Yay! A debate!

[dragonlady7]

My friend Kat recently wrote an entry wherein she expressed her anger over the platitudes we feed our servicemen. She's a newspaper reporter, and has interviewed dozens and dozens of soldiers, the families of soldiers, etc. (She says it better than I do in her entry.) And she says, "War is a horrible thing. It's worse if you come back and sit in a cemetery and think you didn't accomplish anything. I think that's why people say they did it for our freedom. It's all that kid has to hold onto, and it's sickening that all we can offer him is a lie. You'd think society could do better than that by now."

As far as she can tell, this war is being fought for the amusement of this divisive administration. I know she's not alone in that feeling.
So I thought about it a little while.
And I made a, admittedly unresearched, little chart about the various wars we've fought in. This is largely in response to her statement:

We have done many decent and noble things in the wars in which we have fought, but if we had not fought them, I would still be here today, safe in Albany, happily enjoying electricity and freedom of the press and everything else.

Is this true? Is this the case? I am not enough of a historian to really analyze that, and I have a million things to do today so I can't really research it. I was a big military history buff in high school, so I'm just going by what I remember. (I did write a huge research paper about the extent of the decisiveness of the US involvement in WWI, so there you have that one...)

So, my little table of analysis, where column 3 is my take on the likelihood of being safe in Albany with a free press and electricity in 2005 had the aforementioned war not been fought.

war	effects of war, impact if not fought	would US still exist?
Revolutionary War	independence from Britain: when, if ever? Would we be like Canada is now? Settlement west of Appalachians would have been prohibited by British; other countries would likely exist there	not likely
Civil War	South likely would have remained separate country relations with south worse than are now? possible additional fragmentation into small nation-states slavery not abolished for some time until became economically unfeasible to continue it	not likely
World War I	Germany, Britain, France would have come to negotiated peace rather than the dictated 'peace' of Versailles: No Weimar Germany US would have remained isolationist, uninvolved in neo-colonial efforts WWII most likely would not have happened	yes
World War II	Germans likely to dictate terms of peace to Britain Japanese empire in Pacific: impact on trade, impact on economic growth are for a better theorist than I Eventual competition with Japanese inevitable; I believe war would have come to us anyway	debatable
Vietnam	presence of massive numbers of American combat veterans provided invaluable deterrent against Soviets during Cold War: analysts (my father among them) think this is a major reason WWIII was averted.	debatable
Afghanistan	to soon yet to analyze, but Al Qaeda has not launched any major attacks at the US after Sept. 11th and it is highly likely that the destruction of their training bases and their backers, the Taliban, has been a large factor in that	too soon to know: likely yes

Any thoughts, anyone else?

Disclaimer: i know I sound brusque: I'm in a hurry and am supposed to be doing something else. But I believe perhaps kat has a point; I'm not attacking her. I haven't had a chance to do enough reading up on the current Iraq situation to be able to analyze whether that's GWB having a power trip and destabilizing the Middle East, or whether he has an actual real shot at imposing a democracy on them by force and making the Middle East More Like Us In That They Don't Hate Us Forever. I don't know.

But I thought I had to offer a few thoughts. I really don't think that she would be sitting safe in Albany enjoying electricity and a free press had we not become involved in World War II. But I find some of FDR's actions leading up to that war reprehensible. I am conflicted, as any real student of history must be: history is not facts, it is things that happened, and there is no single objective way of looking at them.

I know I didn't say any of this as well as I meant to, but I wanted to at least say something before the entry slipped off my friends page and I forgot about it.

Comments

[spacellama.livejournal.com]

andrethanna posted something a few days ago about the death penalty. In general, I feel the same way about that issue as I do about war: In both cases, I have a broad theoretical position that is firm and, I believe, logical. But when we start talking about specific instances, my conviction sometimes slips.

Broadly and generally, I'm a pacifist. I don't believe that war is ever the best answer. However, right after 9/11, I was shocked and horrified to find that I supported the war in Afghanistan. Even looked up how civilians could participate, help out. For a long time, that was a dirty little secret in my household, and I still feel weird about it. My visceral, furious reaction is totally at odds with my logicbrain.

I felt differently about Iraq; I didn't -- and still don't -- see a defensive reason for the war. At the beginning, I hoped that my president was right, that he had better information than I did, that Hussein posed an immediate threat to my homeland and we were in essence staging a defense. Turns out, that wasn't the case. I feel more than a little betrayed.

But there has been some fall-out that I wonder wasn't the president's deeper purpose all along. For instance, would Libya have made the shift it has if it hadn't felt scared shitless that we'd invade there, too? Would Europe have taken on Iran's nuclear situation (in a diplomatic arena) if they didn't have the notion that we'd invade Iran on a whim if they didn't shape up fast? Would Egypt and Jordan have felt the urgency to get involved with Israel/Palestine negotiations if they weren't suddenly deprived of the support, both diplomatic and financial, that Hussein had provided the violent part of the Palestinan effort? I have no idea if any of these outcomes were a direct result of this Iraq war, and even if they are, I still don't think that they're worth the deaths of 1000+ of my countrymen and soldiers, or the injuries to thousands more.

But perhaps it would be easier for a soldier to swallow those global/diplomatic changes as an explanation for this offensive, rather than the oft-repeated megalomaniacal-George reason. I don't really know.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

I actually made a much longer chart, but decided that my post was long enough without it.
So: I agree with you about the Rev. War and Civil War and to some extent (in that we acquired lots of territory) the Mexican-American War. That's why I said, in the post, that control of our land hasn't been at stake since the Civil War.

As for WWII, there may have been an impact on trade if we had not entered the war and the Allies lost (though I believe it is debatable whether our involvement clinched the win for the Allies -- after all, Hitler's army was substantially destroyed that winter in Russia). But I do not think the trade issue would have changed our borders or the basic stability of our government. It may have made us less rich, but I seriously doubt that a triumphant Japan would have been a better economic rival than the Japan we have now. Japan was able to compete very quickly because we paid to rebuild its factories, thus allowing them to have modern factories without the cost of rehabbing the very outdated factories they had before the war.

Was war inevitable with Japan? Maybe. I'm not saying we shouldn't have gone to war with Japan, but I don't think doing so protected the freedoms of our lovely country half a planet away.

As for avoiding a war with the USSR, I agree the Cold War was a war of deterence and having combat-trained troops was useful. However, when I studied political science in college I discovered something awfully surprising. For most of the Cold War, all but the last little bit of it, the USSR could not hit us with their nuclear-tipped missiles. (By us I mean the continental U.S.)

I know, that shocked me too! Here's the thing. The USSR had the nukes, but they didn't have the launch pads. At the very end, they had built two launch pads that could maybe have gotten missiles to us, and we kept a close eye on them, which was easy since they were in the middle of a swamp. No missiles were ever taken to the sites. This was not made public until after the Cold War.

So, I don't think we were ever in as much danger as our parents' generation believed.

I think that in any war before very recently, we were extraordinarily safe in comparison to the other countries involved, because we had some big oceans and uninvolved countries surrounding us. Even now, if someone actually wanted to take the entire country over, physically, they would have to find somewhere to fight from, like Canada or Mexico. That would mean quite a pre-war war that we would probably be able to influence by protecting our neighbors.

But if our soldiers were fighting that sort of battle, I would agree that they were protecting our freedoms and way of life. What they're doing right now in Afghanistan and Iraq may be noble and decent, but it is not saving our country from being destroyed.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

>not saving our country from being destroyed

So preventing another Sept. 11th doesn't count?


I ask rhetorically.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

It's a good question. I don't think we are actually battling terrorists that want to bomb our country. We are battling people who use terrorist techniques to get us out of their country, and after we invaded Iraq those "insurgents" were joined by some leaders who we think are interested in terrorizing the US and everybody else. But we're focusing on stabilising Iraq, which may stabilise the Middle East but will not end terrorism. Chasing Osama bin Laden might slow down terrorism from his group, but there are lots of groups out there with the ability and the interest and the materials to terrorise any country in the world. Eevn if we killed Osama bin Laden today, terrorism would still exist and much of it would still be directed at Europe -- where they've been experiencing serious terrorist attacks for years, particularly in France.

Looking at France and other countries who have been attacked repeatedly, I notice that the attacks did not end their governments; they are still ruled stabiliy by a democratically-chosen set of leaders. I notice that their people still have the freedoms that their governments set out for them. And although attacks are terrible and people have been killed and wounded and much property has been destroyed, the populace rebuilds and goes on. So even if we were fighting terrorism, I don't think those soldiers could be credited with ensuring a free press and everything else that we have here in the US. They could be credited with protecting us, and that's a noble and decent thing, but it does not rise to the level of saving our country.

That's what I object to -- glorifying these soldiers as saviors when they're not. Other solders were, and maybe some will be again, but this crop is not doing that.