Between Pain and Nothing

I thought that I might take a moment to reflect on how muddied the waters of my thinking have become around interventionism and foreign policy of late on this American occasion for remembrance.

I have for some time now been a a reluctant and hesitant, but vociferous proponent of the idea that it is important to develop a coherent and articulate outline for how militarily advanced countries like the US ought to appropriate utilize that military might when it is needed. My arguments have orbited around the idea that while no one ought to relish the idea of going into a foreign place with weapons in hand, it remains a truism that just those situations necessarily arise and that we are best served to have a clear understanding of what we are to do and how we are to do when they do.

Insofar as I think said truism remains relevant, I take the discussion about what a properly constitute interventionist foreign policy might look to remain vital.

In a variety of venues; however, folks such as my co-blogger Freddie DeBoer have pushed back saying that it is a special kind of American geo-political arrogance to think that, given the interventionist track record, decisions to use military force to deal with a situation are likely result in anything other than death, destruction, and a worse-off state of affairs. Watching The Control Room somewhat recently, I found the already rickety bridge of my moral calculus on the issue snapping a few more planks. As articulated in my post pushing back against Thomas Barnett’s vision of how to use America’s military Leviathan, I can’t help but look at the machinations of a force as large and powerful as the US military and remain blind to the fact that there are institutional interests and biases at play.

I haven’t tended to go in for cabalistic conspiracy theories about smokey backroom deals around lines on a map for some time now, but the military-industrial complex is, to the reasonable individual I think, a simple fact. As such, without ascribing any nefarious intentions to any class of individuals, it is fairly easy to acknowledge that the operations of that entity don’t happen in a moral vacuum of pristine neutrality.

More than the above acknowledgment; however, I find myself at a cross-roads around interventionism due to the very real challenge of information flows and the fog of war. Ill begotten interests in initiating something as a serious as military activity no doubt play a role in cultivating the kind of conditions that give rise to Freddie’s and others’ skepticism, but it strikes me that as much, if not more, is lost due to the sheer chaos of large scale military action. The predominate talking point for military activists these days seems to centre around the notion of heightened precision that such activities have achieved in a twenty-first century context.

Even more than the frooferah that was raised about smart bombs in the US’ first scuffle with Iraq, the idea that military action is a bloodless affair, at least when it comes to “our side”, strikes me as the underlying idea with which the public has been left. If there is anything positive to be said about America’s six, going on seven, year excursion into Iraq, it is the unrelenting damage that decision has inflicted upon such mirages.

The saying that “war is hell,” is a cliche not insignificantly because it is true, and I have assumed my own brand of skepticism that any degree of technological advancement will ever change that fact because it is born not out of any mechanical insufficiencies, but rather of the human condition itself. Violence is, well, violent, and its visitation always throws equilibrium out of whack no matter how well coordinated it might be.

The inherent fog of war, then, is what has caused the tickle in my throat of late, and the belief that no matter how you choose to address is, the amorphous perseverance of that fog will find its way back into your cross hairs.

And yet, I find it equally moving that in spite of this recently learned lesson, there remains a strong intuition that isolationism is simply not an option. War being the hell that it is,  there is an unwillingness amongst a not insubstantial proportion of the population to look at genocide and atrocity on other sides of the planet and say, “Meh, not my problem.” I am disinclined to chalk that unwillingness up to mere arrogance about the ability of one’s military to effectively intervene in situations of moral repugnance and think that we lose a great deal by doing so. It is simply too de regiuer to thumb one’s nose at the American impulse to help while coughing “empire” under one’s breath, doing so indicates an unwillingness to really grapple with the complexity of that impulse, at least in my books.

Look, it is certainly true that there has been as much, if not more harm done to those would be recipients of assistance through the use of arms to the extent that we should be skeptical about this avenue for aid. But that stark fact doesn’t make the impulse itself an expression of arrogance. There is, I think for many — perhaps most — Americans, an underlying pulse of moral obligation that ought not to be the baby we throw out with the interventionist bathwater.

Freddie has in the past suggested that part of the problem with striking an interventionist stance is a over willingness to suspend the rule of normal moral calculus in the process of decision making, which is a more than fair criticism. But I think the same is true when we look at that impulse to help: if we were strolling down the street and saw someone being accosted, it would be hoped that we would feel an impulse to help if we could. Certainly if we were the person being accosted we would hold out hope that the average passerby might be inclined to come to our assistance.

There is a fundamental recognition of the duty to other that flows out of the unavoidable reality of our mutual and relational existence in a particular swath of space and time. And it might be true that by assisting in this instance we may only make matters worse, but the impulse to assist is not wrong in itself. By some lights it is vital; any inclinations towards thwarting it to be derided. If we lose that impulse, we lose something vital about being human.

But what are we do when that perhaps noble impulse is housed in the crooked timber of our actions? It is a real paradox that our inclination towards others might at some level seem relatively pure, while the well of our ability to carry out that inclination is inherently poisoned. To make matters worse, I would offer that said poinsoning extends well beyond the realm of just military options, into many more of our bootstrapping initiatives than we might care to acknowledge. There is an agony here, like the kind of pain that an oger striving towards civility feels in inadvertently crushing every beautiful thing in its path.

That agony strikes me the only real indicator we have about being on some sort of useful path — Shangri-la is not its ultimate destination, but rather an ever unfolding reconciliation of the imperfections of the world in which we live and our efforts to realize something better.  And, as Faulkner once so famously said, “[g]iven the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”

Tagged as: crooked timber, fog of war, imperfectin of action, impulse to help, institutional bias, interventionism, moral calculus