Kos' diary on the 101st Fighting Keyboardists leads me to wonder the opinions of people here are regarding war, responsibility, and moral obligation. In the comments, I suggested that a good litmus test for support of a war would be that nobody should think a war is worth fighting if they are not willing to go and fight it themselves. Asdfasdf responded with a very insightful, difficult, and important question:
"Are you willing to go fight in Darfur to stop the genocide going on there?"
I strongly believe that this is a question that everyone here should answer for themselves, as it goes to the heart of the issue of support for war on the left.
With this simple decision, supporting or not supporting war, in a democratic society you are playing with lives, and yet one of the terrible effects of our professional army is that the lives you are playing with are now, if you are like the majority of Americans, not your own. With a professional army, a majority of citizens have very little or nothing at stake in this decision, which should be of the utmost gravity and consequence to us as a society.
It is, ultimately, an issue of externalizing costs. Large corporations can externalize their costs by creating poor human rights conditions in the workplace, thus pushing the costs of their business onto their workers. They also externalize costs by polluting the environment, forcing the taxpayers and the health care system to pick up the tab for their operations. These tactics have been very successful in increasing the profit margins of these companies. They have also been very successful in increasing the profit margin (and I say "profit" in more than economic terms here) of the military-industrial complex. In this case, every one of us who is not in a military family is externalizing the human cost of war onto our professional army, which is disproportionately drawn from the poor and minorities. So many of us clamor for the benefits of war and yet are unwilling to pay the cost.
I believe that a professional army creates a militant society. A professional army makes it easy, convenient, and nearly painless for many of us to commit to war. It allows those who govern us to more easily pitch a war and gain support for it. If there were a much smaller professional army complimented by a permanent draft in this country, would we be a more peaceful nation? Would we invest less in the military-industrial complex and more in what Dennis Kucinich called the "Department of Peace" during his run for President? While I concede that there are serious problems with the draft and our civil rights I think this is perhaps the only way to counter the military-industrial takeover of our government.
The goal of my proposed litmus test is to increase the gravity of the option of going to war. War should only be something that you are willing to commit to as a last resort, as a solution that you believe so strongly in that you are willing to sacrifice everything to achieve it. If you wish for the benefits, you must be willing to pay the cost. The decision to go to war should not be made easily and should involve an extended dialog in our nation before it happens. It should never be rushed into without debate, without planning, and against the will of the majority of the people, and the inability of our military to commit to action without the immediate threat of citizens being drafted would help to make sure that it never does.
So tell me, do you support intervention in Darfur, and would you be willing to go there and fight? If you answered "yes" and then "no", does that make you a coward just like the 101st Fighting Keyboardists?