By Captain Gene Thomas Gomulka
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Last week I responded in my weekly column to a wife whose husband was killed in Iraq and who marched in the September 24 anti-war protest in Washington, DC. This week a wife whose husband is claiming conscientious objector status wrote: “My husband is in big trouble because he refuses to redeploy based upon his belief that our country's involvement in Iraq is not just. I respect his conscience, but I am also concerned with the strain this has placed upon our relationship and the number of military friends we have lost….”
Unlike the first Gulf War where there were large numbers of reservists who claimed to be conscientious objectors without having deployed or fought in the Gulf, today there are service members, like this woman's husband, who are claiming this status following their actual war experiences.
The soldier in question is a select conscientious objector (CO) in so far as he is not opposed to war in general, but our current military involvement in Iraq. However, because CO Boards assume that our country's actions are always moral and just, CO petitions are only granted when it can be shown that one's objections are against all war in general, and are based upon firmly held religious, moral or ethical convictions consistent with one's lifestyle.
The reason President Bush gave for invading Iraq changed after it was clear that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was preparing to use in acts of terrorism around the world. So, was the invasion justified? It was because the moral grounds for invading Iraq were questionable that people like the late Pope John Paul II questioned the real rational behind the war.
The wife's husband who is claiming to be a conscientious objector is not the first U.S. soldier in history to question the morality of our military involvement in a foreign country. Of course, the most famous example of such a soldier is Ulysses S. Grant. On May 13, 1846, President Polk got Congress to declare War on Mexico that ultimately resulted in the deaths of 13,000 American soldiers, only 1.5 percent (i.e., 195) of whom died of wounds suffered in combat; the rest stemmed from disease and unsanitary conditions during the war.
President Polk said we needed to declare war because Mexicans had "invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil". This was in reference to shots supposedly exchanged between Mexican calvary and U.S. soldiers along the Rio Grande on April 24, 1846. However, was the U.S. in any real danger from our neighbors to the South? Did this skirmish justify a declaration of war, or were there other motives at play for invading Mexico?
The war against Mexico was supported by Southern States but oppposed by Northern States. At the time, Texas recognized the institution of slavery, but Mexicans, most of whom were Catholics, did not. Many Northern abolitionists viewed the war as an attempt by the slave-owners to expand slavery and assure their continued influence in the federal government. Many Southerners supported the war to provide more room for slavery to expand with the belief that if slavery were not allowed to continue to expand, it would ultimately die out.
In reflecting upon his involvement as a young officer fighting against the Mexicans along side Robert E. Lee and other fellow West Point graduates, President Grant wrote: “There was never a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign." In writing his memoirs, he concluded that that the Civil War was God's punishment upon our country for attempting to introduce slavery into Mexico. It was his belief that "the occupation, separation and annexation [of Texas] were ... a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union."
Had the Mexican-American War waged on for years and had Grant been ordered to return to fight in Mexico, would he have applied for select conscientious objector status (had it existed)? Would the history and economy of Mexico evolved differently and would we be experiencing the problems we have today with illegal immigrants had we not invaded Mexico, occupied its capital, crippled its economy, annexed its territory, and killed some 25,000 Mexicans?
By comparison, what will be the long-term consequences of our invasion of Iraq? Will it result in the formation of a very unstable Islamic State (as some suggest is happening), or will it bring peace, prosoperity and stability to the region, along with a reduction of terrorism?
What do you think? Sound off and Join the discussion.
Gene-Thomas Gomulka
Columnist and author whose books are available at www.plaintec.net
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© 2005 Gene Thomas Gomulka. All opinions
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