roachboy

the best cliche i know is that war is politics using other means.
the military is an instrument of state policy. nothing about the rationale for military action originates with the military--it is always politics that shapes when and how the military is to be used.
given that, the question of whether military action can be understood as a "defense of freedom" is a function of whether you understand the state policies that determine military actions to themselves be in "defense of freedom."

(note: i feel like i have to put freedom in quotes. it is not obvious what that word actually means. particularly not these days.)

typically, the question of whether you can seperate the elements that underpin a particular use of the military is itself a political matter: those who support a particular administration or a particular action have every interest in arguing that you cannot make seperations and so have to see any action as necessarily about the general interest of the state which is always about "freedom" because it is always about defending the general context within which that "freedom" is exercized.

the linkage is most logical at the level of mobilization of support: the notion of "defending freedom" is a way of personalizing what would otherwise be an abstract matter--it is a turn of phrase that works off particular preconceptions--for example, this "land of the free and home of the brave" business that you might have heard about--this line from the anthem provides shows how the mobilization logic goes: you are a citizen (otherwise you would not be inclined to sing the star spangled banner--it is not the easiest song to sing, for example)--you are a citizen in this geographical space, within this space what defines you is "free", which is now a personal attribute. so defending freedom is a kind of code that establishes a link between the immediate personal interests of citizens, the mythology of nation as a way of designating a community, the state as the framework that assures the functioning of that community, and the policies of the state----which according to this logic are the expression of the requirements of the previous terms----and the use of the military in a particular case.


to my mind, you have to swallow alot of arrive at that view.

for example, everything about this logic is geared toward disabling critique by lumping together levels of activity that may or may not have anything to do with each other.

-it is pretty obvious that the interests of the state, which are determined by the composition of the institutions of state and their particular allegiances (class, interest groups, political party, blah blah blah) are not and need not be necessarily coincident with the interests of the population as a whole. in fact it is incoherent to image a general interest on the part of the population, no matter what rousseau said about the general will--all that is simply metaphysics rooted in attempts to ground the phantasm of nation. without that metaphysics, you have a great diversity of interests about which it is really difficult to speak coherently, etc.

-it is pretty obvious that the state is a relatively autonomous entity. people who work in that context can come to see the interests of state as being independent of all others--one of the main interests of state is to continue functioning as state.
-it is obvious that state policies can be shaped on any number of grounds.

-it is therefore obvious that military action, which is an expression of state policy, can and should be evaluated in the context of the policies that inform it.

and it is equally apparent that the generalizing claims are about selling a particular state action, a particular military action.

now you need to sell war regardless of the legitimacy of its causes. so if marketing war is inevitable, it follows that the fact of marketing war does not and cannot be confused with consideration of the legitimacy of the policies that determine war (what when where why).

all of which means that you and i have to make judgements. it is our prerogative as citizens to make political judgements--in a democratic setting, this is fundamental--assembling information, assessing it, arriving at conclusions as to whether particular military actions are legitimate or not. and it seems to me--but here i am talking from my own political viewpoint--that judgement presupposes a distance from the marketing of war in every situation. to my mind, the marketing of war NEVER addresses the question of whether particular policies are legit and whether the decision to go to war is legit. it seems to me that in a democratic context, there should be a space of prior deliberation--if after informed debate folk choose to support a particular action, then fine---but war cannot and should not short circuit democracy. even in its shallow american form.

sadly, the marketing of war is an interesting job for some, and allowing a polity to make judgements about an action has come to be seen as dangerous. so marketing tends to attempt to substitute the myth of national unity and the illusion of momentum for judgement.
so to sell war you have the notion of a unified and eternal nation.
to sell war you have the illusion of popular unanimity in a context in which no-one asks the population what they make of anything and no-one cares really what the population thinks--the people are malleable, they are willing to be led--they can be told what they think--and a segment of the population always seems to enjoy that.

in this , you see one of the worst features of americna pseudo-democracy operating in one of the worst areas--the people are not the source of politicalpower in any meaningful sense--the people are generators of opinion and opinion can be managed--so the people are a management problem and marketing a way to solve that problem.

it is only within the context of marketing war that you start to hit cliches that the bush administration has been milking for all they are worth. take the fetishsim of the military, for example, this kind of strange idea that being part of the military makes you a special type of human being whose every action operates at a higher level of significance than those which happen in any other sector---"our boys", a group constituted within this elevated, mystical sphere of direct communication between the nation (the sacred) and us mortals, are a group of martyrs (at least in potentia) and the narrative about "our boys" is a sacrifical one.
so the sacrifice of memebers of the military--who matter publically only indirectly (but whose individual sacrifice impacts directly on families and particular communities) is staged as a theater of national unity--our boys risk their lives in a space of chaos and crisis--when any of them is martyred, it would follow that the increased unity of the nation should follow and that this increased unity explains and justifies the sacrifice.

all of which has nothing to do with the empirical military. the empirical military does not operate in this mystical register, which is a remapping of the space of crisis and the intervention of the gods in athentian tragedy.
but the possibility that it can be seen in these terms is doubtless flattering and may for some (or many, who knows, really) function to legitimate a particularly dangerous career choice.
either way, this entire register of argument is part of marketing war.
whether you choose to accept it or not is--or should be--a function of prior judgements--the only thing sure is that there is nothing natural about the claim that the military operates in this register, just as they is nothing given in advance about the defintion of nation or the relation of individual citizens to the nation.
marketing of war always acts otherwise, as if the terms were given and war simply puts them into motion.

so how does it work, this claim that the mlitary defends our freedoms?
outside the framework of marketing war, it doesnt.
within that frame, this chain is all there is.
in terms of american military adventures, i could imagine participating in this in the context of ww2...the civil war, viewed from a particular angle and not others...maybe ww1...but the spainsh american war, vetnam, iraq--for me all clearly absurd. korea was more ambiguous simply as a functin of the strategic game that was played out across it.

so there is no one answer, it seems.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite