From the Editor's Desk

Where the military questions itself

In a free-association exercise, Leavenworth, Kan., would not be the first locale to come to mind in response to “intellectual rigor.” (The Sisters of Charity and their institution, the University of St. Mary, excepted, of course.) It’s mostly known for a military base and a huge prison.

But as Paul Winner demonstrates in an artful piece, the military college at Fort Leavenworth is a place where presumptions are regularly stood on their heads. ( See story)

Since the Vietnam era, this newspaper has raised far more questions than applause at the resort to violence, especially massive, state-sponsored violence. The objections have been raised for any number of considered reasons, backed by the Catholic social justice tradition, just-war thinking and the condemnations of war that emanate with increasing frequency from the Vatican and church authorities around the world.

One might append a very practical reason to the above. In recent decades, the failure in Vietnam and the unraveling of the misbegotten war in Iraq stand as tragic proof that war doesn’t work. There are limits to overwhelming power and force and to the most sophisticated war technology.

That said, the vision of a modern city without a police force, let alone a country without a military, lies only in the farthest extremes of my imagination.

And if that’s the case (the other given in all of this is that an almost endless stretch of largely untried possibilities lies between the extreme militarism we are experiencing at this time and absolute pacifism, a position to which I cannot yet subscribe), then I come square up against a thorny question: Just what is the legitimate use of force?

I am not suggesting that this week’s issue contains the answer, nor that an answer exists. You may, however, find the report on the discussions at Leavenworth encouraging. It is heartening to know that the warriors and those who train the soldiers take self-scrutiny so seriously. It is disheartening, at the same time, to know that such discussions are not going to get the attention they should in the wider culture. It is also a fact of military culture that raising ethical issues doesn’t trump obeying orders. Armies are, in the end, armies, and they work a certain way because war is war and not an exercise in democracy or the Socratic method.

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The odd question we face today is what happens in a system based on civilian control when those entrusted to guard the guards -- civilians who control the military -- end up to have more warrior tendencies than the warriors themselves?

Even those who subscribe to the manners of the military culture understand there’s a time to suspend protocol and speak up. So some months back we had the unprecedented show of opposition to the administration’s tactics by a collection of retired generals. It seems that if those with military experience had been listened to, from Colin Powell on down to those engaged in the discussions at Leavenworth, we might not be engaged in the endless nightmare that Iraq has become. Instead we are treated to the expanding fantasies of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who for so long sounded like John Wayne with a bad script.

Now we await word of new directions, the result of weeks of presidential consultations in the wake of the Iraq Study Group’s highly critical report, to see how clearly the reality of the Iraq fiasco is showing up on the administration’s radar.

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, January 12, 2007