You’re hardly going to clear up whether Strauss was a moral realist, or a closet Nietzschean, here, kid bitzer.

Yet, I think you could make the case that when Strauss argued the need for combining the ancients’ concern with honour, with the moderns’ concern for interest, he wasn’t exactly yearning for all of this.

“Honor” is also a useful shorthand to denote titles in mass-market military history publishing.

I’m not denying that there may be an interior, affective and moral honor experienced by individual soldiers and officers, but scaling it up to the level of the nation (and nationalistic discourse) is a serious error.

The habitus of military personnel (both physical and interior emotions) is invoked by the media to deflect criticism of military policy on macro-political, strategic, and economic grounds.

When the media refer to the honor, struggle, sacrifice, etc. of our soldiers and their personal experience, to avoid discussing these larger political issues, it shows that the war is now indefensible in abstract terms.

I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak.

If you are interested in a view of the inside of the Pentagon procurement process from Vietnam to Iraq please check the posting at my blog entitled, “Odyssey of Armaments”

http://www.rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com

The Pentagon is a giant, incredibly complex establishment, budgeted in excess of $500B per year. The Rumsfelds, the Administrations and the Congressmen come and go but the real machinery of policy and procurement keeps grinding away, presenting the politicos who arrive with detail and alternatives slanted to perpetuate itself.

How can any newcomer, be he a President, a Congressman or even the Sec. Def. to be – Mr. Gates- understand such complexity, particularly if heretofore he has not had the clearance to get the full details?

Answer- he can’t. Therefore he accepts the alternatives provided by the career establishment that never goes away and he hopes he makes the right choices. Or he is influenced by a lobbyist or two representing companies in his district or special interest groups.

From a practical standpoint, policy and war decisions are made far below the levels of the talking heads who take the heat or the credit for the results.

This situation is unfortunate but it is absolute fact. Take it from one who has been to war and worked in the establishment.

This giant policy making and war machine will eventually come apart and have to be put back together to operate smaller, leaner and on less fuel. But that won’t happen until it hits a brick wall at high speed.

We will then have to run a Volkswagen instead of a Caddy and get along somehow. We better start practicing now and get off our high horse. Our golden aura in the world is beginning to dull from arrogance.

I would guess that you could map the honor code population and the population that supports the President’s vanity war and you would get a nice, snug fit. And in fact there is an academic paper on that topic: Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s The Ethic of Honor in National Crises: The Civil War, Vietnam, Iraq, and the Southern Factor in the Journal of the Historical Society, Winter, 2005.

Here’s a nice quote: “From the Quasi-War with France to the Vietnam War,” argues David Hackett Fischer, both coastal and inland Southerners
“strongly supported every American war no matter what it was about or who it was against. Southern ideas of honor and the warrior ethic combined to create regional war fevers . . . in 1798,
1812, 1846, 1861, 1898, 1917, 1941, 1950 and 1965.” It is now feasible to add 2001 and 2002.” Wyatt-Brown also points out that the presidents who have led us into recent wars have all been Southerners. Or to put this in plain english: The rednecks are running the asylum.

That might be the single dumbest thing I’ve read this week. The reason that there is terrorism is because we are too likely to make a deal? To the extent that causality exists isn’t this, like, 180 degrees from the reality?

“He died defending his country”, “honour the troops for they defend our nation”, “in defense of the people”.

We used to be more honest, and we called the relevant administrative unit the Department of War. Until 1947, when we renamed it the Department of Defense, and proceeded to engage in nothing but offensive wars thereafter.

Another cheap mechanism is the word “defense”.

“He died defending his country”, “honour the troops for they defend our nation”, “in defense of the people”.

Well, no. The American armed forces are there primarily to attack or threaten others. That’s precisely the point of a Carrier Task Force. You can try justifying it as “active defense” or some such twaddle – but consider the American reaction to Soviet attempts to put missiles in Cuba. That’s how everyone else feels about American bases near them.

At least in feudal times, there was a sharp distinction between calling on vassals to defend your own and sending them out to attack other people. Perhaps teh US needs to write time limits on the use of troops in offensive operations.

During the 1973 Yom Kippur War Richard Nixon ordered the military resupply of Israel in its hour of need not because he was sympathetic to Jews – he wasn’t – but because he understood that the U.S. could not be seen to let a client down. Nine months later, he was accorded a ticker-tape parade through the streets of Cairo.

I liked that honor and offer joke posted by steven labonne.

“Standing by one’s friends and defying one’s enemies, whatever the price” may or may not be among these principle; instead it might be, for example, something like: defending the weak whatever the price, or don’t ever go against the family, or something.

Needless to say, it’s always better to find the best course of action by analyzing, thinking rationally.

We honor the soldiers who gave their lives for their country. We heap them with praise, we build monuments in their names, we nod our heads solemnly for them on Memorial/Veterans/Armistice/Remembrance Day. And then we shaft their wives and kids and tear up the freedoms they thought they were fighting for. Same use of the word – giving away a free symbol in place of an expensive substance.

Richard, I suppose I am proposing that there is an independent notion of virtue quite apart from what is socially acknowledged with honors. I’m not proposing that it is independent of social conditions or forms any kind of absolute system of values or absolute measure of true virtue. I’m only proposing that it’s independent of its social acknowledgment.

There’s a difference between saying you’re doing good for folks and actually doing good for folks. It may not always be possible to determine what is good for people, or for oneself. But “false consciousness” is, for me at any rate, not even considering whether something genuinely produces non-symbolic benefits. That was the essence of the original Marxist notion of false consciousness as applied to nationalism: the difference between being ruled by British, French, German or Russian capitalists or being ruled by capitalists of the same race, language or religion and having the symbolic quality of a nation. Setting aside whether or not that accurately captures the history of nationalism, that notion parallels what I’m saying and I don’t think that’s such a tricky distinction.