There is a fatal problem with the recent propensity of the US government to commit troops to various parts of the world with some vague goal of cleaning-up internal quarrels. It is, put plainly, that war requires full commitment, not some halfhearted intervention.
One reason that in his farewell address President George Washington warned Americans about getting involved in foreign wars is he realized that such involvement requires dedication and such dedication can only exist when the people are convinced the war is just. Without this conviction, we have the spectacle of the US trying to get serious business done without serious commitment.
And this makes very good sense. If you send the US military to Yugoslavia without justice on your side, you get some citizens supporting it, you get some machinery deployed, but as soon as soldiers begin to die, as soon as the war is prolonged, the resolve needed to fix things disappears.
Why? Because there is no clear-cut justice on the side of the military in such a fight. What do I mean by justice here? A just war is fought in defense of the rights of the citizens of a country. The military of a citizenry is entitled to go into action only to defend, not to attack. This is true even if it seems pretty clear that somewhere else, there are serious troubles in how people relate to one another.
To make the moral dynamics clear, let me use a simple analogy. Presume that you hire yourself a bodyguard. Such a person is justified to defend you against aggressors, hoods, criminals, etc. A bodyguard’s task is defense. No bodyguard is justified in going out to clean-up the neighborhood, let alone attack people where he has no clue who is right and who is wrong. Bodyguards are guards, period, not members of vice squads–a group that has no business in a free society. But if you are attacked, the bodyguard has full justification to go to your aid. That is the guard’s proper role.
Of course, the bodyguard may be tempted, given such a person’s expertise and skills, to interfere in some nearby altercation that is no threat to you. But that would not be right–it is not the bodyguard’s proper job to do that, however tempting it may be. It would be an unjust engagement.
So it is an unjust engagement for the US military to go around the globe to clean-up various messes. No one need doubt that there are gross injustices being perpetrated in those spots–e.g., by Serbs upon ethnic Albanians (although there is some evidence that the reverse is also true, though to a smaller extent). There are many, many trouble spots throughout the globe where such altercations are occurring. But it is not the proper task of the US military to intervene. It wasn’t hired to do that job and to yield to the temptation is akin to leaving of one’s post.
This is exactly why the politicians are trying to confine the military intervention in Yugoslavia to bombings. That makes it appear that full commitment will not be needed to clean-up the mess there. But a greater involvement cannot be avoided.
Such involvement, however, cannot succeed without proper commitment. And that is just what cannot be had from the citizens of the US in this kind of military operation. Many Americans realize that their military can only be committed fully if there is a real threat against the citizens of the United States of America, the rights of whom that military has been appointed to protect. They know that is the only justification for war, and that is the only kind of war that deserves full commitment.
(The author is a philosopher, and is presently with the Freedom Communications, Inc., California, U.S.A. He is a a member of Board of Advisors of Liberty Institute.)
Copyright 1999, Liberty Institute, New Delhi
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