For families of the fallen and for modern veterans, there is a reality that often deepens our grief. Our wars since World War II have often been inconclusive, at best. Battlefield victories have been squandered, a nation that we defended — South Vietnam — is now extinct, and in Iraq thousands of men are right back where Americans were ten years ago, fighting the same enemy. Against that backdrop, I’ve heard people say that American sacrifices have been in vain, even that lives were “wasted.”
.. But I also know that courage is never truly wasted. It returns incalculable value to brothers-in-arms, to the military, and to the nation. We’ve seen throughout history that cowardice is contagious — but so are honor and courage, even (and sometimes especially) honor and courage displayed in a “losing” cause.
.. Yet that bond of shared sacrifice, of the willingness to die for your brother, sustains our nation and our culture.
The Citizen-Soldier: Moral Risk and the Modern Military
When he got to me, down at the end, he unloaded one of his more involved hypotheticals. “All right candidate. Say you think there’s an insurgent in a house and you call in air support, but then when you walk through the rubble there’s no insurgents, just this dead Iraqi civilian with his brains spilling out of his head, his legs still twitching and a little Iraqi kid at his side asking you why his father won’t get up. So. What are you going to tell that Iraqi kid?”
Amid all the playacting of OCS—screaming “Kill!” with every movement during training exercises, singing cadences about how tough we are, about how much we relish violence—this felt like a valuable corrective. In his own way, that Sergeant Instructor was trying to clue us in to something few people give enough thought to when they sign up: joining the Marine Corps isn’t just about exposing yourself to the trials and risks of combat—it’s also about exposing yourself to moral risk.
Trump will find that fierce nationalism goes only so far
This Trumpian view of the world, and of how his country fits into it, is something we have seen before in many places and at many points in history: the blaming of others for misfortunes. Sometimes the enemies are within (Communists, racial and religious minorities); sometimes they lurk abroad.
A strong and confident United States would never succumb to this appeal, and perhaps, in November, most of the country will have seen the appeal for what it is: a dangerous diversion.
.. These anxieties relate in part to Americans’ own choices: an unwillingness to tax themselves sufficiently to pay for programs; income inequalities that have been allowed to grow; a political system that is dysfunctional, grossly distorted by money, gerrymandering and inflamed partisanship; a financial system so loosely regulated and consumed by greed that its collapse in 2008 is still being felt; misguided foreign military adventures. But these observations are too toxic for domestic consumption.
.. So we have the plutocrat as the worker’s friend. The deal maker whose foreign policy will be a unilateral set of demands. The free-trade critic who has made lots of money outside the United States. The neophyte who almost revels in his ignorance, because knowledge breeds an understanding of complexity, and who proposes his daughter as an adviser in the White House.
Is America’s War on ISIS Illegal?
Does the captain’s participation in this undeclared war involve him in a mission to destroy, not “defend,” the Constitution?
Captain Smith, 28, has now brought suit in federal court to request an independent judgment on whether he is betraying his oath.
.. In August I published an essay in The Atlantic explaining that soldiers during the Vietnam War faced a similar predicament — and that two federal courts of appeal had considered their challenges to the war’s legality on the merits. The war ended before the issue could be decisively resolved by the Supreme Court, but I argued that these decisions would serve as precedents for a comparable lawsuit today.
.. Its aim was to prevent future presidents from following Nixon’s example in escalating the Vietnam War far beyond the limited authorization provided by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
The 1973 resolution requires the commander in chief to gain the approval of the House and Senate within 60 days of introducing forces into situations involving “imminent hostilities.” If he fails to gain congressional authorization, he must terminate his campaign within the next 30 days.
.. President Obama has repudiated the extreme claims made by former Vice President Dick Cheney and John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, who have denounced the War Powers Resolution as unconstitutional.