Posts Tagged ‘Petraeus’
Morality of War in Afghanistan
Thursday, August 19th, 2010
Since the dawn of history, men have fought wars of aggression.
And since the dawn of history men have sought to justify those wars…
They have failed.
There is no moral justification for starting a war. None. While there can be honest debate about the acceptability of violence in defense of one’s life or liberty, it is a perversion of the concept of morality to claim that it is right and just to be the aggressor and preemptively attack another nation for any reason whatsoever. Whether you call it “making the world safe for democracy,” or whether you claim you are simply seeking “lebensraum,” sending soldiers into battle without provocation is wrong. It is immoral, and yes it is evil.
Fact: Since the events of Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941, no nation has attacked the United States. Despite prodigious amounts of government spin, in the past fifty years none of the conflicts in which we have engaged have been in defense of our shores. In every conflict since WW II in which the United States has begun, we have been the aggressors. Thus with regard to the defense of this nation, none of the wars and invasions we have begun were justifiable.
As I said, bullies of the past have always tried to justify their aggressive acts. The chief difference I see between wars of the past and today’s conflict is that today, those in power don’t even try to justify their actions. Take General David Petraeus for example. In a recent interview with David Gregory of MSNBC, General Petreaus spoke out on the “big issues” of the conflict in Afghanistan. He talked about “the public’s frustration with the war, the strength of the Taliban, the government of Hamid Karzai… and whether President Obama’s July of 2011 withdrawal timeline will hold.” In addition, Gregory added his own straw-man question to the mix: “Is nation building possible in the badlands of Afghanistan?”
However, no question was raised in the interview of the rightness of the United States’ cause. Not one word was devoted to the moral justification of invading and occupying Afghanistan, putting our soldiers in harm’s way, and bankrupting the country in the process.
Instead, Petraeus talked about the “importance of the mission” and how hard that mission was. But the rightness of the mission? Un uh. No way.
In addition to being morally vague, General Petraeus’ comments on the war were so ambiguous as to be practically double speak:
“What we have are areas of progress, we have to link those together, extend them and then build on it because, of course, the security progress, as you noted earlier is the foundation for everything else, for the governance progress, the economic progress, the rule-of-law progress and so forth… the trick is to get all of it moving so that you’re spiraling upward where one initiative reinforces another.”
If my head did much more “spiraling upward” it would leave my shoulders altogether.
Not only can’t Petraeus identify the moral underpinning of America’s cause, he has trouble identifying what constitutes success:
“…but if you could reduce the level of violence by some 90 to 95 percent, as was the case in Iraq, to below a threshold which allows commerce and business and outside investment to take place, where there is an election that’s certainly at least elected representatives, and now you have to see if they can come together and form a government that is still representative of and responsive to the people, as was the previous one. If that can all be achieved there, that would be a reasonable solution here as well. “
The hell with peace; the hell with freedom; the hell with winning hearts and minds, the most important moral justification for all the death and destruction we are causing is so that commerce can resume?
“If Afghanistan can become the central Asian “roundabout,” to use President Karzai’s term, to where it can be the new Silk Road, think of the implications for that, recalling that, of course, Afghanistan is blessed with the presence of what are trillions, with an S on the end, trillions of dollars worth of minerals if, and only if, you can get the extractive technology, the human capital operated, the lines of communication to enable you to get it out of the country and all the rest of that.”
Is he serious? The moral purpose behind fighting and killing and dying in Afghanistan is so that we can dig up some minerals?
In an August 14 article in Huffington Post, entitled “Why Petraeus can’t make the sale” Author Dan Froomkin identifies Petraeus’ main problem as a simple one of facing up to reality.
“That reality, increasingly obvious to national security experts and the general public alike, is that no amount of good intentions or firepower is going to advance our fundamental interests in Afghanistan — and that as much as Petraeus might be able to achieve in the next six months, or a year, little to none of it is sustainable and most of it is, even worse, counterproductive.”
I believe Petraeus’ problem to be much more basic. If the General truly cares about “making the sale” for continuing to fight a war in Afghanistan then either he or President Obama must offer up a clear and unambiguous moral reason for fighting it.
And as the United States was the one who invaded and is currently occupying Afghanistan – as well as being responsible for inflicting much of the damage – I think that is a hard sell indeed.
