Article & Essay: Foolish Leaders and Bloody Wars
War is often the product of those who never fought, while those who
did the fighting are often the ones fighting against war.
By Gerald S. Rellick
The 20th century, as we are so often reminded, was the most lethal in
history--a century of staggering human slaughter, with more than 100
million people dying at the hands of others. Author and scholar Peter
Brooks writes that for European intellectuals, the First World War was
a major shock. At a time of unprecedented scientific, economic, and
social progress, “war had come to seem unthinkable.” The outbreak of
the war drove Albert Einstein to remark, “What a sad species of animal
we belong to.” For Sigmund Freud, it was almost as if “some primal
force was at work ... a hatred of life or a lack of talent for
living.” Freud was no optimist about the human condition. He thought
he saw in man an instinctual drive toward self-annihilation. He called
this the “death instinct” and postulated that man fought off this
drive in himself by projecting it outward as aggression, thereby
obtaining relief. As such, aggression was too deeply rooted to ever be
expunged completely. At best, it could only be managed--through a
blend of knowledge and reason. This was Freud’s one hope for mankind.
In a PBS documentary, Legacy, first broadcast in 1992, British author
and historian Michael Wood captured a small part of the tragedy and
disbelief of it all with these words:
It is a freezing February night in northern France. Former enemies,
French and German, meet to commemorate the bloodiest battle in
history, which began on this night [in 1916], Verdun. Only a lifetime
ago, three quarters of a million men died here for a couple of square
miles of ground. The pointlessness of it all passes belief today. The
inescapable lesson of history is that for all the great achievements
of the West, for all its humanistic values and its egalitarian
principles, its character is touched by a deep strain of violence;
that’s the paradox which confronts us as we look to the future of
civilization at a time when all across the world, the values of the
West are supposed to have triumphed.
But next to the sober words of Freud, Einstein, and others, there
arose a perversion of the “language of war.” This language in the
current day, so carefully crafted--”smart bombs,” ‘collateral damage,”
“blowback”--attempts above all else to desensitize awareness of the
Achilles Heel of all war, the enormous human cost. Leaders go to great
lengths to keep this awareness from the public. We witnessed this
recently when the Bush administration tried to block photographs of
the coffins of dead soldiers returning from Iraq. And again when
certain local television affiliates refused to broadcast ABC’s
Nightline segment in which the photos of dead Americans from the Iraqi
War were shown and their names read aloud.
I was born during the last months of World War II. and when I was
about 10 or 12 and the war was still a fresh topic, I recall a friend
and I trying to get his father to talk about his combat experiences in
the war. He had fought in North Africa and Italy and was wounded
twice. But the most we could ever get out of him were some stories of
drunken revelry while on leave, of once being sold whiskey made from
gasoline by the locals. It was so dangerous, he said, “you couldn’t
drink and smoke at the same time.” War sounded like great fun.
Philosopher Jackson Lears describes this type of non-response as part
of “the minimalist vocabulary of ordinary American soldiers during
World War II,” men who “just had a job to do and didn’t want to talk
about it when they returned home.” It was, says Lears, “the honor of
silence in response to the unspeakable.” For poet Walt Whitman, who
tended to the wounded and dying in the Civil War, “The real war will
never get in the books.” Says Lears of Whitman, “He sensed that there
was something new about the carnage of modern war, something that
resisted literary convention and ultimately language itself.”
The mechanization of war not only produced mass killing on an
unprecedented scale, but it made death more random and impersonal.
Death could come without warning from anywhere, without seeing one’s
enemy. Survival came to the lucky, not the fittest. Karl von
Clausewitz, the famous 18th century military strategist, whose
detailed treatises on the conduct of war are still required reading at
the Army War College and West Point, in the end likened war to a card
game, “a meaningless exercise in calculating chance.”
One of the cruelest features of any war is the enormous price paid by
the young. Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey, a Medal of Honor recipient
who fought in Vietnam, writes that when he returned from the war he
wrote to the Selective Service System arguing that the age of the
draft be increased from 18 to 30, because, he said, “young men had too
little political or social power for their objections to matter.” But
he found himself corrected by a veteran soldier who told him that
anyone over 30 was of little use for military training because at that
age they begin to think, form opinions, and ask questions. But, he
added, “Give me a group of men between the ages of 18 and 26, and give
me the power to control how much they can eat and sleep, and I can get
them to do anything I want.” Such is the cruel trick played on the
young--“old men dreaming up wars in which young men do the dying,” as
George McGovern put it.
In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Vietnam historian Jack
Langguth writes that in its earliest days, the republic was fortunate
to have former General George Washington as its first president. His
military experience shaped his actions as president, says Langguth.
When Washington faced the prospect of entangling the United States in
further wars, “he risked his reputation by maintaining the nation's
neutrality.” Thomas Jefferson was also wary of unleashing the power of
war, once remarking, “I think one war is enough for the life of one
man.” But James Madison, who had little experience in military
matters, led the country into the senseless War of 1812.
The chickenhawk argument that has risen to such prominence today, with
the major players in the Iraq war--Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice,
Wolfowitz--having never experienced war firsthand, is in fact an
argument as old as war itself. Civil War general William Tecumseh
Sherman, in an address to a class of military cadets after the war,
concluded his remarks with the now-famous words, “War is Hell.” Lesser
known are the words that preceded his conclusion: “It is only those
who have never fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the
wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”
In our current age, George McGovern ran for the presidency in 1972
against Richard Nixon; the campaign issue was the Vietnam War.
McGovern had flown 50 combat missions as a bomber pilot over Europe in
World War II; Nixon secured a safe and comfortable slot in the navy
during the war. Yet, it was Nixon who was viewed by the country as the
tough guy, the man who would--in those God-awful words--”bring us
peace with honor.” But tens of thousands more soldiers died in Vietnam
during the Nixon years as the war ground on well past any point of
reason. And let us not forget the real architect and arch-villain of
the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson; like Nixon, Johnson also wound up
safely in the navy during WW II, far removed from harm’s way.
War is an unleashing of the most powerful man-made destructive force
on earth. The only thing we can ever be certain about in war is that
there will be human corpses to dispose of and painful letters to write
to family members of those who sacrificed everything. All else is
subject to the law of unintended consequences. Karl Kraus, an Austrian
writer, wrote of WWI, “The war was a disastrous failure of the
imagination and an almost deliberate refusal to envisage the
inevitable consequences of words and acts ... made possible [in part]
by the corruption of language in politics and in the newspapers.” In
our modern age, with so many staggering examples of war’s unintended
consequences, war is more than ever a colossal failure of leadership,
vision, diplomacy, and above all, a failure of human will itself.
Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times writes that we are just now
hearing serious debate in this country about whether the Bush
administration’s response to 9/11--particularly the decision to go to
war with Iraq--signaled “a major shift away from the values,
principles and strategies that guided America before.” Although an
accurate assessment, Brownstein’s words certainly understate the
situation. It would be more accurate to say that the war was not just
the result of a failed ideology and bad policy making--which it
was--but more, a deliberate attempt to distract attention away from
the Bush administration’s strategic and tactical failures that
contributed to the tragedy of 9/11. It was also intended to give
Americans some sense--no matter how false and perverted--that George
Bush was doing something about terror, at the same time as he and his
cohorts in the administration never tired or felt ashamed of reminding
us in so many subtle ways to be afraid and that only George Bush could
protect us from the evil of international terrorism.
That facade of “leadership” is now collapsing, and a growing majority
of Americans are beginning to see that no president of the modern era
has been more reckless and derelict in his duty than George W. Bush.
The Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, has resigned in
disgrace. Leading newspapers, including The New York Times, have
called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. The disgrace of Abu
Ghraib prison is almost beyond words. And most recently, a group of 27
retired diplomats and military commanders who have held positions of
major responsibility in American foreign and defense policy over the
past 50 years have called for the removal of George Bush from office.
George Bush is a failed president. It is time for change.
Gerald S. Rellick, Ph.D., worked in the defense sector of the
aerospace industry. He now teaches in the California Community College
system. You can email Gerald at
Posted Wednesday, June 23, 2004
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