Of War, Peace and Dragonflies in the Ointment of Hope

One Sunday evening last November, I had a long telephone conversation with my friend the general. We chatted about many things, and finally Iraq. Ever the pragmatic man, he said, “Saddam has really put himself in a tight place this time.” That is how he saw it then--perhaps even more so now that Kofi Annan apparently has worked a compromise. But from a U.S. college campus, it doesn’t feel quite that way.

How different and unsettling it is to discuss matters of war and peace with those who are responsible for war and peace. Like many fellow baby boomers, I have an ambiguous relationship with violence. We are, literally, children of war--the timing of our births determined by the signing of the peace that ended World War II. We grew up in the shadow of that conflict and its legacy of a Europe devastated and a world divided between the two hostile former allies along the Iron Curtain. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, our generation divided along the fault lines of our reaction to another war, the one in Vietnam. As I grow older, my respect for the fragility and wonder of life--all of life, from children to dragonflies and earthworms--becomes greater, and I find it harder to think comfortably about the use of force. The arguments about just wars and national defense that I studied in philosophy and political science courses take on a totally abstract quality, as though the most important thing about baking a pie crust is the geometrical theorem for the circumference of a circle. I am not a pacifist. I believe that in a world of difficult choices, violence, whether civic or personal, is an option that needs to be considered. The caveat is that it always be used carefully and at the lowest level to be effective. Yet I cannot resolve this position with either my revulsion at the news of the day or my sense that official explanations for the use of force, often phrased in terms of national pride, are too hollow to be dignified by acceptance.

The pundits’ reactions to the news of Annan’s potential compromise sound more like a report from the sports pages--who won, who lost, who got traded--than a thoughtful response to a world crisis. I am happy about the news, even if it was extracted at gunpoint, but I am troubled, too. Am I the kind of breakfast table political critic who wants the omelet but without breaking the eggs? No doubt. But this is not just about moral squeamishness. I believe I am less willing than I once was to overlook methodological (read tactical) matters for the sake of great ends. If I do not, as a pacifist would, cede transcendent value to each single human life, I certainly accord transcendent value to humanity. And gambling with that leaves me more than uneasy.

As to Saddam, the issue of preventing a psychopath (if he is one) or simply a bloviated tyrant (he is at least that) from developing weapons of mass destruction is clearly a shared world good. When we use threats, they must be effective. Force appears to work. It did in the Persian Gulf War, and apparently has again. That is a caution. And history provides others: It may not be moral not to use force, when force is called for, to prevent a greater evil. Chamberlain’s action at Munich cost no lives but doomed millions.

Now in my 50s, when I talk with those who make these military and strategic decisions, as I see in their brows the same wrinkles and in their eyes the same clouds of concern, I wonder whether our generation has made any progress in understanding our world and the duties we owe it. The president, the chiefs of staff and the officials of the State Department lead lives of insufficient sleep and inordinate demands. When might they think of the sunbaked villages in Iraq? Or the cleaning men and women in the palaces? Or the young recruits standing guard? Who should consider the lives and well-being of those hapless Iraqis if those Americans and others in power do not? And what good will thinking of them do if the Iraqis still are less important than the other considerations weighed in the balance? Old questions, and the answer even older: Only in the promise of a prophet do the meek inherit the earth and the peacemakers see God. The watchers--the questioners on the sidelines like me--are not dignified with a mention.