Fighting wars without pain might be OK if it were possible, but merely ghetto-izing the pain is unacceptable

"The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again -- for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours -- is obscene. All decent people should object. . . .

"The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. . . .

"What we are doing is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it."

-- Bob Herbert, in his Tuesday NYT column, "A Fearful Price"

by Ken

I've been content to let Howie do the heavy lifting on Afghanistan. I don't disagree with the strong position he's taken against increased American involvement in a war there, but I still feel conflicted about it.

As Hendrik Hertzberg begins his "Comment" piece in this week's New Yorker, "Bad Choices": "There are no good options for the United States in Afghanistan. That has been the conventional wisdom for some years now, and this time the conventional wisdom—the reigning cliché—happens to be true."

Later Hertzberg writes, "The principal virtue of [the president's] choice remains the vices of the others." He writes further:

The botched war in Afghanistan, like the economic crisis and the broken health-care system, is an inheritance from which Obama is trying to extricate the country. In each case, the institutional, historical, and political constraints under which a President must operate mean that the solutions—or, if there are no solutions, the ameliorations—are doomed to be nearly as messy as the problems.

However, one thing about the war in Afghanistan -- and indeed the last war in Iraq, and the ones currently being lined up for Iran et al. by the enthusiasts -- needs to be flagged down. As Bob Herbert wrote Tuesday, it "is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it." It was an innovation of the Bush-Cheney regime, and unfortunately like so many other innovations that expand the power of the executive branch, the chances of its being reversed by succeeding administrations, even those run by less despicable, megalomaniacal leaders, are slim. Giving up power one finds oneself heir to isn't something politicians do a lot of.

Nothing characterizes the hypocrisy and general doodyheadedness of Movement Conservative thuggery more surely than what has come to be known as its "chickenhawkishness" -- the truly astonishing percentage of these Bombs-Away Bozos, screeching to start a new war every day, who have never served in the military and are offended by the mere suggestion that they should.

When our friend Max Blumenthal was honing his videographer's skills, he took his video camera to one of those conclaves of Daring Young Doodyheads (Values Voter Summit, perhaps?) and put the question to all those blood-thirsty doodyheads frothing at the mouth for more invasions, more wars: Would you fight in those wars? Not only wouldn't they, most of them were clearly mystified, or offended, by the fact that someone would ask them such a question.

One especially irritating far-right doodyhead said simply that he could contribute to the war better in other ways. I wonder whether those delicate geniuses (as I hope George Costanza won't mind my calling them) are aware that they get to make that choice because of the elimination of the draft, under which previous American wars, both declared and undeclared, were fought. But can the delicate geniuses really not see how philosophically and ethically repulsive it is to advocate a war in which neither you nor your family, friends, and associates is put at risk of any sort?

Of course this point has been made before, but it never seems to stick, and each time it's brought up, it's as if nobody's ever said it before. I'm not sure anyone's said it as well, though, as Bob Herbert did the Tuesday column from which I've quoted above.

To drive the point home, the column begins with Herbert's encounter with a Columbia University student "who was enthusiastic about the escalation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan," and "argued that a full-blown counterinsurgency effort, which would likely take many years and cost many lives, was the only way to truly win the war."

He was a very bright young man: thoughtful and eager and polite. I asked him if he had any plans to join the military and help make this grand mission a success. He said no.

Hmm. Is there a cognitive-dissonance monitor in the house?

Herbert relates this to a RAND Corp. study --

showing that the eight years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan were taking an emotional toll on the children of service members and that the difficulties increased the longer parents were deployed.

There is no way that the findings of this study should be a surprise to anyone. It just confirms that the children of those being sent into combat are among that tiny percentage of the population that is unfairly shouldering the entire burden of these wars.

The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again -- for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours -- is obscene. All decent people should object.

We already knew that in addition to the many thousands who have been killed or physically wounded, hundreds of thousands have returned with very serious psychological wounds: deep depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and so on. Other problems are also widespread: alcohol and drug abuse, family strife, homelessness.

The new study, by the RAND Corporation, was published in the journal Pediatrics. The children surveyed were found to have higher levels of emotional difficulties than their peers in the general population.

According to the study:

"Older youth and girls of all ages reported significantly more school, family and peer-related difficulties with parental deployment. Length of parental deployment and poorer non-deployed caregiver mental health were significantly associated with a greater number of challenges for children, both during deployment and deployed parent reintegration."

The air is filled with obsessive self-satisfied rhetoric about supporting the troops, giving them everything they need and not letting them down. But that rhetoric is as hollow as a jazzman’s drum because the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire at all to share in the sacrifices that the service members and their families are making. Most Americans do not want to serve in the wars, do not want to give up their precious time to do volunteer work that would aid the nation’s warriors and their families, do not even want to fork over the taxes that are needed to pay for the wars.

To say that this is a national disgrace is to wallow in the shallowest understatement. The nation will always give lip-service to support for the troops, but for the most part Americans do not really care about the men and women we so blithely ship off to war, and the families they leave behind.

The National Military Family Association, which commissioned the RAND study, has poignant comments from the children of military personnel on its Web site.

You can tell immediately how much more real the wars are to those youngsters than to most Americans:

"I hope it’s not him on the news getting hurt."

"Most of my grades dropped because I was thinking about my dad, because my dad’s more important than school."

"Mom will be in her room and we hear her crying."

Which brings Herbert to the point that I made my second extract above, and eventually the third:

The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. We’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than we fought in World Wars I and II combined. If voters had to choose right now between instituting a draft or exiting Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops would be out of those two countries in a heartbeat.

I don’t think our current way of waging war, which is pretty easy-breezy for most citizens, is what the architects of America had in mind. Here’s George Washington’s view, for example: "It must be laid down as a primary position and the basis of our system, that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government owes not only a proportion of his property, but even his personal service to the defense of it."

What we are doing is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it.

A cruel irony in this new way of waging war is that the 1 percent of the country doing the fighting, which tends toi support these military adventures, seems largely ignorant of the way the way they are used by militarily adventurous pols to shield them from the proper scrutiny of the American people at large.

If it turns out that there is an afterlife that involves rewards and punishments for earthly deeds, you have to hope that there is a sufficiently fierce punishment for sending other people's children off to die.

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