War Is Not the Answer (Except When It Is)

Saddam Hussein in 1990

I find myself thinking lately about the autumn of 1990. For history mavens, that’s the year Saddam Hussein’s Iraq crossed the border and illegally seized Kuwait. Not coincidentally, that’s also the year I first identified as conservative. Amid the saber-rattling rhetoric and rising nationalist sentiment for a swift American intervention, I began seeing myself as part of that push, as somebody contributing to a great coast-to-coast effort.

The rhetoric surrounding Operation Desert Shield (later Operation Desert Storm) was pure national security state mythology. After ten years of presenting Saddam Hussein as America’s proxy hero during the Iran-Iraq War, our national story immediately flip-flopped. Suddenly he became a world-class tyrant, head of a rogue state with Third Reich-ish ambitions and, potentially, a nuclear bomb. Worst of all, his illegal occupation of Kuwait targeted women and children.

I believed everything. When I heard Iraq had 630,000 troops in tiny Kuwait, enough to invade Saudi Arabia, I embraced an immediate American counter-force. Government spokespeople claimed Iraqi troops heedlessly slaughtered Kuwaiti civilians in their homes, I responded with outrage. Like millions of Americans, I react with horror to learn that Iraqi soldiers had stolen Kuwaiti baby incubators, leaving 231 preemies on the linoleum to die.

There’s only one problem. As we now know, all that was a lie.

The legal and moral justifications for Operation Desert Storm were almost entirely fabricated by American PR firms, mostly Hill & Knowlton. These agencies provided lurid content that grabbed ratings on nightly news. It was pure gold for networks; audiences old enough to remember, will recall how Desert Storm turned CNN into a mainstream source, and Wolf Blitzer into a celebrity. To achieve these ends, sources needed only to baldly lie.

This week, after promising for weeks, Russia’s Putin Administration finally crossed the border into Ukraine. Having successfully annexed the Crimea in 2014, and watched NATO balk, Vladimir Putin apparently decided to repeat the escapade once successfully accomplished by tsars and Supreme Soviets before it: seize Ukraine’s abundant farmland on a specious pretext. Like Kuwait before it, and Anschluss before that, it created waves of refugees.

Watching from my armchair, this looks like an unprovoked, illegal invasion, a clear violation of UN standards of national sovereignty and secure borders. Putin used glaring anti-semitic language to belittle Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is ethnically Jewish. Putin also used claims of protecting ethnic Russians from mistreatment abroad, a justification similarly used in Germany to justify repeated unethical invasions. This feels very Third Reich-y.

Vladimir Putin pictured with his favorite lapdog

As a believer in peace, I don’t encourage war anymore. Learning how readily I swallowed lies in 1990 and 1991 partly contributed to my politics shifting several years later. That shift was confirmed when America decided Gulf State entanglements were fun, and we should do that again. I slapped a “War Is Not the Answer” bumper sticker on my car, marched in local peace parades, and started attending a Quaker prayer circle.

But I acknowledge too that no one-size-fits-all policy response exists: Vladimir Putin sure looks evil, and he’s demonstrated that a stern finger-waving won’t discourage him. Having already rabbit-punched Ukraine, he now promises similar treatment in Scandinavia. This isn’t America getting involved in another country’s internal affairs, like happened in Vietnam. This is clearly a toxic mixture of imperial ambition and unchecked power, and peer pressure won’t stop it.

As a dedicated amateur follower of history, I watch with dread, knowing this happened once in Germany. But it also, let’s admit, also happened in the Persian Gulf, twice. Our media uncritically regurgitated fables of murdered babies, of WMDs, of connections to global terror described in clearly racialized terms. And we pedestrians, including me, swallowed it. (The first time; by 2004 I’d grown skeptical.)

If we’re witnessing what authorities say we’re witnessing, this looks like a legitimate case for intervention. Viewed from afar, the Ukraine situation appears clear-cut, the desperate gasp of an aging despot aware that, if he doesn’t do something soon, he’s likely to lose power and die in prison. Even recognizing that we’re pitting two nuclear-armed powers against one another, this appears to be a case of justifiable war.

This appears so. But within our lifetimes, we’ve been lied to, both by our own national security apparatus, and by paid propaganda hustlers. In a world where we know evil exists, and we must confront it courageously, we’ve swallowed so many lies that we can’t tell who’s truthful anymore. I find myself paralyzed. Because, God forgive me, I never want to be that wrong again.