Over the summer and into early fall this year, I have read two books on war and law as well as a novel about the lawlessness of Haiti. I have reflections on all of them; novels and dystopia are the province of Codex and Hypertext, however. Then, just within days, I watched all of Ken Burns's The Vietnam War and endured the ignorant statements of President Trump about North Korea in our current crisis of nuclear threat. After the racism of his comments about a destroyed Puerto Rico following hurricanes and collapse that he will not address (and for which he blames them!) finishing today with the horror of a mass shooting with automatic weaponry in Las Vegas, everything seems like war.
This phrase echoes the first of the two books I reflect upon here:
Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (Simon & Schuster, 2016).
Richard Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (Penguin, 2017).
How DID everything become war? Rosa, whom I know slightly as a librarian working with the Graduate Programs at Georgetown and who was chair of a committee I attended, has a good answer for this:
We don’t trust Congress, and the budgets of civilian foreign policy agencies have taken a beating, along with their capabilities. Faced with problems, we send in the troops—who else can we send? Unlike any other part of the government, the U.S. military can be relied on to go where it’s told and do what it’s asked—or die trying. As a result, Americans increasingly treat the military as an all-purpose tool for fixing anything that happens to be broken.
Haass, who is more the foreign policy wonk and less the lawyer in comparing his book with Rosa Brooks's work, concludes by suggesting that we need sovereign responsibility and acceptance of obligations and not just rights and self-determination. That is all well and good, but the United States has been struggling with being responsible for everyone and everything, and even with our military, we cannot do it. We cannot rescue the "failed states" that Rosa Brooks points out were never really states. Civil wars have erupted in response to various experiences of conquest and colonialism over the history of the world. This is certainly the case of Vietnam.
Rosa Brooks approaches world disorder differently and less abstractly than Haass; after reviewing issues in international law around piracy, drones, and the Responsibility to Protect, she looks at something interesting- the warrior identity that has been set off from daily life even in earlier pre-industrial tribal societies. And we are still tribal- that is our central truth in my view-and in fact she is understated about that aspect. But she raises a fascinating point about war paint and ritual- we used to enter "war time" deliberately, not just drift into it.
Drift is exactly what Ken Burns shows happened in Vietnam. We just kept on pointlessly overlooking a people who needed help and mixed real blood with an abstracted strategy that our competitors in global domination exploited. An ideology, a Communist and authoritarian reality drawn down from Kant's noumenal world and made phenomenal, became the enemy. And it was real, no question about it, when manifested in a liberation movement that was ignored and not assisted by the U.S. for fear of offending the French. (Odd that we should care so much for a country that was not strong in resisting fascism, but which did help us out in our revolution). In any case, the manifestation that took root when next the north turned to China and Russia was brutal indeed, and we could not stop the unlimited energy, local knowledge, and the support against us of two ambitious powers, each alone not our equal. But together...they encircled us with mayhem.
In the end, we did not learn and the Republican party in particular keeps scratching the itch of war, as it did twice in Iraq even after our defeat. Far from needing a weaker government, we need more democracy coupled with the rule of law, ruling over hyper-capitalism and restraining it in favor of the vulnerable. Rosa echoes what I've talked about with other often- an ideal of national service. I'll close with her recommendation:
War, for all its horrors, has long been one of the best and only means of harnessing collective human talent and energy to serve the group as a whole, and the military has long been the institution we use to bring talent together. If the military is becoming everything, why not use this as an opportunity to engage everyone—to include millions more Americans in the project of makingon the idea of universal service—an America in which every young man and woman spends a year or two engaged in work that fosters national and global security. the nation stronger, and the world a little less cruel? ...Imagine a revamped public sector premised on the idea of universal service—an America in which every young man and woman spends a year or two engaged in work that fosters national and global security. Reimagining the military and combining it with a broad program of universal national service would be complicated and, in the short run, expensive—but in the long run, how else can we harness the creativity, energy, and talent we will need, in this uncertain and dangerous world?
Amen to this, and if we can overcome greed and egotism to achieve it, it would be the birth of an engaged social justice, much like the School of Youth for Social Service that Thich Nhat Hahn founded in 1966 in the midst of war-torn Vietnam. Thoughtfulness and compassionate action are as great a challenge as the excitement of war might seem to provide and profoundly more conducive to human flourishing.
This phrase echoes the first of the two books I reflect upon here:
Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (Simon & Schuster, 2016).
Richard Haass, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (Penguin, 2017).
How DID everything become war? Rosa, whom I know slightly as a librarian working with the Graduate Programs at Georgetown and who was chair of a committee I attended, has a good answer for this:
We don’t trust Congress, and the budgets of civilian foreign policy agencies have taken a beating, along with their capabilities. Faced with problems, we send in the troops—who else can we send? Unlike any other part of the government, the U.S. military can be relied on to go where it’s told and do what it’s asked—or die trying. As a result, Americans increasingly treat the military as an all-purpose tool for fixing anything that happens to be broken.
Haass, who is more the foreign policy wonk and less the lawyer in comparing his book with Rosa Brooks's work, concludes by suggesting that we need sovereign responsibility and acceptance of obligations and not just rights and self-determination. That is all well and good, but the United States has been struggling with being responsible for everyone and everything, and even with our military, we cannot do it. We cannot rescue the "failed states" that Rosa Brooks points out were never really states. Civil wars have erupted in response to various experiences of conquest and colonialism over the history of the world. This is certainly the case of Vietnam.
Rosa Brooks approaches world disorder differently and less abstractly than Haass; after reviewing issues in international law around piracy, drones, and the Responsibility to Protect, she looks at something interesting- the warrior identity that has been set off from daily life even in earlier pre-industrial tribal societies. And we are still tribal- that is our central truth in my view-and in fact she is understated about that aspect. But she raises a fascinating point about war paint and ritual- we used to enter "war time" deliberately, not just drift into it.
Drift is exactly what Ken Burns shows happened in Vietnam. We just kept on pointlessly overlooking a people who needed help and mixed real blood with an abstracted strategy that our competitors in global domination exploited. An ideology, a Communist and authoritarian reality drawn down from Kant's noumenal world and made phenomenal, became the enemy. And it was real, no question about it, when manifested in a liberation movement that was ignored and not assisted by the U.S. for fear of offending the French. (Odd that we should care so much for a country that was not strong in resisting fascism, but which did help us out in our revolution). In any case, the manifestation that took root when next the north turned to China and Russia was brutal indeed, and we could not stop the unlimited energy, local knowledge, and the support against us of two ambitious powers, each alone not our equal. But together...they encircled us with mayhem.
In the end, we did not learn and the Republican party in particular keeps scratching the itch of war, as it did twice in Iraq even after our defeat. Far from needing a weaker government, we need more democracy coupled with the rule of law, ruling over hyper-capitalism and restraining it in favor of the vulnerable. Rosa echoes what I've talked about with other often- an ideal of national service. I'll close with her recommendation:
War, for all its horrors, has long been one of the best and only means of harnessing collective human talent and energy to serve the group as a whole, and the military has long been the institution we use to bring talent together. If the military is becoming everything, why not use this as an opportunity to engage everyone—to include millions more Americans in the project of makingon the idea of universal service—an America in which every young man and woman spends a year or two engaged in work that fosters national and global security. the nation stronger, and the world a little less cruel? ...Imagine a revamped public sector premised on the idea of universal service—an America in which every young man and woman spends a year or two engaged in work that fosters national and global security. Reimagining the military and combining it with a broad program of universal national service would be complicated and, in the short run, expensive—but in the long run, how else can we harness the creativity, energy, and talent we will need, in this uncertain and dangerous world?
Amen to this, and if we can overcome greed and egotism to achieve it, it would be the birth of an engaged social justice, much like the School of Youth for Social Service that Thich Nhat Hahn founded in 1966 in the midst of war-torn Vietnam. Thoughtfulness and compassionate action are as great a challenge as the excitement of war might seem to provide and profoundly more conducive to human flourishing.
