Against Gilliard I
By You can’t split the difference. If you support the war in Iraq, then you need to be there to support it. If not, your words are that of a coward, no matter what cheap excuses you come up with.
No.
Here’s a dirty little secret. However much fun it is to jeer at the 101st Fighting Keyboarders for supporting the war without enlisting, they aren’t really required to. It’s all well and good to lob the word “chickenhawk” at them, but it doesn’t really apply. In a country with a professional, volunteer military, support for military action does not require enlistment. Moreover, the left should not be making the argument that it does, because this argument relies on an understanding of military life that concentrates on romantic glory rather than on professionalism.
There are real chickenhawks. George W. Bush is one of them, Dick Cheney another. Actively avoiding conscription while supporting a military action is cowardly and deceitful, and the real chickenhawks, those with “other priorities,” deserve all the scorn that we can heap upon them. However, we don’t have a draft in the United States today. It is entirely legitimate to support a military intervention carried out by a professional military organization on the orders of civilian political authorities without personally enlisting.
I am no more required to enlist in a war that I support than I am to teach in a high school if I support public education. This is true even if there is a shortage of high school teachers. I support the Peace Corps, and appreciate that it is understaffed and underfunded. This commits me to a certain set of political actions, but it doesn’t mean that I have to join or donate all of my cash. There are a set of professionals who can do this job better and more efficiently than I can, just as there are a set of professionals that can fight the war in Iraq better than I can. If I support either the public programs or the war, I am committed to the support of these professionals, to taking action to give them what they need to succeed. I am not committed to join them.
What irritates us the most about Jonah Goldberg or the boys from Powerline isn’t that they support the war without joining it. The problem is that they spend their time glorifying toughness, honor, and military virtue while possessing none of it. They do not treat the military as what it is, which is an organization of professionals designed to serve the foreign policy objectives of the people and the civilian leaders of the United States. The glorify military virtue in order to attack civilians who disagree with them, and attack civilians who oppose military action as anti-military. In this sense, it is legitimate to ask Jonah Goldberg why he doesn’t join this organization he seems to love so much, because the question reveals a basic hypocrasy in his rhetoric. Gilliard has made the error of mistaking a rhetorical move for an absolute truth, and has decided to attack those who have not made the same error in the most reprehensible possible language.
Turning military professionalism into glorious personal sacrifice is not a mistake the left needs to make. The left needs to treat the military as a professional instrument capable of achieving some national ends, and not as a glorious romantic endeavour based on patriotism and ideological commitment. This is what Gilliard’s argument does, and it couldn’t be better designed to hand foreign policy to the right. If we think of our soldiers as committed patriots rather than as professionals (and they are both, it just depends on which element we’re emphasizing) then it becomes that much harder for civilians to constructively critique military policy and military operations.
There are conditions under which I could see myself volunteering for military service. Under other conditions I can, and have, supported military interventions without joining. Even a draft does not compel voluntary enlistment. I can believe in the justness of a war and sincerely hope that no one makes me fight in it. Waiting to be drafted is not the same as avoiding the draft, and millions of honorable, hardworking Americans have waited to be called upon even in wars they supported. Finally, if I oppose a war I think it’s legitimate to make whatever attempts I can to avoid the draft, although there are some questions about just how far such steps should go. But to cut the issue down to support=service makes a mockery of the complexity of the situation, and opens the door to the worst strains of pacifist thought.