My trouble with the Fighting Dems phenomenon:
I was thinking about the Fighting Dems phenomenon, which is generally a positive one in terms of both the message it sends about commitment to national security and patriotism, as well as the political advantage it will presumably lend us, come November. But something about it all still made me a little queasy, in the same way that the implications that Clinton and even Bush -- loathe him though I do -- were unfit to serve as presidents because they never served as soldiers did.
So I thought about it for a while, and I came back to a piece of a book I read last year. You may have heard of it -- it sparked a little controversy when it came out. It's called "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" by Paul Fussell. More after the flip.
Fussell was a soldier in World War II -- pretty much a grunt infantryman, as far as I can remember. He was slated to land in the first wave of the planned invasion of Japan, and his life, as he sees it, was saved by the atom bomb. He thus cannot abide the retrospective moral equivocation about Hiroshima. He believes that it is only those who have seen combat, who know what it is like, who are really equipped to make decisions about the life and death of soldiers. He further points out, accurately, that there is certainly a class division between those who fought it and those who criticize the bombing. Fussell quotes John Kenneth Galbraith's argument that the bombs shortened the war by a few weeks at most, and responds by ticking off the number of American dead in the waning days of the war. He also points out that Galbraith worked at a desk during the war:
"But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk (880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7,000 per week. "Two or three weeks," says Galbraith. Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you're one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the Destroyer Escort Underhill was lost. That's a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. What did he do in the war? He worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don't demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn't."
Fussell does the same thing to a number of critics of the bomb, pointing out again and again, even, as he admits, at the risk of going "ad hominem" that those who oppose the bomb's use were not staring potential death in the face. And he's right, they weren't.
When we jump aboard the Fighting Dems bandwagon, or for that matter when we criticize Cheney for his deferments or Bush for his supposed stint in the Air Guard, or lavish praise on James Webb or Wes Clark or John Kerry for their honorable service, we essentially make the same argument as Fussell. And there is certainly truth to be had in the chickenhawk argument, which is a sort of inverse variant of Fussell's point, that those who have not stared death in the face are less credible when they ask others to do so. But we also undermine the very idea of civilian control of the military. It is often fitting and appropriate that those who make the decisions about the lives and deaths of soldiers are not soldiers themselves; we assume, when we hand control of the Pentagon to a civilian Secretary of Defense and a civilian president, that they are able to take a broader view of events than the soldiers themselves. They are able to account for diplomacy, for civilian deaths, and for countless other factors. The endpoint of Fussell's argument is MacArthur in Korea, asking to unleash nuclear war in Asia and launch full-scale war with China -- a request that Truman was wise enough to reject.
We want so badly to think that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, God is on our side in this political fight, that we are the righteous who have seen the bloodshed and have come back to end it. And while we certainly are the righteous, we can't make the mistake described in the Dylan song:
"The Spanish American War had its day
And the Civil War too was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes, I was made to memorize
With guns in their hands, and God on their side"
God is not on our side in this fight because we have Paul Hackett and Patrick Murphy, glad as we may and should be to have them.
If you know the song, you probably already saw where I'm going with the Dylan references:
"So now that I'm leaving, I'm weary as hell
The confusion I'm feeling, ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head, and they fall to the floor
That if God's on our side, he'll stop the next war."