Thoughts on Protesting War
War has always evoked a wide variety of emotional responses. Some have seen it as the road to glory; others have simply seen it as the road out of town, away from home, and into adventure. To some, war is to be embraced as a way to strengthen the fitness of oneself and one's fellow man to live upon this world; to others, it is viewed as repellent, barbaric, savage, an accession to humanity's baser instincts. It has been called the last resource of political diplomacy, and it has been described as something that God would never have wanted for His children at all.
War is not really glorious - it is horrible, dirty, terrifying, painful, and destructive on many different levels. Any "glory" can really only be seen in retrospect, when you look back and see that terrified private soldier who still did his duty, the junior officer who led his men through a storm of metal to accomplish an objective, the battalion commander who kept all of his men moving in the same direction despite the enemy's resistance, or the general who read the enemy's move perfectly and swung his own troops into the proper counterattack. Each level up, however, removes the amount of mud from the individual - the mud on the general's boots comes whenever he dismounts his horse/jeep to inspect the shattered ground of a specific area (having come forward from his safe position, aloof in the rear). That private soldier, on the other hand, has mud in places he didn't know mud could go, is exhausted from days of constant action, from moving without rest, burning energy without eating, and from having no more adrenaline in his body to keep him moving. He can't nap for an hour 'to keep his mind fresh' - if he closes his eyes, they may never open again!
Gone, really, are the days of 'warriors,' the days when armies consisted mainly of those who wanted to fight, who trained their whole lives for it and could expect to use their skills because a fight between their clan and the one next to them could be resolved relatively quickly through them engaging each other. Don't get me wrong: there are still 'warriors' in our world today. You don't join any of the "elite" forces of any nation's military without driving yourself to the point of exhaustion/insanity - the SAS, US Navy SEALs, US Army Rangers and other groups like them around the world are not looking for soldiers. They are looking for warriors, who will drive themselves to the point of physical failure and breakdown in training so that just about anything they might encounter in the field will be a breeze by comparison. However, these groups also tend to fight limited engagements and have single-component missions, and exist as swords to be sheathed until needed. The ordinary private soldier today walks a post, totes a rifle, and gets moved about at the whim of an officer he has possibly never met and who probably doesn't even know his name. He's a club, a blunt instrument, to be used and possibly abused in a variety of ways, some of which he has trained for, and some of which require (as for everyone) a certain amount of OJT.
Now, what does this have to do with "protesting"? Well,
hanrow had an interesting link to a certain story on his journal, while this is actually the site composed by the creator of the Cherry Blossom Backpack. The young lady in question is a student at MIT who has composed some technologically interesting pieces of art during her time there. Part of this contraption's interest is found in that she wears it and walks around town not knowing if or when it is going to go off due to a bomb's explosion in Baghdad corresponding with her present location in Boston! The confetti expelled by the launchers in the backpack contains the names of civilians who have been killed in Iraq during the American incursion there, just some of the 34,000 that her sources are aware of (in a bit of a contradiction to the just under 10,000 that the US State Department figures have been slain). She says that she is trying to 'create empathy' with this device, that it helps to symbolize that "human loss resonates beyond the boundary of conflict." Most of the people who have commented on the various places where it has been posted are calling it a "protest" of the war in Iraq.
But what is she protesting?
Is she protesting that the mere presence of American forces are destabilizing the region, and therefore declaring that if the Coalition Forces were to pull out of Iraq, the bombing of civilians and the slaughter of 'police' forces would stop? You would think that she would be declaring that outright somewhere (most people who believe this are very open about it). She does not.
Okay, is she then supporting the war by saying that for Coalition Forces to pull out would render all of these deaths as worthless? Again, I don't think so, because she does not out and out declare it anywhere.
Is she criticizing the American forces for not doing enough to help the people of Iraq? Is she criticizing the efforts of the soldiers, the doctors and nurses and the medics in the field, saying that their efforts are on too small a scale and that these are lives lost through a lack of will to be of assistance? I mean, she is using the casualty number that is three times the size of the "official" record... but these be shark-infested waters, and from what I'm seeing, she's not swimming there.
Is she trying to raise awareness of the randomness of death in Iraq? Is she trying to make people aware that behind each statistic there lies a name, a face, a history, and a life? Yes... but to what end?
Protests have an end in mind, a 'correction' to a flawed situation, a simple declaration of what the protestors want to see stopped or put in place as a replacement for what already exists. "Stop the whaling." "Bring the troops home." "Forgive the debt of poor nations." These are protests - against a specific body or organization, with a specific and (technically) achievable goal. Protests can demand just about anything - actually achieving the aims of the protest, however, are never as easy as the protesters seem to think: their attitude is more along the lines of "Just do this and all will be well!"
Protesting a war because one thinks that war is immoral is simple: declare "I won't fight" and don't go. Do it before you put on the uniform, before you swear the oaths and publicly, so that everyone knows! Most armies do have a Conscientious Objector exception clause because they don't want to waste their time training someone who won't fight.
Protesting a war that you think is causing egregiously destructive behaviour without an acceptable end in mind needs to be focused properly: on the politicians, not on the soldiers themselves. A uniform does not make one a "murderer," as much as many of the sixties' hippies wanted to believe it. I fully believe that a uniform engenders a sense of discipline and, properly guided, a sense of honour and acceptedness based on clear guidelines and expectations. However, an intolerable situation coupled with ineffective political leadership and a lack of will to succeed will drive the troops on the sharp end of the stick to the point of destructiveness - whether that destructiveness manifests itself outward or reflexively depends on the psyche of the individual soldier.
The war in Iraq is a schmozz because, as in Vietnam, the enemy is not wearing a uniform and looks just like the locals because they are the locals. Bush cannot make the enemy reveal themselves, no matter how many high-tech toys he deploys, nor how many troops he puts on the ground. The enemy wants control; the Americans want control; the people want peace, but they also want to live. There is no clear strategy for declaring an actual 'victory' and no way to make American thought patterns stick in the Middle East.
The creator of the Cherry Blossoms Backpack is right in one thing: every name on every sheet has a name, a face, a story, a life, someone who loved them, someone who misses them, and someone who killed them. But until she can reach inside the minds of those who kill and justify the wanton deaths in the name of some higher cause and make them see the true pain they are causing, she's creating nothing more than a spectacle of "performance art" and essentially changing nothing.