Moral outrage, moral opposition, and when President Trump contemplates war (op-ed)

A passage attributed to Mark Twain goes, “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

It was the boy that grew in understanding not the father. The passage points out how conceit in one's own knowledge or moral position prevents the introspection needed for maturity.   

Social movements are no different.

Do you remember the anti-war movement during the Bush/Cheney years?

This anti-war movement made it clear they supported the troops, but not the invasion of Iraq. They didn’t want to be associated with their predecessor’s mistreatment of soldiers that returned from Vietnam. So they corrected that behavior, but they failed to understand the difference between moral outrage and moral opposition.

Now, the moral dilemma was different between the generations.

The first generation lived during the time of the draft and they didn’t feel morally obligated to participate in a civil war in another country. Their moral outrage was against the draft, which is not the same thing as moral opposition to military intervention. This generation was fractured between the “drafted” and the “draft dodger”. This led to a horrific climax at Kent State University when the National Guard shot and killed demonstrators that were opposed to President Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War effort into Cambodia.

So to prevent this moral outrage the draft was ended and America has an all-volunteer army.

Now the Bush/Cheney administration invaded Afghanistan before they invaded Iraq. The Afghan invasion was based on the “Bush doctrine”. This unprecedented doctrine sanctioned the invasion of sovereign states for harboring terrorists. At the time no serious opposition to the invasion formed because American’s were still morally outraged over 9/11. Plus, the ruling Afghan government wasn’t recognized by the majority of the world’s nations. So the unprecedented language of the “Bush doctrine” was overlooked because of the insignificance of its target.

If there was ever a time the innocent needed a moral opposition to invasion by “citizens of the world” this was it but it never materialized.

Success in Afghanistan and the lack of serious opposition to the invasion encouraged the Bush/Cheney administration to invade Iraq, which was a separate issue, but they figured if they connected Iraq to 9/11 and Afghanistan America’s moral outrage will continue in their favor.

That didn’t work.

So the anti-war movement was morally outraged because of the falsehoods that led to the invasion of Iraq. Once again the moral outrage over lies is not the same as moral opposition to war.

Of course during the Presidential primary candidates who wanted to get rid of the moral outrage like their predecessors did by ending the draft promised to pull the troops from Iraq. Senator Barack Obama won the presidency and the first thing he did was send more troops to Afghanistan. And there was no opposition to escalating the “Bush doctrine” due to the President’s promise to withdraw troops in Iraq, and the anti-war movement vanished.

President Obama kept his promise and withdrew from Iraq, but at the end of his presidency a White House correspondent for the New York Times stated that President Obama has an unexpected legacy of two full terms at war. He wrote: Obama, the anti-war candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than FDR, LBJ, and Nixon. He also said when President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize Obama declared that humanity needed to reconcile “two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.”

Former President Obama’s right, but the problem is President Trump inherited these conflicts and if he begins to escalate them all anti-war moral outrage will be ignored, labeled as partisan, immature, or folly because a serious moral opposition to war failed to develop when it was needed.

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 3/15/17