Is There Any Such Thing as a GOOD WAR?

• Author: STRADA, MICHAEL J.
• Position: Draft resisters' opinions of Canadianmilitary involvement - Statistical Data Included

Americanadians--Vietnam War draft resisters who fled to Canada--speak out on the Persian Gulf and Kosovo conflicts.

DURING THE 1,000 YEARS between the second and third millennia, wars killed approximately 175,000,000 people. In the 20th century alone, war left 111,000,000 dead in its wake. Accordingly, many observers question war's legitimacy as the final arbiter of international grievances. Surely, though, all wars are not created equal. How, then, do we separate good wars from bad ones?

One articulate group of individuals who have wrestled with this dilemma--not merely abstractly, but concretely in their own lives, are the Vietnam War resisters who emigrated to Canada. I call them Americanadians because the common labels (draft dodgers or evaders; war resisters or objectors) fail to capture the diverse stories behind their Canadian exile. One Americanadian shares the insight that "we almost always used `draft dodger,' the most inflammatory term, to fly in the face of the epithet." A questionnaire that I sent to a group of draft resisters in 1999 revealed that just a small fraction of them consider themselves pacifists, and the great bulk of them are liberals.

I have otherwise observed that many liberals who were "doves" during the Cold War have changed during the post-Cold War period to "humanitarian hawks" viewing human rights-motivated wars as good ones, but those intended to protect U.S. strategic or economic power as bad wars. I believe that this attitudinal shift regarding war applies to liberal academics and liberal activists in the U.S. My interest lay in asking whether humanitarian hawks had become as commonplace among Americanadians. Answers to this question can be found in the post-Cold War decade of the 1990s and, more specifically, in its two largest U.S.-led conflicts: the 1991 Persian Gulf War against Saddam Hussein's Iraq (U.S. strategic-economic motivation) and the 1999 Kosovo air campaign against Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia (human rights motivation). In each of these wars, the Canadian government staunchly backed the American position. Concerning the Kosovo war, a Canadian Embassy report proudly notes that "Canada has contributed personnel and resources beyond its relative strength and military capability, comparable to France or Britain." During a March, 1999, foreign policy speech in Winnipeg, Prime Minister Jean Chretien made the case for Kosovo, arguing that, "As Canadians, as world citizens, we could not sit and watch as people are displaced, their homes looted and burned, and lives taken away." Even more vocal was Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, an advocate in recent years of a policy he calls "human security" whereby international organizations must accept the need to intervene forcefully whenever civilians are threatened. One foreign affairs journalist tagged Axworthy "a peacenik-turned-hawk."

A year after the Kosovo war, Maclean's magazine ran a cover story featuring interviews with a few of the 68 pilots who had flown some of the 678 Canadian sorties over Kosovo, concluding that "these Canadians were proud of what they did in supporting the NATO cause." Their only regret is that NATO Command did not allow the fliers to go into Serbia "after the head of the snake" (Milosevic), but they also realize that maintaining NATO's united front regarding Kosovo was complicated.

Likewise supportive of the Persian Gulf and Kosovo wars was overall public opinion in both the U.S. and Canada. In the U.S., Pres. George Bush's Persian Gulf War enjoyed the highest public approval (80%) of any conflict since World War II. While Kosovo never approached such a lofty figure, Gallup polls taken in April and May, 1999, found support in the 55-60% range. Moreover, polls established that majority backing for the war in Kosovo was bipartisan in composition. Two-thirds of Americans in 1999 (much higher than in a 1993 poll) felt that "The U.S. should continue to respond to international human rights atrocities with military force."

While the Canadian public was never as gung-ho about either the Persian Gulf or Kosovo war as its hegemonic neighbor, and while Canadians still preferred their traditional role as peacekeepers rather than peacemakers, they nevertheless supported these conflicts as ultimately necessary. However, more commonplace in Canada than in the U.S. during the spring and summer of 1999 were editorial opinions and street demonstrations vehemently opposed to NATO's Balkan strategy.

So, how does my small group of Americanadians compare to the popular support for the Persian Gulf and Kosovo wars in these two allied countries? Given their universal antipathy toward the Vietnam War, their extensive education, as well as their left-of-center philosophy...