The Validity of Anti-War Criticism

By Tim Wise, AlterNet. Posted November 20, 2001.

Imagine the following. You live in a community that has been experiencing a serious upsurge in crime. The possibility of being victimized is an ever-present reality, and previous attempts to solve the crime problem in the neighborhood have failed. Frustrated by this fact, local officials announce that beginning tomorrow, police will have permission to shoot anyone they suspect of criminal activity, on sight. No questions, and no arrest necessary. No need to even present proof of guilt to a magistrate -- mere suspicion or circumstantial evidence will do. Sure, some innocent people might be killed, but if so, that would be an accident. Hopefully, say the local officials, this response will deter criminals and return the neighborhood to safety.

And let's say that you find this new policy to be wrongheaded to the point of absurdity. Yet, let us also assume that you aren't really sure what needs to be done to stem the crime problem. You feel certain that shooting people at the drop of a hat won't work, but frankly aren't prepared to offer an alternative to this newly announced "Dirty Harry" approach. In such a situation, would it be inappropriate for you to object? To say that such a plan is not only morally repugnant, but guaranteed not to work, and perhaps to even make things worse, by reducing overall respect for the rule of law? Must you maintain your silence unless and until you have a "better idea?" Or if you do issue a critique, should it be taken less seriously just because you don't yet know exactly what might work better?

I would suspect that most would say no to all of the above questions. Despite not being sure how best to solve the crime problem, it would be perfectly appropriate, and indeed incumbent upon you as a concerned citizen, to say "stop" to a proposal that you found ethically and practically indefensible. Though it would be good, as a practical matter, for you and others to sit down and attempt to devise a workable anti-crime plan, doing so should certainly not be viewed -- nor would it likely be viewed -- as a prerequisite to criticizing other plans with which you disagree.

Likewise, if you were rushed to the emergency room with dangerously elevated blood pressure, and the attendant physician pulled out a canister of leeches to administer a bloodletting treatment, it would be fine for you to object, even though, never having been to medical school, you really couldn't say what the appropriate treatment might be.

Yet, despite how readily most would agree with the above propositions, it appears the same logic is not understood when it comes to discussing the bombing of Afghanistan. Repeatedly, since first writing in opposition to the extant war -- both on moral and practical grounds -- I have heard from persons who insist that unless I have a better plan to address the problem of terrorism, my criticisms of the current strategy are ipso facto invalid. Even if my detractors agree with the futility of the Administration's approach, they seem to think that "doing something," even if it might be wrong, is better than doing nothing. And they seem to feel that we haven't the time to actually think things through, deliberate, gather better intelligence, and only then, take action.

What's more, now that these same folks can point to the fall of the Taliban and the death of one of bin Laden's henchmen as positive outcomes of bombing, they feel especially emboldened to criticize anyone who has opposed the war, especially if they feel such persons to have offered no alternative methods to achieve such presumably splendid results as these.

Truth be told, of course, there actually have been alternatives to bombing and war proposed by those of us in opposition to such approaches. That the persons demanding that we provide such alternatives haven't seen them can only be the result of having not looked very hard. From the outset we have been calling for an international law approach that would involve presenting evidence of responsibility to the UN Security Council, a concerted global crackdown on terrorist financial networks and, if necessary, approval of limited but targeted police action, involving special forces, designed to go in, find the guilty parties and capture them. Such actions would be an international version of what the U.S. itself did in bringing the 1993 Trade Center bombers to trial, as well as those involved in the 1988 bombing of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland.

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