http://www.juancole.com/2008/01/king-war-cannot-achieve-even-negative.html
This is a permanent link to the posting in Juan Cole's blog, the text of
which I faithfully reproduce below.
Be sure to read the comments.
Prof Cole, /Magnifique!/
<cheers>
Monday, January 21, 2008
King: War Cannot Achieve Even a Negative Good
Martin Luther King will be honored today throughout America as a
champion of racial justice and racial harmony. That is a pivotal legacy
for the United States of America, which for 87 long years was built on
the lawful enslavement of one race by another, and for another century
practiced the lawful Apartheid of Jim Crow.
But he was not the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize only
because of his work on civil rights and integration. He was also a
profound thinker in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi on peace. Not peace
in the abstract, but peace as a practical political tool. Not only peace
as a social movement but peace as a method in international relations.
King critiqued the typical use of "peace" by politicians as a distant
ideal toward which they are working, even while they bomb and massacre
and slaughter. In his Christmas Sermon, December 24, 1967, King made
this point:
' And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace.
Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson
talks eloquently about peace.
What is the problem?
They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek,
but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant
goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal.
We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.
All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends
must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and
ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.'
The reply to such an assertion from politicians, generals and others is
that peace as method (rather than as distant ideal) is impractical. That
the enemy is deadly and determined and will slaughter us if we attempt
to deal with him through the method of peace.
But King came to this conclusion at the height of the Cold War, when the
Soviet Union had the US targeted with thousands of nuclear warheads. He
came to this conclusion when the Vietnam War was raging. He was not
naive. He was not a babe in the woods. He was not an impractical
dreamer. He was a seer, and he saw the end of war.
He saw the end of war not because war could never achieve any good. He
recognized that it had in recent history accomplished what he called a
"negative good," of, say, keeping us from having to live under the
jackboot of a tyrant. But the sheer destructiveness of contemporary
warfare began to raise doubts in his mind, even as a young man in the
late 1950s, as to whether this instrumental use of war to achieve a
negative good was any longer possible.
Let us just review American wars since King began to have those doubts.
There was Vietnam, where the US lost 58,000 dead and tens of thousands
more wounded, where it spent billions and as a result suffered from an
inflationary spiral, and where it lost. It did not lose, as the Right
fondly imagines, because of a stab in the back by weak-kneed civilian
politicians.
The US lost in Vietnam because it fought on the wrong side of history,
because it took up a French colonial project of suppressing Vietnamese
Left Nationalism. The US killed perhaps as many as 2 million Vietnamese
peasants, which surely counts as a genocide, all to no avail, because
the war was poorly chosen. Ironically, Dwight Eisenhower had told the
French to give up on a similar fruitless war in Algeria, because he
could see that it could not be won and risked pushing the Algerians into
the arms of the communists. Three or four years later Kennedy began
getting us more deeply involved in precisely the same sort of war,
succeeding the French. My guess is that it was because the North
Vietnamese had already embraced communism; if they had been bourgeois
nationalists like the Algerians, even Washington would have had more
sense than to get involved. But what that generation of Cold Warriors
could not see was that "communism" could often just be a banner for
nationalism.
Then there were Reagan's covert wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and
Afghanistan. Reagan won temporarily in Nicaragua, at the price of
running nun-killing death squads. But if you check, you'll see that
Daniel Ortega is president of Nicaragua, and left-leaning regimes of the
sort Reagan attempted to destabilize are in power in Venezuela, Bolivia
and Brazil. Reagan's covert wars in Latin America caused a lot of
trouble, harmed a lot of people, and had no long term success. In part
that is because politics wells up from social and economic conditions,
and is not just the creation of some individual an imperial power
installs in power.
As for Reagan's Jihad in Afghanistan, it clearly was a world-historical
blunder. Had the communists stayed in power in Afghanistan, their regime
would probably have just evolved after the fall of the Soviet Union in
1991 into a Kazakhstan-style state. Not a democracy, but stable enough
and with schooling for all and an investment in development.
Instead, Reagan and his Saudi and Pakistani allies funneled the lion's
share of their covert war aid to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the most radical
of the Mujahidin leaders. They forced the Soviet Union out, and
destroyed the Afghanistan communists, but the ultimate result was a) the
rise of al-Qaeda and b) the rise of the Taliban.
Reagan won the Afghanistan war, but it was a Pyrrhic victory that came
around to bite the US on the posterior on September 11.
So you have to ask whether any of these wars -- Vietnam, Nicaragua, or
Afghanistan-- should have been fought. Either we lost, or the victory
was temporary, or we contributed to a blowback that hit our society on 9/11.
And of course, then there is the Iraq War.
But first, let's consider what King said about the negative good a war
might have accomplished in the past. It is from "Pilgrimage to
Nonviolence" in /Strength to Love/, 1958:
' More recently I have come to see the need for the method of
nonviolence in international relations.
Although I was not yet convinced of its efficacy in conflicts
between nations, I felt that while war could never be a positive
good, it could serve as a negative good by preventing the spread and
growth of an evil force. War, horrible as it is, might be preferable
to surrender to a totalitarian system.
But now I believe that the potential destructiveness of modern
weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again
achieving a negative good.
If we assume that mankind has a right to survive then we must find
an alternative to war and destruction. '
And given the dismal record of the failure of US wars since King wrote
that in 1958, he may well have been prescient.
The Iraq War failed for many reasons, but one important cause was that
contemporary warfare is too destructive to achieve political and
nation-building goals. The destructiveness of the US war helped to
provoke the various Iraqi insurgencies. The killing of 17 civilians at a
protest in Falluja in April of 2003 was the beginning of the end of
Falluja. In November and December of 2004, the US military damaged 2/3s
of the city's buildings and emptied it of its population, except for the
unknown number it killed (hundreds? thousands?)
And for all the subsequent frantic US military actions, the US has not
put humpty dumpty back together again, and almost certainly cannot.
The narrative of the warmongers is that war has become ever more
precise, ever more useful in achieving specific diplomatic and political
goals.
Need to remove a dictator? Well here is some Shock and Awe.
Need to restore human rights? Here, destroy this city to save it.
Fighting terrorism? You just need a hundred thousand more troops with
more M16s!
But actually the nonviolent means of dealing with the Saddam Hussein
regime turn out to have been completely effective. The United Nations
inspections had actually worked, something that no one in the United
States or Britain seems to want to acknowledge, even with all we now
know. The inspections really did force Saddam to dismantle his WMD
programs and destroy his stockpiles. The economic sanctions were useless
for regime change. But as a means of destroying Saddam's power to menace
his neighbors, they were completely effective. Too effective, to the
extent that they ended up harming children and civilians.
The 2003 Iraq War was not necessary if its goal was to remove the Saddam
regime as a threat to US or regional security. Iraq had been disarmed
and contained.
And, the 2003 Iraq War was not effective if the goal had been to restore
civil society and bring democracy. Iraq lacked the essential social and
political prerequisites for such a transition, and the US military is a
military, not a police force.
Let us consider whether King wasn't right in 1958, and whether
contemporary warfare isn't too destructive, too blunt an instrument to
achieve even negative good any longer.
Far more al-Qaeda operatives have been busted through good police work
than were ever captured on a battlefield. And, the brutality of the Iraq
war has created hundreds of little Bin Ladens, as Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak predicted it would.
Three main sorts of security challenges face the United States.
There is the rivalry with other nuclear powers, where war cannot be used
as a tool of diplomacy because it would be far too destructive.
There is conflict between the US and small weak third world annoyances
such as Iran. What the Iraq War should have taught us is that elective
war is a horrible policy tool for dealing with such conflicts.
And there is the problem of terrorism, which cannot be fought with big
conventional militaries. The attempt to do so just provokes insurgencies
that grow potentially even more formidable.
Bush and Cheney keep imagining that they are in 1928 or 1942 or 1947.
Their mindset is that of the first half of the twentieth century. They
are men of the past.
Martin Luther King was a man of the future. He saw clearly that
humankind has a choice. It is the choice between continuing to wage war,
and surviving as a species. King was also a man in a hurry. He did not
have much time. Neither do we.
It is time to wrap up the Iraq War and to, as carefully and deliberately
as possible, end the US military presence in Iraq. It is not a Japan or
a Germany after WW II, both of which feared the Soviet Union and so
could put up with foreign bases as protection. Iraqis fear no one, such
that they would accept permanent bases. The Middle East is a
postcolonial region inhospitable to the humiliations of foreign
domination, which its peoples struggled hard and long to end.
And it is time to take the elective war option off the table, with
regard to Iran, and to the Sudan, and to Somalia, and all the others on
the Neoconservative hit list.
War does not work. It is too destructive. It creates too much blowback,
as with Afghanistan and al-Qaeda. It leaves too much of the city
destroyed, that it meant to save, as with Falluja. It cannot midwife
rights or democracy, it is too gross, too indiscriminate, too brutal for
that purpose. It produces Abu Ghraib and Falluja, not Monticello.
The US needs a defensive military, insofar as it can contribute to
protecting us from asymmetrical or conventional challenges. But
*launching* a war against a country that did not attack us, that is
immoral and stupid. Let's listen to Dr. King and never do that again.
Labels: Iraq <http://www.juancole.com/labels/Iraq.html>
/posted by Juan Cole /
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