Memo to journalists: Take voices of peace seriously
Peace marchers in Canton in 2003. Photo: David Sommerstein
America once again finds itself embroiled in a ferocious debate over war and peace.
Should we, as a society, commit acts of violence against a nefarious regime on the far side of the planet — particularly given Syria’s apparent use of chemical weapons against civilians?
Or should be step aside and allow the civil war there to unfold without American intervention?
This is a complicated, painful and fraught conversation, especially given that we got so much wrong in the build-up to the Iraq war.
During the build-up to that nightmarish, misguided conflict, journalists missed or ignored key voices.
In particular, we as a professional tribe minimized the voices of peace activists who might have offered crucial context about the risks and costs of going to war.
In hindsight, of course, it turned out that those faint, critical and skeptical voices were absolutely correct about many things. The Iraq War was one of the great foreign policy blunders of modern times.
This isn’t to say that I think that opponents of military intervention in Syria are correct this time.
When Noam Chomsky argued this week that a US action would be tantamount to a “war crime” without authorization by the United Nations, that struck me as simplistic.
The UN is immobilized not because of moral qualms about armed aggression, but because Russia, one of Syria’s key allies and itself an aggressive imperial power, is blocking serious debate within that body.
Russia, it should be noted, has done nothing to reign in Syria’s brutal regime.
But Chomsky, like other “peace experts” deserves a central role in the discussion. He should be questioned forcefully and thoroughly and skeptically, as should other knowledgeable policy advocates who oppose a strike.
We know from experience that the strong tendency is to fill the interview programs and news-hours with former generals, former military and intelligence professionals.
And we know from experience that those individuals, while informative and usually well-meaning, offer only a part of the picture.
We also know from experience that the tendency among journalist is to interview peace advocates only for their emotional energy, their protest chants, their broad-brush statements.
This time, we need a full, intensive and skeptical treatment of the views held on all sides. It’s not okay to treat one side as the “grown-ups” and the other side as the noisy idealists.
It’s also not enough to allow peace activists to state broad ideological opposition to military action, without questioning them aggressively about what they view as alternatives in Syria, where civilians — including children — are suffering horribly.
Before we begin dropping bombs on another nation, we need to hear from the Cassandras among us who were ignored at great cost last time the drums of war were sounding.
They may be right or wrong, but their voices and doubts should be heard with respect – and it’s the job of journalists to make sure that happens this time around.
Yeah, let’s set up a standing army for the UN and then send them to Syria. We can send the black helicopters too.
Pay a standing army that is never going to do anything? Where do I sign up!
Are there good examples of when this sort of thing has worked for the US? It just seems everyone hates us over there and bombing Syria is not going to change that or change the use of Chemical weapons? I am certainly not saying this is an easy issue. I think the President did the right thing in going to Congress. Thus people like me can’t bitch and moan about it being unconstitutional.
It is interesting however that you have Hezbhola (sp), actively engaged in supporting Assad and his actions. What does that say about them and who they are? The fact is even using chemical weapons this regime actually has some support in the middle east.
“The fact is even using chemical weapons this regime actually has some support in the middle east.” That is because there are some other serious nut jobs over there and apparently some in Russia.
Mervel, in fact in many cases the nut jobs that retaliated for the US actions did some serious damage to us. For example the marine corps barracks in Beirut and the USS Cole. But that doesn’t mean you just let everything slide. The president knows that the bad guys are going to lash out. Even if a strike is effective and it can be, they are going to lash out either way. Bad guys don’t like nice guys that try to stop bad guys from doing bad things.
Paul, I am post-gender. I am no longer willing to associate specific traits with gender. My dogs never cared about gender identity, why should I? Femininity, masculinity it’s all the same to me.
What if they are all bad guys Paul?
I basically agree that doing nothing has major risks also. I personally think they all hate us and will hate us even more if we do anything militarily in the Middle East right now. How many people in Iraq today are liking the US for ridding them of a man who used gas on them? How do the Iranians feel about us getting rid of Saddam who used gas on THEM? They all hate us.
Let Saudi Arabia and Egypt use some of the billions we give them for their defense forces to go in there and take care of business, why is it always us? What is Canada doing? They are supposedly a moral compass for us, what are they doing about the use of Chemical weapons? England already opted out where are the Germans, where are the Japanese?
What we need to do is take away the US and Western excuse for the madness that is now the middle east, as long as we are doing something pushing things around, controlling things, the people will blame the West and in particular the US for ALL of their problems and thus they will not solve any of them.
They need to work this out on their own, they being the Arab league. Syria does need help and I hope their brothers and sisters living right next to them rise to the occasion.
Mervel; “they” don’t all hate us, surprisingly. “They” often have a much more sophisticated understanding of our foreign policy that we do ourselves.
And the reason that other nations have not stepped up to support us is that they did not establish a “red line.”
But we did. For better or worse Obama committed us to some sort of action. Let’s hope he has thought some of the consequences through better than Reagan or W Bush ever did. ( Notice that I didn’t include Nixon or H. W. Bush, who actually though things through a little bit)
They don’t hate us as much as they hate each other. We are merely the enemy du jour, filling the role formerly held by the Crusaders or the French or the British or the Russians, etc. Hundreds of years of internecine warfare, punctuated with the involvement of whatever colonial power that feels it has an interest to protect has brought us here and we have no more hope (or chance) of an equitable solution than any of the afore-mentioned groups. Read Churchill’s memoir of his experiences with the Malakand Field Force (Pakistan/Afghanistan) in the 1890s and you will be astounded by how little anything has changed in well over 100 years.
There is so much more going on here than a dictator gassing his people. There are the great powers’ oil and gas interests, the profits of the arms industry, and the ancient Islamic power struggles. The odds are that the chemical weapons attack is being used to manipulate opinion in furtherance of other ends. And KHL, the odds of democracy working in Syria even if we really had no other interests involved are vanishingly small. There are just too many forces at work there.
Walker, you mean too many OUTSIDE forces.
OL, it is interesting that you believe “they” hate each other then go on to list the numerous invasions from outside the region and call it internecine warfare. Do you know what internecine means?
Churchill was a great leader for wartime Britain but he was pretty dumb about a lot of stuff otherwise. That is why the British wouldn’t let him be a leader during peacetime. His opinions of Afghanistan don’t hold much sway with me. I happen to know many people who know a whole lot more about Afghanistan than Churchill ever did.
Take a look at this front page story in the Washington Post. The headline reads:
“Neighbors fear Syria may turn to bioweapons”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/as-syria-deteriorates-neighbors-fear-bioweapons-threat/2013/09/04/ed5b47e0-10ad-11e3-85b6-d27422650fd5_story.html?hpid=z1
I would like Brian’s take as a journalist. This story seems totally irresponsible to me. There isn’t really any real evidence stated in the article that this is much of a possibility. In fact it seems to me that the conclusion you could reach from the article is that the program is basically mothballed for the past 30 years? Putting out a story like this at a time where congress has to make some very serious decisions seems just stupid. Is the Post trying to sway opinions on this or report the facts??
Come on guys. All the administration is saying is give war a chance.
KHL,
Instead of trying to make me look foolish by asking if I know the meaning of a word I used (possibly a valid point, given some of the comments I have read here, but not one which I think applies to me) you should spend some time trying to comprehend what I wrote. As for Churchill, he fought on the Northwest Frontier in 1897, so I guess he knew something about it. Having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his prolific (yeah, I know what that one means too) writing, much of which was history, I guess he knew something about that too. Politics has nothing to do with it.
I don’t agree with his course of action in this case; however I thought President Obama made a great point; he didn’t establish a red line, the international community after WWI, and that line has not in general been crossed through several major wars and conflicts.
Should we have intervened in Rwanda, also a civil war, but also a genocide?
“Should we have intervened in Rwanda, also a civil war, but also a genocide? ”
The international community should have. But as we know they have no spine.
“I don’t agree with his course of action in this case”
What is the course of action? I have only heard that they need to be “punished” in some vague way. That it will NOT be long. It will NOT involve ground forces. It will NOT be about taking out Assad. It is NOT about US credibility. It is NOT about the presidents credibility…..
We definitely look like a bunch of bumbling idiots.
Okay, Larry, fair enough, it was just a poor turn of phrase. We all do it on occasion and it was wrong of me to nit pick over it.
But I do not withdraw my point on Churchill. The British were arrogant and ignorant in their dealings around the world and their history in Afghanistan proved to be supremely incompetent.
However I am disturbed by the prevalence of the term “they” in comments by many people in regard to Syria as well as other Middle Eastern countries. It has the ring of bigotry to my ear. “They all fight each other” or “they have been fighting each other for hundreds of years” or any number of permutations.
Maybe the problem is that “we” don’t get good reporting or that “we” don’t care enough to become educated about other countries and cultures to understand people’s actions.
KHL, I get what you’re saying about the use of the word “they”. They is appropriate for my point, which is that whether they are Syrians or Pakistanis or Afghanis or whomever, their primary beef is with each other. We are only the latest in a long line of outsiders who feel we have to protect our interests and we have no better chance of settling things than did all those who went before us.
As for Churchill, his identification with British colonialism aside, he was arguably the pivotal figure in 20th century world history. This is perhaps not the place to expand on that but I will say that any number of different outcomes to WW II, all of them unfavorable to us, could have resulted if not for him.
“Walker, you mean too many OUTSIDE forces.”
Well, yeah, maybe. What’s inside and what’s outside in the Middle East? And even if all of the countervailing forces were external, how could they possibly be kept out?
“become educated about other countries and cultures to understand people’s actions”
I would certainly like to understand how anyone could do this. Don’t watch this video if you have a weak stomach:
http://www.youtube.com/verify_controversy?next_url=/watch%3Fv%3Dn2GPTqxf8rE
Agreed, Paul. I think it is OK to criticize any person, people or country that engages in such depraved savagery without worrying too much about understanding their culture. Unless, of course, their culture promotes or condones such behavior.
No culture condones that type of behavior. Madness is madness it is not part of any culture or anything else.
Not so sure about that, Paul. History says otherwise, no matter how repellent that reality might be.
Back to the topic of journalism, in the current discussion over Syria the media have concentrated on talking to people about how they feel and to legislators about what their constituents have been telling them but where is the in-depth discussion about the use of force, how much force, and what the results may really be.
I am in favor of limited use of force proportional to the alleged use of chemical weapons if (and only if) the use of force is limited (to the extent possible) to military infrastructure targets. But the use of force should also be conditioned on immediately proposing a set of peace talks with the intent of ending the conflict. Our role should not be in support of any sides in the conflict but rather in support of innocent non-aggressors.
The idea that this is happening far away and is no threat to our interests is wrong. Already there are about 2 million refugees. In effect refugees are self ethnically cleansing the areas in conflict. As we should all understand by now refugee camps become places where disaffected people are easily swayed into committing acts of violence and terrorism. Refugees are destabilizing for the countries that host them as well.
Then there is the problem of perception of US policy. Already many around the world don’t take US assertions seriously. In 2015 we will be out of Afghanistan so we have a short window for talks with the Taliban. Showing, yet again, that we as a nation don’t mean what we say is a bad message to send to them. It is also a bad message to send allies, especially with difficult allies like Israel. If Israel doubts our ability to follow through with promises they may end up using force in situations we don’t want them to which could lead to major conflicts.
Then there is Iran. Iran has been sending small signals that it may be willing to de-escalate tensions. We should be working to open a dialog with Iran, but we have to be taken seriously first. In order to establish trust a nation must do what it says it is going to do.
Finally, there is the bigotry issue here. There is no doubt in my mind that if a chemical attack was used against any white people there would be no doubt about us retaliating. Don’t think that Middle Easterners believe differently. Read through the comments on this thread and you will find that there is blatant bigotry against Middle Easterners. Or maybe some of you wont see the bigotry because you call it “history” or “truth.”
I used to really buy into the paper tiger argument, that places that are more brutal in their thinking don’t respect the US because we don’t follow through or we are all talk or we won’t really do what we say, or we won’t sacrifice American lives.
Well we spent 10 years; first kicking the crap out of the biggest army in the Middle East, Saddam’s then spent the next 9 years involved in fighting an Iraq civil war, we sacrificed thousands of American lives dieing in direct fighting.
So after all that if the people in the Middle East and governments there don’t believe we will act, what would make them do so? No I don’t buy it, I don’t think it makes any difference in our credibility at all. I personally think that Syrians and Iranians and Egyptians want us to attack as it shows we still care; that they are still relevant. When in reality they are becoming less and less relevant. In 20 years they will be another Sudan or Nigeria. Our holding back and not playing into this parlor game is actually a more powerful move than jumping into this worthless mess.
Knuck, very good comments. I am torn.
Mervel, the reason we have had so many mis-adventures in the Middle East is that we have not had a consistent and well conceived foreign policy. We have worked to overthrow democratically elected governments, we have worked to suppress the will of the UN, we have engaged in secret wars and backed perpetrators of war crimes, and we have failed to work consistently at engaging in diplomacy toward ending conflict.
What is the result of those policies? Well, we had cheap gasoline for a long time at the cost of untold deaths and injuries to military and civilians on every side, we paid to help establish international terrorist networks, and we have expanded our national debt to something like $11 trillion.
It is time to do change the way we conduct foreign policy. Many or most see the conflict in Syria as more of the same. I believe the consequences of inaction in this case may be worse than the consequences of very limited action – which is what the President is proposing.
I called it history, and reality, and I stand by those comments. The history of the Middle East features unspeakable atrocities on all sides, ours included. We generally don’t condone it and that places a societal or cultural restraint on the worst of it. Other parties, not so much. Nobody likes to think that a particular culture is so depraved as to continue to sacrifice their people but there seems to be no shortage of suicide bombers. It isn’t bigotry to recognize that fact (and other similar facts) and call attention to it. Failure to understand and act on reality is a big part of the problem.
KHL, Well I would agree we have not had a consistent policy toward the middle east and many times have backed anti-democratic forces.
I think as we become an oil exporter and develop more non oil based options for power in the US; the region will continue to shrink in importance. Obama has already basically recognized that fact by being non-interventionist up to this point and focusing on the Far East. To me he does not really want to do this, I think he wants congress to vote this down, he is not stupid he can count votes he can read polls. He had to go through the motions on this, but I don’t think we are going to do anything militarily. I could be wrong, but that is my guess.
The only democracy existing in the region are Israel and Turkey and well Egypt tried for a couple of months; I don’t think we have overthrown any democracies. Certainly however we have supported all of these dictators/Kings. The Arab Spring is continuing into the Arab winter and fall, and they will fight a series of civil wars to gain true democracy. They first will fight against the kings and secular dictators and then they will have to fight against the Islamic Dictators who move into the vacume but I think they will in the end achieve liberty and democracy, they are a great people. The fact is the mess of the middle east is NOT our fault, they have to solve their own issues and they have to own the fact that they are who they are and not some sort of creation of and perpetual victims of the West. Which is a demeaning anyway. Iraq lasted 10 years and achieved nothing, how could one month of bombing do anything?
Turkey claims they back us in action; but the people on the street the majority do not. I don’t see any support in the Middle East among the people for our intervention.
Who is more popular in the Middle East, Canada or the US? Looks to me Canada, I say follow their lead on this.
This seems to be a solution to the Syria problem:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/poll-majority-of-americans-approve-of-sending-cong,33752/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=LinkPreview:1:Default
“It’s also not enough to allow peace activists to state broad ideological opposition to military action, without questioning them aggressively about what they view as alternatives in Syria, where civilians — including children — are suffering horribly.”
Why do opponents of war have to come up with an alternative? Especially when they think (quite reasonably, in my view) that bombing Syria will create more civilian casualties?
Actualy opponents to war have come up with many alternatives to the use of force but when a conflict isn’t imminent there is little pressure to effect those alternatives. Aggressive engagement on a diplomatic level to end long running conflicts is the primary method of stopping war.
As we have seen in third world countries over the last several decades most wars are relatively small scale conflict that become larger as outside groups and nations attempt to influence international action that usually has nothing to do with the individual conflict at hand through the use of proxies.
The alternative to the use of military force is to push peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, Pakistan and India, the US (and Arab states) and Iran, not to mention all the on-going conflicts in Africa and Latin/South America. Many will say that this is what the UN is supposed to be doing. True, but it must be remembered that we, the US, are one of the primary obstacle to the UN getting stuff done. It isn’t just Russia and China who veto resolutions.
Opponents to war have additional moral obligation to pressure for diplomacy. Wearing a peace sign and putting flowers in your hair doesn’t cut it. Gandhi didn’t achieve anything by attending peace vigils, he did stuff. When peace proponents fail to forcefully promote action toward settling disputes when conflicts are still small it is hard to take them seriously when a crisis is at hand.
The one thing that the current situation in Syria shows is that there is a commonality in interest between peaceniks and conservatives; money. War is tremendously expensive, many times as expensive as flying diplomatic missions around or sending Peace Corp into countries before conflict is even sown. It is time now for conservatives to understand that foreign aid directed at peaceful action is a good way to spend money while at the same time we should be eliminating foreign aid that is primarily sent in the form of weapons – really not foreign aid at all but a means for legislators to bring pork barrel spending to military contractors in their own districts.
I agree with your last paragraph.
In fact peaceful aid is much much less expensive than almost any military action. Also agree that we have to pull back this gravy train of military aid. I would start with Egypt AND Israel.
Trouble is, the real gravy train is to our defense contractors and weapons manufacturers, and thanks to Citizens United, they get a lot of attention in Washington.
Plus there are a LOT of good paying jobs tied up with those industries. They are a part of economic stimulus.
I was just thinking how odd it is that we are making a “case” for war. I think the case that should be made should not be made by us, we are the ones who are going to kill and possibly be killed, the case must come from the UN or the Arab League or the international community, they should be trying to convince the USA to enter the war. If indeed this is legitimate. In WWII we were begged by England and France to enter the war, we finally did after much hesitation. If this is real than we should have delegations traveling from Europe from the Middle East all making cases TO us that we should enter this war, that we should use our giant military to do something.
What is this I am hearing in the news? Obama’s credible threat of the use of force may have driven the Russians, Iranians, and Syrians to consider a diplomatic solution to remove the chemical weapons from Assad’s control?
Score a point for Obama.
You think this is a plus for Obama? He looks like a complete ass, all the more for having been out-flanked by Putin, Assad & their Iranian henchmen. Plus, Kerry gets hung out to dry. Not a great day for American foreign policy, or what’s left of it.