The war on ____.
Insert any of the following nouns, and you get a common American phrase.
Terror. Drugs. Crime. Poverty. Christmas.
Declaring “war” on things reduces the horrors of armed conflict, said Christopher Coyne, professor of economics at George Mason University
“War, killing other human beings, is perhaps the ugliest act that can be undertaken,” and is the “greatest threat to human well-being and human liberty there is,” said Coyne, kicking off the 2022 Burkett Miller Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
The mainstreaming of the word “war” negates its meaning, he said, and contributes to the general public either being unaware of government-led military action abroad—and the foreign policy that shapes it—or being supportive without critically examining the costs. The death. The massive spending. The toll on combat veterans.
“The uncaring person sends troops abroad, sends them into harm’s way without critically engaging in a thought process of what can and cannot be accomplished,” said Coyne, whose lecture at the University Center Auditorium boiled down to asking the audience to consider the “return on investment” in war.
Coyne is the author of “After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy,” “Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails” and “Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of Militarism.”
The “Global War on Terror”—a military campaign coined by the American government after the 9/11 attacks—underpinned the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but has only created more terrorism after years of fighting and nation-building efforts, Coyne said.
What’s more, many of the ways in which the U.S. has waged war have been deceitful by design, not only to the American public but to the world, he said, pointing to “black sites” as an example.
Black sites were secret prisons controlled by the CIA in foreign countries where the Geneva Conventions—rules of warfare upheld by certain countries around the world—did not apply. Authorities were able to interrogate combatants using psychological torture techniques, he said.
Even when such harsh and illegal methods yielded high-value information, “You have to think about what it means when you adopt these techniques as a way to treat other people and what you are giving up in terms of the fundamental values that you purport to advance,” Coyne said.
From the government “lies regarding weapons of mass destruction” that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in August 2021, Coyne focused on modern U.S. conflicts, drawing upon his work, public records, government reports and specifically “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War” by Washington Post investigative reporter Craig Whitlock.
The government and the political class—from both major parties—amass unchecked power during times of war, he said, doing it on the backs of citizens who fund the conflicts, supply the troops and are increasingly surveilled.
In the end, he asked the audience to consider the term “Pyrrhic victory,” a win that comes with such a devastating toll on the victor, it’s tantamount to defeat.
“A good citizen, whether of America or somewhere else…,” he said, “needs to be patriotically skeptical of war.”
