By Rudy Barnes, Jr.
Legitimacy
defines what we consider to be right and wrong, and conflicting concepts of
legitimacy have polarized our politics and initiated our wars—war being “an
extension of politics by other means”.
Controversy over monuments to the Confederacy has reminded us of lessons
in legitimacy that we should have learned in politics and war.
Slavery
was considered legitimate in 1776 when slave-holding American colonies proclaimed
their independence from the British Empire; but in 1833 Great Britain passed
the Abolition of Slavery Act. When slave-holding
states in the South seceded from the Union in 1860, state sovereignty was still
an unsettled issue, but slavery had become a political anathema.
The
Confederacy was considered legitimate by white southerners, but it needed the
support of Great Britain or France to defend itself against a vastly superior
Union Army. Had Lincoln announced an
Emancipation Proclamation in 1860 rather than in1863, it would have undermined
the legitimacy of the Confederacy earlier in Europe. But Lincoln justified the war with the preservation
of the Union, a justification dictated by politics rather than morality.
History
provides the proper perspective to judge past military crusades. The resentment of blacks to Confederate
monuments and the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford is understandable. Those monuments represent painful lessons
learned in legitimacy, and they remain unpleasant reminders of the danger of
using military force to reconcile conflicting concepts of legitimacy.
Although
Great Britain abolished slavery in 1833 it and other European nations retained colonial
empires that rivaled slavery in their exploitation of natives in Africa, the
Middle East, Asia and India. The French colonial
regime in Indochina ended at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and the U.S. unwittingly filled
the French political vacuum left in Vietnam, with catastrophic results.
Earlier
in the 20th century the U.S. had tried its hand at being a colonial
power in the Philippines and Latin America; and after World War II the U.S.
kept Okinawa as a U.S. protectorate for its military bases. It was not until 1970, after increasing
Okinawan resentment toward Americans, that the U.S. allowed Okinawa to revert
to Japan.
The
U.S. learned a painful lesson in legitimacy after LBJ deployed U.S. Marines to
Vietnam in 1965. Even a vastly superior
U.S. military force could not overcome the lack of legitimacy in the South
Vietnamese government. That lesson should
have prevented the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and should dictate an end to U.S.
combat operations in Afghanistan.
American
exceptionalism promotes American standards of legitimacy overseas. Human rights and democracy have long been strategic
objectives of U.S. foreign policy and military operations, but human rights have
been a hard sell in Islamic cultures where Islamic Law (Shari’a) denies the freedoms
of religion and speech with apostasy and blasphemy laws.
Religion
is the primary source of standards of legitimacy, and conflicting concepts of
legitimacy have historically motivated military crusades—most recently U.S.
interventions against terrorism in Islamic nations. Such interventions have been countered by terrorists
using asymmetric warfare, confirming that God/Allah has nothing to do with wars
in His name.
Public
support is essential for the legitimacy of military operations, and conflicting
concepts of legitimacy can create public resentment that can turn a military
success into political defeat. The U.S.
must remember the painful lessons of legitimacy learned in its Civil War and in its past military interventions overseas if it is to avoid having history repeat
itself.
Notes:
See generally, Barnes, Religion, Law and Conflicting Concepts of
Legitimacy, a paper submitted for a conference on April 14-16, 2016 at The
Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) at the University of Pennsylvania
Law School. See https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/5473-barnesreligion-and-conflicting-concepts-of.
Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
was a Prussian general who famously described war as “an extension of politics
by other means” in his classic On War (unfinished at his death in 1831).
On lessons learned in legitimacy and
the legitimacy of military operations generally, see Barnes, Military
Legitimacy: Might and Right in the New Millennium (Frank Cass, London,
Portland, 1996), posted at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3gvZV8mXUp-VmpMUV9sSU9kaDA/view.
Seymour Martin Lipset has defined
American exceptionalism in religious terms, citing Alexis DeTocqueville, Max
Weber and Samuel Huntington to support the idea that American religions
provided the moral energy for American progress and economic success. See
Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, W. W. Norton
& Company, New York, 1996, pp 60-67. In a more recent work focused on US
military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Andrew J. Bacevich has
predicted the end of American exceptionalism. See Bacevich, The Limits of
Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Henry Holt and Company, New
York, 2008. Richard Cohen has described
American exceptionalism as a misguided mix of patriotism, politics and religion
that seeks to impose American values in other cultures, the real danger being in
using military force to accomplish that objective, as in Vietnam, Afghanistan and
Iraq. See Cohen, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, The Washington Post,
May 9, 2011.
Fareed Zakaria has described
Trump’s recently announced U.S. policy in Afghanistan as more of the same Bush
and Obama policies that ignored issues of legitimacy. Zakaria concludes that “…half a century
later, at a lower human cost, the U.S. has replicated its strategy in
Vietnam.” See https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-signs-on-to-the-forever-war-in-afghanistan/2017/08/24/64684004-890e-11e7-a94f-3139abce39f5_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions&wpmm=1.
Related
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(7/19/15): Religion, Heritage and the Confederate Flag
(10/25/15): The Muslim Stranger: A Good Neighbor or a Threat?
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(4/16/16): Religious Violence and the Dilemma of Freedom and Democracy
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