War

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=his_uniform_my_responsibility

Regardless of your view on any war, regardless of the side you demonstratively or passively take ... the story in the above link is profound. Not only in its sobriety but in its inescapable truth.

There are millions of families, throughout the world who are at war. Suffering. There are millions who are watching, learning and developing opinions and beliefs from the side lines. Millions more don't care. To send your son or daughter into war must be gut-wrenchingly difficult. The feeling of despair and hope mingle inside you. You have got to find and cling to the hope, otherwise the despair will kill you. Yes many of these millions are fighting with conviction. But the depth and strength of your belief system, relative to war, varies. Each has an individual tolerance. Entering a war zone is a brutal and cruel passage.

In time of war, the psychology of victory is worth understanding. If you think about war, merely as a conflict it becomes a comprehensive and multidimensional term. Conflicts vary in terms of scale and importance, as does the significance of a victory. Winning is obviously preferred and in many cases worth pursuit. However, taking the time at a "less emotional and critical" stage of a conflict to define the "win" is often neglected. Here is where we as a worldly people and a collection of nations, make a grave mistake when the conflict escalates into war. The kind of conflict that takes human lives gratuitously and violently. We make this mistake continually. In many modern and current wars the win is undefined, ambiguous and therefore out of reach. Perhaps the soldiers carry with them into the battlefield everyday, a clear vision of victory, but it is probably not the same as the overarching political vision, for which they are supposed to be fighting. Their victory on a day to day basis is to stay alive. Politically the vision of victory is often unclear, but the need to fight, as we search for the win is tolerated, accepted even.

So why, is there not a congressional mandate to define the win, before declaring war. We can't demand this of other nations, but America represents freedom, prosperity and civility. We should be leading with intellect, power and compassion, not aggravated and wounded emotions. If we wage war with the intention to win something, or eradicate something, we should be damn clear on what that something is. We should at the very least be able to recognize the win, if and when we accomplish it.

Some may fail to see the pragmatism of this kind of approach. Its importance gets lost on people, because they are angry or afraid. It seems unrealistic and naive, certainly unnatural, to think that there should or could be any other reaction but to fight, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Facilitating freedom and democracy was enough of a reason for Americans to die in Vietnam. Retaliation for a brutal and surprise attack on American soil on 9/11/2001 of course must involve more human combat, waging of war, defending our freedom. In this situation we leaped to attack, without completely understanding who our enemy was, or where they lived. We acted on our first, highly emotional and aggravated reaction. Something you should never do when making a profound decision of any kind.

In the modern case of 9/11, would we have put ourselves into considerably more danger, if we demanded a more thorough understanding of the attack, the attackers and the strategy to defend, before we waged war? Could we have launched a "better" defense of our national security and freedoms if we had clearly identified "the win" for America? If we had done that, might "the win" have been expressed as "creating an in-penetratable boundary of sovereign nations, enabling us to protect our freedoms and our people from irrational, unpredictable attacks" Could we have accomplished this with the deployment of advanced technology to facilitate satellite protections, while funding deeper intelligence strategies to help us understand and reveal radical threats to our way of life. Could our "win" have been expressed as an internal victory. One in which America retains its greatness and might by virtue of protecting ourselves, while understanding others, instead of an external show of power that was erratic, inhumane, unproductive and ultimately senseless. What did we gain by acting irrationally? I believe that if we had just identified the win, even if we never had accomplished it, we would be in a far better and more peaceful place today, than we were on 9/11/2001.

This may feel like an oversimplification, but I submit that if the Israelis were strictly focused on their "win" to create a safe and sovereign nation for themselves, they might be more successful in attaining it. In fact many Arab nations want the same thing. Their willingness, all of them, to go to war, continually, with each other has caused a severe distraction from achieving their goals. The fight is getting in the way of their dream. The war is making safety impossible. the war is destroying their nation, both its land and its people. It is dividing their own communities. The "win" if remembered seems so out of reach that the fight has become desperate, rendering the win meaningless. That is profoundly sad. Mostly because it could be different.

History will usually teach us the value or waste of war. History will recount the battles, the territorial situations, the principles for which people were fighting, the freedoms they were defending. I wonder, if the soldiers on the field realize what history teaches us about them. The impact of the outcome. The victory, the loss is clearly defined in history. Wars are necessary, sometimes inevitable, even "good" but it is extremely uncomfortable for me to realize these virtues only after the brutal decades of suffering. As an American, I am eternally grateful for the outcome of World War II. Indebted to the leadership, soldiers, and families participating in that war. Their suffering led to my fortune. We owe the victims and heroes in current conflicts around the world a clear picture of "the win", while they are fighting for it. We should be ashamed of ourselves if we rely entirely on history to define it.

Individuals and nations are accountable. Your character is defined by what you do today. i would encourage all of us to think about how our actions impact the people around us. Be selfish in your endeavor, but compassionate in your methods, and humanitarian in your actions. Identify the win, collectively. Coexist peacefully. Pursue the dream not the fight.