by Wolf DeVoon

Twenty-five years ago, Robert Heinlein addressed the cadets of Annapolis -- future U.S. naval officers, at least some of who are senior active duty Navy commanders today. Heinlein impressed upon them the imperative of national survival contained in an ancient aphorism: "Women and children first!"

He explained that a nation can sacrifice the lives of numerous men, nearly all of them, and yet survive as a viable society if their women and children remain unharmed. It is undeniably true, that men are properly warriors and breadwinners, to safeguard and nurture the next generation. While we hope that men, too, might be spared from peril, the primary meaning and unequivocal horror of "war crime" refers to war on civilian women and children, who are almost universally deemed noncombatants and exempt from battle. Death and dismemberment of defenseless children is categorically evil at all times and everywhere on earth.

That's why strategic nuclear weapons are rightly condemned as mala in se -- utterly and inherently always wrong because their use against civilian population centers like Hiroshima (or New York or London) is plain genocide, wiping out the innocent and their moms, indiscriminately obliterating all hope of survival and care, the whole fabric of human life and its future. The recent tragedy in Darfur was no different conceptually, rape and murder and arson, driving tens of thousands of noncombatants from their homes -- war on women and children, to kill a people by killing its nursery.

Legendary tough guys like Winston Churchill saw the wisdom of guarding and nurturing little ones: "There is no more far-seeing investment for a nation than to put milk, food and education into young children. If you add to that respect for law, knowledge of the traditions of the country and love of freedom, you have at any rate the foundations of national survival," he told the Carlton Club in 1939, just two months before war was declared and Britain's national survival was sorely tested.

This trenchant, enduring liberality of feeding and educating our young comes to us from many sources, practical as well as sentimental. Heinlein and Churchill used rational arguments to buttress the innate paternal impulse to cherish and defend the family. Good men see the joy of life in every child and every mom, with a charity and happy exception that is seldom extended to grown men, our competitors and rivals in life. I trust that my remarks are plain enough although obviously out of step with contemporary indifference that masquerades as unearned universal love and respect for all, regardless of age, sexual orientation, or parenthood.

The politically correct mantra of good vibes for all is completely out of phase with the chivalry of Churchill and Heinlein. It is my unpleasant duty to emphasize that fact and direct your attention to it. "Women and children first" is negated by inclusion of childless adult homosexuals and footloose metrosexuals among the group of precious innocents that our soldiers and marines are dying to defend.

I am not in sympathy with or supportive of revealed religion or straight-laced conservatism. I have no particular complaint about the modern world or its flirtation with barren amusements. What is at issue rather is the armed defense of innocent liberty, particularly the welfare of women and children secured by men in uniform.

The Lesson of Vietnam

All of the Vietnam vets of my acquaintance are gentle, thoughtful, generous men who know and understand why I fought on the other side in the late 60's when antiwar activism peaked. Civilian students, hippies, housewives and Catholic priests were bold enough, to be sure, wrecking draft board offices and battling riot police from coast to coast. But the gallant men of conscience who formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and joined us on the marches ultimately convinced Americans that the war must end. It was a brutal "asymmetrical" war that few U.S. ground combat veterans could be proud to have prosecuted. Two million Vietnamese were killed; 4,500,000 were wounded; 6,500,000 women, children and elderly made homeless refugees.

To put this in perspective, imagine that China someday decides to attack the United States and deploys its U.S. espionage network to bollix our computer-addicted chain of command so badly that coordinated homeland defense is impossible. Further suppose that a wave of Chinese nukes incinerate 30 million U.S. civilians and poisons half of our food supply. That's basically what we did to Vietnam. Ten percent of the Vietnamese population was killed and thousands of square miles of forest and rivers were poisoned with Agent Orange.

Incredibly, destruction and carnage amounting to genocide were justified by selfless altruism! "An important part of the reason we marched into Vietnam with eyes fixed was liberalism's irrepressible need to be helpful to those less fortunate. But the decency of the impulse cannot hide the bloody eagerness to kill in the name of virtue. In 1981, James C. Thomson, a member of the National Security Council under President Johnson, finally concluded that our Vietnamese intervention had been motivated by a national missionary impulse, a 'need to do good to others.' In a phrase that cannot be improved, he and others called this 'sentimental imperialism.' The purity of intention and the horror of result are unfortunately the liberals' continuing burden... Conservatives shared with liberals the conviction that America could act, and in Vietnam did act, with absolute altruism, as they believed only America could. Thinking of this war, President Nixon declared that 'never in history have men fought for less selfish motives -- not for conquest, not for glory, but only for the right of a people far away to choose the kind of government they want.' " (Loren Baritz, Backfire)

For 30 years, enduring the hell of occupation and B-52 bombardment, what the Vietnamese wanted was government by anyone except the U.S. Army and a string of lunatic Saigon dictators who Americans lavished with luxuries and unchecked power. "Diem legalized his brutality by creating special military courts to try [approximately 40,000] political opponents and to pass sentences of death in no more than three days... A reluctant Vice-President Johnson was sent to review conditions in South Vietnam. While abroad he informed the world that Diem was the 'Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia.' When a reporter asked LBJ if he meant what he had said, he answered: 'Shit, Diem's the only boy we got out there!'...

"July 1965 was when President Johnson lost control of the war in Vietnam and America. It was then that he made the decision to raise the level of killing and committed America to what the most thoughtful military men had consistently warned about: a land war in Asia... A few months earlier there had been another change of political leadership in South Vietnam. [Coup leader and new Prime Minister] Ky liked to dress in black or bright yellow silk fatigues decorated with a vivid scarf, and toted an ivory-handled pistol. He admired Adolph Hitler more than any other Western 'statesman.' He worked hard to earn a reputation as a gambler, boozer, and womanizer. General Westmoreland liked Ky because 'he was a man of action, a swashbuckler'... For the fifth time since Diem's assassination, the American planners concluded that the new regime would not succeed unless the American war effort was intensified. (Baritz, id.)

On to Iraq

Bombardment and occupation of Iraq was vastly different than the catastrophe of Vietnam. It has been established beyond doubt that George Bush and Dick Cheney ordered an invasion plan long before 9/11 gave them an excuse. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and had no WMD. Bush and Cheney lied repeatedly to Congress and the American people. They ignored professional military advice and expected cheap victory. It is misleading to count the cost in dollars and dead U.S. servicemen. Tens of thousands of our best troops have been butchered, with permanent injuries that will never heal: head trauma, amputations, and mental illness. Among the "enemy" perhaps 100,000 have been killed, a half million injured, an entire nation impoverished and terrified.

The cockpit of America's new imperium is not Southeast Asia, not easy war on unarmed obsequious peasants in black pajamas atop lumbering water buffalo. Iraq is historically one of the wealthiest, most powerful and populous states of the Middle East, an economic colossus astride the second largest oil reserves on earth. Our invasion and conquest was far from altruistic. Iraq was a former ally; Rumsfeld was photographed shaking Saddam's hand on the occasion of providing U.S. munitions to Iraq, including battlefield chemical weapons.

Flash forward to the present. Four or five billion U.S. dollars have vanished into the pockets of freelance power brokers and former exiles. All talk about "iraqification of security" is complete bullshit. America is two blinks from war with Iran, the patron and defender of Iraq's newly freed Shi'ite majority. "Security" is a euphemism for counterinsurgency, which the United States could not obtain in Vietnam with over 2 million U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines deployed for that purpose. No wonder Cheney recently ordered a war plan for Iran that relies on tactical nukes. We do not have the men or machines to survive conventional combat with Iran's army. Some reports say that Predator drones are already flying in Iranian airspace. You can rely on it, that the Pentagon has a huge team studying hi-res satellite images of Iran's defenses.

The White House intends to conquer and tame the world's richest oil prize, an entire region led by an extremely strange theocracy that few Americans understand. Many think Islam = terrorism; Bush = commander in chief; Iran and Syria = evil, none of which is helpful or factual.

Rational Family Values

Mindful of the axiom "women and children first," it is imprudent for the United States of America to blunder (again) in the Middle East, lobbing nuclear bombs. The world would be irrevocably altered by America's first use (again) of atomic WMD. Every hostile power and every cadre of committed insurgents will scramble to acquire nuclear weapons and use them in retaliation against American civilians. Insurgents and third-rank powers cannot win by directly engaging our military forces, because U.S. forces are invincible as the world's supreme power. Therefore, like 9/11, sterner war must come to American cities and the cities of our British and Australian allies. All three have already suffered grievous terror attacks (New York, Bali, and London). Nuclear attacks would be incomprehensibly more ghastly and emotionally shattering.

It is therefore my position that every effort must be made by men of good will to fight the faith-based Republican tyranny of lies and immediately revive the antiwar tactics of the 1960's -- a secular, rational, determined campaign to stop the war now, before it purposely or accidentally spirals into a transnational holocaust.

In today's context, "women and children first" means peace.

Wolf DeVoon is a scholar of natural law, Objectivism, and an all-around interesting character.