Myths of War

[Dardedar]

I am starting this thread to get suggestions for our new Mythbuster board on "Myths of War."

While snooping around I found this powerful article which should give this topic a good start off.

***
The Press and the Myths of War
by Chris Hedges

In wartime the press is always part of the problem. This has been true
since the Crimean War, when William Howard Russell wrote his account of the charge of the Light Brigade and invented the profession of the
modern war correspondent. When the nation goes to war, the press goes
to war with it. The blather on CNN or Fox or MSNBC is part of a long and
sad tradition.

The narrative we are fed about war by the state, the entertainment
industry and the press is a myth. And this myth is seductive. It
empowers and ennobles us. It boosts rating and sells
newspapers--William Randolph Hearst owed his fortune to it. It allows us to suspend individual conscience, maybe even consciousness, for the cause. And few of us are immune. Indeed, social critics who normally excoriate the established order, and who also long for acceptance and acclaim, are some of the most susceptible. It is what led a mind as great as Freud's to back, at least at its inception, the folly of World War I. The
contagion of war, of the siren call of the nation, is so strong that
most cannot resist.

War is where I have spent most of my adult life. I began covering the
insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then went to
Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the
West Bank and Gaza, the civil wars in Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in
Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellions in southeastern Turkey
and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally Kosovo. I have been
in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in
the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held prisoner for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion
following the Gulf War, strafed by MIG-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy
artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments. I
have painful memories that lie buried and untouched most of the time.
It is never easy when they surface.

War itself is venal, dirty, confusing and perhaps the most potent
narcotic invented by humankind. Modern industrial warfare means that
most of those who are killed never see their attackers. There is
nothing glorious or gallant about it. If we saw what wounds did to bodies, how killing is far more like butchering an animal than the clean and neat
Hollywood deaths on the screen, it would turn our stomachs. If we saw
how war turns young people into intoxicated killers, how it gives
soldiers a license to destroy not only things but other human beings,
and if we saw the perverse thrill such destruction brings, we would be
horrified and frightened. If we understood that combat is often a
constant battle with a consuming fear we have perhaps never known, a
battle that we often lose, we would find the abstract words of
war--glory, honor and patriotism--not only hollow but obscene. If we
saw the deep psychological scars of slaughter, the way it maims and stunts those who participate in war for the rest of their lives, we would keep our children away. Indeed, it would be hard to wage war.

For war, when we confront it truthfully, exposes the darkness within
all of us. This darkness shatters the illusions many of us hold not only
about the human race but about ourselves. Few of us confront our own
capacity for evil, but this is especially true in wartime. And even
those who engage in combat are afterward given cups from the River
Lethe to forget. And with each swallow they imbibe the myth of war. For the myth makes war palatable. It gives war a logic and sanctity it does not possess. It saves us from peering into the darkest recesses of our own hearts. And this is why we like it. It is why we clamor for myth. The
myth is enjoyable, and the press, as is true in every nation that goes
to war, is only too happy to oblige. They dish it up and we ask for
more.

War as myth begins with blind patriotism, which is always thinly veiled
self-glorification. We exalt ourselves, our goodness, our decency, our
humanity, and in that self-exaltation we denigrate the other. The flip
side of nationalism is racism--look at the jokes we tell about the
French. It feels great. War as myth allows us to suspend judgment and
personal morality for the contagion of the crowd. War means we do not
face death alone. We face it as a group. And death is easier to bear
because of this. We jettison all the moral precepts we have about the
murder of innocent civilians, including children, and dismiss
atrocities of war as the regrettable cost of battle. As I write this article,
hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including children and the
elderly, are trapped inside the city of Basra in southern Iraq--a city
I know well--without clean drinking water. Many will die. But we seem,
because we imbibe the myth of war, unconcerned with the suffering of
others.

Yet, at the same time, we hold up our own victims. These crowds of
silent dead--our soldiers who made "the supreme sacrifice" and our
innocents who were killed in the crimes against humanity that took
place on 9/11--are trotted out to sanctify the cause and our employment of indiscriminate violence. To question the cause is to defile the dead.
Our dead count. Their dead do not. We endow our victims, like our
cause, with righteousness. And this righteousness gives us the moral
justification to commit murder. It is an old story.

In wartime we feel a comradeship that, for many of us, makes us feel
that for the first time we belong to the nation and the group. We are
fooled into thinking that in wartime social inequalities have been
obliterated. We are fooled into feeling that, because of the threat, we
care about others and others care about us in new and powerful waves of
emotion. We are giddy. We mistake this for friendship. It is not.
Comradeship, the kind that comes to us in wartime, is about the
suppression of self-awareness, self-possession. All is laid at the feet
of the god of war. And the cost of this comradeship, certainly for
soldiers, is self-sacrifice, self-annihilation. In wartime we become
necrophiliacs.

The coverage of war by the press has one consistent and pernicious
theme--the worship of our weapons and our military might. Retired
officers, breathless reporters, somber news anchors, can barely hold
back their excitement, which is perverse and--frankly, to those who do
not delight in watching us obliterate other human beings--disgusting.
We are folding in on ourselves, losing touch with the outside world,
shredding our own humanity and turning war into entertainment and a way to empower ourselves as a nation and individuals. And none of us are untainted. It is the dirty thrill people used to get from watching a
public execution. We are hangmen. And the excitement we feel is in
direct proportion to the rage and anger we generate around the globe.
We will pay for every bomb we drop on Iraq.

"The first casualty when war comes," Senator Hiram Johnson said in
1917, "is truth."

The reasons for war are hidden from public view. We do not speak about
the extension of American empire but democracy and ridding the world of
terrorists--read "evil"--along with weapons of mass destruction. We do
not speak of the huge corporate interests that stand to gain even as
poor young boys from Alabama, who joined the Army because this was the only way to get health insurance and a steady job, bleed to death along the Euphrates. We do not speak of the lies that have been told to us in the past by this Administration--for example, the lie that Iraq was on the way to building a nuclear bomb. We have been rendered deaf and
dumb. And when we awake, it will be too late, certainly too late to save the dead, theirs and ours.

The embedding of several hundred journalists in military units does not
diminish the lie. These journalists do not have access to their own
transportation. They depend on the military for everything, from food
to a place to sleep. They look to the soldiers around them for protection.
When they feel the fear of hostile fire, they identify and seek to
protect those who protect them. They become part of the team. It is a
natural reaction. I have felt it.

But in that experience, these journalists become participants in the
war effort. They want to do their bit. And their bit is the dissemination
of myth, the myth used to justify war and boost the morale of the soldiers and civilians. The lie in wartime is almost always the lie of omission. The blunders by our generals--whom the mythmakers always portray as heroes--along with the rank corruption and perversion, are masked from public view. The intoxication of killing, the mutilation of enemy dead, the murder of civilians and the fact that war is not about what they claim is ignored. But in wartime don't look to the press, or most of it, for truth. The press has another purpose.

Perhaps this is not conscious. I doubt the journalists filing the
hollow reports from Iraq, in which there are images but rarely any content, are aware of how they are being manipulated. They, like everyone else, believe. But when they look back they will find that war is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians and of idealists by the cynical men who wield power, the ones who rarely pay the cost of war. We pay that cost. And we will pay it again.
***

LINK

He has another excellent article here:

War: Realities and Myths

Here are some rough ideas I am playing with so far:

1) Mostly soldiers die in war

2) War has been an effective way to resolve conflicts

3) War is good for the economy (probably in the very short term)

4) The US doesn't spend enough on the military

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

What Hedges says is true - and then we have WWII. The "Last Good War" - what Hedges says about myth is true there, too, but for that 4 years it was as close to truth as war myth ever gets.

Item 3 - War is good for the economy - used to be true but is no longer. Just before and during WWII government spending to feed, cloth, house, and transport the army (not even talking weapons here) put a whole lot of closed factories back online, which meant a whole lot of people were taking home paycheck who otherwise wouldn't - ditto farmers who were going under, about to lose their land, were suddenly making enough money to put in electricity, indoor plumbing, and even buy more land and "modern" equipment. Most of those industries, including some of the agriculture, have now been outsourced. The government spending for this war is going to those countries that make our textiles and other things - and Halliburton CEOs, of course.

[Glen]

Actually, reputable economists will tell you war is seldom or never good for an economy. I am sure economic historians can give many examples of how wars ruined countries. If I remember correctly, the Louisiana Purchase was made because France was deeply in debt from past wars. In the case of Iraq, the money spent there could have been better spent in the United States for research on energy efficiency, insulation, alternate energy sources, etc. The long term impact is that the money spent in Iraq will lead to very little positive payoff, and prevent any positive payoff because of the lost opportunities mentioned beforehand. The long term debts from wars are never imagined or counted at the time the war is begun. For example, I believe the last veteran of the Spanish American War died a few years ago. All the money spent on veteran's care is not initially considered as are many other unforseen costs. However, sometimes when a country is hit with an unprovoked attack like Pearl Harbor, they have no choice but to resist to protect their political system. Iraq does not fit that category.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

OK, now we have to define "good for the economy" - wars are "good for the economy" in that the material needed to field an army and fight a war put lots of people to work at high paying jobs for the duration. Even those not directly producing the material needed benefit because of the increased number of jobs as well as the increased amount of money flowing into the sytem. (For example, my mother at 13 got a job in food service in 1943 that was only available because the women who normally worked in food service were working in "war plants". Teens and minorities had decent money for the first time in generations during WWII, farms made enough to pay off depression-era mortgages and even install indoor plumbing, etc.)

However, this "good" only lasts 1) "for the duration" - as long as the war or 2) until the government spending on war goods stops - as in they ran out of money and couldn't borrow any more. (Most women got "pink slips" on V-J day, long before there were any returning servicemen looking for jobs.) Long running wars do exhaust the economies of all combatant countries. That's part of what led to the American Revolution - GB tried to recoup expenditures from the last of the "French and Indian Wars" (American war site of the "100 Years War" between France and GB) by increasing taxes and creating new taxes for "the colonies" - the colonists were not amused. WWI war debt was largely responsible for the Great Depression of the 1930s. In fact, the boom-bust cycle of war/depression was a well-known economical constant, until the Fed got into the act.

We've paid off the last of the WWI & II war debt, but Korea is still running (as in we still have a military presence there), and we still owe on Vietnam. Iraq will be generations to pay off, even if we left tomorrow, and even though - compared to WWII - it's such a little piddly "war". Even more serious is that, unlike previous wars where the borrowing was domestic, the borrowing to finance Iraq has been mostly foreign (China and Japan vying for the dubious honor of holding what, in regards to Social Security, our president has called "worthless paper"). If Hogeye's long-desired destruction of the federal government occurs, it will be when the foreign holders of that paper start to agree with the president.

[Dardedar]

Another war myth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hiRC5ZDTXk

43% of Americans believe Saddam was personally involved in 9/11. Amazing.

[Hogeye]

OK, now we have to define "good for the economy" - wars are "good for the economy" in that the material needed to field an army and fight a war put lots of people to work at high paying jobs for the duration.

To see the flaw in this reasoning, let's do a thought experiment. Suppose instead of a war, people had been put to work at the same "high pay" digging holes and refilling them. You get the same "high paying jobs" benefit, but without the destruction in life and property of war. You get the same long-term debasement of money and malinvestment in both cases. Was the hole digging and refilling good for the economy? Of course not!

It seems to me that Barbara is looking at some superficial short-term phenomena and ignoring the long-term effects. Printing more pretty pieces of paper and doing makework does not improve the economy. It only appears to on a very superficial level, like giving morphine to a terminal cancer patient or giving another drink to an alcoholic with liver damage.

I recommend googling "myth war economy." Here are a couple of the hits:

The Myth of War Prosperity by Rep. Ron Paul

The Myth of US Prosperity During World War II by David Henderson

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Of course putting people to work for any reason at high paying jobs is "good for the economy" as long as they last - the WPA proved that - and the WPA workers were doing vastly more important jobs than digging holes and refilling them. The problem comes down to deficit spending - the lid on "welfare" or "charity" jobs is significantly lower than the lid on "defense spending". FDRs "New Deal" would have worked much better than it did, if he hadn't been trying to balance the budget at the same time. Once WWII started, they jettisoned trying to balance the budget, and the war materials rolled out of the factories - many of which had been closed in the post-WWI depression.

That's the point of "war is good for the economy" and why it is so short-lived. It is totally based on deficit spending and only lasts as long as the war does. It only works this way because our war-minded populace doesn't flinch at war spending, even though they'd have a fit at 1% of that given to a starving child or spent to hire a daycare worker so a welfare recipient could take a job.

Of course, now, we are so deeply in debt, and so much of it is foreign, that even if the old program (ala WWII) were still operative, which it isn't, we couldn't afford to create the job environment necessary to fight a world war. We're at war and megacorporations are laying people off and still outsourcing manufacturing jobs to 3rd world countries (which is only "economical" because the government is both giving the megacorps tax incentives to do so and subsidizing the transportation expenses). The time and place has changed and no amount of propaganda will take us back.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

And a comment on Henderson's article - his bias is obvious just from his comment that unemployment had gone down some 20% from 1932 to 1941 "despite" Roosevelt's actions. WWII, that special case that everyone likes to use to prove whatever they're selling, and FDR's plans really can't be judged by the war years themselves. The price caps and rationing did reduce the potential for a higher GNP, and so forth. However, Henderson obviously didn't belong to a family who'd been un- or under-employed during the 30s. Having a job with decent wages and all the overtime (at the "new" government ruled time-and-a-half) was more than a comfort - and if beef was rationed, chicken wasn't. Sugar wasn't a problem for my family - my grandmother (widow with 4 school-aged and younger daughters) usually gave some of hers to the more gluttonous family down the road. Where those wages went was SAVINGS - both regular accounts and war bonds. WWII jobs are what fueled the "Happy Days" of the 50s, when those savings were spent on the suburbian lifestyles of the "Golden Age of Television". That "war economy" is only a temporary good is demonstrated by what happens when the jobs/savings run out - due to the Fed, instead of a new depression, we got recession (joblessness and inflation instead of joblessness and deflation) - same song, second verse - and equally bad for ordinary folks.

[Hogeye]

Of course putting people to work for any reason at high paying jobs is "good for the economy" as long as they last - the WPA proved that.

A classic case of the "Broken Window Fallacy." You are equating what is good for a few direct beneficiaries of subsidy with what is good for the economy. There is no doubt that workers (and bureaucrats and politicians) in the WPA benefitted. You can see them working and see their paychecks and payoffs. But you are ignoring that which is not seen - the debasement of everyone elses money, the jobs that would have been created had the resources not been diverted to the make-work program.

You could just as easily claim that no-bid contracts for Halliberton are good for the economy. After all, you can see the paychecks of the Halliberton employees and the dividends and stock appreciation of stockholders. But you don't see the debasement of the dollar nor the jobs and services that would have been created.

I notice, Barbara, that you acknowledge that such subsidies depend on deficit spending, but ignore "that which is not seen" - the destructive consequences of deficit spending. You imply that, if only as much deficit spending was lavished on social programs as for war everything would have been hunky-dory.

A comment on Henderson's article - his bias is obvious just from his comment that unemployment had gone down some 20% from 1932 to 1941 "despite" Roosevelt's actions.

Not bias - he provides a citation for his assertion. He doesn't elaborate simply because this essay is about the WWII prosperity myth, not the New Deal myth. For that, here's a starter article: The New Deal Debunked (again) with plenty of additional sources cited.

Henderson's point was that the US economy was steadily improving before the US entered WWII, thus claiming that it took WWII to get the US out of its depression is erroneous. As he writes: "Relatively-free-market economies, as the U.S. economy was, even after eight years of FDR, tend to recover from recessions and depressions as businesses find valuable uses for previously unused resources. The odds are high, therefore, that the unemployment rate would have continued to fall, absent U.S. participation in World War II."

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The US economy was steadily improving prior to WWII because of, not despite, FDR's policies (there were no "other jobs" that would have been created had the resources not been diverted into "make-work" - like dams, the TVA and other rural electrification programs (which benefited dairy farmers across the nation, especially in the south), health clinics in rural and low-income areas, parks and trails in national forests and parks, road and bridge building and repairing, education support in rural and low-income areas, works of art and music provided for rural and low-income areas, and a whole lot more, much of which is still standing/operable) - and the last year before we got into WWII, the fact that we were providing war materials to Great Britain & the Commonwealth meant the factories were starting back up. You can discount WWII in your calculations of 1941 unemployment, but reality does not.

[Hogeye]

There were no "other jobs" that would have been created had the resources not been diverted into "make-work" ...

Patently absurd. Only a true believer in government solipotence could make such a claim.

[Dardedar]

DAR
A fellow named Brian submitted these examples:

***
From my master's thesis were:

Myth: The US has found weapons of mass destruction in IRaq.

Myth: The US has found clear evidence of a relationship between Al
Qaeda and Saddam Hussein

Myth: The majority of the world supports the US war in Iraq

You may thnik these are no-brainers, but they are not. Zogby's last
poll of US troops (less than a year ago, last february)found that 85% of them said that their mission in Iraq was to retaliate for Saddam's involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

[Doug]

Zogby's last poll of US troops (less than a year ago, last february)found that 85% of them said that their mission in Iraq was to retaliate for Saddam's involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

DOUG
Hogeye is right. The U.S. is going down. Stupidity trumps all...

[Dardedar]

Another War Myth (maybe):

The Iraq war has made the US more safer

From a letter to Lieberman by Ned Lamont:

***
Dear Senator Lieberman:

As I am sure you have seen, the New York Times today reported that the National Intelligence Estimate in April concludes “that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.” The NIE represents the consensus view of the U.S. government’s 16 major intelligence agencies. The Times notes that the Iraq War is a major “reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology” and cites one intelligence official acknowledging that the NIE “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.” Let me put this news in terms that you can clearly understand: Our own intelligence agencies now confirm that the Iraq War is undermining America’s security and credibility at our nation’s peril.

With this report being released on the eve of your major address on Iraq, I and thousands of other citizens in Connecticut expect to hear your response to this news in your speech, considering you have echoed President Bush’s claim that the Iraq War has made our country safer, and that staying the course will help keep us safe. As the NIE now shows, that is absolutely not the case – in fact, the Iraq War has and continues to unnecessarily endanger U.S. national security. Never again can a political leader claim otherwise, lest they deliberately ignore the concrete facts presented to us by our intelligence agencies…

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