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WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
Expanding Our Moral Universe A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government. —Edward Abbey1 I love my country too much to be a nationalist. —Albert Camus2 Disentangling justified, unjustified, heroic, and atrocious actions on the American side of its wars remains a permanent challenge to this country’s historians, public leaders, and citizens. We Americans have scarcely begun a morally mature public debate on the assaults of terrorists on us on 9/11 nor on our assault on Iraq in 2003. But we are almost forty years into debate over the Vietnam War, which entered the presidential campaign debates of 2004. Civilians like myself must not forget that it was to the soldiers and veterans that we owe some of our most convincing persuasion that Vietnam was the wrong war for Americans to have undertaken. Whether or not we shall ever have public consensus on reasons for the war, soldiers know that much wrong was committed by all sides. Some explicit governmental testimony to that knowledge came on March 6, 1998, in a ceremony undertaken by the Pentagon in one of the quasi-sacred sites of our national capital: the Vietnam Memorial. There, in antithesis to the Medals of Honor granted members of the Seventh Cavalry for “heroism” at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Pentagon awarded its Soldier’s Medal to three helicopter crewmen who, in 1968, turned their guns against their fellow soldiers to halt the slaughter of My Lai villagers. Almost every critic of the war remembers My Lai as a symbol of American military power run amok3 in the heat of war. The West Point curriculum now includes analysis of this incident as a warning to future army officers against violating the “rules of engagement.” In May 2004, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a West Point instructor, said that the army now requires annual troop review of these rules, which include definitions of orders not to be obeyed. “It’s the first time in history when an army is instructed in disobedience of orders.” (Not true. The Bundeswehr of Germany has had such instruction for over forty years.)4 In retrospect, the killing of more than two hundred villagers in this assault was to many, inside and outside of the U.S. Army, a gross violation of the “just war” principle of discrimination between military and civilian targets. Long ago, the present government of Vietnam erected a monument in My Lai to memorialize these deaths and to serve the Communist view that Americans were the perpetrators of numerous such atrocities. To my knowledge there are no monuments in modern Vietnam to atrocities committed by its own soldiers. The Pentagon citations to three helicopter crew members read: For heroism above and beyond the call of duty on 16 March 1968, saving the lives of at least 10 Vietnamese civilians during the unlawful massacre of noncombatants by American forces at My Lai, Quang Ngai province, South Vietnam, Warrant Officer Thompson landed his helicopter in the line of fire between fleeing Vietnamese civilians and pursuing ground troops to prevent their murder. He then personally confronted the leader of the American ground troops [Lt. William Calley] and was prepared to open fire on those American troops should they fire upon the civilians. The tributes further describe how Thompson and his two fellows—Specialists Lawrence Colborn and Glenn U. Andreotta —coaxed villagers out of bunkers and assisted them to flee. In a pile of ditched dead bodies they found a wounded child, whom they flew to a hospital in Quang Ngai. Together, the citations concluded, the behavior of each exemplified “the highest standards of personal courage and ethical conduct, reflecting distinct credit on himself and the United States Army.”5 The restoration of “standards” to the instigation and conduct of war remains atop the fearsome agenda of modern global society. The Soldiers Medal event is rare in the annals of countries. But, as Kenneth Boulding once remarked, “If it has happened once, it must be possible.”6 One could skeptically assess the ceremony as part of a Pentagon program for keeping American troops from getting involved ever again in a war with Vietnam-like ambiguities. One could also note that, given the court-martial of Lt. William Calley, his short imprisonment, and the clean bill of military health granted almost every one of his superiors, explicit repentance for My Lai was superficial among high-level military and political leaders. A new generation of leaders now realizes how damaging to American interests is even one My Lai. In May 2004 some were ruefully remembering My Lai as they grappled with the damages to the United States in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. As far as we know, no one present that March day in Washington voiced the excusing view, “Atrocities by the Vietcong were greater. And what about all those massacres by the Russians in Chechnya, the Hutus in Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the Bosnian Serbs?” Memorials, medals, and occasions signifying political repentance are best conceived case by case and in one major dimension. Better to leave to other occasions synoptic comparisons between virtues and vices on various sides of terrible conflicts. In the psychology of apology, “We’re sorry” gets undercut by the additional clause, “But we had our reasons; and besides, others were worse.” One Vietnam veteran, once a helicopter pilot and now a Presbyterian minister, said to his New York congregation in 2003 that in his experience all war is “the Devil’s work.” He wonders if the rules of “just war” can ever overcome the fundamental injustice of organized killing.7 He is deeply aware of the hazard in lesser-and-greater evil calculations with their propensity for leading the calculator into moral comfort with the lesser. Lesser evils are still evil. Moral innocence vanishes on a battlefield, which is why Reinhold Niebuhr once cautioned fellow Christians, “We may find it possible to carry a gun, but we must carry it with a heavy heart.” To all the evils of war, let no side add the evil of self-righteousness. In the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2003, the U.S. military portrayed its new weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq as inflicting only unintended, “collateral” damage on civilians. It thereby reaffirmed the old rule of a “just war”—target discrimination. It was also implying that the carpet and nuclear bombing of cities in World War Two no longer has military justification.8 Was it justified even then? American memory of 9/11 should revive the question. On that day we enrolled anew in a world consensus that unprovoked attack on civilians is wrong. The March 6, 1998, award to that helicopter crew was a military application of a rule which historian Gordon Craig coins for his own profession: “The duty of the historian is to restore to the past the options it once had.”9 Doubtless, if the whole history of good and evil done by all parties in any war were ever to be told, all their descendants would have large resources for a complex experience of pride and shame. Those of us who did not fight in Vietnam and who opposed the war can look back with our own form of chastened pride when we remember how close many in the antiwar movement came to treating American veterans of the war as scapegoats. “My country sent me to do evil and then hid from me because I reminded them of it. I was a victim of America’s arrogance, and I was being blamed for it,” lamented one hospitalized veteran.10 Vietnam veterans have much reason to resent some of the treatment accorded them when they returned to a country whose civilians were blaming them either for losing the war or for fighting it in the first place. This is to acknowledge that America’s domestic processing of the Vietnam War is far from over. The awards to Thompson, Colborn, and Andreotta embodied my central theme: Next to refraining from collective evildoing, the next best thing is collectively to repent of it. Righteous persons and righteous peoples are those who follow Psalm 15:4 by “swearing to their own hurt.” The Scope of Public Mourning Ordinarily, in any conflict, we get around to compassion for the enemy side much later than to compassion for our own side. On a space in a memorial garden in Berlin, in the 1990s, there was placed a memorial “To All Our War Dead.” Some local group then covered over this inscription with a banner that inserted a German possessive: “To All the Dead of Our Wars,” that is, all fifty million humans killed in the war of 1939–1945 of which Germany was a chief instigator. To mourn this expanded version of “our war dead” requires supranationalist moral imagination. It assumes that enemy war dead are worth mourning as well as those of one’s fellow countrymen. Most nations on earth have a long way to go before their citizens enter into this widened scope of public mourning. This includes the United States. I wonder how long, if ever, there will be:
The mourning of foreigners requires courage and moral imagination not popular in any nation. One can dismiss the idea as simply beyond the capacity of citizens and leaders who understandably have reason to attend, first of all, to next-door neighbors. But there is a deep moral flaw in exclusive domestic grief. In post-1989 Berlin, one could have understood a gathering of public pressure for destroying the huge Soviet war memorial in the Pankow district. In the final battle for Berlin 300,000 Soviet soldiers perished. The East German government erected giant heroic statues and stone-inscribed Stalinist rhetoric to commemorate the event, in which thousands of Berliners died, too. In spite of bitter local memories of how Soviet troops treated Germans (especially German women) in the final months of the war, however, it is unlikely that the city government will ever obliterate this remnant of a Soviet invasion which helped defeat Nazi Germany at terrible cost of human life.13 One hopes that Germans will increasingly see the Pankow park through eyes filled with grief for “all the dead of our wars.” The imagination of many Germans is better equipped than that of Americans to understand what it meant for the USSR to lose twenty million soldiers and civilians in the war. To the contemporary credit of the American military, however, in the 2004 wake of the Iraq War, its officers in Baghdad were offering compensations between $1000 and $6000 to Iraqi civilians who could make valid claims for family deaths or injuries from misdirected bombs and bullets. “While occasional payments were made to families wrongly bombed in Afghanistan, there was nothing this formalized before.” Inadequate and symbolic as this gesture may be, and as little combined with apology or empathy, it set a new precedent of overt military affirmation of the target-discrimination rule along with reparations to the unjustly killed and injured.14 As this is written, reparatory awards to abused prisoners in Iraq seem also to be intended by the U.S. government. American presidents, on the other hand, among other representatives of the body politic, have shown little inclination in recent years even to mention the cost of “our wars” to other peoples.
The death of people closest to us will always assault our emotions more radically than the deaths of people far away in time or space. Yet, to rest content with this fact is to cut off the possibility that one’s own immediate suffering can be a door-opener, not a door-closer, to empathy with the suffering of others. One Manhattan psychotherapist reported that out of the 9/11 event “our empathy bar has been raised. We no longer say, ‘Why me?’ but ‘Why not me?’” We thus exhibit the survivor syndrome. From counseling with people in his downtown Presbyterian congregation after 9/11, Rev. Jon Walton reported, “We are so aware of every life that 10 more deaths in our city add to the loss that we’re already borne.”17 Unforgettable for most Americans will always be how, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, many doors to our losses opened around the human world. Did doors open in new American reciprocation? Four months after 9/11, Claudia Rosett wrote in the Wall Street Journal: Here, we might look to countries that know far more, firsthand, of the kind of horror we witnessed on September 11. In the week following the attack, [Mayor] Giuliani compared the bravery of New Yorkers to that of Londoners during the blitz. The bravery I would not contest. But—heretical though it feels to say this right now—the blitz was worse. For months, from 1940–41, German warplanes bombed not only London, but a slew of British cities, burying people in the rubble of their own homes and setting off firestorms in the streets. More than 40,000 civilians died.18 Amid hundreds of deaths in New York on 9/11 and many thousands in the bombed cities of World War Two, physical remains often disappeared beneath the rubble, leaving statistics of deaths uncertain. And those 40,000 Londoners were only a fragment of British and German deaths in the war. The Germans would lose an estimated 100,000 lives each in Hamburg and Dresden. Chinese and Japanese historians argue even today over the toll of the Nanjing Massacre—300,000 or 20,000?—but for the Japanese there is no doubt that they lost 900,000 lives from aerial bombing of their sixty-seven cities, of whom “only” 200,000 were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We Americans are likely to remember, first of all, that our 1941–1945 war deaths approached 400,000, and we are as likely to be shocked when people of other countries minimize that number with the remark, “It was nothing compared to our loss of millions.”19 Numbers can numb. After the above paragraph, most readers may find themselves skipping the statistics. That is why we will forever need the recorded personal experience of an Anne Frank, a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or a single Iraqi widow as narrow door-openers into glimpses of evil history. Mayor Giuliani deserves our moral-political salute: He stood on a growing edge of public leadership for expanding New Yorkers’ necessarily immediate griefs toward like, larger griefs of neighbors worldwide. Better, after 9/11, to remember the Blitz, and to remember Dresden and Tokyo than to draw tight the perimeters of moral imagination and indignation. Empathy for the “far off ” as well as for “the near”20 belongs in the calling of democratic leaders. It belongs most of all to citizens whose religious faith impels them toward a humanitywide ethic. Democracy notwithstanding, it is a difficult ethic to translate into political act. When psychologist G. H. Mead said that democracy depends upon voters who vote for the interests of somebody else as well as their own interest, he echoed Edmund Burke. Conservative Burke reminded his Bristol electors that his representation of their interests in Parliament required the reciprocal of representing the interests of the nation back to them.21Americans, in particular, now need leaders who will adapt and expand the Burkean theory to an interdependent global human community. Even if domestic acknowledgment of far-off sufferers is accorded only a public token, that token is a supremely important increment of public moral education. There would be no Holocaust memorial in Washington, D.C., if a U.S. president had asserted, “The Jews the Germans killed were not Americans. Let the Germans memorialize them. It is none of our business.” As members of a world religious community, American Jews would have protested this claim out of deep religious conviction. John Donne would have protested it out of a similar Christian conviction. His metaphor of Europe and his sexist language may need our updating, but it is time, in the sad aftermaths of the twentieth century, to adapt his famous words to our globalized twenty-first:
The American politician who best exemplified this rigorous moral perspective was Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address. On a March day in 1865, Lincoln addressed a war-weary Northern audience expecting a speech that would blow the trumpets of victory and scourge the South for bringing on a war in which more men in blue died than men in grey.23 Instead, with great solemnity and an undertone of grief mixed with hope, Lincoln promised “charity for all,” for “him who shall have borne the battle” on both sides, “and for his widow, and his orphan.” The injection of compassion for the defeated into a victory speech set a new precedent in presidential rhetoric. The assertion of divine judgment on the prayers of both sides also had little precedent. Lincoln knew that this address would not be popular. “Men are not flattered by being shown that there is a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.”24 Such speech has had few imitators, Democratic or Republican, in Lincoln’s successors. The Scope of Apology God forbid that I should claim for our country the mantle of perfect righteousness. We have committed sins of omission and sins of commission, for which we stand in need of the mercy of the Lord. —Harry S. Truman25 In March 1947 President Truman visited Mexico City. On an unscheduled stop at Chapultepec Castle, he laid a wreath on the monument to six Mexican army cadets who killed themselves rather than surrender to the American army that conquered the city one hundred years before. Numerous local Mexicans rejoiced in the presidential gesture. A local newspaper headline proclaimed: “Rendering Homage to the Heroes of ’47, Truman Heals an Old National Wound Forever.” A cab driver exclaimed, “To think that the most powerful man in the world would come and apologize.” Back home Truman avoided the word “apology,” saying simply, “Brave men don’t belong to any one country. I respect bravery wherever I see it.”26 We do not know what combination of justice and injustice Truman saw in the Mexican War. We do know that Lincoln opposed it as a congressman and failed to be re-elected as a result. Many Americans have viewed the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Philippine War of 1899–1901, the Vietnam War of 1962–1975, and the Iraq War of 2003 as national power aspirations rather than “just wars.” Truman may not have intended to apologize, but as an avid reader of history he knew that wars are great occasions for “sins of omission and sins of commission,” a phrase he surely learned as a member of the Southern Baptist Church. For years after his ascent to the presidency in 1945, various critics challenged him to consider the atomic bombing of Japan as among our recent national sins, but he refused to repent of that decision. Significant for any relevance of religion and moral law to affairs of state, however, was his theological move from sins of individuals to sins of the American nation. Truman’s reference to the sins of his country, Martin Marty commented wryly in 2003, was “not the favored form of discourse in these imperial times.”27 Some will say that a mere apology for ancient collective wrongs has little political impact. The Chapultepec illustration speaks eloquently to the contrary. When, in the second half of the twentieth century, Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders openly confessed the wrongs done Jewish people from early centuries into the present, they took a step toward new relationships with the descendants of an abused people. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of a thorough-going political apology in recent American history was that to Japanese Americans. But there remain on the agenda of history other candidates for apology to descendants of those who once suffered unjustly at the hands of governmental power, either by the latter’s “commission” or “omission.”
Reexamining our reasoning is not something that has come naturally to American statesmen. In fact, Mr. McNamara is one of the very few senior American government officials ever to admit major error without being forced to do so.... On those rare occasions when American officials have expressed remorse for previous policies, they have tended to do so offhandedly. And while on these shores, such utterances were ignored or derided as insincere, in the countries grievously affected, many victims and survivors welcomed the gesture with surprising grace.33 One thinks of the “surprising grace” of audience response that greeted many perpetrator confessions before the South African Truth and Reconcilitaion Commission. A striking illustration of an admission of American political policy mistakes came in late 2003 from an American president not noted for this practice in his first three years of office. An Arab advocate of democracy for his region, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, expressed his astonishment that in a speech George W. Bush “admitted past foreign policy mistakes and vowed not to condone dictatorial regimes, even among close traditional allies.” Among obvious examples would be the military help which Reagan and Bush administrations in the 1980s supplied Sad-dam Hussein’s war against Iran. Journalists like Power keep remembering that no less than Donald Rumsfeld negotiated U.S. military aid to Saddam Hussein in 1988 as that dictator was gassing thousands of Kurds. The Scope of American Responsibility Ah! As our commerce spreads, the flag of liberty will circle the globe, and the highways of the ocean–carrying trade of all mankind, be guarded by the guns of the republic.... Fellow Americans, we are God’s chosen people. —Albert Beveridge, Indiana Republican,in an address, “The March of the Flag,”calling for annexation of the Philippines, September 1898 Expansion and imperialism are a grand onslaught on democracy. —William Graham Sumner, later in 189834 This essay comes to print in months of raging worldwide debate over the degree to which Americans, our soldiers, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and national government are responsible for intervening in the lives of other peoples. Though many world conditions have changed, the debate between the Beveridge and the Sumner views is not over. In 1899 the Beveridge speech went to three hundred thousand copies and helped propel its author into the United States Senate.35 A hundred years later, the speech had an astonishing echo in opening words of Representative Henry Hyde to a 2004 meeting of the House Committee on International Relations. Our unilateral pursuit of war in Iraq, he said, “is all to the good, for it is unambiguous proof that absolutely nothing will deter us, that the entire world arrayed against us cannot stop us.”36 In 9/11, Americans experienced a new, unprecedented vulnerability to the harms that some other humans mean to inflict upon us. It is understandable that national political leaders should respond to this aggression with counter aggression. Few seemed alert to William Graham Sumner’s cautions about power in a democracy. As citizens of a “superpower,” how shall we resolve the dilemma of expecting too much from our power to influence the world and expecting too little? With our ideals, economic strength, and military power, are Americans now able to control the rest of the world to the benefit of its interests and our own? To this end, a 2002 publication of the U.S. Department of Defense envisions American power in year 2020 under the rubric, “Full Spectrum Dominance”: [G]iven the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain its overseas presence and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance.37 A “good” nation like the United States, say supporters of this “vision,” can build a good empire. Whatever our diverse citizen attitudes toward America’s stance in 2004 worldwide, we have to acknowledge that with power always comes responsibility which entails both scope and limits. Hyde’s claim that “the entire world...cannot stop us” rings with historical ignorance and with no regard for the choices that all wielders of power must make. Consistency in those choices is hard to find in recent American history. Moral realists have to ask how, if military intervention in famine-wasted Somalia in 1993 was justified, was not intervention in Serb-invaded Bosnia yet more justified? And, most of all, in genocide-ravaged Rwanda? Realists have to add: Once military force acquires a cloak of justice, does the precedent make easier the disguise of unjust interests under cover of the same cloak? It is one thing to say that America had to strike back at terrorists in Afghanistan; another to ask where, in the name of just interests, American power must halt before the just interests of others; and yet another to ask: What sacrifices of life and wealth should Americans consider for serving the life and well-being of non-American peoples? What restrictions are we willing to put on the pursuit of our interests in service to those others? And what changes of intention are called for when our best intentions go awry? In her passionate conclusion to her landmark study of “the age of genocide,” Samantha Power summarizes the history of American inaction in response to this “problem from hell.” No American government has seen fit to risk even a few American lives on behalf of halting the mass killing of Armenians, Cambodians, Kurds, Shiites, Bosnians, or Rwandans while time for a halt was still open. Rallying the nation to attack Iraq in 2003 depended most of all on government claims that weapons of mass destruction and terrorist havens there directly threatened America. Those claims gave way eventually to the humanitarian argument of liberating the Iraqi people from tyranny. If that argument is worth the lives of a thousand American soldiers, why were not a million deaths of Muslims in Bosnia and Tutsis in Rwanda worth the same risk? Power’s indictment of our government’s sins of omission brings this American to the shamed conclusion that across many administrations, Democratic and Republican, Washington has taught us citizens that the United States will go to war for oil but not to halt mass murder. American leaders have been able to persist in turning away because genocide in distant lands has not captivated senators, congressional caucuses, Washington lobbyists, elite opinion shapers, grassroots groups, or individual citizens. The battle to stop genocide has thus been repeatedly lost in the realm of domestic politics.... In the end, however, the inertia of the governed cannot be disentangled from the indifference of the government.38 The history of slavery and the defiance of Indian interests abound with such mutual entanglement. “If democracy is about the right to choose one’s leaders,” said one South African recently, “it is also about taking responsibility for their leadership.”39 To this should be added: Governments have some responsibility for modeling and critiquing the idea of “public service.” Americans like to call their leaders public servants, so power to dominate often disguises itself as power to serve. As ethicist Edward LeRoy Long, Jr., says in his 2004 book, Facing Terrorism, there is a radical difference between “full spectrum dominance” and a “servanthood” understanding of political power: One is a form of playing God; the other is an acknowledgment of being human. The temptation to take on the world and make it into the images of our own ideals, especially by the use of power, is a form of idolatry, even in morally plausible versions.40 Political theology is no monopoly of theologians. In exact reflection of Long’s fear of idolatry of power, journalist Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian, wrote in June 2004 in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s funeral: The signal illusion from which America has to awake in Iraq and everywhere is that it serves God’s providence or (for those with more secular beliefs) that it is the engine of history.... For believing that it is Providence’s chosen instrument makes the country overestimate its power; it encourages it to lie to itself about its mistakes; and it makes it harder to live with the painful truth that history does not always—or even very often—obey the magnificent but dangerous illusions of American will.41 It is a sober note on which to end this essay, but the question presses upon Americans now as seldom before in our history: For what displays of hubris, in our current collective stance in the world, may the American government one day have to consider apologizing? Notes
* Donald H. Shriver, Jr. is emeritus President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Practical Christianity (1975–96) of Union Theological Seminary, New York. [Go to interactive discussion forum]
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