Our country's been at war for a long time now. The longest time in our history. At the time of writing 6,735 American troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The official numbers say that over 50,000 American troops have been wounded in those conflicts. They won’t even tell us how many civilians have been killed.
There is an eerie acceptance of all this; a tacit understanding that no cost is too high, no burden too great, and that more fighting is a sad inevitability. There’s a missing reluctance to engage in warfare. This massive apparatus of destruction, once created, demands a purpose. We may try to hold back, but there never seems to be an end. Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and most of North Africa, including Egypt, are all smoldering candidates for US military intervention. There is no end game, just the next fire to put out, too often caused by the fanned embers of the last.
Whatever happened to peace? I don’t mean putting flowers into the barrels of guns, or frolicking morons in the sun. Those are too often the images that come to mind when the word is invoked, after the defeat of the non-interventionists in the Bush years, and the many years of war that followed. Whatever happened to there being some realistic image of what peace would look like, here or abroad? People raising kids in relative safety, going to work, building and prospering? Why is this not even mentioned as an objective to all this destruction?
Whatever happened to the “peace dividend,” the idea that out of conflict and suffering come new business opportunities, or that the skills and assets acquired in wartime can be retooled to benefit everyone? Instead of thinking about how all its energy can be put to use, we worry about the impact that demobilization of our military would have on the economy as if there were no substitute activity for all our restless young. Instead of thinking about all the other investments that could take place with the money spent on war, we think about the losses to defense contractors who have profited massively on something that used to be considered the world’s greatest evil. Only war pays a dividend now.
We can’t imagine peace today because we have built ourselves around war. Any sporting event coast-to-coast has at least one patriotic moment where we honor our troops. We stand and cheer their bravery, and that’s important. But these displays have a dual function. They not only honor people who have sacrificed tremendously for their country, they also leave us unable to question why they do so in the first place. How can we be uncomfortable with war and avoid insulting someone whose legs were blown off in its service? We may mutter to ourselves about how all this is no good, but surely we can’t take it out on him. For this and many reasons, we can’t even begin to think about peace and patriotism coexisting.
Even as the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts wind down, related conflicts demand our ongoing vigilance. Sectarian violence, religious extremism, fallen dictatorships and emergent nationalists all beckon in different settings, all tied together as a larger trend, but each with its own potential for conflagration. War profiteers stand at the ready with tailor-made solutions to each of these possibilities, and sage advice on when to deploy them.
Nobody stops to consider what peace would look like across the entire region, or how it could be achieved. There are no multi-national solutions to our involvement. We’re tired of mass efforts. We don’t believe in diplomacy. It is now about small-bore policy with short-term goals, each with its convenient unit cost. Stop the fighting in Libya. Take out an Al Qaeda sect in Yemen. Send arms to Syrian rebels. Dance around the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Ally with the Saudis and the Gulf States against the Iranians. Support some insurgents, but not others. One conflict inevitably leads to the next. How does this ever end?
We will be involved in Middle-Eastern conflict, but it’s time for a strategic re-evaluation of the why they are happening at all, who is responsible, and how to end them once and for all. We need to revisit our most basic assumptions on how we involve ourselves. What are the major divisions? Sunni-Shia, Secular-Islamist, Democratic-Dictatorial, proxy wars between oil-rich princes who dare not dirty their hands. There are other realistic approaches to consider. How can we approach these problem on as a whole, instead of our unending piecemeal approach? What must we demand of our allies? What are we willing to sacrifice in order to cripple our enemies? How can you neutralize or coopt extremists instead of endlessly incurring their wrath? What about putting the restless unemployed to work building their nation? Who can we call out for not doing their part? What can we control, and what are we best off avoiding?
We need to ask our enemies and ourselves alike, how can we once again make peace more valuable than war?
