Ugly Choices

By David Simmons

“War is ugly,” US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said in the Pentagon’s latest damage-control effort following troops’ misbehaviour in Afghanistan.

Well, why do it, then?

My parents were veterans of a “just” war, the one that tore Europe apart in the 1940s. Although they rarely spoke of their experiences in World War II, and certainly never pretended there was any glory or honour in it, my early life was nevertheless immersed in the concept that war is sometimes necessary, and that good can be done by it – but only as a last resort.

Like many of my generation, I found that line of thinking challenged by the Vietnam War, a harsh awakening to the possibility of a “war of choice” and, more broadly, the illogic and disingenuousness of the Cold War itself. It turned out that wars were not necessarily waged to defend home and hearth or to protect our “freedom”, but to maintain global economic imbalances at best, or at worst for no sounder reason than ideology.

During that period, we also were forced by the My Lai scandal to wake up to the fact that, in the heat of war, “atrocities” are not always committed by the enemy, but by the good guys too. It should have been obvious, but a lot of us had let the mythology of the “just” wars in Europe, the Pacific and Korea cloud our logic. War films have had a lot to do with that distortion; a notable exception, of sorts, is Saving Private Ryan, in which a German machine-gunner who killed one of their colleagues is captured by US Captain John Miller and his team. Some of the men want to kill the German in revenge, but Miller lets him go.

I seriously doubt that in real life, a real Captain Miller would not have let his men slaughter the German. Would you? Would I, in such a situation, when I had been sent to a foreign land where people were killing my friends and, when we managed to catch one of them, we had the chance to blow his despised head off? With no repercussions? How many such “atrocities” by the Allies were covered up?

Even 30 years later, My Lai–type events rarely came out in the open. It took more than a year for independent journalist Seymour Hersh to break that story; how many other atrocity stories died with their perpetrators? The very word “atrocity”, derived from Latin atrocitas (“cruelty”), is a propaganda tool, implying that such things are not the norm.

Nowadays independent journalists are practically a thing of the past; nothing is reported if there is no money to be made. But at the same time we journos were selling our souls to the corporations who paid our salaries, we were being replaced by cell-phone cameras and the Internet. And so the Abu Ghraibs and peed-on corpses and grinning soldiers posing with body parts go viral, stripping us of any excuses we have left to deny that “war is ugly”. That it should be avoided at all cost.

Yet self-delusion is a powerful thing, and we won’t learn from the Afghanistan horrors any more than we learned from those in Iraq, Bosnia, or Nicaragua or Vietnam or Korea or the Ardennes.

Sometimes, the facts are just too ugly to face up to.