I sat on a train heading westward from Toronto. At the stroke of eleven, the train rolled to a stop next to a calm forest lake. A crew member recited "In Flanders Fields". We passengers paid our pittance of time in silent tribute to those who paid so much more.
There are no good wars. Perhaps you can argue that there are good intentions behind some wars. There are certainly good people who fight in wars. But to say that any war is itself "good" means to baldly excuse killing and maiming. That these actions are (usually) sanctioned by government makes little difference to their objective consequences; indeed, it is arguable that the facts of intention and premeditation make these state-sponsored crimes against humanity even less excusable.
Every war sees its share of evil done. No war is free of atrocity. Women are raped, children orphaned, families destroyed. Combatants and civilians alike become physically and mentally crippled. Historical artefacts are ruined and cultural knowledge is lost. These are the realities of each and every human war, from antiquity to the present day. There is no good reason to believe that these realities will change.
What determines when a war should stop? What factors compel state governments to make peace? Certainly, the attitudes of the public make some difference. And yet these attitudes are carefully shaped by the state. We hear of "precision strikes". This image equates the combat zone to an operating room, where dangerous enemy cancers are eliminated with surgical exactitude. We hear of "collateral damage", a euphemism that more readily calls to mind a pickup truck squashed by a hurricane-felled tree than it does a child left with no family, and no arms, due to an errant missile. And we hear countless acronyms: IED, RPG, WMD, KIA. The chaos of destruction is disguised by abbreviation.
In America, the return of a soldier's flag-draped coffin is offensive enough to have led to a 15-year media ban by the Pentagon on such images. Yet this is nothing compared to the recent firestorm of controversy over the photo of the last moments of Marine Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard.
The dead and mutilated of war embarrass us. Their broken bodies are flown home under cover of darkness. They packed into coffins and hospital wards, shuffled out of sight, left to decay in the shadows. With their pain carefully hidden from view, our memories of their sacrifices decay as well.
If you want to eat sausage, you should see how it is made. If you want to support the troops, you should understand how they suffer. Mouthing talk-radio maxims and affixing stickers to your car bumper are poor substitutes. Life in a combat zone is terrifying, frustrating, and tenuous. This is doubly true in asymmetric warfare.
In his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the famous political economist Adam Smith wrote these words:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. ... They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war. (Book Five, Chapter III)
In a supermarket the other day, I heard an old woman berating a store manager because there were no bags of sugar for her to buy. As he profusely apologized, blaming a production shortage, I reflected upon how very little the modern conflicts abroad directly affect the citizens of developed nations.
Sixty years ago, we made tangible sacrifices: we formed motor pools to conserve fuel; we ate organ meats so that a young soldier could have a choice cut of steak for his last meal. Today, as our volunteer forces die in protracted and arguably unwinnable wars, we gripe about the freshness of produce and the ubiquity of reality television. Where are our shortages? Where are the admonitions to conserve, to donate, to volunteer?
And for those who do actively support the war effort, the pull of sunk cost is hard to deny. We have a hard time giving up on a goal after we have put a significant amount of resources toward its achievement. After ordering an expensive meal, diners will often force themselves to finish it even after their stomachs become uncomfortably full. After the value of a held stock plummets, investors will often buy up even more of it, assuming that the stock must recover in due time. After losing a cupful of quarters to a slot machine, a gambler will find it hard to just walk away without trying to win back their losses. The elusive jackpot, after all, may come on the very next pull. Casino operators know this aspect of psychology; it is why ATMs are never more than a few steps away.
Like feverish slot jockeys, world leaders borrow against our futures and promise large payoffs. They scorn those who suggest withdrawal or tactical reconsideration: if we "cut and run" all that effort will have been in vain; far better, then, to "stay the course". A rational analysis quickly reveals the core weakness of this justification. The more billions we have spent, the more time elapsed since the beginning of hostilities, the more lives snuffed out -- in other words, the less successful the war -- the more we feel pressured to continue. The madness of war is reinforced by the madness of our logic.
Among the greatest luxuries afforded by human brain evolution is our ability to consider alternative courses of action; among the greatest traps is our ability to rationalize previous bad decisions. The next time that you silently take a minute to honour your war dead, take another minute to consider why we support policies destined to forever create more dead to honour.
We owe the fallen far more than that.
Image source:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42054000/jpg/_42054848_support_ap203.jpg
