Pandora’s Box
Jun 1st, 2006 at 11:08 am by Susie
I read this from Lt. Col. Bob Bateman yesterday, who often posts at Altercation, and I thought he made some thoughtful points regarding the atrocities at Haditha:
I will not dispute the accounts now appearing about events that took place in the Iraqi town of Haditha. So far as I can determine, there is nothing to dispute in the coverage thereof by the national (and international) press. Thus far their reporting has confined itself, appropriately, to what is known. That is bad enough.
Should even a small part of the allegations prove true, I will not be surprised, but I will be saddened. What these charges may mean is that there was not just a failure at the lowest levels, but that there was a moral failure through several levels of command, among the officers. Beyond that there is little that I can say.
Now is not the time to explain how such things happen, or why. Although I have spent a good part of my professional and intellectual life seeking to understand how things like this occur, and believe that I have some understanding of the phenomena (here), it is entirely too early to begin commenting now. In no small part this is because any such explanation at this point may be construed as apologia, which is in itself not a good thing. If events occurred as they are
currently reported to have occurred, then there is nothing more to say than, “It is wrong.â€Yet at the same time I cannot help but note that those who might be inclined to trumpet these events may themselves do well to maintain some perspective. War, in short, is savage. All wars, bar none. It has always been savage, and it will always be savage. No matter how “Good†the war is, how completely altruistic the motives of the civilians who send us to this conflict or that one may be, no matter how necessary a war may be, at the level of the Soldier, War is Savage. Professionals know this, and it is one of the very real reasons that we are (somewhat ironically, for those who do not know us or our morals) so often opposed to the use of force. In other words, we have an informed idea of what rests inside Pandora’s Box, and this colors our thoughts when considering force.
At the most basic level, the role of the professional military officer is to control and direct the use of violence. It is to confine the savage, but you cannot prevent it entirely. You can train for a lifetime, devote vast resources to the creation of a professional force, and emplace institutional checks to reduce the incidence of misdirected violence…but you will never, ever, stop it entirely. Please keep this in mind.
My dad, a career infantry officer, would, when asked, “What do you do?”, reply with a straight face, “Manage Violence”.
The basic fallacy of all this thinking is that you can create peace through violence, that in the end all peaceful approaches to resolving conflict will fail and that in the end we will inevitably be forced to violence in order to destroy evil and create peace and justice. It is the theme of every fairy tale, cowboy and cop show that spends the first 40 minutes leading up to the final confrontation and gunfight.
In reality the truth is opposite: no matter how long and protracted the war, in the end we must finish the violence and create peace.
We have to be able to do both war and peace. The key is knowing when to do each thing, and that comes from balance. Clearly, George Bush lacks balance, but so does the bulk of our nation or we would not have been so easily mislead. George Bush is a big problem, but he will eventually go away. But George did not do this all by himself. We are a nation whose understanding of itself and its world has not only allowed, but celebrated, all the violations of our principals, our laws, and our most basic understanding of what America stands for that the Republican governing cabal has imposed in the last six years. Our fellow citizens won’t find the wisdom to recognize the next iteration of the Iraq bamboozle just because George Bush is out of the White House. We have a much bigger problem than George.
The only reason we have to do war is because we don’t know how to do peace.