In Wrong-Headed Wars, When Do a Nation’s Broken Promises become Its Citizens’ Personal Shame? — Abandoning the Foreign Locals Who Helped Us in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam

21 July 2011

When the United States starts a war without having a sound or workable strategy, it would be wise to think about the ethical consequences that will arrive when the conflict ends in failure

A string of premises:

(1) True conservatives are generally people who think that keeping one’s word is an honorable necessity.

Admitting defeat in self-initiated wars is difficult.

(2) Retreating from the conflicts that we started has historically meant that foreign peoples (whom we intended to aid) were ultimately left to fend for themselves against an increasingly powerful enemy.

Many of these “friends of America” suffer death, torture, or imprisonment when we withdraw.

(3) For many of us, the failure to keep our implied word offends our personal sense of morality.

(4) Because letting other people down, at the cost of their lives, is morally distasteful, we Americans should be motivated to examine the unreasoned impulses that too frequently persuade us that unnecessary wars are worthwhile.

Once we have broken the chalice multiple times, we should think about why we keep dropping it.

(5) One way to avoid dishonorable behavior is not to initiate conflicts that will foreseeably put us in strategic positions that break implied promises made to foreign nationals whom we are morally committed to protecting.

Tarak Barkawi (at the University of Cambridge) wrote about aspects of this

He said:

The course and timing of imperial retreats usually reflect circumstances in the imperial country, not the target country. It's about the US and the West, not Afghanistan. As ever, Vietnam is instructive.

Those South Vietnamese who had stood with the US and depended on US assurances were abandoned to their fates. They were shut outside the embassy gates while the US airlifted its remaining personnel to safety in April 1975. Very few of them were even to be given asylum in the US until the plight of the "boat people" shamed the West.

Ironically but unsurprisingly, it was often US soldiers who felt their country's betrayal of South Vietnam most deeply. They were the ones who had shed tears, sweat and blood for higher purposes.

And, as now in Afghanistan, they were also the ones who hoped for a victory that was just around the corner. If only the West would live up to its values and stay the course, they believed, the blood debt might yet be redeemed.

Barkawi points out that the Bush and Obama administrations failed to fill 18,000 of the 25,000 visas that Congress had authorized for the Iraqis who had helped us there. Left behind, many were killed.

A doubly negative ethical whammy

There is more to this than national dishonor.

There is the question of what our wrong-headed wars are doing to the psychic health of our troops:

First, we put our combat units into situations in which they will predictably form bonds of friendship and appreciation with the foreign nationals who are trying to help them win.

Then — because the war was strategically inept (and therefore unwinnable) from the outset — we (equally foreseeably) force these same troops to abandon helpful foreign nationals to the deadly fate that could have been prevented, if the United States had kept the promises that its war-making actions had implied.

The conflict between personalized military honor and abstracted national dishonor is a very difficult place for military people to be.

Moral stains are difficult to wash

The War in Afghanistan is not going to end well in the long term.

Tarak Barkawi concluded:

The killing of bin Laden and Vice President Biden's "counter-terrorism" strategy are the fig leaves that will attempt to cover the protruding shame of US retreat this time around.

Promises of nation-building have been steadily downgraded. The hope now is that enough Afghan soldiers and policeman can be trained to turn Afghanistan into a kind of permanent counter-insurgent state, only with Afghans doing all the dying on both sides.

While some real progress has been made in building an army, as was also the case in Vietnam, an army without a regime or a cause to support it is unlikely to hold together for long.

US drones will circle above the bloody madness to come, occasionally firing missiles.

Meanwhile, back at home, the bill for Bush's wars will come due in a United States that has become ungovernable.

The same corrosive neoliberalism that undermined US development programs in Iraq and Afghanistan - contracted out to a private sector interested only in its own bottom line - has left the US unable to respond to the multiple crises it faces.

Retrievable lessons?

On the negative side of the balance:

Our politicians, and past and present Commanders in Chief, will hide their responsibility for mistakes in obfuscation, self-justification, lies, excuses, and false patriotism.

And civilian consumerist memory, never focused on anything particularly worthwhile, will quickly forget.

On the positive side:

Those who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq will not forget.

In that, there may be hope.

Though I thought the same about Vietnam, which (due to the draft) scarred the nation more deeply.

PeteFree.com

In Wrong-Headed Wars, When Do a Nation’s Broken Promises become Its Citizens’ Personal Shame? — Abandoning the Foreign Locals Who Helped Us in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam