FIREBLIND.COM

I know you’ve all heard a phrase that goes something like “our brave soldiers fighting for our freedoms”. I can’t recall if I heard it used around the time of the 1990/1991 Gulf War, but it’s definitely made the rounds since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the US. Each of you reading this have also seen the sundry patriotic e-mails that expand on the theme.

In any event, I’ve been pondering this expression of late, primarily because it’s starting to anger me. This is not because good hearted Americans use it to describe their respect for the American military, but because for too long it’s been used as a tool to stifle legitimate debate on the policies of our government. Before you start calling me a pinko or something, hear me out.

Militaries around the world and throughout time have been used for different purposes. In many cases, soldiers have been used for the personal benefit of a ruler, whether it be Alexander the Great, or crabby ol’ Yahway of the Old Testament. If I’m a despotic ruler and I use my military to invade a defenseless neighboring country so that I can capture its queen and take her for my wife, I think you would have a hard time convincing people that my invading soldiers are fighting for anyone’s freedoms. Similarly, if I’m a Muslim ruler who invades a Hindu country simply for conquest over another religion, discussions of freedom are out the door.

Suppose that my purpose in invading another country is to take it over and rule it, and that I intend to treat the citizens harshly as I consider them to be barbarians. I want to lock everyone up in shackles and only give them a small portion of bread and water each day. Should the citizens of that country decide to fight my military, it’s pretty clear in this example that they are, in fact, fighting for their way of life, including their “freedoms”.

I suspect that during the Vietnam or Korean wars, few proponents of them argued that American soldiers were fighting for American freedoms. Rather, the motives were probably seen as something like stopping the communists, or perhaps preserving the freedom of our Vietnamese/Korean allies.

I write all this because I’m trying to show that, as far as wars go, there are a spectrum of motivations, some being more moral than others. Or, more specifically, we can understand that some wars are not fought at all over issues of freedom.

We can thus ask the question, are American soldiers in a given conflict fighting for American freedoms? Even more to the point, are Americans killing others and being killed themselves in order to protect American values?

My honest assessment of the invasion of Iraq is that no, American soldiers are not fighting for American “freedoms”. Keep in mind that I’m a political independent, and that my graduate studies centered largely around the relationship of Islamism and terrorism to the Middle East, in particular to the interests of Iraq, Iran, Israel, and the US. I’m not just some yahoo blogger this time.

It may very well be that our soldiers are being used in the interests of a larger American policy that will benefit Americans in the long run, but I find it severely disingenuous to pretend that this is the same thing as “fighting for freedom”. Fighting for freedom seems to imply that the dark-skinned barbarians are literally at the gates, ready to pounce on every small-waisted blond mother. You can just see her now, loving her freedom while she washes her dishes and cherishes the freedom of her two blond, freedom loving children playing in the front yard.

I’m joking of course, but my point is still valid. Expressions like “fighting for freedom” seem like good, safe patriotism, but in reality this is not the case. When we reduce such an enormously complex conflict like our invasion of Iraq into a cute phrase like this, in actuality this is where we’re giving away our freedom. We give up our freedom to challenge our elected officials on good policy, and in the way in which we want them to use our fighting men and women. We’ve let the spin-doctors win, because they’ve been able to hide all the difficult questions underneath a soft blanket of blue-blooded patriotism. Instead of legitimately discussing the ugly truths involved in the conflict, they’re wrapped up in a faux-patriotism that can be used as a weapon against anyone who dare challenge the “rightness” of “fighting for our freedoms”.

I’m not interested in arguing here over whether the invasion of Iraq was or was not the right thing to do (maybe another time), but if we want to truly honor our men and women in uniform, it’s time to quit with the bullshit phrases and all the fake patriotism and really talk about what’s going on in the world. If you had to sit a young soldier down and tell him that tomorrow you were going to send him into a firefight in Falluja and that he was most likely going to die, don’t you think you owe him something better than a trite, condescending phrase? At that moment, he’s fighting for himself and his family. Most importantly, he’s trying to prevent bullets from ripping through his young face. He’s got a job to do—whether right or wrong—and he wants to do it and get out alive. It’s simply insulting to tell this young man that the reason he is never going to see his daughter again is because Saddam Hussein wanted to take his freedoms away.

Support the invasion if you want, I don’t care. Just don’t do for some bullshit propaganda. Do it because you think it’s the right choice for everyone in the long run. Do it because you have a brain to decide that it’s a tough decision, but it might be the right decision. Don’t do it because you get a warm feeling forwarding along an e-mail, or because you put a goddamned bumper sticker on your car. You are quite literally telling every American soldier that you’re willing to let him or her die because this war is that important. If this is the way you feel, at least make their death count for something. Getting all warm and fuzzy over a country song doesn’t count.