Pacifism and Democratic Security Policy
By I’m afraid I have to go with Matt and Kevin on this one.
From Atrios:
That’s ridiculous. The issue with that war and any other war isn’t simply whether it’s “justifiable.” And opposition to George Bush’s War in Afghanistan does not imply that someone was “flatly opposed to any use of American military power at all.” . . .
And Matt Yglesias’ response:
Fine, fine. Opposition to the Afghan War does not imply, as a matter of formal logic, that you would oppose the use of American military power under all circumstances. But if you, like I, spent the fall of 2001 in a place where anti-war sentiment ran high, listening to anti-war speeches and lectures and protests and teach-ins, reading anti-war op-eds in your school paper, speaking to anti-war people in your daily life and so forth, it was clear that most of the publicly offered rationales for opposing the war did, in fact, imply that the speaker or writer was opposed to any and all use of American military power. The most common line of criticism I heard was that any action that resulted in the deaths of Afghan civilians was an illegitimate form of collective punishment. There’s a certain logic to this position, but it’s the logic of pacifism and it’s not the basis of a viable national-security policy. Unless the Democratic Party and its advocates can say so, it’s not going to win any elections for the foreseeable future.
Matt is absolutely right. Opposition to the Afghanistan War does not necessitate a pacifist outlook on national security (which I find indefensible, for any number of different reasons). However, most of the people on the left in 2001 who opposed the Afghan War were making pacifist arguments, arguments that could have justified virtually no US military action under any circumstances. In my experience, these were the same people who marched in 1999 under banners that superimposed the NATO star on a swastika to protest the Kosovo intervention.
Atrios is right that we need to escape the nonsensical “hawk vs. dove” terminology on military intervention, and establish that beliefs about the use of military force fall on a continuum; almost everyone believes that the United States should use military force against some targets under some circumstances but not others, whether they read Daily Kos or Little Green Footballs. However, we also need to recognize that the pacifist position falls outside that continuum, that part of the opposition to war within our camp is informed by pacifism, and that this pacifism cannot be defended strategically (or morally or intellectually, for my part) in the current American political climate.