Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: War

  • Understanding and Acting

    There are many on the right who complain whenever someone tries to understand evildoers, or to explain the reason for their actions. They assume, not always incorrectly, that the person who is explaining also intends to excuse, that finding a reason, other than that certain people are evil, must remove any justification for reprisal or punishment.

    On the other hand, there are those who justify just such an attitude by believing that somehow an explanation is also a solution. A murderer comes before the court, and either in the trial of the facts or during the sentencing phase provides an explanation, perhaps a very difficult childhood with abuse, or deprivation as an adult. The jury or the judge is supposed to accept the explanation as, in some sense, a solution.

    Now those on either side can accuse me of expressing the extreme views here. Conservatives are not opposed to explanations in principle, nor are liberals satisfied with only an explanation. But it often appears that way. What are we to do with the murderer who was mistreated by his parents or guardians? Perhaps his plight can arouse our sympathy, but does it allow us to increase the threat to others? An explanation, to be valuable in this case, needs to lead us to a course of action that is effective, and better than existing options.

    What about terrorism? I think I do understand, to some extent, the reasons why terrorists become terrorists. It is not simply that they were born evil and wanted to kill lots of people. They and their people have real problems to solve. But that’s only part of the explanation. They also have goals that are incompatible with ours. Muslim extremists, for example, are frustrated by the success of our lifestyle, which to them is morally bankrupt and should fail. There is a great deal of anger that can result when your high moral values don’t produce their equivalent in material resources.

    Timothy McVeigh was frustrated because the American people repeatedly didn’t vote for the type of policies he wanted. He saw–correctly I might note–that his vision for America would never come about in the normal course of events. So he blew up a building. An additional cause here, I believe, was that he really wasn’t all that smart. So there’s an explanation. That explanation, however, leads up to one point, the point at which hundreds of people had to pay with their lives for McVeigh’s frustration. Does the explanation help us deal with the action? Not that much.

    Now we have some people who are annoyed whenever anyone suggests that terrorists might have reasons for what they do. Of course they have reasons. Some of them are even good reasons–to do something, not to blow people up. And why are we the target? Because we’re the largest roadblock to their plans. I don’t want to minimize the provocation of bad behavior as a nation. An inconsistent foreign policy encourages others to believe they can get by with treating Americans badly. An arrogant attitude on our part makes Americans unpopular in some places. But most people respond by overcharging American tourists or saying nasty things.

    The problem with terrorism by Muslim extremists is that part of the explanation for their anger with us is simply who we are. They don’t want us to exist. They don’t like our freedom and what appears to them as our decadence. They do want a world that is dominated by their particular view of Islam. That doesn’t mean they haven’t been mistreated, but it’s not just by the United States. The UK and France had a good part in creating the current mess as well. But we are the ones in the center of the target because we are the biggest roadblock.

    Recognizing both legitimate and illegitimate grievances should not be either our license to give up on the grounds that we really have been the bad guys many times in our past, nor should it be our excuse to hate indiscriminately. It should be the occasion for us to defend ourselves appropriately and in a reasoned manner, and at the same time for us to correct those elements of our behavior (inconsistency and arrogance come to mind) that are legitimate grievances. It is naive to assume, however, that because we correct legitimate offenses, that suddenly peace and friendship will break out.

    What understanding does give us is an opportunity to decide how to act without the level of hatred and anger, to use a measured response (not a weak response) to produce just the result we want.

    Explanations provide the pattern for effective action, not the excuse for inaction.

  • McCain and Conscience

    I have liked John McCain for a long time, and now he has taken a stand on torture and interrogation. Chip Read on MSNBC’s first read comments on this as a matter of conscience. I’m amazed, despite everything that has already happend in the war on terror, that this is entirely an issue. I’m deeply disturbed that leaders in the administration have taken the stand that they have.

    From the moral point of view this should be a no brainer. From the point of view of international politics, it should be a no brainer. I served as aircrew in the Air Force. Aircrew always face the possibility that they will be shot down and captured by the enemy. Don’t imagine me being wondrously heroic or anything. I didn’t feel threatened. But when your job is one in which you could get into that position you do give it a little thought.

    One of the few bright spots in that horror we call war is the Geneva Convention. It’s more honored in the breach than otherwise, but it’s still a bright spot. We shouldn’t play with that. It’s wrong morally, and it’s dangerous politically. This is a place we need to listen to the international community and play good citizen on the world scene. When Christians support this sort of thing I truly have to wonder whether they’ve even passed the idea somewhere near their Christian principles.

    There are times when we need to challenge the international community. When other countries supply money to terrorists, or make it easy for them to transfer it, that is a reason to take some sort of action. They’re aiding and abetting criminals.

    But when they ask us not to torture, that’s a request for us to live up to our principles. True, many of these same countries will engage in torture. But if we don’t live up to a higher standard ourselves, we may come to the next stage–or the next–of this war on terror and find out that we have come more and more to resemble our opponents.

    That’s too high a price to pay.

  • Moderate Thinking

    Since starting the Moderate Christian Blog Aggregator, I’ve gotten a few comments on what it means to be moderate. One very reasonable question is how I can combine the words “moderate” and “passionate,” as in “passionate moderate.” It seems like a contradiction in terms. And I do do intend the two words to convey a certain amount of tension. Nonetheless I don’t think they’re entirely contradictory.

    “Moderate” isn’t an ideological or party label. It’s a general description that some people are comfortable with. So what I’m about to discuss applies only to me. It may apply to other people. Many people I have run into who self-identify as moderate would be comfortable with most of what I’m saying, at least what I’m saying about the process of thinking, though not necessarily about the specific positions I have come to. I use my own specific conclusions simply as an illustration. It’s quite possible, and indeed likely, for those who identify themselves as moderates to disagree.

    There are people who espouse a form of moderation from apathy. They don’t care to make a decision so they generally find a center point, effectively a point of least conflict among those they have to live with. Another group may well find it difficult to make decisions and end up in the center through lack of concern. I’m not talking about these groups, but rather those who are active and committed and yet take a moderate approach.

    Here are the keys to what I think of as moderate thinking.

    1. Never improperly excluding a middle position

    Improperly excluding middles is a standard practice in both politics and religion. You are either a laissez faire capitalist or you’re a communist. You’re left wing or right wing. You accept Biblical inerrancy, or you don’t believe in the Bible at all. You’re a fundamentalist or an atheist. Each of these pairs ignores many positions between, and some of them ignore additional positions that are more extreme.

    2. Finding the actual extremes

    Very often politicians and theologians want to place their opponents on the extremes. Moderate thinking avoids this by looking for the actual extremes and finding the range of opinions. As an example, Ned Lamont, Democratic senatorial candidate in Connecticut, is called an extremist, and his election is supposed to mean that the Democratic party is turning far to the left. But Lamont, who wants to withdraw troops from Iraq over a period of six months is hardly an extremist. His position is probably held by a majority of the voters of his state, though they may vote for another candidate for other reasons. The extreme position would be a pacifist position that stated that we should not employ force against terrorists, but should turn the other cheek (figuratively) to them.

    On the other hand, Democrats try to paint Bush as an extreme right winger. But a few miles from me we have a Baptist pastor who was a Vice-Presidential candidate for a minor party in the last election and who thinks Bush is a liberal. That doesn’t make Bush right, any more than agreeing with a majority of Connecticut voters makes Lamont right, but it does mean that he’s not the extreme.

    3. Setting relative values on issues and positions

    This third point simply means that in general moderates are not one issue people. Many people have numerous litmus test issues. For example, they will not vote for a candidate who differs with their position on abortion, or on the war in Iraq, or on taxes, or on any of a number of other issues. I don’t do litmus test issues. There are certain positions I find very hard to stomach, but in choosing a candidate to vote for, I have to deal with a range of issues, and generally no issue is absolute.

    Application

    Much of our political and religious discourse is conducted with excluded options. Let me just take a few examples.

    Gun in the House

    I have made a decision not to have a gun in my house. I have had all kinds of reactions to that decision. I have been congratulated on my high moral stance against gun control. I have been condemned for not believing people should be permitted to defend themselves. But gun control advocates should not take comfort from my stance, and homeowners who wish to protect their property with a weapon should not be concerned. I’ll be voting for candidates who will uphold your right to self-defense.

    So then why do I not have a gun? I have simply made a calculation that my own level of alertness, my normal reaction time, and my decisiveness under the appropriate circumstances are not quite good enough to make the gun a good idea for me. I’m not bad with one on the range, or at least I wasn’t a few years ago when I last tried. I have decent aim. But I don’t believe the odds are good that I’m more likely to get the weapon from a safe place, locate a target, and use it effectively, than I am to have it stolen and used to shoot me, for just one example. And to those who have told me I should darn well get that good, I say, “You get that good. I’ll do what I think best.”

    I have no moral qualms about shooting an intruder. If I can get the guy with a baseball bat, I will. But that is where I think that I am safest. The extremes here are a complete refusal to use violence on the one hand, and a “guns blazing” approach on the other. I ask what will make my family safer.

    War in Iraq

    I oppose the war in Iraq. Again, there are those who respond to my high moral stand against war, and there are those who think I’m a wimpy pacifist (no, I’m not calling all pacifists wimps). But neither are dealing with my own reasoning. The question is one of strategy. What is the best way to use force? Here I see the extremes as pacifism, in which we do not respond violently to terrorists, and the parking lot view, which suggests we make countries that support terrorists into parking lots. I look for the action that is going to result in a better state of affairs after it has been accomplished. I cannot see how the Iraq war can end in a better state than things were before the war, and thus I regard it (and did so before it was launched) as a bad strategy.

    Historical Jesus

    This is a topic on which it’s easy to get Christians confused, because most simply don’t know all the various options, and in fact, very few probably need to know all of them. To identify the extremes, however, we have on the one hand a historical Jesus who is precisely as a harmony of the gosples would make him, and on the other hand we have the belief that Jesus was made up, that he is not a historical figure, or even a historical figure around which some myths have grown, but that he never existed at all. There is quite a lot of ground between those two positions.

    I would like to see us recognize the many possibilities between “every detail of the gospels are historically true without even normal eyewitness variations” and “most of the gospel record is false. For example, one can assume that certain details such as how many times the cock crowed and how many times Peter denied Jesus may have been remembered differently by different people. Even more substantively, one can wonder whether there were, in fact, multiple feedings of 5,000 people and then 4,000 people, and can do so without doubting the entire story of Jesus.

    I recall an online written debate in which I undertood in a series of messages to defend Jesus as a real, historical figure. I came up with six points that I would defend and began the debate. A number of Christians observing these posts told me that I had already given up Christianity because I was not defending the virgin birth or the resurrection. But I had not denied either of those doctrines; I had merely taken on a more limited task–demonstrating that Jesus was, at least, a historical fiction, and not totally a construction of his followers.

    Passionate Moderation

    How can one be a passionate moderate? I see no reason why one cannot be passionate about one’s beliefs just because they are not extreme. In other words, I don’t see the problem here. Let me give a quick example. On the topic of evangelism and missionary effort I get pegged both as evangelical and as liberal. Why?

    First, I believe passionately that Christians are to be witnesses for Jesus. We are not to be ashamed of who we are, and we are to testify of what Jesus has done for and in us.

    Second, I believe passionately that it is the Holy Spirit who convicts and converts, and that our witness is never to be forceful, intrusive, emotionally manipulative, or offensive. (Note that I did not say that the gospel itself would not offend; our witness to the gospel should not offend.)

    The first of these points gets me called evangelical; the second gets me called liberal. And if you were to hear and see me carrying out those statements, independently of one another, you might agree. But together, they seem to me to be the “Jesus” way of evangelism. The combination seems moderate to many people, but I simply think it is right, and I’m passionate about it.

    Conclusion

    That, to me, is the essence of being a passionate moderate. Your mileage will probably vary–moderately, I hope!

  • Eleanor Swift on Cheney and Iraq

    Some time ago I blogged on the danger of using insufficient force and of not completing the solution to a problem. The result of that procedure, used all too often in goverment and international relations, is that people suffer and die, but there is no real cause and no conclusion.

    Now in a column Eleanor Swift (Holding Pattern — Rumsfeld’s Senate testimony underscores that there are no good options on Iraq. Meanwhile, where’s Dick Cheney?) evaluates Rumsfeld’s testimony before the Senate armed services committee as indicating that there are no good options:

    The best any of this trio of apologists could come up with is that U.S. forces need to keep doing what they’re doing to keep from losing. They offered no strategy for victory, only a holding pattern to prevent a worse defeat than that America is already experiencing. An honest reckoning would acknowledge there are no good options in Iraq and that the road to failure began with Rumsfeld’s bullheaded determination to keep the number of invading troops to a minimum.

    She’s right on part of this, but I actually think she hasn’t gone quite far enough.

    (more…)

  • The Middle East: Solving and Appearing to Solve

    The headline today on MSNBC drew my attention back to the middle east after an overnight rest from it. It says: Israel targets Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut, which is, of course, no surprise due to the course of this conflict. In the narrow sense, this conflict is following the pattern of many before it. There are numerous attacks by guerillas–in this case Hezbollah–on Israeli targets. Israel retaliates. The conflict escalates until the international community finally gets mobilized into some semblance of action, after which all sides agree to put a bandaid over the problem.

    I’m not claiming to have a solution to the many problems of the middle east. One thing I do want to point out, however, is that only a very small number of people actually care to solve the problems, especially those involving the Palestinian people. What the world leaders want to do is to appear to provide a solution, hopefully one that will appear to work long enough for them to get people’s attention elsewhere. Other leaders are invested in having the problem there to distract from the very real problems of their own countries.

    Let’s face it. A real solution to this problem is going to involve several things, many of which the Arab countries don’t want to support, and some of which Israel doesn’t want to support. The west, I’m sorry to say, seems to find any solution acceptable that keeps the violence off our TV screens. Palestinians can keep living in misery and dying, and Israelis can continue to live under constant threat and also die, just as long as they do it quietly and the supply of oil is not threatened.

    • Many Palestinians will never return to Palestine or live in Israel. They might as well plan to get assimilated wherever they are living. It’s nasty, but it’s a fact, and the sooner they start working on it, the sooner things will actually be solved.
    • Israelis need to give some on land–which they have–but also on rights and equal treatment of their Palestinian citizens. While it would not be practical for all Palestinians, both those displaced in the various wars and their descendants, to return to Palestine, those who can and do return need to be treated with dignity and respect.
    • Arab countries need to control terrorist activity within their boundaries. That’s going to be hard. It’s going to be unpopular. But none of this works without a stable legal framework.
    • The west, especially the United States, needs to recognize that we cannot impose western style democracy and western values on Arab countries. I’m not saying that they are too immature or stupid for it, as though I can arrogantly impose a goal on them of becoming just like us. What I’m saying is that they are different, they are them and we are us, and we should accept that.

    The reason the problem is so intractable is that none of the parties are really ready to accept the elements that they need to accept. Palestinians do not want to give up the right, however impractical, of returning to Palestine, which they consider their home. Some Israelis and their Christian allies in the United States are anxious not to give up any of the “Biblical promised land,” and so oppose any land placed under the rule of the Palestinians. Other Israelis are not anxious to create a state in which the Palestinians are actually full citizens with equal rights, because in practice that is contrary to the Jewish state. In a Jewish state, non-Jews are not quite as equal as everyone else. Arab governments would generally prefer to keep their population’s anger focussed outward, and truly stepping on their terrorists would bring the anger on them. Further, many of them are in sympathy with the terrorists anyhow. The west, especially the United States doesn’t want to allow middle eastern countries to solve their own problems because they won’t solve them our way.

    In this way, in one paragraph I destroy my previous one paragraph solution. The motivation simply isn’t there to actually solve these problems. In the meantime, Lebanon continues to burn because they cannot control the activities of what is effectively a foreign army in their territority.

    Real peace won’t happen until all sides are willing to give something up, until peace becomes more important than the largely symbolic goals–this land versus that land and where precisely do we live.

    I tend to think we generally get what we really want, and in this case peace hasn’t come to the top of the priority list. In the meantime, politicians can continue to claim to want it, but the rest of us should watch what the politicians actually accomplish, not what they claim.

  • The Danger of Ineffective Intervention

    In February of 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote an essay entitled Revenge! in which I made some comments on the justification of violence. I think what I said then reflects well the situation in Iraq now. I’m not claiming special prophetic gifts here, but folks, I told you so!

    Sometimes that will mean war. Saddam has certainly provided justification through his own actions for someone to deal violently with him. I have no sympathy with a suggestion that somehow the Iraqi government doesn’t deserve to be removed. But I believe there is a second part to the justification of violence. How can things be better when it’s done? In this case that includes the question of who will rule Iraq following an invasion. Will there be a power vacuum left in its place?

    You see, no matter how bad a government is, there is a possibility for something worse. The possibility has been raised of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Does that make us feel more secure? Would we prefer that Iran became a power dominating the region? That is only one scenario, but it is something that must be considered.

    I’d like to expand a bit on those two justifications for violence. In my view, first there must be a reason for a person to take action, for example that they are threatened or attacked, and that the attacker is not receptive to peaceful means. The second, however, is more difficult to meet. I think you need to ask two questions: 1) Will the violent intervention be successful? and 2) Will the resulting situation be an improvement over the previous situation.

    I would add a corollary to these. If you are going to use violence, you have to use enough violence to accomplish your goal. Applying less than that to the situation only results in worse conditions, thus the resulting situation will not be better. It will generally be much worse.

    Let me illustrate. I don’t keep a gun in my house. Some of my friends think having a gun is a simple and ordinary part of being able to protect their families, and would wonder why I would not take this precaution of being prepared to defend myself. Others would congratulate me on my commitment to non-violence. Neither view correctly identify my reason for not having a gun. I’m convinced that my skill with the weapon is not sufficient to make it more likely that I will successfully defend my home than that the weapon will be used by a criminal. I am not committed to non-violence. As a veteran of the U. S. Air Force, I’m willing to see violence used in the pursuit of national goals. In my household I would feel fully justified in putting a bullet between the eyes of an intruder. I just rate the odds of my actually doing so rather low.

    In many of our recent wars (I’m a veteran of Grenada, Panama, and the first Gulf War) I have seen violence applied, but I have not seen the expected results accomplished, bar the result of Kuwait no longer being under Iraqi occupation. That’s the result of applying violence, but applying it either improperly or in insufficient amounts to accomplish one’s goal. Panama after Noriega was removed was not such a nice place for a very long time. Please note here that I’m not saying that each of these situations would have been better with more violence applied. Especially in the case of Panama, all justifications for the violence failed. Panama (and Noriega) had not provided an appropriate justification for foreign intervention, and no amount of violence applied was going to make the situation better. It was one of the clearest cases I know in which violence was a totally incorrect solution.

    All these thoughts came to mind this morning when I read the story Exporting Chaos from Newsweek. Rami G. Khouri, editor-at-large of the Daily Star in Beirut writes about the fear that he and other middle easterners have whenever us westerners get together to try to decide or influence their fate. There are some things in his article with which I disagree. For example, I don’t feel that we have some duty to provide aid to a Hamas led Palestinian government. Nonetheless, I think his remarks are almost all very well directed, and we in the west would do well to listen.

    Despite my belief that we have no duty to provide aid to Hamas, we were the ones who urged the elections. We wanted to deal with a “democratic” Palestinian government, but we wanted them to elect the “right” people. Well, folks, that is not how democracy works. You can want democracy, and you can want the “right” people in power, but if you want both, and think you can have both, you are toying with insanity. I think our foreign policy is doing precisely that.

    We want democracy in Iraq, we want human rights. We want a unified state. We want that state to be friendly to us. We don’t want it to be an Islamic state. Hold it a second! Have we considered that the people who are going to vote in that democracy might not want the same things we do? Their concerns may well have little to do with protecting the United States from terrorism. They are more concerned with how their neighborhoods are run. One aspect of the way many of them want their neighborhoods run is Islamic standards and Islamic law. We are not going to be successful in accomplishing all those goals that I listed.

    Saddam Hussein maintained a government that was more friendly to western values than anything we are likely to see by means of an election. If we wanted western values established in Iraq, we should have followed a different strategy. I suspect we would have to occupy the country with substantially larger numbers of troops and rule with a ruthlessness that would make Saddam Hussein’s rule look positively heavenly. We aren’t that ruthless (at least I hope we aren’t). It’s not a practical policy. But what we have done is exercised violence in pursuit of that sort of a goal, but done so in a way that will not be successful. That means that those who die in this war will, in the end, have died in the process of making things worse. It’s not their fault; I’m not criticizing the American troops on the ground. I’m criticizing the planning and goal setting (or lack of it) that put them in that place.

    I’m also not very happy with the democratic response to the planning. It has always seemed to be more or less that we should do something that is very much like what the current administration has done only a bit less of it. Democrats are just as infected with the bug of solving everybody else’s problems with American solutions as are Republicans. Democrats seem to be even more muddled on how we should do it.

    Violence is sometimes necessary. War is sometimes necessary. But it is a tragedy when we resort to violence, and fail to make the resulting situation better.