“We should begin a campaign against more war: no new statues, no new memorials, no new parades. No new names etched in stone.” Jerry White, The Sacramento Bee, 5/27/12
Memorial Day, 2012, saw a reversal in mainstream opinions about war. National patriotic holidays are traditionally reserved for homage to the sacrifices made by Americans in the military service. Jerry White has declared that troops need no further homage, and the best way we can thank them is to stop having wars. Until now, war fever would have drowned out such sentiment in a major newspaper. Ten years of endless war have dampened the fever so that now, someone like White can open the door. Once more we can debate the waging of war.
In the sixties and seventies, the discussion of warfare’s practicality was widespread and passionate, even ugly at times. Some of us remember. Ronald Reagan stifled the debate when he declared the Vietnam War was a “noble cause” while running against Jimmy Carter, who, like many Americans, had started out supporting the war, but had changed his mind.
As we know, Reagan won.
The victor gets the spoils. During the five years between War’s end and Reagan’s election, public opinion was quite ambiguous about the Vietnam War. We still detested communism, but there were very few who actually wanted the conflict to continue. We knew we had been conned into going to war, though we weren’t cheering that our side had lost. With Reagan’s victory, all the lies, cruelty, and death, could be justified as a noble cause. And that concept put war protesters just where Reagan wanted them: with traitors. And if one war could be a noble cause, it stood to reason they all could be. This trend would smooth the way for Reagan’s military buildup, and increased confrontation with the Soviet Union.
The joke war with Grenada proved how effective the noble cause argument had become. American ecstasy over winning a war against a tiny, impoverished island got us strutting our stuff once more. We were saving the world again, which meant that anti-war people had better get out of the way. During Reagan’s presidency we bombed Libya a couple times, shot down an Iranian airliner, and got into an illegal war against Nicaragua, which would have gotten any president but Reagan impeached. But Reagan could pretend not to remember while the right-wing propaganda machine went to work. If we were fighting another noble cause in Nicaragua, then those congressmen who tried to prevent it were the real bad guys. The Commander-in-Chief should be supreme. There was no time to debate over a noble cause. When Bush I invaded Panama we kept on cheering, so he treated us to the Gulf War. Resistance was futile during that carnival, as we deliriously watched the jets fly over and the troops move forward, while the enemy retreated in confusion. In the ecstasy of the aftermath, Bush I could gloat that Americans had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
Of course, some Americans had been killed, as had many others (not that those statistics mattered much). And later, serious physical and psychic wounds, and war-related illnesses, would come back to haunt us, making life miserable for many veterans. But they had served their purpose so far as the country’s rulers were concerned. Except parades, statues, and memorials, veterans, like protesters, could be ignored while we searched for another noble cause.
The Afghanistan invasion turned out predictably: high-tech NATO forces routed Afghanistan’s backward military and let us jubilantly re-write history. America had done what empires from Alexander’s to the Soviets’ had failed to do. And before Americans could really see what a horror the occupation would become, Bush II set the stage for a full invasion of Iraq. In the case of Iraq, protesters had time to organize, and the demonstrations were huge and on a global scale, but the powers could still ignore them. We were on a roll. How could we stop in the middle of our triumphant ecstasy? Some of us remember that sick sensation from watching the fireworks on Baghdad, homes and cars decorated with flags, gloating politicians celebrating another righteous, easy war.
Then came the nightmarish struggles to pacify our conquered lands. Ten years in Afghanistan, eight in Iraq, have caused people to think, and question. And they are being heard. Jerry White, a decorated veteran of Vietnam, has sent out a call to stop going to war. Once again we can question the concepts of war as peace, freedom as slavery, ignorance as strength. Once more we are willing to listen when someone who was there reminds us that war is hell. Once more we can look at all the carnage and cruelty and honestly ask if it was worthwhile. We cannot bring back the dead… not ours, not theirs. But it has been suggested, by a combat veteran, that the only possible good we might take from this tragic decade of war is the good sense to quit.
War is not peace. Freedom is not slavery. Ignorance is not strength.
