On the British hostages, freedom, and the military...

So, the whole British hostages thing... Plenty has been written about the insane things being said about this story, which is thankfully over. (Although perhaps not in the long term...?) MediaMatters has a pretty good mop-up job of the madness here. The usual suspects had a fun time pounding their keyboards about how the British troops should have accepted death rather than appear on Iranian television, presumably in order to sublimate certain masochistic militarist fantasies on their parts. John Derbyshire, whom I have designated "Semi-Intelligent Yet Prone to Revolting Arguments," said that the British troops, upon returning home, should be court-martialed, and that he "didn't entirely disagree" with the sentiment that they should be executed (for their cowardice, of course). New York Post columnist Ralph Peters said the "wankers" of the Royal Marines "wimped out" and should be "disbanded and stricken from the rolls" since they didn't "resist collaboration" "to the last man and woman." Ho-hum. Just another day in the world of the "I can't politely stand up right now because I've just been thinking of heavy infantry" crowd.

Here's what's really interesting to me: On the National Review's editorial page, they say that the important next step for Britain is to "mak[e] sure the captives repudiate their confessions and denounce their captors" and "have the 15 demand compensation for their illegal capture and treatment."* In other words, fight Iran's propaganda with our own propaganda. What's left out is any consideration of the personal beliefs of the troops themselves, their individual rights presumably being the reason that the Iranians' parading of them on television was wrong in the first place. Is this not, at the end of the day, a little sick? I don't mean just from a critical perspective on the conservative position, but in general, as a criticism of the military. Soldiers are citizens with rights no different from the average civilian. In fact, their willingness to place their lives on the line, often for useless or even pernicious enterprises (not of their own choosing), should seemingly entitle them to an even greater freedom in expressing their views. But this of course runs counter to the general hive mentality of the military. The point of the military is that in dangerous situations freedom of expression is a freedom we can ill afford. A disobeyed order means the potential deaths of others, or the "shame" of the nation. A critical comment, based on the firm individual beliefs of the speaker, can be "conduct unbecoming an officer," as in the case of the court-martialed Lt. Ehren Watada, who spoke out against President Bush and the Iraq War.

Austin-5000 and I, in our earth-shaking reunion a week ago, watched a bit of A Few Good Men on the ol' teevee. I really don't think this movie could be made today. Although it's nominally about truth and justice, and how nobody, not even super bad-ass Jack Nicholson, is above the law, it's really about how pointy-headed lawyers and civilians who don't know shit about real combat can tell hardened military personnel what to do. Nicholson's character Col. Jessup believes exactly what I outlined above: the idea that if marines don't do exactly what they're told and suppress their personal feelings and weaknesses, they deserve to be punished, even to the extreme of death. Derbyshire and Peters seem to believe it today, and this sort of spirit runs high in our "age of terror."

Here's an important point, one that the libertarian Milton Friedman stuck to in his advocacy of a volunteer army: If free choice is one of the defining characteristics of the modern liberal age (and the backbone of a free market economy, with uncoerced buyers and sellers entering into free contracts with one another), why is the military so fundamentally unfree? Is there such an essential difference between civilian life and military life that the basic freedoms extended to private citizens should be so pointedly withheld from those in the armed forces? For the hardcore conservative side, the answer is pretty easy: It's that they don't give a shit about freedom, especially for gays, drug users, flag burners, war protesters, enemy combatants, and other "subversives." For them, rights are inscribed within a nationalist framework (and specifically an imagined community of patriotic, heterosexual Christians). Rights are of the Volk rather than of all humankind. This is one reason why in the last few months I've found libertarianism to be so immensely refreshing, if only because it's an internally coherent and consistent position.

As for the military question, it does actually seem to be easily resolvable within several kinds of explanation. For example, from a pragmatic perspective the curtailment of rights for the military stems from the obvious dangers which could result from a more or less "anarchic" military system. Since there are no fundamental principles to be adhered to in pragmatism, the lessening of rights for some makes sense in that the benefits outweigh the dangers. (Notice that this begs the question for the pragmatist of how "benefit" and "danger" aren't then fundamental principles.) On the other hand, from a social contractual perspective soldiers can be conceived of as entering into an autonomous "agreement" to accept fewer rights because of their military involvement: The courts-martial that can result from a disobeyed order or unbecoming conduct are the necessary penalties paid for not living up to the "stipulations" of the contract. The obvious problem with this position for classical liberals is that if fundamental rights can be voluntarily ceded in military situations, what prevents them from being compromised within a more general social contract? (I'm thinking specifically here of the redistribution of income--a violation of the freely gained fruits of labor--for the purpose of the alleviation of "societal ills": poverty, poor education, etc. The pragmatist is presumably already on board for these measures, but again for reasons that don't seem explicable except through some appeal to basic principles--i.e. "alleviation of societal ills" is a good thing, but why?)

I hope these questions provide some food for thought and hopefully some good conversation. Where's that been on the blog lately?

Coincidentally, I've been listening to Fela Kuti's "Zombie" throughout this whole post. (Lyrics here.)

* The National Review editorial also contains this paragraph:

"If there is a glimmer of hope in this shameful denouement, it is the possibility that the sheer brazenness of the kidnappings will shatter some of the widespread naïveté — particularly in the British and American diplomatic corps — about the nature of the Iranian regime. It has never been reasonable to think that this regime, whose guiding purpose is to export its particular brand of Islamism, could be made to act in accordance with the West’s interests. Its latest exercise in hostage-taking-as-foreign-policy underscores the unreasonableness of that view."

What's patently ridiculous about this paragraph is that if you turn the tables and insert the U.S. into Iran's position, you still have a perfectly consistent argument. So, suppose the paragraph was published in Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly and read thus:

"If there is a glimmer of hope in this shameful denouement, it is the possibility that the sheer brazenness of the kidnappings will shatter some of the widespread naïveté — particularly in the Egyptian and Jordanian diplomatic corps — about the nature of the American regime. It has never been reasonable to think that this regime, whose guiding purpose is to export its particular brand of Americanism, could be made to act in accordance with the Middle East’s interests. Its latest exercise in hostage-taking-as-foreign-policy underscores the unreasonableness of that view."

Since we have in fact kidnapped Iranian officials, Al Jazeera newsmen (still being held at Guantanamo), and deported and rendered countless foreigners, such a paragraph would make quite a lot of sense. (Plus when you tally the "exporting" that each side has done, the results aren't very comforting.) This seeming contradiction is easily remediable by the fact that the National Review doesn't care about internationalism or universal rights, only about American interests. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being a conservative, I guess.