War and The Politics of War
P. Schultz
September 9, 2013
Below you will
first read a quote from an article sent to me by a friend, the link to which is
at the end of my comments in response to said quote. Enjoy.
"In his book He Came Preaching Peace, John Howard
Yoder wonders why it is so hard for political leaders to admit mistakes, to
confess they were wrong. He asks, for instance, if it was necessary to withdraw
American soldiers from Vietnam in 1975, or from Beirut in 1983. "Why can
it not be admitted that it was wrong to send them there in the first place? Why
can the statesman not afford to advocate peace without saying it must be 'with
honor'? Why must the willingness to end the war be dulled or perhaps even
denied by the demand that we must still seem to have won it?" I think the
answer to Yoder's perfectly sensible questions is quite simple: to acknowledge
a policy or a strategy was mistaken is thought to betray the sacrifices made by
those who as a result of the policy died."
This quote is from this excellent article that you sent. But it is
only partly right, I think, because it is insufficiently political. Part, and I
think a greater part, of the answer to these questions is that lost wars
undermine political orders or, as I like to say, '"established
orders," and those in power in the established orders cannot abide by that
as it is the established order that gives them their sense of worth. Nazi
Germany arose from defeat.
If Vietnam were "lost" and the cause admitted to be
dishonorable, then the "peaceniks" and the "hippies," the
Eugene McCarthy's and the George McGovern's, and other "subversives"
would have been right and they could have claimed "the power." This
is why LBJ and Nixon fought in Nam even though they knew they couldn't win there.
They couldn't allow a "loss" there as they were concerned
about losing power here. Both these men were quite capable of betrayal
and even the betrayal of those who had already died, as well as those who would
die, although they would use them to continue justifying the war. These dead
are still being used today for the same purpose: protecting the established
order. Men like LBJ and Nixon, et. al., are not moved by noble deaths; they are
moved by fear, the fear of losing the established order and, hence, their own
elevated social status, their fame, and, hence, their glorious immortality.
[Think of how history would have been written about Hitler had the Germans won
WWII. You get a glimmer of that by reading what people, well thought of
people, were saying about the Nazis and Germany's "economic"
recovery in the 30's.]
And I would argue that even Hedges' take on war is also
insufficiently political in this sense, at least for those who authorize wars.
These types are calculating how to preserve their own power and the power of
their ilk. LBJ wanted Nixon to succeed him, I think, because he knew that
Nixon, unlike Humphrey, his own vice president, knew how to use power and what
it was for. He despised those in the peace movement as "whiners" and
"egg heads" and so when he announced he would not seek re-election to
seek peace, he put himself at the head of his own "peace movement"
because he was sacrificing his own power for peace. No one in the other peace
movement could make that claim as they were seeking power. He now looked like
the "honorable" one. But he was merely calculating how best to
prolong the war and, hence, the established order.
Thus, the purpose of his "peace movement" was to prolong
the war long enough for Nixon to win the '68 election and then he, Nixon, would
prolong the war even longer for the same reasons. And neither man cared how
many more died, both Americans and Vietnamese, to preserve the established
order. They spoke of these deaths as "noble" because it served their purposes
to do so. And the explanation offered here makes these "leaders" like
LBJ and Nixon seem honorable themselves when in fact they were not at all. They
were guilty of criminal negligence, at least. But I would say they were guilty
of more than that. McNamara, in his own way, came to see, to sense, what he had
done or helped to do and he hated it. LBJ and Nixon knew what they were doing
and took pride in their "virtu." [But then Machiavelli taught us
this, didn't he?]
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