March marked two chilling milestones in the Iraq war: the fifth anniversary of our invasion and the death of our 4,000th American soldier.
However, there was little talk of either of these events on the home front. There were no moments of silence, no lowering of flags, no tears shed for our dead—certainly not at Amherst College, at least. Nonetheless, pained mothers and fathers were indeed reminded of their fallen sons and daughters. And, through their despair, they no doubt found themselves wondering why their fellow Americans were not reminded of the same loss, why the rest of us seem so ignorant of the heart-wrenching realities of this war.
Yet a closer inspection of the American psyche shows that what plagues us is not so much conscious ignorance as sheer oblivion. While our young soldiers fight day and night in Iraq, dodging enemy fire and trying to evade hidden Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), back on the home front we are preoccupied with college basketball finals and our ridiculous reality shows. Having little interaction with the war beyond a few short seconds of Iraq footage on cable news as we swiftly flip through the channels, we have the unsettling power to turn on and off the bloodshed with the press of a remote. And with approximately one half of one percent of the American population directly engaged in the fighting, it perhaps seems only natural that the other 99.95 percent of Americans would be so detached from the battlefield 6,000 miles away.
Colonel Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations and military history at Boston University, had much to say on this subject during the College’s recent Spring Colloquium titled “Reinstating the Draft.” Bacevich has written on the “great divorce” of the citizenry from the military, most prominently in his acclaimed book, The New American Militarism. But during the Colloquium—also featuring General Wesley Clark, the erstwhile Democratic presidential hopeful—Bacevich reiterated the grave dangers that such a disconnect is liable to bring about. When the populace lacks an adequate degree of military literacy, as it does today, it is unable to make educated decisions about the use of its military. That is, knowing little about the technicalities of warfare and the realities and capabilities of our armed forces, we are forced to accept the military decisions of our leaders with little question. As a result, Bacevich argues, we find ourselves mired in military and foreign policy blunders like Iraq, having been led blindly into a hopeless engagement—now the second longest and second costliest war in our nation’s history, as Nobel Laureate and College Trustee Joseph Stiglitz ’64 noted during the Colloquium.
Bacevich’s proposition may seem absurd at first. That we could have prevented the Iraq war seems to us now, five years into the fighting, utterly silly. But the fact is that his diagnosis of our country’s military illiteracy holds a lot of weight, especially in any survey of the student bodies of elite Northeastern liberal arts colleges. As students, we are given very little opportunity to learn in depth about war and military policy. Instead, we either ignore war’s existence or tend to think of it as some great, mysterious creature that we must harpoon and destroy.
We need to take steps toward reorienting ourselves as a citizenry—our generation, particularly—with the military, its members and its inner workings. One suggestion that came out of the Colloquium, its most vocal supporter being General Clark, was that ROTC be brought back to campus. Certainly that step would have some effect, but I imagine it would be to bring back to campus the “blood on your hands” folks permanently. No, Bacevich’s proposition does not require that we involve ourselves in the military, only that we think more critically and more deeply before allowing the initiation of wars and before accepting bad foreign policy strategies by acquiring a greater knowledge of military affairs. After all, the military ultimately answers to the leaders we elect, and if we delegate to those politicians a monopoly on war decision-making, we in essence surrender our oversight as citizens.
If not through ROTC, then how might Amherst instill in its students such knowledge? The Colloquium itself was a laudable first step in bringing these issues to the fore. But academic courses in war, its effects and its mechanics are even more critical than an intense weekend-long discussion. Courses like Professor Tiersky’s Seminar on War and Peace and Professors Levin and Machala’s Case Studies in American Foreign Policy—both offered next semester—are steps in the right direction. I would urge the faculty and the administration to continue to make such courses available to students, and to widen yet further the scope of military-related education at Amherst.
More than 4,000 of our countrymen are dead and tens of thousands more are wounded. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the process. We failed to end the bloodshed in 2004, we failed to end it in 2006 and we might just fail to end it in 2008. These figures rise every single day that we don’t act; the death won’t end until the American people endeavor to reassert their control over this nation and our military at the polls in November. But it ought not be done in a fit of anti-conservatism or anti-Bushism. We must stop blaming our leaders for this war and remember whose ballots installed, and reinstalled, these leaders.
In November, perhaps the winds of change will indeed blow through Washington. But ours is a long-term infection, one to which the only antidote is knowledge, wisdom and education. If Amherst College is to fulfill its mission, it will have to answer the call to provide us with the right knowledge in these truly dark days.