II. War & Peace -- Cops Vs. Generals
But there is an additional level of complexity for Quakers regarding the new war which needs to be teased out, a third paradigm that may be shifting out from under us, making our footing uncertain. Again this can be illuminated by a glance into Quaker history:
While early Friends regularly denounced war as an instrument of state policy, they also generally upheld the place and role of what they called "the magistrate," in enforcing what we would now think of as "law and order" within a society.
This distinction can perhaps be usefully summed up as "the Cops versus the Generals." Early Friends were anxious to dispense with generals and armies; but they weren’t in such a hurry to get rid of the cops. Fox among others more than once quoted scripture (cf. Romans 13: 3-4; 1 Peter 2:14) to the effect that "magistrates," local authorities were divinely sanctioned as "a terror to evil-doers," who did not "bear the sword in vain." (As many leading figures in the Quaker community gained acceptance and wealth, their concern for "law and order" increased, as does that of most people with something to lose. As the saying goes, Quakers came to Philadelphia to do good, and some did very well indeed.)
Of course, in practice there have often been gray areas and overlaps between the two realms of the cops and the generals. The necessity to draw lines between them has made for recurrent headaches for the weighty Friends called upon both to uphold a peace testimony -- and to survive as a community in a tough world.
To take one obscure but apposite historical example: in 1705, the Quaker Mother Church was a body called London Yearly meeting; and its executive committee was called the Meeting for Sufferings. In 1705 this group was asked to adjudicate a dispute among Friends on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Island officials, fearing a French invasion, were building various fortifications, posting sentinels and training a militia. They had offered Friends there the option of helping with some of the construction work, as well as keeping watch, in lieu of serving directly in the armed militia.
Older Friends were ready to accept this arrangement as a reasonable accommodation of their pacifist scruples. But then a group of young radicals loudly dissented, insisting that such projects were in fact "all one," of a piece with the military effort, and thus all were contrary to stated Quaker convictions, which called for Friends to steer clear both of war itself and the preparations for war. The two groups could not resolve this difference, so both factions appealed to London for support.
Meeting for Sufferings took awhile to respond; were its members squirming? I wonder.
But in the end, being the Establishment, they sided with the older Friends, ruling that keeping watch and helping build walls were not inherently warlike, but were simply prudent precautions that good neighbors owed each other under the Golden Rule.
Who was right? Or, suppose you (or I) were on meeting for Sufferings -- who would we have sided with?
Today many believe our planet is increasingly resembling that island of Antigua, more and more of an inescapably close-knit community, rather than a collection of heterogeneous sovereignties, each a law unto itself. In this globalized context, the new war can be portrayed as more an attempt at international law enforcement than as a specimen of traditional warfare.
Such a line of argument seeks to escape Lincoln’s dilemma by redefining it out of existence: in these cases, we Quakers don’t really have to choose between war and oppression, because, if it is fought against grave "oppression" like terrorism, such a campaign isn’t really a "war."
To be sure, it is easy to find Friends who, like the young Antigua dissenters, would reject this whole "world cop" notion as an abandonment, even a sellout, of 350 years of Quaker pacifism. To them the current war is "all one" with other wars, of a piece with Vietnam and Desert Storm, no more than another bloody example of American militarism and imperialist pretensions running amok.
For that matter, objections to the new calls for an imperial Pax Americana don’t come only from religious pacifists. Listen to retired Army Col. David Hackworth, a combat veteran and military columnist who is very far from being a pacifist, from his column of December 26, 2001, entitled: "A Christmas Wish –– Let’s End Our Role as Globocop":
"Since I was a kid, the sound of American boots marching off to war has come to seem as inevitable to the young men of this nation –– and now, unfortunately, to the young women as well –– as spring rain.
First there was World War II, a just war against totalitarian monsters in which –– as with today's terrorist crazies –– we had to either whip 'em or wind up suffering the terrible consequences.
But once the Axis was put down in 1945, America became the self-appointed guardian of Western civilization, and Johnny didn't come marching home. Like the Romans and Brits before us, we began setting up outposts around the world without any mind of the burden or the cost.
This long occupation has been intermittently interrupted by the occasional hot war, as with Korea –– another just conflict that certainly was in our national interests –– or Vietnam –– where we had no reason for going except the greed of the war profiteers. . . .
We maintain about 100,000 military personnel in both Europe and Asia –– where many of the locals want us gone yesterday –– at a cost of billions of dollars per year. The locals rightly say that we've overstayed our mission, which ended when another empire, the Soviet Union, bellied up and followed the path of the Romans and the Brits into history's dustbin. So it doesn't make a lick of military sense. Not only are these people more than capable of defending themselves against now mainly nonexistent threats, the average Hans and Kim are chanting, "Yankee go home."
. . . Sure we need a strong military ready to defend America, but we need one that –– as opposed to the Roman, Brit and Soviet models –– follows the wise guidance of our Founding Fathers when they said that we shouldn't do a Pax Americana and stick our nose in other folks' dealings."
Yet there are in fact thoughtful Friends who have adopted the world cop view, at least in principle. One is Daniel Seeger, the retired Executive Director of Pendle Hill, formerly a career executive for the American Friends Service Committee, and a very weighty, influential Friend. Writing in 1995 (in a book of essays, A Continuing Journey) on the character of Quaker peace witness in a "post-Cold War world," he concludes:
"It is my conviction that if progress is to be made in...the prevention of ethnic violence; and the ending of the arms trade and arms profiteering -- such progress will require development of a body of international law governing these matters and a capacity of the international community to enforce these laws on behalf of the common good. It seems to me that this will involve some sort of international police force...to intervene when, in the power vacuum created by the collapse of empires, ethnic strife breaks out."
Seeger hastens to admit that there are risks associated with this concept, and urges Friends to begin thinking these questions through in a deliberate and searching way, especially the task of designing safeguards against the abuse of such power.
Indeed. One can hear the skeptics already: designing such "safeguards" will be no small task. If police forces are so benign, it will be asked, why is there such a continuing plague of cases of notorious and atrocious police abuse? What about New York City, where police pumped 41 bullets into Amadou Diallo, and brutalized Abner Louima? Or the Los Angele’s Police department’s notorious Mark Fuhrman, whose chilling and acknowledged habit of faking evidence against persons of color helped acquit O.J. Simpson. These are only a few recent examples?
The record of violent police misconduct is long and daunting. It could easily be argued that police forces are just as dangerous as armies, except for the fact that they’re smaller and not as heavily armed.
Did the U.S. bombing Kosovo campaign in 1999 embody what Seeger had in mind? Will the current "war on terror" end up resembling it, with a U.S.-backed protectorate in Afghanistan? What can Friends make of such a scenario?
For myself, while the "world cop" idea has a certain plausibility, it still seems very risky. Here are some of the hazards its current incarnation seems to carry:
Do we know what kind of "law and order" the U.S. is out to enforce? I don’t. The simplistic rhetoric from the White House is neither concrete nor entirely convincing. what would "victory" in this latest struggle look like to our current officials?
Columnist Molly Ivins offered a typically apt and pungent summary of this situation in her column of April 10, 2002:
"From the beginning," she wrote, "the trouble with ‘war against terrorism’ has been the definition of terrorism and the immutable fact that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. After he got us involved in this war on a noun, Bush then upped the ante and announced it was a war between good and evil, and we would continue until we had eradicated evil. Oh man, this is going to be a long sucker."
For that matter, the old pacifist’s question, of whether such a "victory" will be worth the longer-term cost seems very apropos just now. While the number of US casualties from the one day of attacks in September was in the thousands, there seems little doubt that the cost of the U.S. war in Afghan lives, is probably already higher, and likely to increase substantially. Besides actual combat deaths, how many unnecessary deaths have there been among the hundreds of thousands of war refugees, of which we now hear so little?
Beyond Afghanistan itself, this war seems based on maintaining indefinitely a shaky coalition that itself has put the U.S. in league with a pack of governments whose own records are hardly less bloody and ominous than those of the perpetrators we are so loudly determined to track down. Will the U.S. end up trading an enforced stability in one small province for a much more dangerous instability on a much larger stage?
Or, to pursue the "what if" one step further, what if the present arrangement falls apart? What might that mean? We can get some clues, I think, from the case of Kosovo. The fact is, it was the Pentagon, not mobs of protesting peaceniks, who raised the fiercest objections to plans for US military intervention in the Balkans with ground forces. They did this quietly, "through channels," but it was no secret. This is an important point, I think.
The basis of the generals’ unease was that the region presents many difficulties and traps for a military mission; I believe the word "quagmire" has been mentioned. This assessment was repeated for all the world to read on June 3, 1999 in the New York Times’ account of President Clinton’s meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"Among Pentagon strategists," read the dispatch, "there are strong reservations about an invasion that could quickly become mired in the Balkans with no clear exit in sight."
A few paragraphs later, the point is repeated: "From the start, the chiefs have expressed reservations about NATO's strategy and ever deeper misgivings about the prospects of an invasion, which would require thousands of troops and would risk significant casualties. On the 71st day of the air campaign, those views have not changed, the officials said."
For the short-term, the new war is different, in one major respect: the enemy attacked the Pentagon, the citadel and symbol of U.S. military might. A fighting machine of its size and ethos can hardly be expected to absorb such a blow without a thirst for retaliation in kind. Whether wise or effective, payback of the sort we have seen in the autumn of 2001 was a certainty.
But for the longer term, how long can a recurrence of the generals’ misgivings of 1999 be staved off? A long war/occupation in Afghanistan will be a major logistical challenge. A wider war, against Iraq, in the Philippines and who knows where else, will be even more daunting. And amid this confusion, debate and doubt among politicians and public about the wisdom of the entire campaign may begin to grow, as they already are in Europe.
In short, the situation, difficult as it already has been, could easily become disastrous.
This is a worst-case scenario, of course. On the other side, maybe al Queda and its forces have been decisively defeated and scattered, and Afghanistan will somehow be reconstructed to be harmless to those within and beyond its borders. The world "cops" may win this round with the "bad guys" after all.
What might all this mean for Friends and other religious pacifists? Is there a useful roles for our Quaker peace witness in light of such "world cop" efforts?
Copyright © 2002