On the awfulness of war
War makes sense only for the aggressor and the defender, else, were war beautiful, or heaven help us, fun, we’d really be fucked.
What brings forth these happy thoughts, you may ask? Well, the recent news that President Biden has approved the shipment of anti-personnel mines to Ukraine and the use of American ATACMS medium-range missiles against targets within Russia, followed quickly by Vladimir Putin’s escalation of his country’s nuclear strategy to allow nuclear strikes against so-called “third party” nations – here, read Ukraine – who threaten Russia’s territorial integrity by attacking the soil of the homeland.
These developments contain two of the wonderfully quirky and nasty elements of war itself – the ease of escalation, followed by the speediness of retaliation. Everything in war is easy but the making of war, you see. One of the easiest things in the world to do is start a war. All that is necessary is for a nation’s leader, or the chief of a “non-state actor,” to give an order. Such an order to start a war used to consist of a single word: “Fire!” as in, the ignition of the cannons of the newly-seceded Confederate state, South Carolina, against the Union’s island garrison, Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor.
Today, the order is usually transmitted electronically, via radio or satellite, but the effect is the same. Guns begin to fire. Bodies begin to fall. And the whole dirty, ugly, terrible business of war starts anew.
Vladimir Putin issued such an order on February 24, 2022, the day the Russian army invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine in force. A war had been going on since 2014, but in the modern lingo of war, it was called an “armed conflict,” meaning that soldiers who were both Ukrainian and Russian citizens had begun fighting Ukrainian military forces and taking and controlling Ukrainian territory, which came to include the entire peninsula of Crimea on August 14, when Russia formally “annexed” Crimea, seizing Ukrainian military bases and taking Ukrainian soldiers prisoner. By March 30, Ukraine had ordered the withdrawal of its military forces, and Putin declared Crimea part of Russia.
See how easy that was? An “armed conflict” morphs into an “occupation” which morphs into a full scale “invasion,” and presto! We have a war. The war fought by the United States to occupy Iraq in 2003 was just as easily begun. One day, American military forces were in Kuwait on the border with Iraq. President George W. Bush gave an order, probably from the “Situation Room” at the White House, and presto! U.S. forces invaded Iraq, and yet another American war on foreign soil far from the shores of the continental United States was on.
Don’t you love the euphemisms of modern war? There is a special room, deep under the White House, called the “Situation Room,” where Big Decisions are Made, and Great Orders are Given. President Putin of Russia, upon ordering his army to invade Ukraine, gave his war on a foreign people living in a sovereign nation, the catchy name, “Special Military Operation,” as if by the use of words he could transform military aggression and dead bodies and destroyed schools and churches and hospitals and shopping malls and the terrible smoke and blood and smell of war into something that was, if not benign, at least acceptable.
No war is acceptable. That is why nations have armies and navies and air forces to ensure, or at least attempt to ensure, that they are not attacked, and a war does not begin. But armies and navies and air forces sometimes do not work to deter aggression. When deterrence fails, wars begin, because – well, take your pick -- the human condition, the fallibility of man, the doomed prophesies of the Bible, the inevitability that history will come back and bite your human ass, because that is what history does to the humans who make it happen.
We have gone into the specifics of this particular war before in these pages, because the United States and its NATO allies in Europe and beyond quickly found themselves motivated to get involved in helping Ukraine defend itself. Amazingly, at the moment that Russia invaded Ukraine, there were people in the White House and Pentagon, and in foreign capitals around the world, who had read history and could therefore remember what happened the last time an insane dictator ordered his armies to cross the border of a sovereign state in Europe, which happened in 1939 when Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland. These people who had studied history did not want the same thing that happened last time – the fall of Europe to dictatorship – to happen again, so the U.S. and its allies began sending arms and sharing intelligence with Ukraine in an attempt to fend off the fall of that European nation.
And here we are, 1001 days later, President Biden still sending arms and sharing intelligence with Ukraine alongside other NATO nations, with the fall of Ukraine still at stake and under a bigger threat than ever, because Donald Trump and his reality show cast of history ignoramuses will take over command of our army and navy and air force and marines on January 20 of next year, which is right around the corner, and God himself only knows what they will do not only to Ukraine, but to all of Europe.
That is why President Biden authorized Ukraine to use American ATACMS missiles on military targets within Russia and ordered the delivery of anti-personnel mines to be used as a last chance defense against Russian forces.
These are terrible steps. The ATACMS missile decision begat Putin’s escalation of his nuclear threats with a re-jiggering of his first-strike doctrine. The delivery and use of anti-personnel mines is just as terrible. The world is littered with anti-personnel mines that were used to defend against invaders, or in the case of Russia, to defend its forces against Ukraine’s army within Ukraine once Russia had seized and occupied Ukrainian territory. The problem with these mines is that they are laid out on lands, and maps are made of their location, and then wars end, and maps are lost, and the mines remain, and they start killing civilians, including women and children, who go back to their towns and homes and are sometimes blown up by the mines armies have left behind.
But ATACMS missiles and anti-personnel mines are just two more terrible aspects of the war being fought by Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression. We and our allies have sent Ukraine other weapons, and then we sent bigger and more deadly ones, and Russia has deployed everything it has up to but not including nuclear weapons against the much smaller and less wealthy nation of Ukraine.
Already, tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed or wounded by these weapons in this war, as well as hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who were ordered by Putin into the meatgrinder he created. The dead bodies of both sides have returned to loved ones to be buried and mourned, the dead themselves not being able to care anymore who ordered what or why or what happened as a result. And the maimed are repaired to walk again as a reminder to the living of the terror out there where the guns fire and the missiles fly and the mines explode.
Wars happen for reasons that make sense to those seeking to vanquish others for their own gain. Wars are forced on those who must defend themselves against conquest, thus the sense they make is dictated, not chosen, as from a menu of options.
What can we do as people who are, by force of our remove from war on the ground far away, to make sense of all this? Not much, I’m afraid. They teach about war to soldiers at places like West Point and the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy and the Command and General Staff College and the War College. They teach about war to civilians in the history departments of colleges like Harvard and Princeton and New York University and the University of Tennessee, the ROTC program of which my son graduated from and is now engaged in the application of military technologies to fight in future American wars as a lieutenant in the Infantry.
Wars engage the marvels and frailties of humanity – the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. That wars do this by the existence of death and destruction, blood and soil, pride and prejudice, is at once tragedy and reality, a place where we sadly must live, all of us.
Doublespeak is the lingua franca of war.
"Ancillary casualties" (civilian deaths), "insurgents" (native people defending their homeland) and even "tactical nuclear weapons" (for which Fat Man and Little Boy both quality) are par for the course with the "Department of Defense," which so far since its creation from the War Department in 1949 has ONLY attacked.
This is old hat.
As Tim O'Brien wrote,
"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."
As two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner General Smedley Butler pointed out in 1933, war is a racket. It's also an American obsession. Where are the statues of pacifists and conscientious objectors?
Viktor Frankl: "Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."