Support Hos

By Crispin Sartwell

It seems that all Americans, whatever their views on the war, are clamoring to express support for our troops. Democratic presidential candidates (including those, such as Howard Dean, who are vehemently anti-war), unanimous quorums of both houses of Congress, even news anchors have felt compelled to make this declaration.

Expressing support for our troops is a painless way to appear kind and patriotic. But the very fact that it is painless should give us a bit of pause. It's unanimous because it's meaningless.

Partly, such declarations are implicitly responses to the disaster that returning Vietnam veterans faced, in which they often felt disowned by the country for which they had presumably been fighting.

This, it was held, increased their alienation and sense of betrayal, and was considered to be one factor in a variety of health problems that many faced and face.

Fair enough. And if what "I support the troops" means is that we wish, all things being equal, that the troops live long, happy lives, then I heartily concur. Of course, I wish the same for all people of good will the world over, and for that matter for all intelligent life forms anywhere in the universe, if any.

But if "I support our troops" means "I support what our troops are doing" - an assertion which at least has some content - then it is simply a declaration of support for the war. The people who opposed the troops in Vietnam thought that the war was unjust and so therefore the actions of the people who were fighting it were wrong. When these soldiers came back, they faced the accusation that they had done something wrong. It was a sincere and important and appropriate accusation.

That doesn't mean, of course, that we couldn't understand how someone might have been misled by patriotic enthusiasm or a sense of duty into doing something bad. It didn't mean that we begrudged these folks health care at taxpayers' expense. It didn't mean that - short of a My Lai situation - we condemned the people as evil overall. It just meant that we thought they had made the ethically wrong choice.

Of course, we might relieve the average soldier of responsibility for his own actions in a variety of ways. We might blame the commanders. We might blame a system that encourages, or indeed requires, strict obedience to orders. Then we could, perhaps, condemn the war and not condemn the actions by which the war is fought or the people doing the fighting.

But that is a formula for disaster, as we saw again and again in the state-sponsored holocausts of the 20th century. A soldier chooses to join the military, and chooses to obey orders, and if these violate his conscience, then he is himself to blame for the results of his own actions.

Now I very much hope that the moral situation of the American troops currently engaged will be reasonable. Saddam Hussein is worthy of removal, though I can't see that we had any acute reason to do so now. Perhaps we will take better care of civilian lives than we have in the past. And perhaps the government with which we replace Hussein's will be better than his, and better, for that matter, than the vicious mafiosi we were propping up in Vietnam. The current government of Afghanistan is a reasonably good omen.

But even at this moment it is important for dissenting Americans to express themselves, and we have a right to do so. So even at this moment, mealy-mouthed cliches that no one can possibly reject are not a worthwhile form of public discourse.

If you oppose the war, work up your guts and say so.