{"id":1771,"date":"2008-06-16T05:13:20","date_gmt":"2008-06-16T05:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2008-06-16T15:32:36","modified_gmt":"2008-06-16T15:32:36","slug":"mccain_peace_ac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1771","title":{"rendered":"McCain, Peace Activists, Moral Hazard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Overall good guy Phil Carter has a piece up on John McCain’s War College thesis<\/a>. I’d meant to blog the NYT story, but Carter makes the argument I want to challenge so well that I’d rather talk about his post than directly about McCain’s paper.<\/p>\n

Here’s McCain<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“The biggest factor in a man’s ability to perform credibly as a prisoner of war is a strong belief in the correctness of his nation’s foreign policy,” Mr. McCain wrote in a 1974 essay submitted to the National War College and never released to the public. Prisoners who questioned “the legality of the war” were “extremely easy marks for Communist propaganda,” he wrote.<\/p>\n

\nAmericans captured after 1968 had proven to be more susceptible to North Vietnamese pressure, he argued, because they “had been exposed to the divisive forces which had come into focus as a result of the antiwar movement in the United States.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here’s Carter:<\/p>\n

Should we offer our unconditional, unwavering, unquestioning and blind support for the troops — and the administration which sent them into war? Is that our role in the American democratic system? Does “support the troops” literally mean support their mission no matter what? Or is there another way?<\/p>\n

\nI fundamentally disagree with McCain’s thesis and broader argument. Our Constitution gives the ultimate say in matters of war and peace to the people — through their election of the president and Congress and their ability to shape political decisions through popular will. This is an imperfect system, as we have seen in both Vietnam and Iraq. Unpopular wars take a long time to bend to popular opinion. But, it is our system, and our Constitution, and it demands a type of engagement from the people that is the antithesis of what McCain describes.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carter is right, but he’s also fundamentally wrong<\/b> (note: see update below).<\/p>\n

It’s absolutely the case that our way of life is centered on the right to have our own opinions.<\/p>\n

But it’s also absolutely the case that dissent has consequences, and the place where Phil’s wrong is in missing the final step to acknowledging that. Here he comes close to this:<\/p>\n

There is a very powerful idea here<\/b>. In writing<\/a> about his own survival in Nazi concentration camps, psychologist Viktor Frankl emphasized the importance of “purpose.” In short, he who has a why can endure just about anything. For Frankl, that purpose was living to publish his story and his psychological insights on the camps. McCain argues that his purpose was to support American foreign policy and the containment of Communism — and that knowing this purpose and believing in it was crucial for his survival.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Phil – and the others who publicly oppose the war – need to accept the responsibility for the impact of their positions. <\/p>\n

That responsibility may be right and have positive result – if their position against the war and the causes for it is correct. But inextricably tied up in that is the intermediate result…<\/p>\n

…which may be that while the question is being decided, their dissent and attack on the “purpose” of those who fight has real and negative consequences. The positive and negative cannot be separated, and those who oppose the war would strengthen the honesty of their positions by acknowledging this. For those who support the war, there is positive and negative just as inextricably tied together to be sure.<\/p>\n

More on this soon.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b> Looking at this at the breakfast table, I think that my wording is harsher than my disagreement with Phil supports. I do think that he missed the – essential to me – link connecting the two positions, and I think that ‘missing link’ is one of the lynchpins of my discomfort with the moral position(s) of the antiwar movement. So my point, I think, stands.<\/p>\n

But ‘absolutely wrong’ probably wasn’t the best way to put that. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John McCain, POW’s protesters, and ‘purpose’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}