Don't Let our Soldiers Die in Vain - Democratic Underground

Time for change

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Mon Oct-15-07 08:00 PM
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Don't Let our Soldiers Die in Vain

George Bush has often said, in attempting to justify the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq, that we cannot let the deaths of our soldiers have been in vain. To bolster that argument he talks about the many parents of dead soldiers who have begged him not to let the deaths of their children have been in vain.

I agree with that sentiment. We should all strive, as individuals and as a nation, not to let deaths, or any tragedy, have occurred in vain. That is a big part of how we progress as a civilization.

So, let us consider what we can do to make sure that the deaths of our soldiers have not occurred in vain. There are at least two very different general approaches to trying to prevent life’s tragedies from occurring in vain – a narrow, reflexive approach and a broad, fully thought out approach:

The narrow reflexive approach to making sure that life’s tragedies don’t occur in vain

In the narrow approach to ensuring that life’s tragedies don’t occur in vain, we simply look at what the victim was trying accomplish when the tragedy occurred and then proceed to continue the efforts to accomplish that goal. In the case of our war in Iraq, that would mean that we continue the war until we “win” it, regardless of the cost in additional lives and treasure, so that our dead soldiers won’t have to have died in vain.

There are several serious problems with this approach, especially as it relates to war. Many of life’s tragedies, and those that are war related in particular, occur as a result of human conflict where there are at least two sides that are fighting for very different purposes. By continuing the war so that those who died on one side of the conflict won’t have to have died in vain, that means that those who died on the other side of the conflict will have died in vain (Or very possibly, those dying on both sides will have died in vain, since wars often end in ways that are satisfactory to neither side). For example, what about the hundred’s of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country? Do we not care whether their lives were taken in vain?

To consider this issue in more general terms, the goal that the victim was trying to accomplish when he died may have been ill advised. In those cases does it really serve the victim’s interests to continue to pursue his goal after his death? For example, if a person dies jumping off a building because he thought he could fly, should we honor that person by trying to fly off that building ourselves – or by sending others to do that?

The broad thoughtful approach to making sure that life’s tragedies don’t occur in vain

The far better approach is to carefully consider the underlying problems that caused the tragedy and then take steps to address those problems. That is what our Founding Fathers did when they wrote our Constitution following the eight year war to establish our nation’s independence. It is what Presidents Roosevelt and Truman did following World War II when they respectively conceived and led in the establishment of the United Nations, in the hope of preventing similar future catastrophes. And it is what the American people did when they successfully demanded an end to our immoral war against Vietnam.

An approach to our occupation of Iraq to make sure that our soldiers haven’t died in vain

The principle is similar with respect to our occupation of Iraq. If we really wanted to honor the nearly four thousand U.S. soldiers who have died in the that cause, we would take a step back and reflect on the reasons for their deaths, rather than reflexively send more soldiers to their deaths and more hundreds of billions of dollars into the military-industrial machine.

We would start by asking why they died. We know that they are being killed by the Iraqis whose country we have invaded and are occupying – but why do they want to kill our soldiers?

A public opinion poll shows that more than 90% of Iraqis want us out of their country, including 61% who want us out so bad that they actually approve of violence against our troops. Think of what that means. That number is similar to the percent of Americans who approved of violence against the British during our Revolutionary War. And it suggests the likelihood that in order to be “successful” in our occupation of their country we will have to kill a large number of Iraqi civilians – as indeed we have – since much of the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq comes from the civilian population.

So why do Iraqis want to kill our soldiers and our contractors? Is it because we have killed hundreds of thousands of them and made refugees out of more than four million? Is it because we have utterly failed to repair their infrastructure that was destroyed during our invasion? Is it because we are setting up permanent military bases in their country? Is it because we rammed laws down their throat to provide access of our corporations to Iraqi resources, especially oil? Is it because we have insisted on legal immunity for our mercenary soldiers who needlessly kill Iraqi citizens? Or, is the reason they want to kill our soldiers, as George Bush has repeatedly said, because they “hate our freedoms”?

Well, who knows? I’m not aware of polls that ask why the majority of Iraqi citizens approve of violence against the U.S. soldiers who occupy their country. But probably we should ask ourselves what the reaction of American citizens would be if Iraq had invaded and occupied our country and did the same thing to us that we are doing to them. Would we want to kill them only because we hated their freedoms? – Or would we want to kill them for some other reasons?

Analogies to a couple of other U.S. wars

The bottom line is that our war in Iraq is a guerilla war and it is an imperialist war. Those kinds of wars are notoriously difficult to fight because hostilities come from large segments of the population. And those kinds of wars do great damage to the international reputation of the imperialist countries that perpetrate them, regardless of how strongly those countries try to make excuses for their imperialist wars.

Unfortunately, our country has still not done enough to make sure that our soldiers who died during our past imperialist guerilla wars did not die in vain. If we had we would have given a great deal of thought to why and how those wars occurred, and we would have educated our children in a manner that would have prevented the likelihood of future wars of that nature. Let’s consider a couple of those wars:

The war for Philippine independence – 1899-1902
In April 1998, at the start of the Spanish-American War, the American Navy destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in the Philippines. The “Treaty of Paris” between the United States and Spain, signed on December 10th, 1998, ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States. The next day President McKinley officially proclaimed sovereignty over the Philippines.

The only problem with that was that the Filipinos had declared independence on June 12th, and the Republic of the Philippines was proclaimed on January 23rd, 1899, with the Filipino rebel leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, as its first President. The Filipinos wanted American rule over their country no more than they had wanted Spanish rule. So twelve days after proclaiming their new Republic, they declared war against the United States.

Now it was up to the U.S. Senate to decide whether to commit the U.S. to war against the Philippines by ratifying the Treaty of Paris, or to turn away from American imperial ambitions. Many Senators denounced the treaty as an imperialist land grab – which it was of course. The main arguments in favor of approving the treaty were the commercial and strategic advantages that control of the Philippines would give to the United States, and of course our need to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos (Most Filipinos were Catholic, but few Americans knew that.) During the Senate debate a brief skirmish between the Filipino and American military forces gave several Senators all the excuse they needed to vote for the treaty, and it was approved by a vote of 57-27.

A vicious guerilla war ensued, lasting three and a half years, from February 1899 until the middle of 1902. It was characterized by widespread torture, rape, pillage, and the frequent refusal of the American military to make a distinction between civilians and the Filipino military. Rationalizations provided for this behavior included the brutal behavior by the Filipino “savages” (true, but who was invading whose country?) and the claim that the atrocities were the work of a few “bad apples” (not true at all). By the time that the U.S. had “pacified” the Philippines, the dead included 4,374 American soldiers, 16 thousand Filipino guerillas, and 20 thousand Filipino civilians.

So the United States “won” that war, which surely made many Americans proud. But did the results justify the costs in terms of American and Filipino lives lost and ruined? Stephen Kinzer, in “Overthrow – America’s history of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq”, summarizes the long term effect of our imperialistic victory over the Philippines:

Americans waged a horrific war to subdue the islands at the beginning of the twentieth century…. As in other parts of the world, Washington’s fear of radicalism led it to support an oligarchy that was more interested in stealing money than in developing the country… When the archipelago was finally allowed to go its own way, in the 1990s, it was as poor as it was unstable.

The war for Vietnamese independence – 1954-73
Some may consider it inaccurate to refer to the Vietnam War as the “war for Vietnamese independence”. But I think that is a good name for it. During World War II Vietnam was under Japanese rule. After World War II, Vietnam came under French rule and subsequently fought a war against the French in order to establish their independence, which they gained in 1954.

The Geneva Conference Agreements officially ended the war between France and Vietnam in 1954 and provided for general elections on order to bring about the unification of Vietnam. However, the United States, fearing a Communist victory in those elections, intervened to prevent them from taking place. In other words, the so-called civil war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam was really a war between an artificial puppet state (South Vietnam) created by the United States and Vietnam proper. That explains why so many South Vietnamese civilians sabotaged the efforts of the United States to “liberate” them.

And so began our long involvement culminating in an eventual Communist victory, but not until two million Vietnamese and 58 thousand Americans were dead.

How we can honor our dead soldiers so that their deaths will not have been in vain

All of our guerilla imperialist wars have come at great cost in blood, treasure, and international reputation. In the process, several individuals and corporations have reaped huge profits, but what have the rest of us gained from those wars?

What about the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers who have died in those wars, including the current one in Iraq? George Bush and his supporters tell us that we cannot let those soldiers have died in vain. Bush himself tells us that families of the dead soldiers have begged him not to let their children die in vain, and he uses that line to justify continuing the occupation of Iraq until our war is “won”. That plan will of course lead to the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands more Iraqis and thousands more American soldiers – all of them in vain.

Furthermore, Bush’s argument is specious and self-justifying. It gives the impression that the soldiers themselves want us to continue the Iraq occupation so that the deaths of their fellow soldiers will not have been in vain. While it may be true that some soldiers feel that way, the good majority of them don’t. In fact, the good majority of them want us to get out of Iraq. Perhaps by continuing our occupation of Iraq George Bush will be able to claim that his decision to invade and occupy Iraq was not in vain. But it will do nothing for the soldiers who have died there.

What then can we really do to ensure that our soldiers from the Iraq and other imperialist wars did not die in vain? What we can do is learn the lessons from them that need to be learned. We can have a national discussion of what those wars accomplished and at what cost. We can discuss war profiteering and imperialism as a reason for war, and we can ask ourselves if we want to be the kind of country that condones that sort of thing.

OR, we can continue to pretend that all U.S. wars are undertaken only for the purest of motives. If we do that, then all the deaths of our soldiers really will have been in vain.