Beyond Vietnam: The War and MLK's Conscience

Fifty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered one of his most important (and controversial) speeches at Riverside Church in New York City. It was, King said, "a passionate plea to my beloved nation," a plea not focused on the struggle for civil rights in the United States but on the war in Vietnam.

As he opened the speech, King confessed that he had struggled to "break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart." In an op-ed published in today's New York Times, David J. Garrow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, describes how King had come to the point where he felt it necessary to make explicit the links that tied racism to materialism and militarism.

What often sparks the awakening of conscience, both for individuals and for nations, is the dawning awareness of a contradiction. We are forced to admit that we have said one thing and done another, that we have acted in ways that belie our beliefs, that we have demanded justice from one party but not another. We come to understand, in other words, that others may see our hypocrisy as readily as we see theirs. Dr. King acknowledged before the audience at Riverside that he had become aware of a contradiction in his own life when young black men in "the ghettos of the North"--young men to whom he was recommending non-violent struggle against injustice--asked him, "What about Vietnam?" "They asked," King said, "if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."

The Riverside speech was not the first time that Dr. King had focused his moral insight and his rhetorical skill on the Vietnam War. But in April 1967, nine months before the Tet offensive began to persuade many Americans that their government had been lying to them about the war's progress, such a forceful statement against the war was a shock even to some of King's most ardent supporters. When King said "I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted," some of his opponents imagined they were hearing the words of a traitor.

Dr. King offered many reasons to oppose the war--its diversion of the American government from the unfulfilled promises of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs; its disproportionate impact on the poor who had no means of avoiding the draft; its obvious contravention of the Gospel of Christ; and, of course, its impact on the Vietnamese people themselves. And, halfway through the speech, he called for concrete steps toward peace, including an immediate end to the bombing. (When he urged that a date be established for the removal of foreign troops from Vietnam, the audience broke into applause for the first time.) Only at that point, however, did King begin to reveal his larger theme. "I wish to go on now," he said, "to say something even more disturbing."

The speech was called "Beyond Vietnam," and here's why:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality [applause], and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. [sustained applause] So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

King argued that "we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values." To do so, he said, "we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

The further King went in his plea for a "revolution of values," the more prophetic his words became. A sample:

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

It is perhaps not surprising that John Lewis, who was present both for this speech and for King's more famous "I Have a Dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, considered the anti-war speech at the Riverside Church to be his greatest. It "seems to carry the greater weight of prophecy," Benjamin Hedin writes. The most prophetic words, spoken near the end of the speech, may well be these: "If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."

Read or, better yet, listen to Dr. King's speech here.

Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016)

Father Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest best known for his opposition to the Vietnam War, has passed away in New York City just days short of his 95th birthday. He is regarded as one of the most influential American Jesuits of his time both for his protests against war and nuclear weapons and for his writings, which included a body of poetry as well as works on theology, spirituality, and social protest.

In 1967, Berrigan, his brother Philip, and two others--"the Baltimore Four"--were arrested for pouring blood on draft records in protest against the war in Vietnam. In 1968, he joined a tax protest against the war. Then, on May 17 of that same year, he participated--with "the Catonsville Nine"--in the destruction of draft records using homemade napalm outside the offices of the Catonsville, Maryland draft board. He was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison but escaped and spent four months as a fugitive--in order to draw more attention to his protests against the war--before being captured at the home of theologian and activist William Stringfellow. Berrigan was released from prison in 1972.

In 1980, Berrigan turned to anti-nuclear protests at a General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Berrigan, his brother Philip, and six others--"the Plowshares Eight"--hammered the nosecone of a nuclear missile (symbolically beating swords into plowshares) and poured blood on files. The group was charged with a wide range of crimes, but after ten years of trials and appeals, all were sentenced to time served. The 1980 protest was the beginning of the Plowshares Movement, with which Berrigan was active throughout the remainder of his life.

Even after he had turned 80, Berrigan continued to protest war and injustice. He protested the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the U.S. prison at Guantanamo. He also participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Gassed

One hundred years ago, on April 22, 1915, German troops near the village of Gravenstafel along the Ypres Salient in Belgium released 170 tons of chlorine gas in an attack against the trenches occupied by French forces including units from Morocco and Algeria. The gas was released from canisters along the German line and allowed to drift with the wind toward the French line where it settled into the trenches. Soldiers scrambling out of the trenches to escape asphyxiation were hit with a withering fusillade from the Germans.

John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919)

The French and colonial forces suffered approximately 6,000 casualties with many of the wounded being blinded and suffering serious lung damage. A four-mile wide gap in the defensive line was opened up by the attack, but the Germans were unprepared to exploit it fully.

Adam Hochschild's description of the attack in To End All Wars (pp. 140-41) is worth quoting at some length:

On April 22, 1915, near the battered city of Ypres, French soldiers and troops from French colonies in North Africa noticed a strange, greenish yellow mist billowing out of the German positions and blowing toward them in the wind. An unfamiliar smell filled the air. When the acrid cloud reached them, it was so thick that they couldn't see more than a few feet. Soldiers quickly found themselves gagging and choking, yellow mucus frothing out of their mouths. Hundreds fell to the ground in convulsions. Those who could still breathe fled, staggering into first-aid posts blue from suffocation and coughing blood, speechless but pointing desperately to their throats. In the next few days, Canadian troops fell victim as well. Whatever this mysterious cloud might be, it was heavier than air and sank into the trenches, hugging the earth and forcing soldiers to stick their heads out into a hail of bullets. "The chaps were all gasping and couldn't breathe," a sergeant remembered later. "And it was ghastly, especially for chaps that were wounded--terrible for a wounded man to lie there! The gasping, the gasping!"

The spring leaves just coming out on the trees shriveled; grass turned yellow and metal green. Birds fell from the air, and chickens, pigs, cows, and horses writhed in agony and died, their bodies rotting and bloating. The ever-fatter rats that normally swarmed through the trenches, keeping men awake by running over them in the dark on the way to feast on soldiers' corpses, themselves died by the thousands.

This was the first widespread use of poison gas--chlorine--on the Western Front. Deadly and painful as it could be, later forms of gas would be still worse. Like so much else about the war, chlorine was the product of an industrial economy, in this case made by a complex of eight large chemical firms in Germany's Ruhr region known as the IG cartel. Chlorine and its compounds had a long history in manufacturing, but its new use in warfare was an ominous landmark, seeming to open up a range of horrifying possibilities that had previously existed only in the realm of early science fiction.

Chastened by the experience of World War I in which even the Allied Powers eventually deployed chemicals, the international community attempted to close off the "range of horrifying possibilities." In 1925, the Geneva Protocol was adopted to ban the use of chemical and biological weapons in international conflicts. Significant gaps in the coverage of the Geneva Protocol were closed with the adoption in 1993 of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which 190 states are party. The CWC prohibits not only the use but the manufacture and stockpiling of chemical weapons.

Credible evidence indicates that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons--including chlorine gas--with devastating effects on civilians in recent attacks conducted in violation of Syria's obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention and UN Security Council Resolution 2118 (2013). Acting on the basis of findings by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Security Council, on March 6, 2015, adopted Resolution 2209 threatening enforcement action under Chapter VII of the UN Charter in the event of further use of chemical weapons.

It seems unlikely that the Security Council will be able to back up its threat to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons given the continued intransigence of Russia and China on matters related to Syria's civil war. However, both states voted for Resolution 2209. Both are also paying a diplomatic price for their grossly immoral position.

 

Nationalism or Law?

In the New York Times today, David Brooks defends President Obama's decision to negotiate with the Taliban for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier captured in Afghanistan in 2009. The argument Brooks makes is based on nationalism.

Brooks asserts that "national solidarity is essential to the health of the country" and "especially important for the national defense." The loyalty that soldiers in combat feel for comrades in arms, regardless of religious, ethnic, or other differences, is "based on the notion that we are members of one national community." And as the only officials in our government elected by the whole rather than by a part of the electorate, Brooks says, the president and vice president must work to promote national solidarity.

And yet . . .

"National solidarity" is closely akin to "nationalism," a term Brooks assiduously avoids. (In addition to "national solidarity," he refers to "national fraternity" and "national cohesion.") And just a step away from nationalism is "nativism," a sentiment that already runs rampant in right-wing discourse about immigration.

"National solidarity" was an important factor motivating Americans (as well as the British, French, Russians, and others) to resist German aggression in World War II, but its perversion is what generated Nazism in the first place. "National solidarity" is undoubtedly something that Ukraine needs more of right now, but over in Russia its perversion has led Vladimir Putin to pursue policies that continue to roil Ukraine.

Nationalism is certainly a potent force in international affairs, but its ambivalence should not be overlooked. It has inspired anti-colonial movements and the imperialism against which those movements have fought. It has generated the "melting pot" idea and exclusion acts. It may be convenient to look to nationalism--or "national solidarity"--as a basis for supporting President Obama's decision to negotiate a prisoner exchange with the Taliban, but is it necessary? Perhaps the ancient and very straightforward idea that, at the end of the war, prisoners should be repatriated is enough.

If there are problems with this approach they no doubt flow from the same legal morass that created the prison in Guantanamo--and an ill-defined "war against terror"--in the first place.

War and Peacekeeping

On the same day that President Obama paid homage to Americans who died fighting in World War I on a visit to a cemetery in Belgium, I saw the monument honoring Canada's war dead that stands in front of City Hall in Toronto. The Toronto Cenotaph, modeled after a similar monument in London, was originally designed to honor only those who died in World War I. Thus, the Cenotaph bears the names of the places in Belgium and France where Canadian soldiers fought: Ypres, Somme, Passchendaele, Amiens, and others.

After World War II, however, the dates of that great conflict were engraved on the monument.  After all, Canadians fought and died in that war, too. The Cenotaph also bears the dates 1950-1953, testifying to the fact that Canadians died in the Korean War.

There are no other wars noted on the Cenotaph, but at the bottom--engraved on both sides of the base--is the word "Peacekeeping." It is a reminder that Canadians have served all over the world in peacekeeping missions and that some have died in the course of those missions--in the Golan Heights, in the Belgian Congo, in Cyprus, in Haiti, and elsewhere.

Dulce et decorum est pro pax mori.

Predicting Mass Atrocities

Can we predict where mass atrocities and other forms of political violence are likely to occur based on known variables such as infant mortality rates (which happen to be good indicators of state failure) or instances of hate speech on Twitter? We're getting there.

An article in today's New York Times by UN correspondent Somini Sengupta describes a number of ongoing projects that use content analysis from newspaper archives, state-level data (on, for example, defense budgets and infant mortality), social media postings, and more in an effort to predict various forms of violent conflict. Efforts to turn data into foreknowledge--or at least better risk assessment--have been funded by the U.S. intelligence community for years. The Political Instability Task Force, based in the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University, is the center of CIA-funded open-source analysis.

Choeung Ek, Cambodia

Syria: Year Four Begins

The horrendous civil war in Syria is entering its fourth year with conditions steadily worsening. The New York Times presents this snapshot of conditions in Syria:

• An estimated 150,000 people have been killed.
• The number of refugees has climbed to 2.5 million.
• Forty-two percent of Syrians have been forced out of their homes. (The majority are IDPs--internally displaced persons.)
• About 700,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed.
• Unemployment is at 50 percent.

The CBC provides another overview of the civil war in Syria here.

The Impact of War

This brief video, from Save the Children UK, is worth watching . . . twice.

The Uncertainties of Cyberwar

The front page of today's New York Times carries a fascinating article by David Sanger (with reporting from Eric Schmitt) on considerations being raised within the Obama administration regarding the possible use of cyber weapons against the Assad regime in Syria. It is not clear whether a cyberattack against Syria "would be seen as a justified humanitarian intervention, less likely to cause civilian casualties than airstrikes, or whether it would only embolden American adversaries who have themselves been debating how to use the new weapons."

There are some very significant--and obvious--differences between cyber weapons and nuclear weapons, but it is entirely possible that certain restraints on their use may operate in much the same way. Consider this passage from Thomas C. Schelling's 1966 classic, Arms and Influence, in which he discusses the possible impact of the first (post-1945) use of nuclear weapons:

This is not an event to be squandered on an unworthy military objective. The first nuclear detonation can convey a message of utmost seriousness; it may be a unique means of communication in a moment of unusual gravity. To degrade the signal in advance, to depreciate the currency, to erode gradually a tradition that might someday be shattered with diplomatic effect, to vulgarize weapons that have acquired a transcendent status, and to demote nuclear weapons to the status of merely efficient artillery, may be to waste an enormous asset of last resort. 

Or, as others noted, it may be best not to let the genie out of the bottle.

Even though cyber weapons have certainly been used before--think Stuxnet and its progeny against Iran (as well as Iranian retaliatory attacks against the U.S.), the Russian denial-of-service attack against Georgia in the 2008 South Ossetia War, Israel's combined cyber/kinetic strike against a Syrian nuclear facility, and more--there may still be some wisdom in thinking of the carefully designed cyber weapon as Schelling suggested, as "an enormous asset of last resort." Or as a genie not to be let out of the bottle. In any event, it seems essential to avoid the temptation to treat cyber weapons as weapons of first resort. While they may provide the United States and other countries an unusually effective and precise means of weakening the military capacities of states such as Syria, retaliation--even with cyber weapons--is likely to be much more indiscriminate.

As we already know, military dominance in any domain commonly produces asymmetric responses that target the weaknesses of the dominant power. At present, America's Achilles' heel in cyberspace is its commercial sector thanks to businesses that, time and again, have demonstrated an unwillingness or an inability to address Internet security problems. 

Karadžić and Mladić

Today in a courtroom of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, two of the chief architects of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during the 1990s came face to face. On trial for genocide and other crimes related to his role as the political leader of Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadžić called upon Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb military leader during the ethnic cleansing, to testify on his behalf. Mladić, whose trial for similar crimes is ongoing, denounced the court as "satanic" and refused to answer the substantive questions Karadžić presented, citing his health and his desire not to incriminate himself.

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Both Karadžić and Mladić are charged with genocide in connection with the fall of Srebrenica in 1995. Over 7500 Bosnian men were executed when the army of the Republika Srpska, commanded by Mladić, overran a poorly defended United Nations "safe area" that had been created in an effort to protect Bosnians fleeing fighting in surrounding communities.

Meanwhile, trials at the ICTY continue to raise questions regarding their length and cost. To address these questions, Stuart Ford offers a way to judge the complexity of cases in order to compare more accurately the efficiency of different courts. By the measures he employs, the ICTY fares well in comparison to courts handling similarly complex criminal cases.

Revising the Numbers

The French historian Antoine Prost has published an article (titled "The Dead") in the final volume of The Complete Cambridge History of World War I suggesting that the number of soldiers who died in the war has been underestimated by about a million. His examination of a century's worth of casualty figures produced by states that fought in the war led Prost to conclude that most undercounted their war dead. France, for example, failed to count about 70,000 veterans who died of war-related injuries or illnesses after leaving military service. Russia failed to count 200,000 soldiers who died in German prisoner-of-war camps. Germany ended formal counts of its war dead in July 1918, four months prior to the war's end. Omissions like these served the interests of most states with a desire to minimize the human costs of a war that seemed more and more pointless the longer it dragged on.

Tyne Cot Cemetery, Belgium

The United States, which entered the war only in 1917, offers a curious exception to the undercounting that occurred on almost all sides. According to Prost, American casualty figures were inflated through the inclusion of 35,000 soldiers who died of Spanish influenza before they had even started their journey to Europe's battlefields. Prost states that "the Americans were keen to maximise their losses in order to establish themselves as a major military power."

German cemetery at Langemarck, Belgium

In all, there were approximately ten million military casualties during World War I.

Prost is professor emeritus at Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

Victims of Wars Long Ago

Next Sunday will mark the 99^th anniversary of Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia, an event that prompted, in quick succession, Russian mobilization for war, the German invasion of Belgium, and French and British declarations of war against Germany. Preparations for the Great War were years in the making; nonetheless, its onset somehow seemed improvised, spontaneous, even accidental.

The last veterans of World War I have all died--the last one on February 4, 2012--but the weapons of that war survive in large numbers in the fields of Belgium and western France. From time to time, they are unearthed and claim new victims. A recent story in the Telegraph describes the work of Dirk Vanparys, a member of the Belgian army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company. On a recent, all-too-normal day, Vanparys and his team collected 73 unexploded shells and 57 grenades and fuses that had been found by farmers. Many of the shells that are recovered on a regular basis contain mustard gas, chlorine gas, or phosgene--agents that killed and disabled hundreds of thousands of troops along the Western Front during the many spasms of chemical warfare in World War I. Four months ago, seven people were hospitalized after a German shell containing gas exploded as a trench was being dug to lay cable south of Ypres.

Weapons used in World War I will continue to kill and maim completely innocent people for years to come. In 2012, Belgian and French authorities collected 185 tons of munitions left from World War I; the total collected in 2011 was 274 tons. Such totals are possible because nearly one and a half billion shells were fired during the war.

In preparation for the Battle of the Somme, an assault by British troops on German trenches that began on July 1, 1916, British artillery fired 1.5 million shells over five days. Tunnels dug under the German lines were packed with explosives—as much as thirty tons of explosives in a single mine—and set off as the assault began. The final artillery barrage—224,221 shells in a span of 65 minutes—created a rumble that, Adam Hochschild writes, “could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London,” almost 200 miles away. In spite of this extraordinary effort to “soften” German defenses, the first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the British Army over 57,000 casualties, including almost 20,000 killed.

A story posted yesterday by the McClatchy News Service describes another unending war. Forty years after the end of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War (or, to the Vietnamese, the American War), there are still cases of children being born with severe birth defects caused by Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant used by the United States in Vietnam from 1961 to 1971. The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that Agent Orange has affected 3,000,000 people in Vietnam, including 150,000 children born with birth defects since the fall of Saigon in 1975.  While the United States has, since 1991, extended disability benefits for any of fifteen diseases linked to Agent Orange to U.S. military personnel who served in Vietnam, it has provided little assistance to the Vietnamese and has avoided acknowledging any responsibility for health problems caused by the use of the chemical. There is a U.S.-funded effort underway to clean up chemical contamination near the Da Nang International Airport, which was used by the U.S. Air Force during the war, but this site is just one of many Agent Orange “hot spots” in Vietnam.

There is some evidence that humankind is getting better at calculating the costs of war and that, as a result, we have become more successful at avoiding it than we have been in the past. What World War I is teaching us now, and what the Vietnam War seems destined to echo, is this: the costs of a war should be calculated out to a century (or more) beyond its conclusion.

The Christmas Truce

Ninety-eight years ago, at various points along the Western Front, a remarkable thing happened. On Christmas Eve, German and British troops put down their guns, sang Christmas carols--both responsively and together--and eventually crawled out of their trenches to meet in no-man's land to share cigarettes and drinks, to play soccer, to celebrate Christmas, and to bury their dead. The truce was spontaneous: no officers or political leaders authorized it and some, in fact, were incensed by it. And yet it happened, and was deeply meaningful to many of the 100,000 or so soldiers who participated in it. (Consider this sampling of recollections of the Christmas Truce drawn from diaries and memoirs.)

What exactly happened on Christmas in 1914? Was it a sign of the disconnect between raison d'etat and the beliefs of those who were forced to fight in the name of the state? Was it a brief breakthrough of humanity in a war that came to demonstrate the most extreme inhumanity? Was it an act of insubordination by common soldiers? And how could those soldiers so easily return to the fight the day after Christmas? How could men sing together "O Come, All Ye Faithful" one day and kill each other the next?

Tanks, Rockets, Tweets, and Hacks

As the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalates with rocket attacks aimed at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on the one hand and air strikes on government offices in Gaza on the other, various cyber dimensions of the conflict are becoming increasingly noteworthy. On the Israeli side, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in an effort to control the conflict's narrative, are using Twitter and Facebook with a level of intensity last seen in the Obama campaign. But reviews of the IDF's social media offensive are mixed at best. Michael Koplow's article for Foreign Policy on the IDF Twitter campaign is titled "How Not to Wage War on the Internet." The ability of visitors to an IDF site to earn badges for viewing pages and sharing them on Facebook or other social media sites has prompted some to question whether Israel is "gamifying" war. (Allison Kaplan Sommer helpfully gathers some of the reaction to Israel's social media campaign in a blog post for Haaretz.)

On the other side (in support of, but not initiated by, Hamas), a campaign of cyber attacks against Israeli websites began on Thursday. The loosely organized Internet group Anonymous initiated its effort to deface or take down both government and private websites in Israel in response to the Israeli government's threat to cut off Internet and other telecommunications links between Gaza and the outside world. The Bank of Jerusalem was forced offline for a while and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website reportedly was compromised. At one point, Anonymous claimed to have taken down over six hundred websites in Israel.

It would be a mistake to try to press these two stories into the same analytical framework just because the Internet and cyberspace are central to both. They bear roughly the same relationship to one another that the use of radio addresses by Roosevelt and Churchill and the development of radar during World War II did. But we can see, nonetheless, that the two stories are important for their own, independent, reasons.

In the case of Israel's efforts to ensure that its narrative about the conflict with Hamas reaches as wide an audience as possible, we can see the application of what media analysts and political campaign strategists have been telling us for years about the movement from old media to new media. Older people--especially males--still sometimes watch network news on TV; if they miss the evening newscasts, they may read about what they missed in the next morning's newspaper (a print edition, of course). Younger people, however, are more likely to get news in small doses throughout the day (and night) via social media and online news outlets. A press conference with reporters and cameras may be the best way to reach the former group while a tweet or a Facebook post (provided it gets retweeted or reposted) will work better for the latter group. (Richard Parker examines some of these differences and breaks down the way the Obama campaign leveraged social media to its benefit here on the New York Times "Campaign Stops" blog.) Thus it seems that perhaps the so-called "CNN effect" was short-lived. Now we get war news (and revolution news and disaster news, etc., etc.) from the people who are involved--not through the lens of a television camera but through the lens of an iPhone or via tweets and Facebook updates. The army (or police force or government ministry) that wants to control the narrative today can't be content with limiting the access of reporters to a conflict zone or a protest site. It must either impose an Internet blackout--and face the wrath of those affected, other governments, and, apparently, a global community of hacktivists--or attempt to keep pace with citizen reporters by offering its own stream of compelling online information. But the information it provides cannot be too compelling. A video of grief-stricken mothers posted by those on the side of the victims looks very different from the same video posted by those who caused the grief in the first place.

Turning to the Anonymous attacks on Israeli websites, these suggest a future in which the strategic calculus involved in going to war (or suppressing protests) must include the possible responses of unseen third parties. After flexing its muscles--successfully, some might suggest--against Scientologists, opponents of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and now Israel--Anonymous may find it increasingly attractive to weigh in on geopolitical matters. And, given the enormity of cyberspace, there are likely to be other groups developing in other chat rooms around other causes but with the same desire to influence big events in the world. In addition to the loose associations of hacktivists represented by Anonymous, transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) may find ways to use cyber attacks to profit from violent political conflicts while remaining in the shadows. And if states can use cyber attacks to influence the outcome of a rival state's conflict without revealing their involvement, they almost certainly will do so.

If it continues to be more and more difficult for states to control the narrative in conflict and if states continue to face more and more hidden adversaries when they go to war or move to suppress dissent, then the historical advantage that states--and especially the wealthiest and most powerfully armed states--have wielded in the use of force may be eroded to the point where the calculus that leads to armed conflict may be dramatically altered. And that might be a good thing.

McMahan on Just War Theory

Jeff McMahan examines just war theory today and tomorrow on the New York Times' Opinionator blog. Part I, published today, describes the theory, its origins, and contemporary challenges to it. Part II will consider the revisionist critique of just war theory.

A New "Third Rail"

For those unfamiliar with the term, "third rail" is a phrase that entered the American political lexicon in the early 1980s to describe an issue--Social Security reform was the particular issue at that time--so politically charged that touching it means certain death at the polls. The term is, of course, derived from the rail of a subway line that carries high-voltage electrical current to run the trains. William Safire traces the metaphorical use of the term back to Kirk O'Donnell, an aide to Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill.

Over the years other issues, including Medicare reform, gun control, and criticism of Israel have been called the third rail of American politics. Health care is said to be the third rail of Canadian politics. Now, Aaron B. O'Connell, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, makes a strong case that criticism of the military has become a new third rail in the American political system.

O'Connell takes as his starting points President Dwight D. Eisenhower's well-known farewell address in which he warned against "the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." While O'Connell believes that the military-industrial complex has not influenced foreign policy or distorted the economy in the ways that Eisenhower feared, he argues that the American culture has been militarized by the permanent war preparations against which he warned. "Support the troops" has come to mean the military should never be questioned and its spending should never be cut. "Today," O'Connell writes, "there are just a select few in public life who are willing to question the military or its spending, and those who do--from the libertarian Ron Paul to the leftist Dennis J. Kucinich--are dismissed as unrealistic." 

The real problem, as O'Connell describes it, is this: "That which is left unexamined eventually becomes invisible, and as a result, few Americans today are giving sufficient consideration to the full range of violent activities the government undertakes in their names."

In the aftermath of the election, it would be good if the military-industrial complex--and the level of defense spending in a time of budgetary constraints--could be examined critically by members of both political parties. There is a way that they could do this without committing political suicide. After Democrats and Republicans in 1983 came together in support of the Greenspan Commission's recommendations on Social Security reform, Kirk O'Donnell told Tom Oliphant that the political third rail differs from the one in the subway in this respect: "If a Republican foot and a Democratic foot touch it simultaneously, nothing happens."

Misreading History

We are exactly fifty years removed from the opening days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the most extensively analyzed episodes in history. A brief bibliography published online by the Naval History and Heritage Command lists over fifty books on the events of those "thirteen days," to quote the title of Robert F. Kennedy's own book on the subject. Unfortunately, extensive analysis cannot guarantee that the right lessons will be learned.

Michael Dobbs makes this point in an essay in yesterday's New York Times. A single historical error, he argues, has contributed to the myth that John F. Kennedy's firm resolve--his willingness to face down both Khrushchev and the prospect of nuclear war--was decisive in an American victory in the Cold War. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it, "We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked."

But Rusk got it wrong, according to Dobbs, and leaders from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush and Benjamin Netanyahu have also gotten it wrong, believing that being tough like JFK yields victories like the one he supposedly won in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And thus we wind up in wars, somehow missing the point that Kennedy and Khrushchev were desperately trying to avoid a war.

Someday a candidate for the presidency of the United States will say, "I yield to my opponent in the area of firm resolve. I hope I will never be eyeball to eyeball with America's enemies, but if I am, I will blink--and swallow hard. I will do whatever it takes to avoid war." He--or she--will lose the election--unless, between now and then, we stop misreading history.

Joshua Casteel (1979 - 2012)

I learned this week of the death, back on August 25, of Joshua Casteel. Chances are that you've never heard of Joshua Casteel, but he left his mark on the world in a way that deserves to be pondered, discussed, and perhaps even emulated. If nothing else, the trajectory of his life and the "crystallization of conscience" that he experienced merit thoughtful consideration, especially in an age when it seems that, as Yeats put it, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

Casteel grew up in an evangelical Christian home in Iowa, steeped in patriotism and conservative views. At 17, he joined the Army Reserves, then went to the University of Iowa on an ROTC scholarship. On entering active duty, he was assigned to language school where he studied Arabic. In 2004, just weeks after the torture scandal became public knowledge, Casteel was assigned to Abu Ghraib as part of the Army's 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion. He was a translator and an interrogator in one of the world's most notorious prisons.

The "crystallization of conscience"--the moment when Casteel decided to apply for conscientious objector status--came in response to the comments of a Muslim prisoner (and self-proclaimed jihadist) he was interrogating:  "[He said] I wasn’t fulfilling the call to turn the other cheek, to love one’s enemies. When posed with that kind of challenge, I had nothing I could say to him. I absolutely agreed with him. My position as a U.S. Army interrogator contradicted my calling simply as a Christian."

Casteel was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector in May 2005. He joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, published a book entitled Letters from Abu Ghraib, earned an MFA in writing at the University of Iowa, and wrote two plays about his experiences in Iraq. In 2010, be began studies at the University of Chicago's Divinity School. Soon after, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, which claimed his life on August 25, 2012.

Soldiers of Conscience, a documentary produced in 2007 and broadcast on PBS the following year, featured Casteel's story. An excerpt appears in the clip below.

Modern Warfare

C. J. Stivers, a New York Times reporter covering the civil war in Syria, last week posted photos on his blog of a member of the anti-government al-Tawhid Brigade checking text messages while handling the machine gun in the back of a truck racing toward Aleppo at 80 miles per hour. The subject could have been catching up with members of his social network, but under the circumstances his texts more likely contained tactical information--"watch for government forces near the airport," or something like that.  Regardless, the suggestion the photos make is that all fighting forces--military and paramilitary alike--are networked these days.

Walking Wounded

Nicholas Kristof's piece in tomorrow's New York Times about Maj. Ben Richards is a must-read.  It is a reminder that the human costs of war are truly incalculable.  It is also a reminder that when we fail to pay the economic costs of war--by inadequately funding the care of veterans--we dishonor brave men and women.