The war-rationalizing writers and policy-makers are callous at best

Saturday, September 13, 2003

Ranked high among the 15 specific "hates" of the Irish monk Cadoc were writers in love with war. If Cadoc were alive today as we all suffer the Chinese water torture of awaiting the next announcement of a military death in Iraq, he would notice that the traditional war-lover has evolved into the war-accepter or the war-rationalizer. These are ideologues who accept the view that warfare is the natural condition of man. They therefore feel justified in advance to find ways to make war and its consequences more or less palatable for the public, having already accepted its inevitability.

	Samuel Hazo is director of the International Poetry Forum and McAnulty Distingushed Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University (hazo@stargate.net).

It is indicative of the malaise of some of these writers that they have begun to argue that we lose more people to traffic deaths daily than we are presently losing in Iraq since President Bush presciently declared major combat "over." If we can live with the former, they say, we should be able to live with the latter, so why the fuss?

The idea of linking deaths caused by accidents on the road with the deaths of men who are basically moving targets in an undeclared, open-ended war is specious in the extreme, to say the least. No less appalling are the arguments of some others who claim that our comparatively minimal death-count in Iraq is negligible next to the fatalities recorded in the Vietnam War. This justifying rationalization of war deaths through the use of comparison is not only specious, but approaches the obscene, especially when one of these writers -- Jack Kelly, in his Post-Gazette column of Aug. 3 -- went so far as to say that it would take about 158 years for the current death-counts at their present rate to approach the Vietnam toll.

Such writers should walk slowly the length of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall where 58,000 futile deaths are nicked in stone and then invoke the mathematics of comparison for the benefit of the public. Better yet, let them perform this little game for the next of kin of those killed then (and now) if they have the courage to do so. Better still, let them do this for the amelioration of the consciences of the architects of the Vietnam War (and this war as well) who made messianic policies that cost young men their lives while they, the architects, lived on or died in their beds.

What is behind this mentality but an abstruse and bureaucratic disregard of the fact that deaths -- all deaths -- are personal, and mathematical comparisons have nothing to do with it. "Each man's death diminishes me," wrote John Donne, and he was right.

At a reunion of Marine officers several months ago in Quantico, Va., a group of us had to deal with the same realization. Out of the original 291 officers in our class battalion, three were killed in combat. Even after 50 years, those three men were as vivid to us in recollection as we were at that moment to one another. The mathematically minded might consider three a low number (and it is in relation to the percentages of officers lost from other battalions). They might add that it was "only" three.

The war-rationalizing writers of today would not go wrong to re-read the writings of Ernest Hemingway that deal with war or the poems of Wilfred Owen (World War I) or Randall Jarrell (World War II). Each of these men saw war for the tragedy it is for victor and loser alike -- the fratricidal duet of Cain and Abel repeating itself in different countries at different times for different reasons but with the same lethal intent.

The only nobility that comes out of it comes from the solidarity of the soldiers themselves -- their reliance upon and concern for one another. The highest honor that our country confers -- the Medal of Honor -- openly recognizes that. It does not commemorate victory or defeat, and more often than not it is awarded posthumously. Its stipulations are three: first, that the awardee did something at the risk of his life in the face of mortal danger; two, that he did it for the sake of someone else, and, three, that no one would have blamed him if he did not do what he in fact did. This is a recognition of what is biblically identified as the "greater love" -- the risking or giving of one's life for the sake of someone else.

Peace is a condition in which the affairs of men and women transpire within their various institutional disciplines, where differences are not settled by gunfire but by trust, arbitration and law and where good manners make social life possible and even enjoyable. It is not associated with what is known as machismo. Machismo is synonymous with what we would call braggadocio or mere strutting and bravado. The Latin Americans, who originated the term, regard it with some disdain since they think that those who exhibit machismo are really doing so to hide some inner weakness. This particularly applies to those neoconservative appointees and journalists whose philosophy of indefinite warfare (not for peace but for more war wherever) apparently is the core philosophy of the Bush administration.

Comments like this are nonsense to the war-rationalizers. But the more they rant and accuse dissenters of treason or worse, the more one has to wonder what it is they are hiding or hiding behind. After all, our genuine heroes were quite ordinary people until one particular situation compelled them to risk everything for the sake of life itself -- someone else's life. Those who survived could not give a reason why they acted as they did. They simply did it. And they looked back on it without machismo or comment.

In the current climate where the once-removed war-rationalizers claim that love of country means agreeing with their chauvinism, it might be well to remember that the country's real heroes were (and are) rather modest individuals who did what they could not refrain from doing and then returned to their stations with no thought of reward or recognition. For parallel behavior, consider the deportment of the police and firefighters who survived the World Trade Center catastrophe. Cadoc knew the difference.

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