In the White House?

The recent front-page New York Times story (15 June) about John McCain's National War College thesis raises a most important issue once again - the relationship between war and "politics". That issue is often formulated as a choice between "total war" - mobilizing enough force to destroy the enemy's ability to resist - and "limited war" - using military force to achieve a limited political goal. The former ends with the enemy's "surrender" or destruction; the latter in a negotiated peace. In McCain's thesis, the Times stated,

"American officials, he (McCain) had argued, had fostered a myopic focus on the prisoners by forsaking the goal of unconditional surrender (of the enemy) in favor of a negotiated peace" (with North Vietnam).

"Total war" is the notion that war is similar to a struggle between two individuals, which must be fought to a finish - the finish being unconditional surrender to the United States' will.

"Limited War," on the other hand, is the recognition that military action can only be justified by a political objective. "Total war" is a crusade: "limited war" is the application of military power to a political objective which negotiation has failed to achieve, and which can therefore only be achieved by an extreme level of political coercion - military action. Once that political objective has been made achievable by military force, military action is no longer appropriate. A quote from the article summarizes tellingly McCain's view of war:

"American elected officials, he argued, had fostered a myopic focus on the prisoners by forsaking the goal of unconditional surrender in favor of negotiated peace, enabling the North Vietnamese to turn their hostages into a bargaining chip. Many Congressional resolutions, favorable to the enemy, were based solely on the guaranteed return of Americans from North Vietnam'' he wrote.

McCain also, in his thesis, condemns the anti-war movement in the US as aiding the enemy and betraying the prisoners who resisted the North Vietnam propaganda. He also condemns the movement as being unpatriotic.

This alone, in my view, should disqualify him from ever sitting in the Oval Office as Commander -in-Chief. In our American democracy, what the minority believe is just as important as what the majority expresses. Our president, contrary to the opinions of the Bush-Cheney team, is not an emperor. When a reporter asked Cheney last week if he did not care what the people thought (about the war), he answered emphatically, "No". Apparently John McCain thought, while a War College student, that the public demonstrations against the conduct of the war in Vietnam were evidence of treason on the part of the protesters. Fortunately for us, our elected officials recognized that the demonstrators needed to be heeded, and pulled our troops out.

South Vietnam fell, eventually, to the North Vietnamese armed invasion after we left, and is now a far more prosperous place than when we evacuated our officials and friends from it. Vietnam is united, their economy is prospering under the communist control, and the dire predictions of the spread of communism to other countries in South East Asia have proved to be untrue.

No one doubts John McCain's military courage. I, as a Vietnam veteran myself, admire him for it. But the battlefield is not the White House. In the Oval Office I want intelligence, compassion, truth, wisdom, and a large capacity to listen and evaluate.

True courage is "every other virtue at the testing point." Obama has it in spades. Spades trump hearts in that chair.

What is the Mission in Iraq?

Every military operation begins with a mission. While the mission our President gave to the Army for his invasion of Iraq is still classified, we must assume that it directed the seizure of the Iraqi government, eliminating Sadam Hussein, taking control of or neutralizing its military establishment, and the creation of a "democracy". These goals were accomplished swiftly, with minimum casualties on our side, yet we are still there, presiding over a quagmire.

Why?

Various reasons, none specific, have been offered from time to time by the Bush team. Mistakes have been grudgingly and obliquely hinted at under pressure, including disbanding the Iraqi army and police force. Elections were held and a new Iraqi government is functioning, yet we are still there and constructing five very large permanent military bases. We are also seeking to cope with an adversarial population (65% tell the survey queries that they want us to leave immediately) and its religious leaders' militias. Sadam Hussein has been tried and executed. The Iraqi army has been "rebuilt", but the loyalties of its officer and soldiers keep switching from the elected government to sectarian religious leaders. The announced objectives of the invasion have been accomplished, however ineffectively.

The real reasons for the invasion have never been acknowledged, and our news media have seriously compromised their own integrity by failing to report what is really going on. Pax Christi, a Roman Catholic social action organization, has the answer in its March 2008 issue - "Toward a Just and Peaceful Solution in Iraq". I quote:

"The hidden war being waged in Iraq is for control of Iraq's vast oil wealth.....and for permanent US military bases (for geopolitical reasons). For the first time since 1972 when Iraq nationalized the oil industry, foreign oil companies will have a stake in Iraq's vast oil wealth, if the newly-proposed Iraq Hydrocarbon Law is passed.

.....Months before the draft law was shown to the Iraq parliament, it was shared with the US government, major oil companies, and the International Monetary Fund. The draft law would leave only 17 of Iraq's known oil fields in the hands of the national oil company, leaving two thirds of the reserves (as well as any yet-undiscovered reserves) open to foreign control."

As some of us retired military have noted, the war was never about Sadam Hussein and his "weapons of mass destruction" - it was always about oil. There is no question that we need and will need access to foreign oil, and that our uncontrolled rise in our consumption of that product will ruin our economy,and force ever greater inflation, even to the possible out-of-control dimensions that destroyed the German economy after WWI. But we had no right under any theory of ethics to invade another country for that reason - which is probably why we were lied to by the Bush team about the reasons for our invasion of Iraq.

Pope John Paul II was undoubtedly right in publicly declaring that any US invasion of Iraq would fail to meet the criteria for a just war. We have unfortunately not heard much about that proclamation from our American Roman Catholic Bishops. We have seen and continue to see a shell game, based on lies and half-truths, from this administration ("a half-truth is a whole lie" is what my parents taught me). To seek justification for an unjust invasion whose purpose is to secure the present and future security of an oil industry that is the source of the wealth of the families of the current President and Vice-President is the most cynical, reprehensible and irresponsible misuse of office in the history of the United States.

The blood of our killed and wounded men and women rests entirely on their conscience, and will someday come home to roost.

The Myth of Invincibility

Combat soldiers are famous for and know about something called the "myth of invincibility". The first night I spent in Vietnam was interesting. I was assigned to an Aviation Maintenance Battalion in the resort town of Vung Tau. I had never been in a combat zone before. I was given short notice to appear at dinner at a local restaurant for the arriving and departing officers of the unit. I arrived, knew no one, and was introduced to a few people by my sponsor, a chaplain I was replacing. I did not meet the Commander. As dinner ended, he rose, thanked the men who were leaving for their service in a very short, almost abrupt "speech". As the meeting broke up (rather quickly, I thought - folks anxious to get out of each others' company) - he motioned to me to come. I did, introduced my self, shook hands as total strangers, and he said one sentence: "Glad to have you. There are only two kinds of people here, those who are afraid they are going to die, and those who are sure they are not. If you aren't in the latter group, get lost - you won't do me or anyone else any good".

The most abrupt intro I ever experienced, and I went to my room. My first thought was "damn Calvinists all over the place". I later learned that what I had heard was called "the myth of invincibility". Combat veterans will understand what I am talking about. Vung Tau was the safest place in Vietnam for Americans. But my real job was to provide religious services to scattered and isolated groups of US Army advisers attached to Vietnamese Province Chiefs, who could be reached only by air. The VC controlled all the countryside in those days (1965 - before US troops were committed). As I tried to get to sleep I pondered this piece of surprising advice.

After two or three weeks of flying to remote places to pray with and provide the Eucharist for five or six men at a time, realizing that if anything went wrong with the plane we (me and the pilot) were in deep trouble, I had to adjust to a risk-taking routine that was totally new to a preacher. And I had to do something to control my fears, as do all people in combat, whether they acknowledge it or not. And I discovered, Calvinist or not, that the myth of invincibility has its unique, though completely unreasonable, values.

I later learned that the commander to whom I had been so precipitously introduced had been evacuated from Iwo Jima at the age of sixteen with two Silver Stars and a Purple Heart on a Navy hospital ship when the doctors discovered he was only sixteen years old. He turned seventeen on the way back, and when he was discharged from the Marine Corps in San Diego, he went into town and enlisted in the Army. Finished the war, stayed in, went to Officer Candidate School, got an education at army expense, and became the Lt Col commanding the 765th Aviation Maint Bn, where we met. He was the right man to teach me what the myth of invincibility is all about.

It is the necessary but completely mythological notion that disaster will strike all around you and harm others, but you will survive. Obama will need it before Hillary completes her attempt to destroy him politically, without regard to effects on the Democratic Party. I am sure, when I look at his confidence in his message and what he is doing, that he is in fact the myth of invincibility.

Chuck Kriete

What Is War Anyhow?

War is not just the mayhem that foot soldiers experience. War, first of all, is a political act.

It is only secondarily a military action. To control the military action, a battle plan that subordinates the fighting to its political objective is required. The US military historically has had difficulty defining military actions in such political terms. It tends to think of war as a means to "total victory" defined as the surrender of the enemy army after destroying its ability to resist. Historians and strategists call this point of view "total war".

The political claim for justifying the invasion of Iraq was three-fold: to free the Iraqi people from a heinous dictator, destroy his weapons of mass destruction, and create a democracy in Iraq. The defeat of Al Quaida, which was not present in Iraq at the time of our invasion, was added after Bush's famous landing on the carrier to declare total victory, but before the resistance began in earnest. The resulting quagmire (continued guerrilla warfare spearheaded at first by Al Quaida, led probably by Osama bin Laden) has made the construction of a working democracy in a basically still-tribal culture at least problematic, if not impossible.

Our concept of total war is in defiance of what our culture - and other cultures as well - understands to be just. We have an unrealistic view of freedom, which we perceive to be the purpose of social organization. Other societies see justice as the purpose of social organization. But justice and freedom tend to be enemies, a fact which we ignore to our own peril.

Justice prevails only when individual liberty and social interests are balanced in terms of each other.

Why?

Justice rests on a balance of powers. The strong always try to take advantage of the weak; the knowledgeable, of the ignorant; the rich, of the poor. Self-interest is inbred in the human race - and truthfully, in all of creation. We call this "human nature". The Christian tradition calls it "original sin". Lord Acton put it this way: "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Reinhold Niebuhr, a famous theologian of the last century, called "the sinful lust for power" (his description of Acton's accurate assessment) the primary reason for our social difficulties and political needs. John Adams, in Federalist Paper #51, locates the need for the balance of power theories, which formed the Constitution he helped to author, precisely the same way. Just as within societies, justice prevails among societies which are roughly equal in military power. And relations between nations are not entirely different from relations among individuals. Therefore, it is politically unwise to seek to destroy one's enemies.

This concept of "total war" is not only very expensive (the amount of money we are borrowing to fight the war in Iraq has a huge impact on our current economic problems), it also tempts us to consider ourselves "righteous" and our enemies as "evil" - partly because of our deification of "freedom" and our failure to recognize its social outcome. This simply reinforces the belief that total war is the only justifiable way to fight, and "unconditional surrender" of the enemy the only justifiable outcome.

In the nuclear age, this is a monumental error. Unfortunately, human nature being as susceptible to self-deception as it is, that error is still a factor in our national political life. The so-called "war on terrorism" is a perfect example of the unrealistic grandiosity that characterizes our present administration's self-deception. Unfortunately, James Thurber was right. The moral is not that "you can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time; but you can't fool all the people all the time", but that "you can fool too damn many of the people too damn much of the time."

Chuck