Sending Sons and Daughters to War

Hitchens:

The most recent cycle—not that this isn't a consistent undertone—began for me with a Washington Post column by Richard Cohen. In a reminiscence that he doubtless thought was affecting, he recalled a spat between himself and the late John Gregory Dunne. Declining to attend a Cohen dinner party in the year 1991 (and here we sense the real echoes of a life-and-death struggle), Dunne had said that he wouldn't break bread with a man who favored war but was not willing to sacrifice his own son. Cohen went back and forth in agony about the justice of all this, while never betraying any sense of disproportion or absurdity. Should Saddam Hussein have been allowed to add the wealth of Kuwait to his slave state at a time when he most certainly did possess a WMD program? Quite a good question for debate. But the debate comes to an end when one participant says that the other is disqualified because of a refusal of son-donation. (I pause to note what Cohen may have been too delicate to point out: John Gregory Dunne did not have a son.)

But what if he had had one? The fathering of a grown male child does not entitle you to exclude from the argument anybody who is not thus favored. A childless person is not prevented from speaking in time of war. Nor is a person whose children are too young to serve. Nor are those of enlistment age, who are unlikely to have sons of their own. Nor is a person who has disabled children. One could easily extend the list of citizens who have exactly the same right to opine on their country's right to fight—or not to fight.

This brings up an argument I find very lame. The whole "chickenhawk" scenario played out at the beginning of the Iraq conflict. The thinking was that those who did not serve can not support the war or even join in the debate.

This whole line of thinking is garbage. Because I served, do I have more credibility in the debate than some one who did not. I served at the beginning of Somali operations but left before it got ugly, do have less credence than a guy who was there in October 1993?

This whole line of thinking will do nothing but crush debate. If you side with those who think this way, you can't argue for or against abortion if you've never had to decide whether to have one or not. You can't debate whether gay marriage is good or bad if you're not homosexual. You can't share an opinion on capital punishment if you've never had a love one killed or be a killer. I could go on and on.

As a veteran, I believe I do have more insight than those that never served, but I do not have more credibility.