It took me over a year after leaving the military to write my first public dissent against the Global War on Terror. It was late 2006, and the death toll was mounting in Iraq and Afghanistan. By that point, both countries were essentially failed states. Nearly all Iraqis wanted US forces to leave—after all, Washington’s illegal and immoral 2003 invasion had turned their country and society upside down. The world was a far more dangerous and intolerant place than it had been when I enlisted in the US Army in July 2002. Hundreds of American soldiers were being killed and injured monthly, and the moral fabric of our country seemed to be unraveling. On a more personal note, in 2004 my older brother, Pat, had been killed in action while we were deployed together in Afghanistan. In short, I was hardly in the best headspace.
Transitioning out of the military and back into civilian life was a struggle. Fairly or unfairly, I had trouble relating to civilians, who seemed to be carrying on with their usual lives unconcerned by America’s actions overseas. I generally kept to myself. Most of my time was spent watching C-SPAN and reading books on philosophy, science, and American imperialism. Life seemed directionless and without purpose. I wanted to have as few feelings as possible; remaining stoic and isolated seemed to serve me well. Thinking about the military and foreign policy, on the other hand, brought an upwelling of disbelief, disappointment, rage, and survivor’s guilt. At times I would degenerate (speaking loosely and un-clinically) into feeling suicidal, homicidal, or both.
Somehow, though, I managed to steer myself into something I felt was productive and cathartic: writing an article for Robert Scheer’s progressive online journal Truthdig. The piece began by recalling a conversation I’d had with Pat before we joined the military: “He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice … until we got out.”
There were a few nightmare scenarios we had discussed prior to enlisting. One of those was that our service might be used as a tool of profit and power, not to defend the country or for the good of humanity. But we hadn’t imagined just how bad things would get. After Pat’s death, a phrase kept running through my head: how the fuck is it possible that … followed by one disaster after another. The Truthdig article was the first time I wrote (or even spoke) publicly, so for the purposes of the piece I substituted “somehow”:
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.…
Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.
Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is tolerated.…
Somehow torture is tolerated.…
Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.…
Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.…
Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.…
Somehow nobody is accountable for this.
I hoped my voice could in some small way affect the congressional elections that were taking place the following month. More important, though, I needed to release what was bottled up inside me, regardless of whether anyone cared or listened.
It has been fifteen years since I wrote that article. Frankly, I don’t see myself as a true war dissenter in the traditional sense, although I am grateful and honored to be considered one. That designation, I believe, needs to be earned through persistent, relentless public advocacy against illegal wars and immoral military policy. I am also not an intellectual, journalist, or whistleblower immersed in foreign policy conversation. Nor am I a high-ranking military official critiquing national military strategy. I’m simply a veteran who enlisted in the Army to defend this country on the front lines after the 9/11 attacks.
The main impetus for my war dissent was a sense of moral obligation. There was a massive disconnect between the stated laws and ideals of my country, on one hand, and the stark realities that were unfolding in front of me.
I GREW UP in San Jose, California, in a small historic mining town called New Almaden. Our house was tucked against the mountains of Almaden Quicksilver County Park. It was an ideal environment for me, my two brothers, and our parents to thrive—safe, quiet, and with lots to do outside. Not particularly gifted in the classroom, I gravitated toward athletics. Competitive sports offered a controlled physical environment where I could display skill, courage, and discipline, as well as a chance to regularly fail or succeed.
Everyone in my family really enjoyed history, not from a particularly academic, PhD-level perspective but in the broader sense of regularly reading about and discussing it. There were always books around the house about the Civil War, both world wars, the Korean War, and Vietnam. We did talk mostly about military history, rather than economic, scientific, religious, artistic, or other varieties—presumably because, like most kids our age, we had grandparents and other family members with significant military backgrounds.
Naturally, the war that came up most often was World War II. Our grandfather had been stationed at Pearl Harbor during the attack, which filled us with pride and curiosity. We saw the soldiers defending the world from fascism as the gold standard of what it means to serve both one’s country and the global community. That “greatest generation” had fought for the good of all humanity, and made a positive difference in the world, something I think every kid and adult wants to do.
As a teenager I found myself gravitating toward the military more and more. I viewed being a soldier as the only real way of displaying the ultimate courage and virtue. (Of course it is not true, but my experience and perception were limited at the time.) Since I played a lot of sports, I was involved in a lot of events that began with ceremonial renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and it always gave me goose bumps. It was striking how everyone came together to celebrate our history and offer appreciation for those who had sacrificed so much—often everything—so that I could swing a bat for fun. I felt a real sense of gratitude for what past generations of veterans had endured and accomplished.
I also felt a sense of inadequacy. I gravitated toward books about the Green Berets, Army Rangers, Delta Force, Marine Recon, Navy SEALs, and other specialized elite units. These soldiers possessed a level of skill, bravery, and discipline linked to something bigger than a sport. What they were doing was not a game; it was real.
Both my parents grew up Catholic but stopped attending church well before they had kids, so I never had any kind of religious upbringing. Religious concepts like heaven and hell, sin and salvation, gods and scriptures, faith and prophets, and the like played no role in my life. Theism just wasn’t a thing in my family or circle of friends growing up, nor was it a major focus or issue in my community. My worldview is science-based, what might be termed naturalistic or, more aggressively, atheistic. Books like On the Origin of Species or physicist Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture have always been more palatable to me than the Bible or other religious texts. (I do, though, appreciate liberation theology used as a moral framework to fight oppression, as well as individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr., who used religious teachings to promote equality, freedom, empathy, peace, kindness, and self-determination.)
My interest in history and life’s big questions is why I chose to be a philosophy major in college, at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. My upbringing and my background may also explain both my loyalty to the United States and my sometimes skeptical attitude toward it. I’ve always loved the nation I was born into—its beauty, freedoms, opportunities, high standard of living, college football, and all the rest. But I had no illusions that it was divinely created, or that our leaders were infallible. I saw no individual, no institution, no nation, no book as being above reproach. Nor did I think that any people had been “chosen” from above through divine Providence, or possess more worth than any other people on earth. All aspects of life are fair game for scrutiny.
I knew American history was both wonderful and troubling. But I had a natural bias toward America: it was my country, and I wanted the best for it. So even when I would read about our belligerent foreign policy, it didn’t seem to represent the overall character and ethos of the nation or where we were headed. It was only on September 11, 2001, that I truly felt my own life starting to connect with America’s history and its actions overseas.
WHEN THE WORLD Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, I was twenty-three years old. I was an infielder with a minor league affiliate of the Cleveland Indians, getting paid (although not very much) to play a game. I had recently undergone shoulder surgery and was doing physical rehabilitation back home in California. That morning, I watched in horror as the planes smashed into the Twin Towers. My brain had trouble believing what I was seeing. The crystal clear blue sky in the background added to the devastation, as people burned alive and some jumped out of the buildings to their deaths. It was gut-wrenching. Firefighters and other first responders were risking their lives to save people in that cloud of destruction. I was three thousand miles away from it all, haunted by a feeling of powerlessness and inadequacy. I wanted to help but I couldn’t.
Up until then, I’d spent the greater part of my life trying to make it onto the forty-man roster of a major league baseball team. But I felt uneasy about those dreams in the wake of that horrible September day. As much as I loved baseball, the idea of continuing to play a game no longer seemed an acceptable path.
Thankfully, any decision I made would go relatively unnoticed outside the immediate circle of my friends and family. That was not quite the case for Pat. When the attacks occurred, he was in his fourth year of playing for the Arizona Cardinals in the NFL. There were quite a few football fans who watched him play and appreciated him as a person, both on and off the field So there ended up being a lot more attention for him to manage.
Ultimately, each person makes their own decision about whether to join the military; after all, the country ditched the draft at the tail end of the Vietnam War. Joining is certainly not for everyone. And while people who sign up for military service tend to be driven by similar motivations, the exact reasons are always personal, nuanced, and unique. In my own case, it was September 11 that caused me to enlist. The place where I was then in life, my age, my physical capability, my ethical framework, and my worldview made that decision seem obvious and morally obligatory for me.
As for Pat, he never publicly commented in detail on the reasons why he enlisted, and it’s not my place to speak for him. In my opinion, his actions speak for themselves. However, for context, in an interview with NBC News the day after the attacks, he commented: “My great-grandfather was at Pearl Harbor, and a lot of my family has gone and fought in wars. And I really haven’t done a damn thing as far as laying myself on the line like that. So I have a great deal of respect for those who have.” A few months later, in a diary entry that has since become public, he wrote: “After recent events, I’ve come to appreciate just how shallow and insignificant my role is. I’m no longer satisfied with the path I’ve been following.… My voice is calling me in a different direction. It is up to me whether or not to listen.”
So it was that in July 2002, Pat and I enlisted in the Army as infantrymen on a “buddy contract.” This enabled us to go through training together, with follow-on orders for the two of us to join the Army Rangers—part of the US special operations community—if we passed the requisite courses. Our goal was simply to do our part and serve our country honorably, nothing more and nothing less.
EVER SINCE I was a kid, there always seemed to be a lot of noise about Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein. During the first Gulf War, in 1990–91, I was in middle school and didn’t have a clue about what was going on. After the 9/11 attacks, I noticed an uptick in aggressive rhetoric directed Saddam’s way. In January 2002, President George W. Bush called out Iraq in his infamous “axis of evil” quip during the State of the Union, lumping the country together with Iran and North Korea. Still, it wasn’t until I was in basic training in late 2002 that the possibility of invading Iraq became real to me.
During basic training, we heard some comments about what was brewing in Iraq and how we should start mentally preparing for a new war. We had little to no access to the outside world at the time, so the information felt vague, indeed disturbingly so. However, at the time my focus was simply on getting through basic training, advanced infantry training, Airborne School, and the Ranger Indoctrination Program—the last of these, the final prerequisite before joining the 75th Ranger Regiment. As long as we passed all of them, Pat and I would end up where we wanted to be in order to serve our country on the front lines. After months of long and grueling training, we finally made it, joining the 2nd Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment in Fort Lewis, Washington.
It was only when we got to our unit that the talk of going to war with Iraq really sank in. We were not getting ready for Afghanistan; the focus was 100 percent Iraq. And now that we had regular access to the same information as the rest of the American people, we also realized that this war was seemingly preordained, a fait accompli. Stories of weapons of mass destruction, mobile weapons labs, links to al-Qaeda, impending mushroom clouds over New York City, and all kinds of such fanciful shit were being served up by the Bush administration as justifications ostensibly requiring the United States to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein. None of it seemed tethered to reality. It felt like such nonsense should have been dismissed out of hand by everyone, but it wasn’t.
It was at this time that I started to notice war-dissenting voices more clearly—and recognize that they had a direct connection to my situation. The propaganda shoveled to the public was being fact-checked and scrutinized in real time. I was grateful for the insightful and skeptical voices in the conversation. But even after the United States and the United Kingdom failed to secure an authorization at the United Nations to use force against Iraq, the powers that be in Washington simply didn’t care. Days before the invasion, an article in the Washington Post pointed out that the Bush administration was preparing to attack Iraq “on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved—by the United Nations, European governments and even US intelligence reports.” Sadly, if international governing bodies and the US government’s own intelligence reports were being disregarded, war dissenters hardly stood a chance of stopping the invasion. So invade Iraq we did—with Pat and me part of the invading force.
Being certain that we were participants in a war of aggression—what the Nuremberg Tribunal called “the supreme international crime”—was disheartening, to say the least. My childhood delusions of saving the galaxy like Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, or Lando Calrissian were met with the stark reality of being a mere storm trooper for the US empire. Pat never spoke to the press during his enlistment, but a fellow Ranger, Russell Baer, later told a reporter about a scene that took place during the invasion. “I can see it like a movie screen,” he said. “We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat; we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so fucking illegal.’”
United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan has said the same thing in no uncertain terms. Asked in an interview about the invasion of Iraq, he declared: “I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter. From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal.” The United States is a signatory of the charter. But the sad reality is that the United States has veto power as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, so the council will never formally address the illegality of the war. The Bush administration will never be convicted or even censured for its profound crime. Instead of being locked up, the architects of the aggression against Iraq walk the streets as if nothing happened and are even glorified.
As a soldier, I was prepared to serve wherever our elected officials and the American people sent me. I willingly relinquished that aspect of my volition when I enlisted in the US Army, and I was not going to renege on my commitment. However, I didn’t volunteer to risk my life for America only to have officials motivated by profit and power use me as a glorified state-sponsored terrorist. Nor had I wanted to be cheered on by a manipulated, apathetic, and largely deluded citizenry. I felt, then and now, that Americans who voluntarily don the uniform should know for certain that their service is being used to defend this country and further the good of humanity. Anything less is a betrayal of the service member.
THE BETRAYAL BECAME more personal after we redeployed to Afghanistan, where Pat was killed on April 22, 2004, in a friendly fire incident. The Bush administration didn’t like the optics of a high-profile soldier like Pat, in a Ranger battalion no less, being killed by friendly fire. In addition, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal had just hit the headlines. So the government lied to us—his family—and to the American public with a manufactured story about him dying by enemy fire, then used him to promote more war. For maximum effect, they awarded him a Silver Star, one of the highest military honors. It was all based on fabricated witness statements and a false narrative; they didn’t even bother to find out what courageous actions he actually took on the battlefield. Our family did not start getting even fragmentary versions of the truth until about a month later and then in large part only because the coroner refused to sign the fabricated autopsy report.
Our family labored through multiple investigations, first within the US Army, then with the Department of Defense, and eventually the US Congress. Our mother, Mary, was without a doubt the driver of this effort, relentless in the fight for truth. The rest of the family, lots of friends, journalists, soldiers, veterans, and eventually elected officials contributed to it as well. However, none of it was initially motivated by a desire to dissent against the war. Rather, we simply wanted to uncover facts and get justice and accountability for Pat.
As the investigations mounted, it became clear that Pat was not the only service member who’d been used for political purposes during this time. Three years after his death, my mom and I testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform alongside Jessica Lynch. Lynch had been taken prisoner at the onset of the Iraq War when her supply convoy got ambushed in Al Nasiriyah. Several soldiers died in the attack, and she was badly injured. A rescue mission took place at the Iraqi hospital where Lynch was being held, and our forces were able to free her. Although she had been knocked unconscious at the very beginning of the attack, after her rescue there was a false narrative created for public consumption about, as she put it, “the little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting.” These were stories she didn’t create, didn’t ask for, and couldn’t get to stop.
What I learned from the experience is that this wasn’t personal: for certain elements inside the power structure of the US government, this was purely business. The Bush administration and the US military were not trying to harm Pat or Jessica or any particular family with their lies, omissions, and deception. It could have been anyone. They were simply doing what they reflexively do when presented with global and domestic situations, good or bad: manage, control, and manipulate the optics to be favorable to them, and if possible use the situation as an opportunity to promote their agenda. The experience also helped me understand just how the US power structure functioned. It didn’t matter who called the shots inside our unaccountable empire: the result would generally be the same.
This lesson was reinforced for me when President Barack Obama replaced Bush in January 2009. Like many others, I hoped—or, rather, felt certain—that the country’s first Black president would promptly rein in America’s belligerent foreign policy. By most accounts, Obama is a kind, smart, reasonable, hardworking, and thoughtful person. Even so, it wasn’t long before he escalated the war in Afghanistan, expanded our global drone campaign, recolonized Africa with US troops, not-so-secretly helped turn Syria into an apocalyptic wasteland, and extended America’s economic warfare against countries like Venezuela. This, from a Nobel Peace Prize laureate! My disappointment with Obama’s foreign policy proved yet another reminder that the problems we face are structural and systemic—wired into the national DNA. I had counted on Obama’s election engendering a paradigm shift. Instead, he continued nearly all the Bush administration’s policies, only with far more sophistication. For both presidents, the main concern was expanding the American empire, or what US officials term “advancing American interests.”
History now began to take on a whole different dimension for me. Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, I started noticing how the various other American acts of international aggression—all those “police actions,” coups, illegal sanctions, meddled elections, and smaller-scale military interventions—seemed to show up everywhere. I’d been reading anti-imperialist authors like Greg Grandin, Eduardo Galeano, and Noam Chomsky for years, but now I could actually recognize the little games Washington was playing overseas nearly in real time. It was all so offensively transparent.
IN FEBRUARY 2019, I published another article on Truthdig, this one headlined “A Call to Halt an Illegal Invasion of Venezuela.” The US government was in the middle of staging yet another obvious coup in that country. President Donald Trump and the covert apparatus of the United States were colluding with an unpopular, unqualified Venezuelan impostor named Juan Guaidó, who’d declared himself president of Venezuela when he didn’t like the results of his country’s free and fair presidential election. It was all conducted so ham-handedly and unprofessionally that it seemed clear Washington’s power players weren’t even trying to hide it, which made it all the more offensive.
At the same time as our country was making the Venezuelan economy scream through unlawful sanctions, the Trump administration simultaneously communicated its intent to smuggle humanitarian aid into the country. The goal was to bait the Venezuelan military into violently engaging the convoy, which would presumably create enough chaos for the United States to intervene with an old-fashioned—though apparently still very much in vogue—Uncle Sam–driven regime change. Since Venezuela is not the banana republic it’s made out to be, and actually has a legitimate army that refuses to be bought off by American dollars or fold under American bullying, the whole scheme was stillborn. However, the event itself felt somehow prophetic.
Two years later, the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol was, for me, the decisive moment when the moral rot of decades (if not centuries) of America’s overseas belligerence finally came crashing home. The failed coup was the inevitable result of an empire whose leaders had mired the citizenry in a constant state of war and endlessly lied about it all.
As I put it in a piece I wrote shortly thereafter for the indispensable TomDispatch: “On January 6, the US became a foreign country.” The United States removing democratically elected leaders of other countries is a commonplace of our modern history, I pointed out. We replaced Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh with the Shah of Iran in 1953; overthrew Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz in favor of the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas in 1954; supplanted Chilean president Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet in 1973; supported the coup against Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in 2009. In other words, this isn’t a matter of a few one-off mistakes or a couple of “dumb wars.” Invasions, military coups, soft coups, economic sanctions, fueling of existing conflicts, secret funding of candidates of Washington’s choice—all these are known and accepted US foreign policy strategies and behavior.
Such behavior inevitably leads to blowback, which in this case was a homegrown coup attempt on January 6, 2021. Trump, his countless enablers in Congress, his appointees, and his loyal followers did not like the outcome of the 2020 election. Their faith and fealty to the creed of “Make America Great Again” simply would not be stopped by political process, democracy, the Constitution, or other laws of the land. For these folks, the end would justify any means. So the president did what US leaders so often do when they don’t like outcomes in nations around the globe: he tried to steal the election by force and through illegal political manipulation. January 6 was not a riot or a protest. It was the culmination of a coup attempt orchestrated in plain sight over multiple weeks by Trump and his followers, with the express purpose of staying in power by stopping the certification of President-elect Joe Biden.
It didn’t matter that Trump’s Big Lie about the election was transparent, verifiable nonsense. Nor did it matter that the actions of the insurrectionists at the Capitol were tantamount to sedition and treason. After all, when it comes to America’s invasions around the globe, our leaders rarely care about illegality, because they are never held accountable. When they want something they just take it. Trump and his followers were simply imitating our foreign policy behavior in a domestic setting. And true to form, there has once again been a disgraceful lack of accountability. As of this writing, the January 6 select committee is still filling in the details of the coup as it continues its investigation, but the essence of it should have been obvious to anyone paying attention at the time.
My TomDispatch article ended with a plea for our leadership to change course. “There is truth and there are lies,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “Lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders … to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.” I called on him to live up to this rhetoric not only domestically but also internationally. To stop destroying vulnerable nations. To stop displacing families and starving foreign populations through economic sanctions. To stop sending American troops to die for “lies told for power and for profit.”
Belligerent US foreign policy not only creates victims in other countries while getting our soldiers killed and injured but inevitably reverberates at home—with violence and corruption replacing political process and the rule of law; with reality subverted by false narratives; with a flourishing of fear, ignorance, and hate. War dissenters understand this, historically and conceptually. That’s why war dissent is reasonable, necessary, and morally sound. In some cases, depending on your ethical framework, it is even obligatory.
THROUGHOUT AMERICAN HISTORY, there have always been citizens calling out the country’s war crimes and illegal interventions—journalists, authors, political analysts, academics, activists, whistleblowers, and sometimes even combat veterans themselves. Across history, the list includes such famous figures as Mark Twain, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Muhammad Ali, Marvin Gaye, and Howard Zinn. There are also many crucial voices speaking out in our own day, including Angela Davis, Chris Hedges, Michelle Alexander, Juan Cole, Tom Engelhardt, James Carroll, and John Pilger. Arguably the most prolific antiwar activist and writer of the last century has been Noam Chomsky. There are also war resisters, like Rory Fanning, who served with Pat and me in the same Ranger battalion—a courageous man, who, after his deployment to Afghanistan, put down his weapon when ordered to go to Iraq.
War dissent comes at a price, however. Conscience has a cost. In many cases, dissenters get labeled by some members of the media and the general public as traitors, cowards, and distinctly unpatriotic. They are subjected to childish insults—that to be antiwar is to be anti-America, to be “in bed with the enemy,” to be unsupportive of our troops, and similar nonsense. Meanwhile, our political leaders—the ones who so often lie to the American people, commit war crimes, and send American soldiers off to needless deaths—are somehow hailed as true patriots. The rank absurdity of it all makes it difficult to take such discourse seriously.
However, if the dissenter has the power to sway public opinion, or provides damning evidence against the US administration, then the price to be paid can be very real. Such people can find themselves classified as “enemies of the state.” This can mean government-backed discrediting campaigns, harassment, and imprisonment. Most of these more extreme cases involve whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, and Daniel Hale, who see crimes and wrongdoing from inside the US power structure and believe the American people need to know.
One very well-known dissenter exposing American wrongdoing is not even a US citizen: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. His platform is a treasure trove of information that puts powerful institutions in a state of panic. Their reaction is itself instructive. It is well documented how much the governments of the United States and allied nations want Assange silenced. At the time of this writing, he has been held in a maximum-security prison in London for nearly three years and faces charges in the United States that could see him imprisoned for life. After examining him, a UN expert reported that “Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture.”
President Obama insightfully asked in a 2015 speech: “What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical?” Those who choose to speak up and be self-critical about American wrongdoing are in many ways the moral conscience of the nation, the counterpoint to unchecked, unchallenged power. War dissent is committed by those with a deep love for the country and its soldiers, for honesty, justice, humanity, and the rule of law. They bring light to situations clouded by secrecy, lies, and propaganda. The cost can be high, no doubt—for some even more than others—but the collective reward of providing transparency to the American people and global citizenry is priceless.
It is reasonable to think that war dissenters have had at least some impact throughout US history in helping to limit abuse of American power. But in truth, the effect seems minimal, given the sheer amount of destruction America has repeatedly caused around the globe. At every turn, in every generation, our government has managed to invent a new enemy that urgently needs to be destroyed or helpless victims who must be liberated. Seeing the same playbook used against our own democracy on January 6 was beyond discouraging.
The hard and discomfiting truth is that today’s wars cannot be stopped by just a small number of war dissenters. We live in an ostensible democracy, so the onus ought to fall directly on the American public—preferably all of We the People. America’s leaders perform their indecent acts in all our names, under our common banner. Thus, it is up to every one of us to cry foul immediately when they make such illegal and immoral policy decisions.
This, of course, is made more complicated by what has been called America’s “civic religion of patriotism.” The relentless worshipping of our flag and other national symbols goes hand in hand with the overt omission of our barbaric foreign policy from the national conscience. As I mentioned earlier, I grew up with the narrative of America and its allies destroying the evil Nazi empire, which is perfectly true. However, to this day, that one war manages to drown out almost everything else we have inflicted on the world since. Paying no attention to the evil we are doing right now because we destroyed a different form of evil seventy-five years ago is not tenable. This nation has been living off the virtue of the greatest generation for most of a century in order to systematically pillage the planet. It’s an insult to everything that generation fought for in the first place.
All evidence suggests that we as a nation remain a long way off from fixing our foreign policy. We are likely to keep reading courageous, clarifying, and insightful pieces of war dissent while American soldiers die, vulnerable nations get destroyed, and the moral rot spreads at home. However, in the long term, I think real sustained progress can and will be made, and war dissent will reach critical mass both in America and around the globe—tipping the scales in favor of peace, diplomacy, and accountability. This assumes comparable progress in other areas, such as racial justice, economic equity, and environmental preservation. In the end, these issues are all interconnected. Until then, let us hope war dissenters continue their courageous work of providing transparency, honesty, and optimism to us all.