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Books As war changed, few realized the muscle flexed in our
name
ETHICS AND
COUNTERREVOLUTION: AMERICAN INVOLVEMENT IN INTERNAL WARS By Kermit
Johnson University Press of America (1-800-462-6420; fax 1-800-338-4550),
344 pages, $49 cloth |
By MICHAEL J.
FARRELL
For all our progress on specifics, there has not yet come our way
a Bill Gates or an Einstein or an Aristotle to solve the more general problem
of getting along together. So we fall out, have wars, kill people, break
hearts. This yen to prevail seems by now embedded in our genes. For several
good reasons, prevailing in beauty pageants or chess tournaments has
traditionally been no match for military might. Most of the human race
considers force the best medicine.
Great military powers, nevertheless, from ancient Greece to the
recent Soviets, have not only come but gone. Despite all the analysis, their
rise and fall is ultimately inexplicable. Luck or other circumstances has
placed the United States at the top in our time.
Indeed, we are so solidly at the top that its hard to be
humble. The sole remaining superpower, we like to call ourselves.
And congratulations to everybody. This is a chance most nations never get, to
express what is best about being on earth. And Americans have done that grandly
-- one of the most industrious, creative and generous populations ever
assembled, sending aid around the world and welcoming to our shores as many
tired and poor foreigners as possible.
But wait: The United States hasnt fought a war worthy of the
name in ages (let us lay the Iraq debacle to rest at once -- Saddam merely
hunkered down while we took all those potshots at him). Thats because
wars seem to have changed while our backs were turned.
Kermit Johnsons Ethics and Counterrevolution examines
dramatic shifts taking place in the exercise of U.S. military might.
With only occasional exceptions, wars have given way to revolution
and counterrevolution as the preferred method of settling disputes. The
terminology here gets as murky as war itself. Johnson devotes his first chapter
to finessing the differences between the many ways of vying with home-grown or
foreign foes, from rebellion, peoples war, subversive war, popular
uprising, insurrection and proxy war to guerrilla war, low intensity conflict,
covert war and much more.
If we are fuzzy about these hostilities, thats probably no
accident. Our government and others, for their own good reasons, are eager to
keep us in the dark about the mayhem done in our name.
Author Johnson brings to his critical task an impressive military
and religious background. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he was a
company commander in the Korean War. Ordained a minister of the United
Presbyterian Church, he returned to the Army as a chaplain, served in many
prestigious posts, including chief of chaplains from 1979 to 1982. He was
associate director of the Center for Defense Information from 1983 to 86.
His Realism and Hope in a Nuclear Age (John Knox Press) was published in
1988.
Notorious example
The assassinations of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the four
American churchwomen in 1980 and the shabby reaction of the Reagan
administration, were critical in changing his attitude about the way the United
States helps wage other nations wars.
Probably the most notorious example of such hostility by proxy is
low intensity conflict or LIC. For Johnson, as for many others, LIC is, for
starters, an outrageous misnomer. Conflicts that appear low intensity viewed
from Pentagon back rooms or quiet U.S. suburbs look remarkably different on the
ground in the host country. One colonel who served in El Salvador
calls LIC total war at the grassroots level.
Indeed, LIC got such a bad name, especially during the Reagan
administration, that its organizers switched the terminology to Military
Operations Other Than War Involving the Use or Threat of Force -- if this
smells like an oxymoron, this just shows how hard it is to fight other
peoples wars while insisting youre not fighting any wars at
all.
By whatever name, these covert operations add up to the U.S.
strategy to get faraway, usually weak little nations to fight for U.S.
interests, which only occasionally coincide with the battling nations
true interests. Sometimes U.S. participation is on the side of the government,
as it was in El Salvador; sometimes on the side of the terrorists, guerrillas
or freedom-fighters (the terminology depends on whos talking), as it was
in Nicaragua or Afghanistan. Sometimes the side we back is democratic,
sometimes its run by a dictator. The only constant is the U.S. estimate
of what is best for the world, which, to no ones surprise, invariably
coincides with our interests abroad.
Because the government has been so successful at keeping them
under wraps, few citizens realize how common these interventions are -- a book
called Americas Small Wars, for example, analyzes 60 U.S. LICs.
Most are probably launched with good intentions. But when the good intentions
are elevated to strategy, it all sounds like extraordinary bombast. There was
the Monroe Doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, even the Reagan Doctrine, just for
example. In the background are the ideals out of which these doctrines grew. In
his Dallas speech, had he not been killed, John F. Kennedy would have said,
We in this country, in this generation, are -- by destiny rather than
choice -- the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. Its fate, one
politician after another has explained. It was predetermined that we should
carry this load.
Higher ground
That puts us immediately on high moral ground. The free can
conquer but to save, one U.S. secretary of state pronounced. When, out of
the throes of the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed the
Philippines, Sen. Albert Beveridge saw this as the outcome of the most
holy [war] ever waged by one nation against another -- a war for civilization,
a war for a permanent peace, a war which, under God, although we knew it not,
swung open to the Republic the portals of the commerce of the world.
Self-interest was just a lucky bonus, according to this innocent account.
True, there are constantly forces around the world that threaten
law, order, morality and prosperity. True, too, there is scarcely any other
power at this time with the muscle or the will to bring bullies into line and
arbitrate old or new wrongs.
But the United States has, directly or indirectly, killed an awful
lot of people and done an awful lot of depredation in carrying out this
ambiguous purpose.
Author Johnson in his introduction quotes G.K. Chesterton to
devastating effect: It may be said with rough accuracy that there are
three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power and
fights small powers. Then it is a great power and fights great powers. Then it
is a great power and fights small powers but pretends that they are great
powers in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and
vanity.
Could this be us?
Michael Farrell is editor of NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, October 2,
1998
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