The Dogs of War

It being Veteran’s/Remembrance Day, I thought it would be a good time to write a bit about foreign policy that has been kicking around my head for a few months too long. Of course today, we are to spend the day thinking about the courageous and heroic actions of our respective service man and women, both those who have returned from various excursions in maintaining our security and freedom, as well as those who have lost their lives doing so. We are to remind ourselves to value the lives of those brave souls like our greatest national treasure and treat their contribution with the utmost of respect and care.

The sad fact of the matter, though, is that I think we fail utterly and completely in that charge, day-by-day.

Like many of my fellow Canadians, I have become increasingly pessimistic about our country’s role in Afghanistan. That we get to such recorded levels of pessimism is sometimes cited as evidence of a public that is waking up to the realities of what their government is committing significant blood and treasure. And, I suppose there is a degree to which that is true. But the other, and I would offer far more prevalent, reason for that snapshot of pessimism — notable as it is because it represents a drop from previous levels of support — is that we harbor utterly unrealistic expectations for what we might be able to achieve with military interventionism, humanitarian or otherwise.

In saying that, I am not suggesting that there is no role for humanitarian military interventions in geo-political affairs. There remain instances where the kinds of dynamics at play, actors involved, and suffering experienced in particular situations demand the use of force. Clear cases of those instances may well be few and far between, but I think that they do exist and that we cannot credible sweep them under the rug of willful ignorance. Examples of such instances — Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, etc. — have become the stuff of cliche, but they are cliched precisely because of how well they demonstrate both the rarity and the decisiveness of such instances.

And yet, despite the persistent, if not very sporadic, need for an option of systematized use of violence as a last resort, we rarely talk seriously about what the use of such an option actually entails. Drops in support for military actions are, themselves, effective barometers for gauging a public that, when faced with the realities of war-as-problem-solving, find themselves disillusioned that everything hasn’t worked out to plan. Those realities are; however, the story that even a cursory look at the histry of modern warfare tells. While needs in those few cases might be decisive (and even then, we generally only recognize that decisiveness in the context of history), the outcomes are rarely the same.

What the reality of war tells us is that the use of violence is effective in breaking up particular confluences of power and abuse — and little else.

And so when we send our service men and women into battle, it behooves both us and them to have a well-honed and highly conservative estimation of what the scope of the mission and the definitions of success ought to be based on the realities, challenges, and limitations we face in the use of force. Just these types of discussion are, one might argue, the very thing that military leaders spend much of their time engaging, so it is silly and naive to suggest that we don’t have the requisite discourse to back up our use of force. And while I might not doubt the accuracy of that claim, I would also point out that much of the discussion surrounding the actual decision of warfare is of a political, not military, nature.

If we look at those political discussions, we would, I think, do well to note that they tend almost invariably to occur within context of highly charged and emotional circumstances. Things are going poorly in Iraq, should we mount a surge or not? Things are going poorly in Afghanistan, should we send more troops or not? Rarely do we sit down when there isn’t a fire in need of attending to have a meta-conversation in the dispassionate air of relative peace time to weight the lessons learned from a political angle and consider what the overall purpose and direction of military intervention is and ought to be. Of course, each case is different and cannot be fully predicted in advance. But that doesn’t preclude the formation of broad understandings, general guidelines, and, perhaps most importantly, logistics and moral realities that ought to at least inform our frothy machinations at the event horizon of the next great clash of civilizations.

Instead, our decision to hash out the political cards tends to more accurately resemble  the free-for-all anarchy of British soccer hooliganism. Questions are not about what the prudent course of action might entail and what the risk we contemplate placing the country’s soldiers in by entering a frey. Rather, one is either for or against national security. One is either a dove or a hawk. One is either a lover of freedom or an assistant to terrorism.

It should come as no surprise that the decisions flowing out of such melees are both ill conceived and informed.

And so, on a day like today, our unwillingness to grapple with the real challenges and limitations that face our soldiers should be as front and center as anything. We should, to be frank, feel ashamed of our failings and contemptible of the parade of concern we trot out. The gestures of that concern are sincere, to be sure, but their foundations are empty insofar as we maintain a fundamentally unserious and nakedly ad hoc approach to the underlying issues that animate such concern. We need to get better at remembering, beyond just one day.

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Tags | Foreign Policy, National Security, Warfare and Conflict