Berkeley, where I live, has been
in the news a lot in the last few weeks, The City Council, at the urging of some protesters, passed a resolution saying Marine recruiters weren’t welcome in town. It’s been controversial, and has been being pitted as yet another liberal vs. conservative battle. That perspective is unfortunate, as there are plenty of good liberal arguments against the actions of the protesters and the Council.
The war in Iraq has been a series of tragic and perhaps malicious errors on the part of the US Government’s civilian leadership. But even if the protesters were protesting military recruitment in general (which they’re not, but more on that later), their protests would be misguided. The US has been a remarkably stable democracy for over 200 years in no small part because our military follows orders from the civilian government. No matter how much many of us in Berkeley take pride in thinking for ourselves and not following orders (I would certainly make a terrible soldier), our military following orders is something we should be very happy about.
Countries where militaries second-guess civilian governments abound in the world – Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Thailand to pick some recent examples – and the results are not good. Over and over again, all over the world, elected governments do things that spark protests. Militaries decide their help is needed and overthrow the elected governments. Populations cheer briefly, and then discover that their military rulers are less competent and less responsive than their elected leaders were. By that point, it’s too late. Election mechanisms have had to be declared invalid to justify the coups, the military leaders are afraid of personal consequences if they give up power, and chances are several of what would have been election cycles go by before the situation gets resolved, often violently.
We in Berkeley may not like what our military does, but if we believe in democracy – our right to elect our leaders, and our right to protest – we should be thanking them anyway. But we also need to recognize the responsibility imposed on us by having a powerful military that does what our elected leaders tell it to. Because the military does not have a choice about what battles it goes into, we who elect the government have a responsibility to the military, and to those our military is told to help or attack, to elect a government with good judgment. I’m all for protesting the war, but those who do so should direct their anger where it belongs: at the President and Congress, not at our high level military officials, and certainly not at people with no decision making authority in a local recruiting office.
All that said, the targeting of the protests is perhaps less of an issue than what the protesters and Council have asked for. They have not asked for an end to military recruiting;
they have asked for an end to military recruiting in Berkeley. There might be confusion about whether this was an ideological or jurisdictional stance, but they’ve answered that with rhetoric about military recruitment being a violation of Berkeley’s pacifist traditions. This follows campaigns in previous years to get military recruiters out of the local high school, in the guise of keeping Berkeley’s young people safe. This, I believe, is where the protests go from being a misguided publicity stunt to being blatantly self-serving. The protesters are not only protesting the wrong people; they’re protesting the wrong thing. They’re not asking for an end to a war pursued by their own elected government. They’re just asking to have it fought by those from less powerful towns.
I will grant that slipping into that sort of self-interest is tempting. At a time when US military action was mostly humanitarian, my high school friends and I used to take great pride in the things we had said to get the local Army recruiter to stop bothering us. Sergeant Maxwell was pretty annoyingly aggressive. After the 9/11 attacks, one of the first things I did was to read the rules on the military draft, and was quite glad to see that my chances of getting drafted were very low. I like to think that I have more to contribute to the world than I could contribute by being shot at, but realistically so do most of the people in the military. In other words, I’m a wimp, I’ve let my government’s war become somebody else’s problem, and even recognition of that won’t make me go enlist. But the US does need a loyal military, and those of us who aren’t part of it ought to be all the more grateful to those who are.
