The Forever War

If one wanted to identify an example of a traditionalist society better left undisturbed by modernity and its competing ideologies, it would be Afghanistan before the July 17, 1973 coup that overthrew King Mahammed Zahir Shah and set that sad society on the trajectory that led seemingly inexorably to the "Saur Revolution" of April 19789, which installed a pro-Soviet Communist government, which then led to the Soviet invasion of 1979 and the U.S. supported insurgency that followed, ending in the Taliban takeover of the country after the Soviet defeat and departure, followed finally by the 20-year American military intervention in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, our "forever" war.

Now, 20 years since President George W. Bush went to war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, President Joe Biden is apparently prepared to call its quits. The Afghan adventure is hardly the only extra-constitutional war the U.S,. has waged since the last legitimate declaration of war in 1941, but it has been the longest. (Technically, I suppose, the Korean Conflict has gone on even longer, but de facto in terms of actual fighting that war actually ended in the 1950s.)

A lifelong internationalist, who grew up in the Cold War, I remain sympathetic to the idea the the U.S. as the world's principal Power has global responsibilities which will at times entail military interventions. Both U.S. political parties have their neo-isolationist wings, and all such "America First" arguments, whether of the right or left-wing version, ought to be approached with utmost caution. That said, sometimes retreat is the least bad option among many, and this may be one of those times. There was nothing honorable at all about our 1975 helicopter flight from Saigon, but what really viable alternative was there then, apart from a long-term involvement to maintain an ultimately unsatisfactory status quo - at a price the American people appeared no longer willing to pay? The same seems to be the case now in Afghanistan.

Just as the American abandonment of our Vietnamese allies in 1975 made a communist takeover of the entire country inevitable, so too our projected flight from Afghanistan may mean a return to power by the tyrannical Taliban. It might even mean more opportunities for whatever has replaced Al Qaeda. Of course, the Afghan government could conceivable get its act together and prevent or at least minimize such undesirable outcomes. Whatever happens, if the only alternative is a continued conflict involving American forces, fighting for no attainable objective except to forestall something worse happening the day after we leave, then some humility about what American power can actually accomplish may at last be in order.

There is also the political reality that, outside the elite foreign policy establishment, there seems little popular appetite for a forever war. If we still had a citizen army, as we did until the 1970s, the popular pressure to end this war would have been even greater and would have arisen even sooner. Even so, Donald Trump's knee-jerk, poorly thought-out isolationism was likely one contributing factor (even if only one among many) in his initial success. 

There is no obviously goof outcome here. Senator Reed, the Chair of the Armed Services Committee, may have said it best when he called President Biden's decision "the least of many bad options." 

Admittedly, historical analogies are all inevitably problematic, but the Vietnam analogy is not irrelevant. We now know that many policy-makers had come to doubt our Vietnam policy prior to our eventually changing it. I do not deny or make light of the worries of an earlier generation of policy-makers who were afraid to acknowledge the lack of light at the end of the tunnel. No one wanted to have that last helicopter leave Saigon on his watch. Fair enough. And no one really wants to see the Taliban (or worse) conquer Kabul and be the one not to have done anything about it. But Biden - like those Vietnam-era policy-makers before him - long ago sensed the inability of "endless American military force" to "create or sustain a durable Afghan government." And that concern counts too.

A lot has happened these past 20 years since the U.S. first invaded and occupied Afghanistan, a lot that has made the world situation if anything even more threatening - including a worldwide financial collapse, a global pandemic, and the perennial reality of climate change, along with the rise of China, the persistence of Russia, and the development of newer forms of terrorism that don't require a base in far-away Afghanistan. And, maybe most threatening of all, American society has been fragmented and polarized in dangerous ways. All that needs to be attended to now. That, I presume, is what President Biden means by the battles of "the next twenty years - not the last twenty."

On Boehner's Book

 

John Boehner begins this stylistically somewhat unique memoir (lots of golf, with not as much but still more than might be expected about going to Mass) by recalling his first meeting with Donald Trump, appropriately enough on a golf course. That was also when he first witnessed Trump's anger, although he "had no idea then what that anger would do to our country." From that initial experience, he moves on to analyzing why "our government isn't working the way it ought to" - in part because some people "come to Washington intent on promoting themselves instead of working together," whom he calls "political terrorists, peddling chaos and crisis so that everyone keeps paying attention to them."

As a full-fledged member of the once powerful Republican party "establishment," John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2015, lived through and was himself one of the casualties of the moral and political crackup of the Republican party. On the House: A Washington Memoir (St. Martin's Press, 2021) retells that already very familiar story. All of which warrants the obvious question: What is it about dethroned "establishment" Republicans like him that they did not speak up when it might have mattered? Perhaps, probably, they realized it might not have mattered anyway - if , in fact, their diagnosis of the moral and political crackup of the Republican party proves correct. 

Perhaps, in his defense, Boehner could claim to have spoken up in an indirect way when he threw in the towel in 2015. Now, however, he is speaking up directly. 

He portrays his entry into politics as "a Reagan Republican" and his own rapid rise in Republican leadership under Gingrich. Reagan offers him an immediate point of contrast between then and now. "I don’t think Ronald Reagan would recognize the Republican Party today," he claims. "And he sure as hell couldn’t get elected in it. As a matter of fact, Reagan would be the most left-wing candidate in the GOP these days—by a mile."  Gingrich gets him to the Republican takeover of the House and to the politically motivated impeachment of President Clinton in 1998, part of the move to the extremist - and pointless - politics which he now seems to regret. 

It is useful to cover old ground like that, to recall that really not so distant past history, because the Republicans' present predicament (and that of the country) is rooted in the Republican party's perversion of our politics in the 1990s with the likes of New Gingrich and even earlier with Reagan and with Nixon's "southern strategy." All of that helped set the confrontational stage on which Boehner's speakership would be played.

Importantly, Boehner recognizes the distinctive dynamic of contemporary American politics which is highly polarized "with plenty of hardliners on both sides" and where the few "swing districts" determine which party controls the house at any time. Paradoxically, this "means whoever is in charge is still going to have to find common ground with the other side to get things done." But that, of course, is increasingly difficult to do. "There are people we are electing who will destroy this country if we aren’t careful. ... I worked with a lot of these people, and fought them plenty. Sometimes they were just annoying, but sometimes they were downright destructive." He makes of point of pre-dating such behavior before to rise of the Tea party - at least back to the Financial Crisis of 2008, his description of his party's poor response to which is one of the more interesting episodes in the book. "Some of the more reasonable members were panicked," Boehner recalls. "But the nuts were even more emboldened." So, when he took the Speaker's gavel midway onto Obama's first term, he became what he calls the "Mayor of Crazytown." 

And he was already gone from DC by the time Trump came on the scene!

Regarding January 6, Boehner leaves no doubt that "Trump incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons," .For the former Speaker, "watching it was scary, and sad. It should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity."

In the end, Boehner seems happiest recalling one of the few uplifting moments of his Speakership. 

"I tried for 20 years to get a pope to come visit the U.S. Congress. No luck with John Paul II, no luck with Benedict XVI. But by the time Francis was elevated, I had friends in the Vatican who could help the process along. In fact, I understand His Holiness was especially favorably disposed to the invitation I sent him after he learned about the work I (and my late pal Teddy Kennedy) had done for kids at Catholic schools in Washington.

"I’d never seen Congress more happy than it was that day. Republicans and Democrats, senators and representatives—everybody was uplifted by Pope Francis’s visit. And it was the presence of the Holy Spirit he brought there that day that gave me the idea to announce my retirement not in the fall as I’d planned but the very next day."

Through the Locked Doors

The Second Sunday of Easter, April 11, 2021.

As he does year after year on Low Sunday, the Risen Jesus  passes through the locked doors to say to his disciples and to us, Peace be with you [John 20:19-31]. The disciples' doors were locked out of fear - for good reason. So, more or less, have our doors and lives been locked during this past pandemic year - also out of fear, also for good reason. All the more need, then, for us to hear those reassuring words, Peace be with you. 

Meanwhile, today’s 1st reading [Acts 4:32-35] describes what happened after Easter - the life of the first Christian community in Jerusalem. The peace the Risen Lord had given his disciples through the closed doors on Easter Sunday was soon lived outside in the city, which experienced the powerful witness of the apostles to the reality of the resurrection and the dramatic transformation in people’s behavior that resulted - the peace they lived, that then in turn became itself a powerful form of witness.

In a world torn by constant conflict and division, the community of believers strove to be of one heart and mind. In a world divided between rich and poor, between “haves” and “have nots,” between healthy and sick, no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.

In the world in which we now live, it is separation – not unity – that remains fundamental to the human condition. Social, economic, educational, ethnic, racial, regional, religious, and - summing up and subsuming all those divisions, defining and separating us into tribes - political divisions increasingly form the modern day fabric of our human relations. All the more necessary, then, is the living witness of the Church to the peace of the Risen Christ in our midst and his continued action in the world through his Body, the Church. All the more necessary, then, is the living witness of the Church to a new order of relationships linking people and communities of every race, language, and way of life – challenging us all, individually and collectively, to live as changed people because we have been recipients of the peace of the Risen Christ, as witnessed by his continued action in the world through his Body, the Church.

The Risen Christ brings the promise of peace and abundant life to all. Just as the disciples, after being initially full of fear, experienced the greatest joy on discovering Jesus to be truly and fully alive, for all of us too the encounter with the Risen Christ is to discover that same peace and abundant life which is the Risen Lord's great gift to us.

(Photo: The Paulist Fathers' House Chapel, NY, Easter 2021) 

The Wrong of "Rights"

The famous frontispiece of the 1651 edition of Thomas Hobbes' classic masterpiece Leviathan (photo) shows Hobbes's sovereign, sword in one hand, scepter in the other, whose power provides peace and order to the community pictured below. Yet as Sheldon Wolin wrote some 60 years ago: "The sovereign's powerful body is, so to speak not this own; its outline is completely filled in by the miniature figures of his subjects. ... Equally important each subject is clearly discernible in the body fo the sovereign. The citizens are not swallowed up in an anonymous mass, nor sacramentally merged into a mystical body. Each remains a discrete individual and each retains his identity in an absolute way" [Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, (Little, Brown, 1960), p. 266]. That famous image speaks volumes about the individualistic, non-communitarian language and political premises we Americans have inherited from Hobbes and the early modern Liberal tradition. 

Despite dire threats to public safety and public health, contemporary American society seems stymied by anti-social elements that oppose the public and common good - with a purported "right" to private ownership of deadly weapons, with a purported "right" not to wear masks in public, with a purported "right" to refuse to be vaccinated against a deadly disease that has spread all around the world and has claimed more than half a million American lives alone in this past year.

Obviously, anyone at all acquainted with the distinctive history of the United States and with the language of the  Declaration of Independence is familiar with how highly valued the idea of individual "rights" is in our society's self-understanding - and how its prominence sets us apart from other Western democratic societies. Individual "rights" and reasoning based on such assumptions are so pervasive that even critics of this tradition's consequences sometimes seem at a loss for words with which to counter it. 

And for a long time, of course, there were any number of pre-modern, non-individualistic communal institutions (e.g., families, churches) and other communitarian networks which persisted as healthy antidotes to the extreme individualism of orthodox "rights" language. Such residual elements of an earlier outlook and pre-modern social arrangements - what Karl Marx in his Grundrisse called "partly unconquered remnants" of "vanished social formations" - by their persistent presence and survival into relatively recent memory may have helped soften individualism's cutting edge, providing arrangements of sociability which individualism itself can never provide.

Surely the preservation of viable families, churches, and other communitarian networks and, to whatever extent possible, their recovery where they have already been diminished or have disappeared would be a beneficial alternative to our thoroughly fragmented present reality. All indications, however, question whether such solidarities can be salvaged in a society in which they have been increasingly strangled by the suffocating excesses of individualism. As the absurd arguments about guns, masks, and vaccines illustrate so poignantly, individual "rights" removed from any social reference and responsibility destroy any sort of solidarity and reduce everything to fantasized self-interest.

The traditional American fascination with John Locke (1632-1704) notwithstanding, it was Locke's immediate forerunner, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who first formulated in an important way our modern notion of individual "rights" - distinguishing between right and law, defining right in terms of liberty and law in terms of obligation. Hobbes' picture of politics, in which political order was a pure product of rational calculation, cannot appear unfamiliar to an American. It is an artificial alliance formed and based upon individuals for the most satisfactory attainment of their essential private, personal interests. While the calculation that created a necessary political arrangement obviously has rearranged the external environment, it aspires to leave our moral characters as unaltered as possible. We remain socially and politically compromised. Our purposes remain the products of our passions, and our reason remains no more than rational calculation. We will cease to be or really never become citizens in a properly political sense. We are hardly even friends - except in the rather qualified and incidental sense of friendship Aristotle ascribed to those who are so on the basis of utility [cf. Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 4, 1157b]. The inability to foster in people the kind of commitment to the common and public good which would cause them to embrace the burdens and benefits of citizenship points to the politically problematic dimension of defining ourselves in terms of our individual "rights," while the more general inability to instill and cultivate a capacity to care for one another indicates the socially problematic dimension of defining ourselves in terms of our individual "rights."

Hobbes had created his Leviathan state to clamp a lid on the conflicts which would be inevitable between and among "rights"-bearing individuals. Our own American Leviathan state (so much more powerful in practice than anything Hobbes could have actually envisaged in his time) has instead lifted the lid, allowing ever increasing inventions of individual "rights" and ever increasing advocacy on their behalf, increasingly unrestrained either socially or morally by whatever remains of "vanished social formations." The consequence, however, is (to appropriate Hobbesian imagery) a kind of continuation of a state of war within civil society.  The more the protective armor of "rights" is employed, the more seemingly inevitable is the persistence of conflict and the more inconceivable any alternative sensibility which would hopefully facilitate a transcendence of conflict.

Hegel somewhere said that weapons are but the essence of the combatants themselves. As citizens armed with "rights," Americans have become the antithesis of friends, hence hardly citizens at all. Friendship, Aristotle argued, "seems to hold states together." Friends, Aristotle also argued, "have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition" [Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 1, 1155a].

Sociability, fostered by friendship, would hopefully help polarized Americans rediscover citizenship and overcome the perennial problem of inequality and other divisions. Needless to say, individual "rights" remain as much a symptom as an agent of division. Eliminating the language of individual "rights" would not, in and of itself, recover the language, let alone the reality of common citizenship, of shared responsibility for the public and common good. But we must begin somewhere, if we are to reconsider our relationships with one another and rediscover what it means to be human together.

HRH The Duke of Edinburgh (1921-2021)

Dead today at the amazing age of 99, the Duke of Edinburgh, the exiled Greek prince who once described himself as “a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction”, ended up living a life of great merit and moral distinction as husband of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. Leaving behind what might have been a promising career in the Royal Navy, he devoted himself totally to the role he had assumed at his marriage, to support his wife in her unique vocation. Dismissed by some as an outsider (despite impeccable royal credentials as a Prince of Greece and Denmark, whose mother was a British princess born at Windsor Castle), he became one of the most energetic members of the Royal Family (including a reported 22,000 solo public engagements), but always understood his role to be one of duty to crown and country, unlike the self-promoting behavior sadly associated with some others who have more recently married into the Royal Family.

Like the Queen herself and in partnership with the Queen, Philip demonstrated the timeless value of a life devoted to an institution and a purpose bigger than oneself. This is a way of life no longer valued much in our contemporary world, and our world is that much poor for it. Together Elizabeth and Philip have for almost 70 years been a powerful counter-cultural force, exemplifying the value of living a life of purpose. The United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, and the wider world have been notably enriched by their great moral example. Institutions (Churches among them) which by their nature might be expected to promote a morally serious way of life but which have fallen prey to therapeutic and other more limiting alternatives, might well look to Philip's example.

On a personal note, 16 years ago I had the great benefit of a sabbatical experience at Saint George's House, Windsor Castle, a program founded in 1966 by the then Dean of Windsor with the Duke of Edinburgh, one of many initiatives that form the legacy of a long and purpose-filled life of service to his country, the Commonwealth, and the world.