Here’s something I’d like to see this campaign season: our two major party candidates debating our wars rather than ignoring them. Both President Obama and Governor Romney prefer to praise the troops rather than to address the tragic consequences of continuing military action in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The latter, when they’re addressed at all, are reduced to sound bites and homilies about the need to “stay the course” and “support our troops.” Praising our military while ignoring the wars we send them to is perhaps the biggest shame of American political discourse today (and that is indeed saying a lot). Think about it. The eleventh anniversary of our war in Afghanistan recently passed with barely a murmur in the media. This is three times as long as the U.S. military fought in World War II. Presidential conventions and debates occur with no sustained discussion of Afghanistan (Iraq having been already consigned to political oblivion). The most vital, essential, and sacred decision we can make as a nation — when to send our troops into harm’s way and under what conditions we grant them the authority in our nation’s name to take the lives of others — this is neither critiqued nor discussed in our political discourse.
Even as we build more military bases and deploy more troops overseas, even as we elevate defense spending to new heights, our political elites work to isolate war from their politics and our society. But war is inseparable from politics, as the Prussian theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz, reminded us two centuries ago. At the same time, celebrating the actions of our troops as selflessly heroic is a powerful political argument in and of itself, one that is meant to obscure the reality that the sum of all their actions — the good, the bad, and the ugly — is a reflection of our society, a reflection that has alienated many of our friends in the world community.
For good reason the U.S. Constitution puts the military under civilian political control. A confirmed democracy needs serious debate about any war contemplated. Yet we refuse to debate war openly and with honesty. We waste the energies and lives of our young, even as we sow the dragon’s teeth of future wars through misadventure.