both sides, at least when you’re discussing public figures.
Technically not true. Gandhi said that even when facing the Holocaust, Jews should not take up arms against the Nazis but should submit themselves. Gandhi is an example of a public figure who advocated what might be called extreme pacifism. He was fortunate to have his main opposition in the British, who felt so strongly that they must be the decent ones that they could be shamed somewhat by his displays of nonviolence. (A similar situation in the U.S. of a shame-able opposition was to MLK’s benefit, though he never was as extreme a pacifist as Gandhi.)
In contrast, I don’t know of any public figure who thinks that war is the answer to all international conflicts, including those in which the other side is not using any violence (e.g. conflicts over trade).
If you’re going to use Ghandi as an example of one side, I guess there’s no reason not to use, say, Hitler or Ghengis Khan as an example of the other.
I’m discussing modern America, and have drawn all of my examples from it for a reason.
—Myca
PS. Also, post updated.
I agree with Myca. Hawks in American life can be wrong time and again, and it will not get them taken any less seriously (Kristol is an excellent example).
Part of the problem, I think, is that US hawks are like global warming denialists — incapable of understanding evidence, or of ever looking at their own views with skepticism. Thus we have thousands of loyal conservatives insisting that Iraq has gone very well indeed, and that we’re close to victory — which is what they’ve been saying, now, for years.
Is everyone stoned but me? ^_^ America has no “folks (politicians and outspoken pundits) whose philosophy seems to include pacifism-at-all-costs.” Note the concrete example that Kucinich gives from his voting record.
I think a huge problem is that in America, we somehow believe that true reflexive doves exist and exist in huge numbers while disbelieving in any form of reflexive hawk. We buy into the anti-60s narrative that the vast majority of peaceniks are just idiots who would totally loll around in a drug-haze while an enemy force went into their town, looting, pillaging, and killing.
This simply isn’t the case. Most doves have clear ideas of when to start war and are often more correct than not (the most famous example WW2 of pacifists being wrong ignores that a vast majority of conservative hawks thought before Pearl Harbor that we should have gone to war on the side of the GERMANS and even afterwards believed we were on the wrong side in the European theater). Frankly, the few pacifists who are truly committed to nonviolence often are stone-cold m-fers who are literally willing to go to death than stain their souls (they also only apply their morality to themselves, see Buddhists). Still we see all people against any war as reflexive hippies who’d welcome Hitler with open arms.
That’s one big side of it. The other and that which reinforces the first is toxic masculinity. War, tough language, and bellicosity about destroying any Other that so much as looks at you have long been hallmarks of the Man’s Man ideal. Anything less than pummeling those weaker than you is proof that you are a woman and in the toxic masculinity worldview, there is only one role for women.
This is why war-cheerleaders are treated like Gods. They feed into that worldview and make their readers feel all manly and not-women too. Those who were right all along don’t matter, because they had to be all womanly to be so and thus can be replaced with the cartoonish stereotype of the reflexive hippie.
(feel free to add to the list)
Hiroshima
Nagasaki
i would add the firebombing of dresden in feb 1945 to the list.
i have read opinion pieces describing these as either war crimes or necessary wartime interventions to shorten the war and reduce casualties on both sides.
for “hawks” the answer is obvious: “they” shouldnt have messed with the united states to begin with and therefore “they” are getting what “they” deserve. this is all conveniently vague. whether there are legitimate military reasons for bombing these cities during wartime is lost in the emotional debate.
for “doves” the problem is that “lets stop and think this over” presents as nonaction and passivity. something that does not sell politically.
as far as the iraq war, in my opinion the bombing of the training camps in afghanistan appears to have been justified. the subsequent entering of iraq appears to not have been justified and then the iraq war was swallowed up in politics by fools and thieves in washington.
Myca,
You seem to be shifting what you are talking about, from whether there is an hawk equivalent of pacifism (there isn’t — even Hitler didn’t want to go to war until he felt certain of victory; contrast with pacifists, who refuse war even when they are certain it will achieve the short-term objective) to whether Kristol is a tool (duh). I can agree that Bill Kristol ought not be taken seriously by anyone, without agreeing that he believes war is the answer to all questions of international conflict. For example, you haven’t addressed my point about Kristol’s complete lack of interest in invading countries as a way of resolving trade disputes. He’s nuts, but as Drum notes in your update, he can’t go too far out of the mainstream in his nuttiness.
PG, nor are there any mainstream politicians or pundits who profess the sort of absolute pacifism you want to talk about. As I pointed out before and continue to maintain, you are comparing apples and oranges. In order to conjure examples of this sort of thing, you had to reach back to Ghandi (hardly a mainstream American figure, is he?) and MLK, JR., whose pacifism was hardly absolute, and who was hardly mainstream.
Maybe using the term pacifism was a mistake in my original post, but the truth is that extreme hawkishness is more acceptable in America than extreme dovishness. I’d point to Cerberus’ post as an excellent explanation of this.
I’m happy to stipulate that absolute hawks are a myth as much as absolute doves are when it comes to public discourse in America . . . my point is that you can be WAY WAY WAY WAY farther out on the hawk scale than on the dove scale, and still be considered reasonable, despite the extremely public, disastrous, and recent failures of hawkery.
—Myca
OK, so now the new question is whether/why “extreme” hawks are more politically acceptable that ‘extreme’ doves, right?
Well, before we go further: can we agree on what that means? how do you classify a view as extreme? I keep bringing this up because I don’t think you are doing a very good job as defining a hawk other than as someone who agrees with certain wars that you dislike.
For example, you say that Kristol is a hawk because he supported wars in
Is that an extremist view? “If you are looking at “difference from the population mean” then I don’t think it is, which is why I am not so sure that your thesis is correct.
You list seven wars there (eight, if you count Iraq twice.) My guess is that it would be considered fairly mainstream to support iraq 1 and 2, afghanistan as a starting point. Plenty of people think that NK and Iran belong on that list: the question often revolves not around pacifism but rather around the question of how to deal with nuclear weapons and the like–I would certainly support war with Iran if I thought it was the only practical way to stop them from acquiring a nuke. Sudan is popular more among world-police humanitarians (“stop the slaughter in Sudan”) than among the shoot-em-up types commonly considered hawks.
All in all, i would not be surprised if a significant portion of the population supported at least half and possibly a majority of those wars. NK is the province of the hawks, I think, as is Syria. But for each of the other wars you list there are plenty of “non hawk” people who support them.
You are basing your argument on the assumption that hawks are extremists. But in comparison to the US, i am not sure this is an acceptable assumption.
Let me get this straight, Sailorman — you’re arguing that it’s perfectly cromulent to advocate for war at the first opportunity, in every major conflict your nation has during your adult lifetime, and not be thought an extremist because lots of people agree with you?
(“You” meaning Mr. Kristol there, obviously, and not you yourself.)
On balance, I think I agree with Myca more than I disagree with him, and I think you’re over-quantifying. This strikes me as a pretty simple situation: there are some people, like (and watch me reach waaaaay back to get examples, but they were the first two to leap to mind) Teddy Roosevelt or Curtis LeMay, say, who think war is wonderful, and think it’s the best foreign policy tool evar.
These people are wrong. But it never seems to matter how often they’re wrong: the media keeps coming back to them again and again and saying “But what about this war? Do you think we should invade?”
It’s incredibly irritating.
There’s also a corollary that in the US pacifists and COs have been treated with outright malice and contempt during times of war. Never mind the “dirty fucking hippies” thing; in WWI and II, people who refused to fight were put in Leavenworth, or given “alternative service” options like being the guinea pigs for Dr. Ancel Keyes’s starvation tests. A friend of mine did some research in the archives of that study at the U of MN and said that the notes held accounts of repeated, casual cruelty visited on the subjects by the University staff, because just being deliberately starved was apparently not enough punishment for the crime of pacifism (IIRC most of these COs were Quakers, Mennonites, or Brethren). Certainly the horrible treatment of COs at Leavenworth has been well-documented. So there’s already been a long-standing pattern in the US that pacifism merits not just intellectual scorn but actual physical reprisal.
i cant speak for anyone except myself. i think we would do well to address specifics.
irritation aside, it certainly appears that one would need to address each conflict one at a time and determine each of the following:
1) is it in the national interest to intervene?
2) is the intervention likely to succeed?
3) are there sufficient combat forces to complete the mission?
in my opinion the bombing of the training camps in afghanistan following the attacks in september 2001 would have pass these criteria. the invasion of iraq would have failed. the present conflict with somali pirates would fail as well.
i believe we would want to set a very high standard of evidence and need prior to any military action.
Thanks for articulating that, Falstaff.
What you said there is precisely the problem. It doesn’t matter how much of a warmonger you are, you will never lose your credibility.
Meanwhile, of course, opposing the invasion of Iraq (which a majority of Americans believes was a mistake, and has believed was a mistake for years and years now) is easily enough to make Feingold unfit to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
—Myca
That’s somehow the opposite of Hitler’s reluctance to start a war that he wouldn’t win? The refusal to treat the achievement of short-term goals as superior to the concern about long-term detriment is a sign of pacifistic excess? Maybe that’s not what you meant, PG, but I would say that therein lies the true difference between “extreme” hawks and “extreme” doves – doves shun short-term gains which come at the expense of long-term sacrifices caused in no small part by the expenditure of lives and materiel; hawks sacrifice long-term assets in the pursuit of short-term gains.
Bill Kristol’s first answer to any question is military intermention. And I mean any question — if you ask him what he’d like for breakfast, he’ll suggest invading Belgium to secure their waffles. He has, as noted above, argued for military action every time it’s been an option put on the table, and many times it hasn’t been (in addition to the above examples, Kristol advocated intervening in the Russo-Georgian War, and argued we should bomb Burma to get rid of their military dictaorship.)
Kristol may not literally believe every single international issue leads to war, but in any situation where he can conceive of a military engagement, he advocates for it. That’s so close to “reflexively bellicose” as to render the difference insignificant.
And Bill Kristol is still considered a Very Serious Person.
I agree that reflexive anything is a bad idea; while I’ve become more of a pacifist over the past seven years, I still think there are situations where military action is not just reasonable, but righteous (the classic example is World War II, an awful, terrible war that had to be fought because Hitler gave us no good option.) But even righteous wars are evil; they may be less evil than the alternative, but they’re still evil, as the dead of Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Tokyo can tell you.
That’s why there’s something that horrifies me about the grinning chairborne warriors like Kristol — they advocate for something that will bring death and destruction, and never seem to weigh the cost against other options. I can understand finding war so evil that you oppose it at all costs — I disagree, but I can understand it. I cannot understand finding war so stimulating that you see it as the salve for a troubled world. That our nation finds the former to be weak-willed and squishy, while the latter are Serious People — well, that’s one of the major reasons we’re in the mess we’re in.
From now on, if someone finds themselves not understanding what I’m saying in a post, they should just ask Jeff Fecke, and he’ll put it better than I could anyhow.
:-)
—Myca
Two basic definitions of “extreme” in this context: one is philosophical and one measures deviation from the norm. (in a country full of absolute pacifists, that view would simultaneously be extreme and normal, depending on the definition used.)
When you are asking why people are socially accepted–which you are–then you obviously need to be using the definition of ‘deviation from the norm.’
So when falstaff asks if it’s logical to
The answer is pretty clearly yes in the context of your post. If there are lots of people who agree with you, they validate your social position (thus making you less extreme) and therefore it makes perfect sense that other people give you added credibility. That doesn’t make you RIGHT, or less of an idiot–but it makes you less extreme.
Fo you to plaintively ask “why oh why do people listen to him?” and ignore that is silly.
Auguste,
The allegation is that there are people — Kristol and Teddy Roosevelt having been offered as examples by others in this thread — who want to go to war every time their nation is in conflict with another nation, who never want to use a means other than war to achieve their ends. Even Hitler was happy to absorb Austria and other parts of Europe that could be claimed as “ethnically German” without going to war if he could. No one prefers war as a solution to a problem if one can achieve the same solution in the same timeframe without war; it’s simply too expensive. TR, for example, sought to cow the Japanese from challenging the U.S. by parading the White Fleet around the world in a show of strength. He never fought the Japanese, and indeed won a Nobel for his role in brokering the Russo-Japanese peace, but he wanted it to be clear that if there was a fight, the U.S. would win.
As for your belief that pacifists think in the long term, militarists in the short term, I don’t see how that works. It could be said that militarists aren’t willing to wait for problems to be solved through non-military means (those who would wish to go to war with Cuba, for example, lack the patience to wait for the Castro Bros. to die).
But pacifists always highlight the short-term losses of life and money, while militarists claim that there will be long-term gains. Look at Iraq for an example: hawks emphasize that eventually, Iraq will be a lovely thriving market democracy in the Middle East that doesn’t treat visits to Israel as a crime, and isn’t that much better than Saddam Hussein’s always brutal and intermittently genocidal dictatorship? In contrast, doves emphasize that today, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars, losing thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, for an uncertain long-term goal.
Oh, piffle.
Ammunition manufacturers? Embedded journalists? Republican scaremongers?
There are plenty of people who would prefer a military solution to a peaceful one. Yeah, it’s expensive. But they’re not picking up the tab.
Bjartmarr,
Very well, no one who is in charge of making the decision to go to war prefers a military solution. I pointed out that even HITLER preferred to expand via peaceful means when he could. Saying that ammo manufacturers prefer military solutions is like saying the plateglass manufacturers would prefer that anarchists be included in all anti-war protests. It’s certainly to the manufacturers’ benefit, but they don’t make the decision.
You know, Sailorman, I’ve been called many things on The Internets, but I don’t think I’ve ever been on a side that’s simply dismissed as silly before. (Of course, I am silly, but I don’t think in the way you meant.)
I think what we have here is a case of duelling definitions. I feel completely incapable of accepting your definition — “one cannot be an extremist if hir position is popular among hir compatriots” — because… well, it seems to ignore the idea of truth. An extreme idea is an extreme idea. It’s like a rose in that way.
The thing is, I’m really, really bad at debate. This is why I try to avoid it: I’m crap at getting my point across, because I’m not a very good thinker — I admit that up front. So, you know, apologies for that. I’m relatively sure I’m going to get crushed if I keep this up much longer — rhetorically speaking, I mean.
I should probably leave this stuff to Myca, whose idea I’m defending, after all, or to Fecke, who strikes me as being far, far better at this than I am. And Amp, for that matter.
(There is a reason I do not have my own blog.)
I don’t know. I guess, in the end, what I’m arguing — however badly — is that I think Myca’s right: it is seriously odd that our society is set up in such a way that to prefer war whenever available as an option is thought of as a perfectly normal thing to think, but to prefer peace whenever available as an option is thought of as being so wankalicious as to be dismissed as pie in the sky nonsense.
That’s just strange. I think that’s what Myca is getting at, although I could be wrong.
Falstaff,
You are right that there is a definitional problem here. “Extreme” as an adjective doesn’t mean “bad” or even “excessive” — it simply means highly divergent from the mean, in one direction or another. If the mean in this country is an inclination toward war as a means of settling problems related to violence, then hawks by definition will be less “extreme” than doves. It’s no more of a moral judgment than saying that Kenyan marathoners have “extreme” running abilities compared to mine; my running is much closer to the mean.
it is seriously odd that our society is set up in such a way that to prefer war whenever available as an option is thought of as a perfectly normal thing to think, but to prefer peace whenever available as an option is thought of as being so wankalicious as to be dismissed as pie in the sky nonsense.
Yes, it is odd, and more to the point, it is unfortunate. But that doesn’t make those who are an only slightly-exaggerated form of majority sentiment “extreme.”
And who is it that you think makes the decision?
If you said “The President” or “Congress” or something of the sort…well, you get half points.
The United States cannot go to war without the support of big business, the media, at least one major political organization, and a large portion of the citizenry. Business pays to elect a president whom they can influence. The media publishes biased stories and quashes those that make the case for a peaceful solution, to keep the electorate on the pro-war side.
Dick Cheney made a pretty penny from Halliburton, KBR & friends. You want to tell me that he actually would have preferred a nice, cheap, sane, peaceful solution? I’m not buying it.
What is your evidence that “big business” supported U.S. military interventions in Somalia (Bush I), Haiti (Clinton), the Balkans (Clinton), Rwanda (Clinton) and Darfur (Bush II)?
Yes, Dick Cheney would have preferred Saddam Hussein to have resigned as Iraq’s head of state and for the Iraqis to have elected an American puppet who would smile upon the transfer of Iraq’s oil wealth to American corporations. Instead, we’re sinking billions into Iraq every month for, thus far, very little return — which is why I am skeptical that hawks necessarily are short-term thinkers, because they keep telling me to be patient. Halliburton pays a fixed benefit to Cheney that does not vary with the company’s profits. Cheney is not a baby-eating monster who dances with joy over the deaths of Americans (whether he cares much about the deaths of Iraqis, I won’t defend).
Even the stupidest sh*t that neocons have said is good about the war in Iraq, could have been obtained without military force, including the “flypaper theory,” which simply would have applied to Afghanistan rather than Iraq. And of course if the Taliban never had allowed Al Qaeda to operate in Afghanistan, and 9/11 never had happened, the Republican establishment would be quite happy not to be trying to make a go of a nation that hasn’t been successfully conquered since the days of Alexander.
Yes, I agree. That is why I discussed two different definitions of “extreme.” One is subjective and one is objective.
The objective view looks at a stance and where it falls on the theoretical scale. So someone who usually prefers war may be relatively close to the militaristic extreme, and someone who is an absolute opponent of all violence may be at the pinnacle of the pacifistic extreme.
The subjective view compares the stance to everyone else; in that context, “extreme” is somewhat synonymous with “very different from others.” So if a pacifist is in a world filled with pacifists, that view is not subjectively extreme. If a hawk is in a country filled with relatively war-friendly people, that view is also not subjectively extreme.
Our media is generally unconcerned with philosophy. they do not view hawks as extreme because the hawks are not, unfortunately, extreme in a subjective sense.
Does that explain it better?
PG, none of the military interventions you cited are what I think of as “wars”, at least not from the US side. Casualties inflicted by or suffered by the US were relatively few, and the interventions lasted days (not years). You don’t really mean to give those scuffles equal weight with WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq1, or Iraq2, do you?
Where there is less profit and power to be gained, there is less interest from business and the media in promoting war. Little scuffles will cause little interest.
Yeah, I don’t want to quibble over the definition of “eat”, either. No, he doesn’t technically “eat” the babies — but ripping their immortal souls from their bodies and using them to nourish his ravenous demonic offspring is pretty much the same thing in my book.
Bjartmarr,
You may want to read up on the U.S.-led NATO intervention in the Balkans if you believe “Casualties inflicted by or suffered by the US were relatively few, and the interventions lasted days (not years),” and that Gulf War I was much more of a war by the measures of casualties and length of intervention.
Not justified.
Justified.
Justified.
Not sure.
Justified. Just compare South Korea and North Korea today.
Justified, if only because kicking the Iraqi army out of Kuwait turned out to be easy.
Not justified.
Justified, if only because, again, it turned out to be very easy.
Justified.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “not justified.” It turned out okay, but we in the United States basically got lucky. Consider the French Revolution…
Justified. The American Civil War ended slavery – and as far as I’m concerned, that’s enough justification.
One position I hold rather strongly, when it comes to war, is that if it’s not worth killing civilians over, it’s probably not worth killing soldiers over, either. I have absolutely no problem with the bombings of Tokyo and Dresden. When people are shooting at you, the most important thing is that you get them to stop. If that means committing atrocities, so be it. If you’d rather surrender than commit atrocities, and you need to commit atrocities, then surrender immediately. Never, ever prolong a war if you’re not willing to do what it takes to win.
In order to actually win in Vietnam, instead of simply continuing to fight endlessly, the United States would probably have needed to conquer and rule North Vietnam. From a pure military effectiveness standpoint, the Second Boer War represents the ideal counterinsurgency campaign. I have no objection to using these kinds of tactics against guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. Why? Because the United States was attacked (the comparisons between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are apt), and the goal is simply to ensure that no further attacks take place. During World War II, the Allies demanded the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. There is a very good reason for doing so. To quote a certain novel:
PG,
A quick Wikipedia read tells me that NATO losses in Kosovo were something on the order of a dozen soldiers. 700-odd Yugoslavian troops were killed (it doesn’t say by whom) and NATO inflicted somewhere between 100 and 2500 civilian casualties, for a total NATO-inflicted casualty toll of 800-3000.
It also places coalition casualties in Iraq 1 at 358, Iraqi combatant casualties at between 20,000 and 200,000, and civilian casualties at around 3000-ish, for a total coalition-inflicted casualty toll of 23,000-203,000. That’s a 30-fold increase in US casualties, and between a 7-fold and 250-fold increase in US-inflicted casualties.
OK, enough quibbling. The wars I listed were major events in the American psyche; the events you listed were not, and your only response is to tell me to do research about how I’m wrong on one data point out of many when it actually turns out I’m right.
You can stick with your claim that “no one who is in charge of making the decision to go to war prefers a military solution” if you want to; I don’t think any facts or argument I could make is going to convince you otherwise, so I’m going to stop trying.
But I do think you’re being incredibly, obstinately naive.
I’m not sure which Wikipedia entries you were reading. The Kosovo War entry says, “Between 7,449 and 13,627 Albanians killed by Serb forces; More than 2,000 Serbian civilians killed by KLA forces; Around 400 Albanian civilians killed by KLA forces; Around 100 Albanian civilians killed by NATO forces; NATO bombings: Human Rights Watch was only able to verify 500 civilian deaths throughout Yugoslavia, with other sources stating from 1,200 to 5,700.”
My point about the Balkans had more to do with the length of the engagement — the first Gulf War lasted 7 months, while the NATO alliance is still in the Balkans.
As of 1999, more U.S. troops had been killed by hostile fire in peacekeeping operations in Lebanon and Somalia (285) than in military actions against Iraq, Panama, and Grenada (189). The idea that Somalia in particular, where U.S. soldiers were killed and their bodies desecrated by a mob (they even got a movie out of it, “Black Hawk Down”), wasn’t as major an event as Gulf War I in the contemporary American psyche seems to show a bias in your concept of what counts as major.
As for obstinacy, when I point out to you that there appear to have been military actions that *weren’t* supported by business, you say those are the ones that don’t count.