The May 13/14, 2006 issue of The Wall Street Journal contained a front-page article entitled, "The Two-Star Rebel," by Greg Jaffe, which is the story of Major General John Batiste's journey from loyal support and participation in the Bush Administration's Iraq intervention to active dissent. The article is remarkable in the sense that it contrasts with past editorial policy of this newspaper. One might be cynical and say that the article merely represents business reality. With the nation, and possibly the newspaper's readership, moving quickly away from Bush, The Wall Street Journal cannot afford to offend its readers, nor can it afford being labeled the last to get the message. There is another view, however, that the editors' professionalism has allowed them to maintain a wall between editorial opinion and accurate reporting of the news.
And Batiste is news. He is not the first retired general to criticize the Bush Administration's war policies. However, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, "Gen. Batiste stands out among the generals who have called for Rumsfeld to resign because he is the only one to have served in a high position in the Pentagon and commanded troops in Iraq. He turned down a promotion and retired last fall." If for no other reason than this, The Wall Street Journal article deserves close attention.
Feelings of Abandonment of the Military
General Batiste came from a military family and was raised on bases in the U.S., Europe and Iran. He has strong memories of his father, then a colonel, returning from Vietnam to the greetings of his family at Dulles Airport, but otherwise received unceremoniously. "The people in the airport could not have cared less." Batiste shares the feeling of many in the military "that the military was abandoned by the American people and betrayed by the civilian leadership." The article observes, "It is hard-wired into them (the U.S. military) never to let that happen again," citing an opinion voiced by Andrew Bacevich, a professor of International Relations at Boston University and a retired Army colonel.
The Military Officer's Responsibility to Dissent
The article points out that the truth about Vietnam may be more complex than that, mentioning Army Colonel H.R. McMaster's book, Dereliction of Duty, which is a history of military leadership in Vietnam. "Col. McMaster argues that the generals, split by rivalries and eager to curry favor with their civilian bosses, acquiesced to a policy they knew would fail in Vietnam, without raising serious objections or offering alternative strategy." While one might empathize with General Batiste's feeling that his civilian leaders put the troops in danger by insisting on unrealistic minimal troop levels, the real issue is whether the military should have been involved in Iraq in the first place. The article makes a good start on the question of the military officer's responsibility to dissent, relating that Batiste was "haunted by something he had studied during his days at the Army War College: the regrets of Gen. Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff during the Vietnam War." Johnson had planned to simultaneously confront President Johnson about his Vietnam War policy and then resign, but admitted he never had the moral courage to execute his plan.
Dissent and Just War Theory
Batiste has resigned and he has publicly voiced dissent, but he may not be fully confronting his conscience, or if he is, there could be something terribly troubling going on in his mind and perhaps the minds of the officer corp. Apparently Batiste's dissent could be summarized by his belief that "Mr. Rumsfeld had violated a fundamental principle of war by sending in an invading force that was too small to impose security after Saddam Hussein's regime had collapsed." It is true that this is one of the principles (called Probability of Success) of a just war or Jus ad Bellum, but there are six others, and all must be considered before war can be ethically justified. The principles as described in Wikipedia are,
- Just Cause: Force may be used only to correct a grave public evil (e.g. a massive violation of the basic rights of whole populations) or in defense;
St Augustine categorised just cause into three elements which justified warfare:
- defending against an external attack
- recapturing things taken
- punishing people who have done wrong
A contemporary view of just cause was expressed in 1993 when the US Catholic Conference said: “Force may be used only to correct a grave, public evil, i.e. aggression or massive violation of the basic human rights of whole populations.”
- Comparative Justice: While there may be rights and wrongs on all sides of a conflict, to override the presumption against the use of force, the injustice suffered by one party must significantly outweigh that suffered by the other;
- Legitimate Authority: Only duly constituted public authorities may use deadly force or wage war;
- Right Intention: Force may be used only in a truly just cause and solely for that purpose – correcting a suffered wrong is considered a right intention, while material gain or maintaining economies is not;
- Probability of Success: Arms may not be used in a futile cause or in a case where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success;
- Proportionality: The overall destruction expected from the use of force must be outweighed by the good to be achieved.
- Last Resort: Force may be used only after all peaceful and viable alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted.
One might argue that one of the above principles was met in the intervention in Iraq, but to argue that all seven criteria were met is absurd. Granted that military officers at the level of the general rank should have greater experience in the area of Probability of Success, and that they might focus on that principle, it is still difficult to see how raising troop levels to a half million or million troops would have improved the morality of the action.
The Special Case of Legitimate Authority for Military Officers
The principle of Legitimate Authority was touched upon obliquely in the article, but for any military officer this ought to be the beginning of examination of conscience. There is a particularly troubling statement in the article attributed to General Batiste, "But the oath he swore throughout his 31-year Army career to u2018obey the orders of the president' has convinced him that he shouldn't slight President Bush. u2018I support my president.'" Earlier in the article Batiste is quoted as saying that he had "spent the last 31 years of my life defending our great Constitution." Is it possible that General Batiste (and perhaps many in the military officer corps) have confused loyalties? Article II, Section 2 indeed identifies the President as the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, … , when called into the actual Service of the United States (emphasis added), …," but only Congress can call the military into the service of conducting war (see Article I, Section 8), and then only through a formal declaration of war, which was not passed by Congress before President Bush initiated military operations in Iraq. If any lesson were learned from the debacle in Vietnam, it should have been that we as a nation, including our military, looked the other way as our politicians did a short-cut on the constitutional process of declaring war. In doing so, precedent was confirmed in the minds of many who believed that the power to initiate a war could be shifted to an aggressive president through resolutions that could later be interpreted to excuse Congress.
A military officer is required to take the following oath (see 5 USCode Sec. 3331 (01/24/94):
”I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
There is nothing in this oath which requires a military officer to "obey the orders of the president," only a requirement to "defend the Constitution of the United States." The requirement of a military officer to obey the war orders of the president is dependent upon those orders being both constitutional and consistent with Jus ad Bellum.
The Conflict between Compliance with a Superior's Orders and Ethics
In the eyes of some, it is unreasonable to require that a military officer determine the ethics and constitutionality of a superior's orders. However, to accept that premise is to deny the principles that arose from the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. Most famously, the U.S. military hung Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and General Alfred Jodl for war crimes in spite of their protests that they "were only following orders." Immediately following World War II, U.S. military officers were indoctrinated with the lessons that came out of those trials. One wonders if the message has been diluted since the Vietnam era.
Loyalty to Country and Dissent
General Batiste should be applauded for taking the first step in standing up to unethical orders of superiors, and The Wall Street Journal for reporting his important journey toward his stated intent to defend the Constitution. And we should note his concerns that for some Americans "the only time they think about the war is when they decide what color magnet ribbon to put on the back of their car." But he should also note that there are some Americans who have opposed this war on both ethical and constitutional grounds, and that their dissent is based upon their loyalty to their country and its constitution. Hopefully he will also understand that even in the darkest days of Vietnam, this nation did not truly lose faith in its military. In fact, some of those who opposed the wars in Vietnam, and who today oppose the war in Iraq, were concerned that members of our armed forces were being unnecessarily placed in harm's way for purposes that were outside of their constitutional employment.
Balancing Security and Liberty
The citizens of this nation are faced with a very real evil in fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, although it is quite apparent that traditional military resources cannot be effectively deployed against this evil. One need only read The Qur'an and the gospels to see the contrast in philosophies between the culture of the West and Islam. Yet the enemy we face is essentially not a state-based enemy, like Nazi Germany, and the use of traditional military resources is not just ineffective, it is counter-productive. Nor do slogans such as "The War on Terror" produce anything more than confusion and divisiveness within our own ranks. We depend upon our military to defend the citizens of this nation against conventional enemy forces, not non-conventional cells of fanatics unified by religious beliefs. An officer corps prepared to offer legitimate dissent to power-seeking politicians is another potential facet of the separation of powers principle that underlies our Constitution. The officer corps' ability to act upon its conscience serves to guard the liberties of this nation's citizens, but a military leadership cowed by its political superiors provides fertile soil for tyranny. That is one of the lasting lessons that came out of Nazi Germany.
May 22, 2006
