Take Care

Tuesday, August 27, 2013
My family has served this nation in uniform for over 150 years. Every generation, we send off our loved ones to take the oath, to defend the Constitution, and to lay down their lives if necessary in the service of our country and its policies.

So I feel that I have more than a little skin in the game when the United States starts discussing military action as a result of outside events.

The analyses I've read of the United States' potential involvement in a strike against Syria have agreed on a couple of points:
  • The Syrian government's use of chemical weapons against civilians cannot be tolerated and demand outside intervention.
  • The initial engagement will likely be conducted by cruise missiles, and will probably not be effective in ousting Bahar al-Assad. 
  • There is currently no public discussion of ground troop involvement. 
I'm not really qualified to discuss the political ramifications of military action in Syria. The issues are complex, and the area has been so volatile for so long I'm not sure any military solution will result in long term peace (see: Israel vs Palestine).

But there is one thing I'm qualified to discuss, and that's the decision of politicians to put the men and women of the Armed Forces in harm's way.

Sometimes the decision is black and white. If the sovereign territory of the United States is invaded or attacked by the military of another sovereign nation, of course you deploy the Armed Forces to defend. But that scenario has been damn rare in modern times. And for good reason.

So usually the situation comes in shades of grey - deploying our forces in support of "policy," or in "police actions," or to defend the helpless. And these things are far more morally ambiguous than defending the homeland, and often escalate in unfortunate and lethal ways (see: Vietnam).

I served this nation in uniform for seventeen years. I recognize and agree with the use of force in certain circumstances, and I also believe that using the Armed Forces is a viable tool in our country's arsenal to execute our foreign policy. But I want this response to be measured, I want it to be thoughtful, I want it to be worth it.

So to the civilians who control our Armed Forces and determine how to use them: Take care. Take care with the lives of my brothers and sisters-in-arms, with my son and his shipmates. Think carefully before you place these people in harm's way to move your policy forward. Ensure that the actions you ask them to take are moral, and defensible, and worth the risk you ask of them. Don't ask these men and women to wade into a quagmire of murky foreign policy, with no defined goals, with no exit strategy. When you ask them to risk everything for your ideas, envision your own child in harm's way, and ask yourself if that risk is worth it. Take care.

3 comments:

Juan Federico said...

Fuckin A

Random Michelle K said...

This is an especially complex issue for me.

As a pro-life pacifist, I don't believe I have the right to use violence or cause the death of someone else.

But as a human being, seeing human rights violations makes me want to see SOMETHING DONE RIGHT NOW, because it's even LESS okay for governments to commit genocide than for me to kill or harm someone.

On the third hand, if I refuse to take up arms, what right do I have to call for others to take up arms, even in the defense of women and children?

But on the fourth hand, how can we justifiably stand by while genocide occurs?

Woodrow Wilson promoted the League of Nations in hope that the horrors of the Great War would never again happen, yet then we had WWII. We have the United Nations, yet we still have had genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia.

I don't want to see our men and women placed in harms way, but I also don't understand how we can stand by while innocents are slaughtered.

I guess what I'm saying is that I can't even figure this out in my own head.

I wish we lived further in the future--the future where wars and genocide no longer occur. And I wish I knew how we made that future.

Janiece said...

Michelle, I'm torn, as well. The question I keep asking myself is, "Am I willing to trade the life of my son to stop this fuckstick?" And I have to say that the answer is no. No, I'm not.

Because Eric Garland hit it on the head:

"Syria is a very bad situation. And we are very concerned that the Syrian regime, whom nobody on Earth likes, not even the Assad family, has now gone too far. Instead of butchering their citizens with bullets, rockets, tanks and flamethrowers, they are now butchering their citizens with chemicals. We all know from the Geneva Deal, it’s one thing to kill a family by knocking a building on top of them or blowing them up with rockets or shooting them. But shutting their lungs down with chemicals is not the right way to kill them. We will teach the Syrian government this lesson by firing missiles at them and anybody standing near them. The message will be crystal clear."

Our foreign policy sucks.