Recap – Lessons 5-6

We looked at the arguments made to justify the invasion of Iraq with an eye toward whether or not they were good, i.e., persuasive. That led to a discussion about what happens when a military officer disagrees with the stated policy of our civilian leadership and the decisions of our Commander-in-Chief. Pretty clear consensus that once those decisions are enacted in the form of directives from senior military leadership, we either follow orders or resign. Then we took it a step further: what about those officers who stay and obey yet still disagree? Do they get to state their opinion – privately – to family, friends, or subordinates? Mixed feelings on this, with many of you thinking we should suppress our opinions and toe the line, period-dot. Others observed we can’t help but form opinions, and suppressing them when someone asks would be tantamount to BS. In both cases, the effect on the morale of our subordinates was the primary motivator: toe the line so as not to discourage our Airmen, vs. be honest, because our Airmen will recognize BS.

Following Martin Cook’s comparison of two superpowers – the United States after the Cold War and ancient Athens after the Persian Wars – we explored some analogues between the Peloponnesian War and OIF. We looked at the difference between preemptive and preventive justifications for going to war (jus ad bellum), at the types of coalitions each conflict spawned, and at the harsh realism of the Athenians vs. the false dilemma embedded in our own policy, both of which resulted in a “with us or against us” stance toward other nations.

We also talked about the effects of war. For Athens, the Peloponnesian War ushered in the end of her domination of the Greeks, the “brief, shining moment” that marked the beginning of Western culture. The effect of OIF on the U.S. is still unwritten. As Secretary Gates recently told reporters, “the problem with this war for, I think, many Americans is that the premise on which we justified going to war proved not to be valid — that is, Saddam having weapons of mass destruction.” He added, candidly: “It will always be clouded by how it began.”

History will clarify what good comes out of OIF. From the Peloponnesian War, one positive outcome we identified was the re-focusing of philosophy into ethical realms of inquiry. Philosophy had already existed in an early form prior to the war. Its path out of the ancient Greek religion, what we now call mythology, appears when the earliest philosophers, the pre-Socratics, sought naturalistic explanations for life’s everyday challenges. They formed explanations based on their observations of nature, as opposed to relying on the presence of gods and the gods’ interaction with humanity to explain how and why the world worked. Even then, the pre-Socratics couldn’t wholly escape the religious context of their time, and many of their explanations retained mythic qualities. It wasn’t until Socrates developed his style of street philosophy that the ancient, mythopoeic ethic (based on punishment and reward) would begin to be challenged.