Chapter 1 – Responding to War’s Brutalization of Everyday Life

There is only one reason we should concern ourselves with just war theory—as one means to improve the human condition. Just war theory could be, and often has been, relegated to the status of an intellectual exercise within the ivory towers of academia. In some ways, it can be seen as a purely theoretical topic that has applicability only as an esoteric discussion of war with little to offer the real world of violent struggle. At first glance, one may not see that the theory has any bearing on, or involvement in, the decision for a nation to go to war. So, it may be perfectly reasonable to ask: What good is it? Why should the man-on-the-street take time to read this or any other book on the subject?

Some of the answers to these questions are grounded in our individual and national moralities. If an individual has no moral code or if a nation is bent to act without regard to any moral structure when it acts on behalf of the people it purports to represent, there is no sense in wasting time reading about, thinking about, or discussing just war theory. If you view the world with an attitude that war is war, it will always be with us, and there is nothing we can do to change the situation, there is likely nothing I, nor anyone else in the field, can say that will entice you to add even the smallest slice of just war thinking to your already overly busy daily life.

If, on the other hand, you have even the slightest belief that ideas can change the world, you may well find that taking a bit of time to consider just war theory can provide a reason to hope for the eventual elevation of our societal plane. If you are troubled at the ease with which we humans seem to descend into collective political violence or if you feel some modicum of grief over the suffering wrought by mankind’s seemingly infinite capacity for visiting violence upon our own species, just war theory has the potential to help make some sense of a nonsensical phenomenon that seems to perpetually invade our daily lives.

Regardless of one’s views of the inevitability of war, we need to also look at the brutalizing effect the warfare state has on our everyday lives. Whereas war used to be largely something that was “over there,” the second half of the 20^th century and the early years of the 21^st century have seen the boundaries between the realm of war and those of civilian life collapse into an almost indecipherable miasma so that we now see the metaphysics of war and violence creeping into virtually every nook and cranny of modern society. Of this phenomenon, Andrew Bacevich writes, “The disastrous legacy of the Iraq War extends beyond treasure squandered and lives lost or shattered. Central to that legacy has been Washington’s decisive and seemingly irrevocable abandonment of any semblance of self-restraint regarding the use of violence as an instrument of statecraft. With all remaining prudential, normative, and constitutional barriers to the use of force having now been set aside, war has become a normal condition, something that the great majority of Americans accept without complaint. War is US.”¹ With war as the now preferred instrument of statecraft, is it any wonder our civilian environment is continually bombarded with recounts of violence that appear to know no bounds?

One consequence of the continued use of violence is the seemingly endless revelations of acts that in another, saner age we would have labeled war crimes—

• The use of torture on innocent, illiterate peasants who harbor not a whit of information.
• The indiscriminate killings of Afghani and Pakistani civilians by drone aircraft.
• The barbaric murder of Afghani children and peasant farmers by American infantrymen infamously labeled as “the kill team.”²
• The recent uncovering of photographs showing “more than a dozen soldiers of the 82^nd Airborne Division’s Fourth Brigade Combat Team, along with some Afghan security forces, posing with the severed hands and legs of Taliban attackers in Zabul Province in 2010.”³
• The actions of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who “walked off a small combat outpost in Kandahar province and slaughtered 17 villagers, most of them women and children, and later walked back to his base and turned himself in.”⁴

Reading of these, and myriad other such instances in recent warfare, cannot help but compel us to recall the horrors of wars past — the fire bombings of Dresden in Nazi Germany, the unleashing of the atomic menace on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the massacre of the inhabitants of the Vietnam hamlet of My Lai, and on, and on, and on…ad nauseum. The realists among us, those who view war as pretty much inevitable and as, in the words of  von Clausewitz, “the continuation of Politik by other means,” will, at best, shrug their shoulders and view these horrific scenes as simply part of getting the job done. But they are wrong. Dubious appeals to national defense and sovereign honor can provide no excuse for mass killings of civilians, rapes, and other acts of destruction, especially when they lack any justifiable military objective. Even when there is a viable military objective at hand, visiting death, brutality, and destruction on non-combatants simply cannot be justified.

The path we have followed since the early 20^th century (some would say even before that) has led us to a point at which the violence of war has become the norm rather than the exception. This normative violence of war has provided a disguise for the moral cowardice of warmongers, subjected us to a brutalizing psychology of desensitization, and led us to abdicate our moral responsibilities. The framework of continuous, unrelenting war, in which violence and the dehumanization of others has become commonplace, has led us to abandon both our recognition of our ethical accountability and our sense of obligation to express our moral outrage.

Within what Henry Giroux has labeled the “contemporary neoliberal theater of cruelty,” the warfare state has unfurled its poisonous tentacles and burrowed deep into every aspect of our existence. As it refocuses our attitudes towards mayhem and death from something to be condemned to something to be celebrated as a matter of national honor, the warfare state legitimizes violence “through the amorally bankrupt mindset in which just and unjust notions of violence collapse into each other.”⁵ The result is a moral vacuum that allows torture, rape, and other atrocities to be easily dismissed as the inevitable consequence of the now all-too-readily accepted state of war—the old “War is Hell” argument in all its forms. This commitment to the war machine accepts all the indiscriminate violence, death, and destruction, while it ignores any demand for adherence to ethical considerations.

The pulsations of the warfare state send shock waves far beyond the dungeons and battlefields of the wars themselves. The rhetoric of war is used in the civil arena to not only break down long-standing individual liberties through the enforcement of “national security,” but also to attack women’s reproductive right, curtail the voting rights of minorities, and justify the ruthless cuts to what little safety nets are available to the poor, the unemployed, and the sick. In the end, embracing the warfare state leads inextricably to the unleashing of a form of violence on those on the domestic front who are seen to be disposable.

Whether we like it or not; whether we admit it or not—the warfare state not only imperils our domestic tranquility but it brutalizes our very domestic existence. To resist it, we must first understand it. To understand it, we must look at what compels it and what can counter it. Hopefully, the remaining chapters in this book will help shed some light on the morality of war which, in turn, will provide some small assistance to those seeking to resist the state’s machinery of war.

In my view, while our immediate objective must be to rein in the warfare state, our ultimate goal must be world peace. That said, I recognize the truth inherent in Barack Obama’s statement in his December 2009 acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”⁶ But even while we acknowledge this hard truth, we can also work to adopt an ethical framework to serve as both a guide in the prosecution of war and as a counterbalance to the kneejerk reaction of going to war. In the process, we just might be able to effect a change that will eventually provide a future generation with a world that truly is at peace.

- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

I’m struggling with two questions. First, “Just when did our process for selecting a President become a contest in theocratic proselytizing?” Before dropping out of the sideshow that the race for the Republican challenger to Barack Obama became, Michelle Bachman, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry, by groveling for votes from the Christian Right, all contributed a flood of un-Christian inanities, non-sequiturs, and innuendo, each more outlandish than the one before, that would have done P.T. Barnum proud.

Embedded in all of this, albeit usually couched in political doublespeak, has been the now four-year-running claim, by those who still can’t accept a black man as  President of the United States, that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim. The self-same claimants to rights and privileges elucidated by the “Amuricun” Constitution have no problem ignoring that little phrase in Article VI that says, “…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” In other words, even if Obama was a Muslim, a claim for which no shred of evidence has ever been produced, IT DOESN’T MATTER!!! Unless, of course, you happen to be one of those uneducated, fear mongering, head-in-the-sand Islamophobes who equates Islam with Terror.

Bottom line…a person’s faith, Christian or otherwise, is not allowed to be a litmus test for holding any office in the U.S. government—not in 1788, not in 1815, not in 1865, not in 1918, not in 1945, not in 1968, not in 1975, not in 2008, and not today.

I was raised in the Christian faith, and, even though I do not regularly participate in Christian rituals or readily accept all of the magical events recounted in the Bible, I happen to believe the first four books of the New Testament provide a pretty good guideline for how we should live our lives. In particular, there is one verse that too many of our erstwhile politicians conveniently insist on overlooking. Jesus, in Matthew 6:5-8, says,

“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.”

This was not a request; it was not a suggestion; it was not a hint. It was Jesus’ direct command to his followers. Would that those who today claim to be disciples of Jesus, while castigating those they claim are not, should make an effort to adhere to the teachings they so fervently brandish.

The second question with which I am struggling is, “How the hell can those in power who wear their faith on their lapels and sleeves for the entire world to see consistently and recursively violate the basic principles of that faith?”

As a soon-to-be adult, I left the Christian home in which I was raised armed with what I still believe are two very powerful guiding principles:

1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

2. That which you do to the least of these, my brothers, you do unto me.

Unless you’ve been living a life sequestered from today’s news media, you cannot be unaware of the penchant for too many politicians to claim their actions are motivated by their faith, even when it turns out what they really mean is “I’m gonna do to you what you can’t do to me,” or “Do unto the wealthy what is good; unto the poor, not so much.” One can only surmise they must have had some sort of personal revelation that Jesus is more closely aligned with the millionaire than he is to the homeless, the unemployed, and those dying because they can’t afford adequate medical care.

Today’s Jesus shouters are particularly fond of quoting the “eye for an eye” mantras of Exodus and Leviticus. But, then, Jesus came along and made sure the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written, didn’t he?

To my simple mind, Love trumps Power, Charity trumps Greed, and Lending a Helping Hand is the least that is required of us.

Before the delegates finally agreed to the new Constitution, Madison and the other Founders eventually pledged to incorporate a Bill of Rights as the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution — a pledge they honored by riding through the towns and villages of the young country, making the case for the Bill of Rights which was approved by Congress and ratified in 1791.

But to fully appreciate the gift Mason, Madison and the other Founders passed on to us, we need to briefly look back to 1776 and recall that other great document that gave definition to what was to become the greatest nation the world has ever seen, the Declaration of Independence. In it is the following:

On New Year’s Eve past, our President and Congress desecrated the Constitution they have sworn to defend when President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA); an Act which includes language that violates not only the Bill of Rights but other constitutionally protected liberties as well that were sealed in blood and passed down to us by those 18th century patriots.

The NDAA gives the President the authority to use the Armed Forces to detain any person “who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” Under the law, the President also may lock up anyone who commits a “belligerent act” against the U.S. or its coalition allies “without trial, until the end of the hostilities.” The law embraces the notion that the U.S. military can be used even domestically to arrest an American citizen or anyone else who falls under such suspicion and detain them indefinitely without trial, an action that has been illegal since the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

Yes, the Obama administration got some wording put in to say that “nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the [2001] Authorization for Use of Military Force,” nor shall the NDAA “be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.” And there were some waivers stuck in to give the President discretion over whether to send someone into the gulag of the Military Commissions system, possibly for the rest of a detainee’s life given the indefinite nature of what was formerly called the “war on terror.”

After signing the NDAA, President Obama engaged in some serious handwringing, expressed some “serious reservations” about some of the law’s provisions, and declared, “I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.” He added that he would interpret the law “in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law.”

We may argue over whether the NDAA is the deepest wound ever inflicted on the Constitution or just another debilitating cut, noting that the United States has lost its way before beginning with the Alien and Sedition Acts, signed by our second President, John Adams. But to me, the NDAA represents the most serious affront to the rights of American citizens in my lifetime.

Behind closed doors, the law’s chief co-conspirators – Sens. Carl Levin, DMichigan; John McCain, R-Arizona; Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina; and Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut – injected into the NDAA ambiguous language that could be applied by the current President or the next or the next or the next… to Americans who resist endless war against “associated forces” somehow linked to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. All four of these co-conspirators are prominent supporters of harsher and harsher sanctions against Iran, actions that have put in place the dry kindling that awaits some spark to touch off a new conflagration in the Middle East. Now that neocon operatives have “associated” al-Qaeda with Iran does that mean protesting a new war with Iran constitutes the kind of “support” that could prompt a long vacation at Guantanamo Bay?

The success enjoyed thus far by those determined to use artificially whipped up fear of “terrorism” in the same way Joe McCarthy used the dread of “communism” to deprive Americans of their constitutional rights is one of the most painful moments of my life. It is time we remember our Founders who had the courage to declare how importantly urgent was the enterprise upon which they, and the foot soldiers of George Washington’s army, were embarked. In 1776, at a time when it seemed far more likely than not that they would hang at the end a rope, they formally declared their support for a common effort to defeat tyranny: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Iraq war isn’t over.

For tens of thousands of soldiers returning from the battlefield, it never will be.

Too many of these American heroes will turn to alcohol or drugs in an effort to assuage their mental injuries.

Too many will end up homeless.

Too many will be unemployed.

Too many will end up divorced.

Too many will commit suicide.

Most will be forgotten by their country.

This will be the legacy of nearly nine years of an ill-advised and unnecessary war.

And the worst will be that we still have learned nothing about the horrific cost of war in terms of both dollars and human sacrifice.

If you have one wish, one hope, or one prayer for Christmas, please direct it for these lost veterans who now have to try to put together their shattered lives.

- Socrates

This week’s unfolding events, precipitated by the child sex abuse scandal at Penn State, have left me with an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach.  During the quarter century I have lived in Pennsylvania, I have developed a deep admiration for Joe Paterno—not for his coaching prowess, but for what he has given back to the university.  “JoePa” not only gave back several million dollars in contributions to the university, he also gave those who attended the school an image of character they could strive to emulate.

Paterno’s sometimes irascible nature was often a thorn in the side of those who wanted more wins and additional national championships; but, in his near half-century in the coach’s hot seat, he produced an enviable record that counts far more than wins, losses and championships.  The graduation rates for Penn State football players who played for Paterno is far above the averages for most other football programs.  When the NCAA released its graduation rates report in 2009 for athletes who entered college during the 2002-03 school year, Penn State led all Top 25 teams with an astonishing 89% graduation rate.  Because of the way Paterno ran his program, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men earned college degrees they might not otherwise have even sought.

But this week we discovered that “JoePa,” like most of us, is mortal and, as such, doesn’t always clear the moral high bar we like to set for our heroes.  At the time of this writing, there is no indication that Paterno committed any legal breech; but he failed his moral duty by not following through to ensure allegations of sexual abuse by a member of his staff were pursued to their necessary conclusion.  Because of this failure, Paterno has been removed as the football coach for Penn State.  To see that this move is appropriate, one only need reflect on the young boys that might have been spared the pain, humiliation and degradation that comes from being the victim of sexual abuse had Paterno been more diligent—the number of occurrences is not important for even one would be one too many.  From what I know of Paterno, I suspect he knows in his heart of hearts that his removal was necessary and that he will regret his failure of action until his dying day.  The cross he will force himself to carry will be far heavier for the decent person he is.

This incident should cause all of us to reflect on both how we measure morality and how all too often we conveniently allow it to be called into question in a manner that suits us at the moment instead of applying it with even-handed consistency.  Jumping on the bandwagon of those who would pillory Paterno, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post wrote “Penn State football should be retired, permanently.”  I can find no record, though, of Rubin ever criticizing George W. Bush for lying about WMDs to help justify the invasion of Iraq, which, of course, resulted in the deaths of several thousand U.S. citizens.  Neither can I find an instance of Rubin speaking out against the torture of foreign nationals by the Bush administration.  It would be appropriate for us to hold the President of the United States to at least the same level of moral standard we hold the coach of a college football team.

(Author’s Note:  I’m not saying Rubin never criticized Bush, just that I have not been able to find an instance in which she did so.)

Self-serving appeals to moral standards when it is convenient do no one any good.  Any parent who has ever told their child it is wrong to do something like, say, exceed the speed limit, only to later have that child ask, “If it’s wrong to do that, why are you doing it?” understands the dangers posed by morality of convenience.

Moral outrage must be applied across the board.  If we can punish Paterno for failing his moral duty yet turn a blind eye to those who authorized, directed and committed torture under the Bush administration we are failing ourselves, our country and our children.

In the end, it is our morality that defines our individual worth.  Joe Paterno is not the only one who should be made aware of his deficiencies.