More Thinking, Less War

I hope that all members of the Harvard Community will join in rejecting Attorney General John Ashcroft’s message to critics of the Bush administration’s domestic anti-terrorism measures delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee last December. “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this,” Ashcroft said. “Your tactics only aid terrorists—for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends.” Ashcroft’s attempt to associate dissent with terrorism and thereby stifle his critics runs counter to the view that open and rational deliberation should be the cornerstone of both the university community and the wider democratic state, no matter how unpopular a particular viewpoint may be.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, many of us have found a great deal to deliberate and question about the policies formed in response to the appalling attacks of that day. The past year has seen, among other things, an ongoing, devastating war in Afghanistan and various curtailments of the civil liberties of both American nationals and foreigners in America. Now, there is increasing talk of a preemptive strike in Iraq influenced by the simplistic political climate in which President Bush’s war on terrorism is equated with good versus evil. The Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice, a student group formed on the day of the attacks, has been calling for a deeper level of reflection and debate about foreign policy and civil liberties, a commitment to the sanctity and equality of human life everywhere and a fuller investigation of the nonviolent alternatives to war that have been all but ignored by our leaders and the mainstream media.

The memorials around this Sept. 11 honoring the more than 3,000 innocent people killed reminded us of both the scale of the tragedy and the human suffering behind that figure. They should also have been a reminder to us not to ignore the suffering elsewhere caused when innocents are killed or maimed, whether intentionally targeted or as a foreseeable side-effect of the use of force.

The U.S. government refused to count the number of civilian deaths resulting from the bombing of Afghanistan, but estimates range from 600 to 3,800. The number of lives gambled when famine threatened Afghan refugees and bombing prevented the flow of aid was many times that. The massive and foreseeable human toll of the war is clear; yet we question whether that toll was ever taken seriously by policymakers who may have been concerned with only the suffering closer to home.

Many of those keener to engage in armed conflict have presented themselves as making the stark choice between doing something about the perceived threat of the moment, or doing nothing at all. Thus, war is typically portrayed as being an action of last resort. If only this were truly the case. It is not usually the war speeches, but the wider actions of our leaders that belie their reluctance to go to war. Proposals from the left to examine and deal with the root causes of the violence against us are either not taken seriously, or worse, are misrepresented as attempts to appease or to justify the violence. While the injustices and egregious human rights records of the Taliban or current Iraqi regimes neither could nor should be defended, they are matched by a history of injustice and oppression in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere perpetrated by those friendly to the U.S., whose concern with its supposed self-interest and its political ends has eclipsed its concern for the value of human lives and fueled much of the anger against it. Greater commitment to breaking the cycle of poverty and violence in the past might have prevented today’s stark choices from ever arising.

Some will say that there are circumstances where stark choices of the sort mentioned above will be inevitable. Surely, then, the best way to face them is in the context of a just multilateralism and international law, with diplomacy and with reluctance to carry out any threat of violence. If the other side of the conflict is a rogue state that needs to be taught the value of justice and cooperation, vigilantism is an odd pedagogical technique. And if war has truly been our stark choice both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, why hasn’t the more impartial forum of the U.N. been the first and last place to consult?

Political expediency is not a satisfactory reason for working around the U.N. Military conflict even in the age of so-called precision weapons has a tremendous human cost, which is clear when civilian casualties of all peoples are counted equally. As in Afghanistan, in the discussion of the planned invasion of Iraq, the question of the number of expected Iraqi casualties has not even been raised. Until that question is discussed and the real cost of war—including precious foreign lives as well as precious American ones—can be considered, nobody should be inclined to support this war or any other.

Paul G. Dexter ’04 is a linguistics concentrator in Dudley House. He is writing on behalf of the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice.