General Zinni eloquently summed up my frustration in a speech last week: "It's pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way," he said, "and all the others who have never fired a shot and are hot to go to war see it another way."
This is a cheap debater's trick, and I will tell you why.
In the summer of 1941, debate was furious in the United States over whether or not to enter the Second World War on the side of the Allies. The previous year, a bill to reactivate conscription had passed the House by one vote. The nation was still divided. The America Firsters under Lindbergh still had a wide audience.
The intellectual case for taking down Nazi Germany had not quite been made. But that did not stop Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR, a man of very limited military experience (indeed, I believe his only post was that of civilian Navy Secretary under Wilson), understood then what Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Wolfowitz understand now: there was a danger to America and it had to be confronted.
Roosevelt did what he had to do at that time. The U.S. Navy entered an undeclared war against the Kriegsmarine. During this pre-war period, the Navy ran destroyer escorts for the Royal Navy's convoys to Great Britain, freeing up the Home Fleet to go down and help out Wavell's beleaguered Army of the Nile (a little known German division commander named Erwin Rommel had been given a corps command in Africa and was beginning make a name for himself).
Now Roosevelt could get away with this because the Navy could legally fire after being fired upon. But in practice, of course, the destroyer escorts were hunting U-Boats right, left, and center with mixed success. Roosevelt, with the understanding of congressional leaders such as Arthur Vandenburg and Sam Rayburn, sent the Navy out because the leadership of the day understood the threat that Hitler posed.
Roosevelt never fired a shot in anger. Never heard the crack of an incoming artillery round. Never smelt the whiff of cordite.
But history has proven him to be in the right.
Generals are paid to be cautious. McClellan had more experience on the battlefield than Lincoln, whose military experience amounted to a six-month excursion during the Black Hawk War (if it was even that long...). It was McClellan who ran on a campaign of peace with the Confederacy in 1864, and would have sued for peace had he won the election. Experience and wisdom are two different things altogether, as history showed us. Lincoln's way was the best way for the country, notwithstanding the valor of some of my ancestors in the Confederate States Army. McClellan was cautious to a fault, and his politics reflected his generalship (I would cite his clumsiness at Antietam Creek, but I don't want to beat that dead horse into the ground).
History has shown us that Generals do not always make the best analysts of the larger political context in which war must be fought. There are exceptions: George C. Marshall and Eisenhower come to mind.
The upcoming war in Iraq cannot be divorced from its larger political contest. Yes, there will be death, killing, and loss. Plato remarked that only the dead have seen the end of war. Lee maintained that it was a good thing that war was so bloody, lest we should grow to like it. But wars are fought to achieve a political end, and the military ambitions of soldiers, as well as their reservations and fears, must always remain firmly subordinated to political aims.
Sure, it was dangerous and risky to assault Normandy in June of 1944. There wasn't an officer in SHAPE that didn't know the peril that Eisenhower's expeditionary force was about to undertake. Thousands of men were mark'd to die or be maimed. But we did not hesitate, because of the larger political threat of German power and science.
The decision to undertake war and peace cannot be restricted to those who have only had the experience of war. That is not our way under the Constitution. This is not Heinlein's society as argued for in Starship Troopers. It might be better if it was, but under our system, everyone has a right to his opinion and say.
I say this. I've never been to battle. Never joined the armed services. My own epilepsy prevented me from joining the Marine Corps some twenty years ago. But my lack of military service does not invalidate my contention that we are faced with a psychotic who has access to weapons of mass destruction. If left alone, within several years he will have a few nuclear weapons. Only one of them, only one, if smuggled into our country by Islamic fascists, would be needed to kill several hundred thousands of Americans if detonated at just the right spot, at just the right time of day. We are protected by two oceans no more.
To say that only those who have seen war have the right to be either pro- or anti- war in a debate is to attempt to shut off argument. That simply will not do, for the contention that experience trumps facts or even thought does not addrss the situation at hand. Indeed, it hides the fact that those who are opposed to this campaign, from Scott Ritter to Robert Novak, refuse to address Saddam's vast WMD program and what he would do with such assets if left undisturbed.
Saddam would do great evil. Shakespeare pointed out that "...the past, 'tis prologue." What Saddam did in the past, he would do in the future, only on a grander scale and with an evil, vicious design. Those who refuse to stop this evil from coming about not only have the present to answer, but also must answer to history.
The judgements of history tend to be among the most severe of all.
Be Seeing You,
Chris