Sherry Chandler » The Unforeseeable Outcome
The Unforeseeable Outcome
Mark Danner closes his New York Review of Books article “Iraq: The War of the Imagination” with this quote from George F. Kennan:
Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it.
Kennan, “The Father of Containment,” said this in the Fall of 2002. He was 98 years old at the time and watching the Iraq war develop from a Washington rest home. He died in March of 2005.
He also said, “You know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”
These words came to me in the wee hours of the morning today, made me contemplate why it is that I am so adamantly anti-war.
I have spoken of myself here as a pacifist but I’m not sure how purely I’m a pacifist. I don’t think, in the end, I’m either brave or true-believer enough for that.
I would fight to save my own life. I would fight, and have, if somebody was just up in my face giving me a hard time.
I would fight to save my children, though they’re grown now and probably better able to fight for themselves than I am to fight for them.
I would fight to save that proverbial endangered child being beaten in the street — though I think that ethical conundrum is as unfair as the one about torture: if you only had two hours to save the world, would you torture an informant? (Yes you probably would and you’d be as unlikely to get good information then as you would be in a more leisurely use of torture.)
I think we should hold all life sacred and do no more harm than we can help.
And I am strongly anti-war.
My reasons are moral and personal and also completely pragmatic. War is chaos. It unleashes unforeseen forces, call them evil if you will. It does not solve the problems used as a pretext for it and it creates problems that bring on the next war.
I think I would probably fight to defend my property, my neighbors, my country, if we were being invaded by some force more threatening than Mexican laborers. But I am adamantly against wars of aggression on foreign soil.
And I am offended beyond outrage by the kind of magical thinking that got us into the current war in Iraq:
Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn. In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power—enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world
You should read the Danner article and also Max Rodenbeck’s “How Terrible Is It?”
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4 Comments
1. Terry replies at 29th November 2006, 11:55 pm :
Fabulous post. There’s a big difference between self-defense, and defense of the defenseless, and aggression. If we can’t tell the difference by now, we’re in a sad state. I would fight to the death to protect my children, far more than I would for myself, but, I also, am a pacifist. A lot of that comes from an intimate knowledge of Arab culture, but I’d like to think that basic humanity trumps that. We seem unable to learn from the past.
2. Terry replies at 30th November 2006, 12:15 am :
I didn’t directly answer Georgia’s questions, so I’ll address that here, with Sherry’s permission. To verify our identity, we sign the OUTSIDE of our ballot envelops which is compared against the signature on our voter registration application. Anonymity is gone. If the signatures don’t match to the satisfaction of the commissioner, our ballots are discarded. No polls are open in the counties which approved vote by mail. We do it all by home, in advance, completely disconnected from the process.
3. Georgia Green Stamper replies at 30th November 2006, 10:42 am :
I’m stunned. There is so much I would not like about the voting process you describe that I would probably have to move to another county or state. My family has always taken elections very seriously. If Sherry does not object, I will include a link to a column I wrote after last May’s Kentucky primary about “my people’s [noble] belief in an honest ballot box.” http://www.owentonnewsherald.com/20060517/community/georgia.asp
As for voter verification - in my suburban neighborhood where the election officers know most of us by sight if not by name, I am asked to produce a picture ID every single time I vote before I am allowed to sign my name in the election book. I can not attest to what might happen to the computerized vote after it leaves our voting precinct, but I’m pretty sure no dead people are voting at Sheffield Place -:) I am impressed with the integrity of our local poll workers.
4. sherry replies at 30th November 2006, 3:02 pm :
Thanks, Terry. And Georgia.
Here’s an update on the politics of balloting in Kentucky: http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/state/16117089.htm
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