I read somewhere about a group in England that is organizing a “human shield” contingency for Iraq. These folks have organized a group of radical pacifists from the US and Europe who will spend the next few months living in the major cities of Iraq, offering themselves as potential “shame targets” for American bombs and bullets. They hope that the prospect of killing westerners, and the media coverage that it will attract, will deter President Bush from invading Iraq. One guy in his 30s said that he knows he may be killed, but he’d rather die for a cause than live to 80 in desperation about the world as it is.

Wow, that brings some flashbacks for me. Back in the early ‘70s I was about to become a candidate for induction into the US armed services, and thus for assignment to the continuing hostilities in South Vietnam. However, the draft ended just as I became eligible. Still, I had seriously considered declaring myself to be a conscientious objector to armed military service. That was quite popular back in those days, given the unpopularity of the Vietnam war. But I didn’t want to be a “selective objector”, opposed to only stupid wars like Vietnam, which most conscientious objectors probably were back then. I was toying with full objectorship (which is what the draft board required, backed up by solid proof that you seriously held such beliefs for a long time). That required an intellectual commitment to denying the use of deadly force in any and all situations.

Yes, I had some spirited debates with people, as such a radical position invites. I was asked, what would you do if someone was about to kill you without any provocation but you could kill them first. Good old justifiable self-defense. Then they put the limbo bar down a bit lower — what if someone were going to kill your innocent mother and father. Then even lower — what if someone were going to kill a city of 100,000 people, and only you could stop it (by killing the guy)? I mean, come on, couldn’t you live with your conscience if the net gain were 99,999 human lives? And then, of course, they had to bring out Hitler. (Somehow, I don’t remember Stalin coming up in those conversations, even though Stalin killed about 20 million, while Hitler had to settle for around 6 million. History does need to be taught a little better.)

The radical pacifist would respond that the picture is much bigger than one killer and his victims. The whole thing is really a cycle, a sell-out to the cheapness of life. No matter how good the intentions of a “preventative” or “justified” killing are, in reality they uphold the principle that one person can find justification to prematurely shorten the life of another. From then on, it’s a slippery slope down to a cruel and brutish world. The otherwise-virtuous policeman or soldier who gallantly kills a bad guy unintentionally inspires the child who grows to become the next bad guy. The border between good and evil is thin. The only way to stop the cycle is for the truly good people to offer themselves in sacrifice to the bad ones, such that the children of the bad may remember and imitate their goodness (given that kids always rebel against their parents).

Well. To be honest, after years of thought on the subject, I really don’t know which idea is right, or even closer to right. Can we aspire to angeldom, or is the best we can do some sort of balance of terror? I can’t say. But I can say one thing for Saddam Hussein: he does put the pacifism question into sharp focus. There’s hardly been a lower, more cold-blooded example of depravity and human cynicism since Adolph and Josef. (I never went for that bizarre anti-war delusion that the enemy isn’t so bad; even in the depths of my anti-Vietnam war cynicism, I thought that people like Jane Fonda, who cozyed up to Ho Chi Minh, were nuts.)

For now, I’m going to duck the pacifist question by saying that we should at least ask whether the upcoming invasion of Iraq will be an “intelligent” war, whether it really is in our interest or not (hard to say that any war is really “intelligent”). Going back to the 40’s, Josef Stalin did some horribly uncivilized things, even more horrible than Hitler did; and yet for him, we decided to use an alternative to war, something called “containment”. It was expensive and not completely bloodless, but after four decades, it finally worked. There may be ways to keep Saddam Hussein pinned down for a decade or so, until old age or a military coup resolves the situation. And why is North Korea, a nation that brags of its development of weapons of mass destruction in violation of international agreements, getting off so easy? Why can we live with “Dear Leader” and not Saddam? What is our plan there? (Probably something like containment).

There is a very real possibility that America will take Saddam out without too many casualties, but as we raise the stars and stripes over Bagdad, the bloodshed in Iraq will just have started. Without a master of terror keeping a lid on all the various tribes and religious factions in Iraq, the place may get nuttier than Yugoslavia after Tito. We could even see an anti-western Muslim fundamentalist regime take power as in Iran, unless we keep our troops tied up there for years. If we do stay on, our soldiers would be caught in a lot of crossfire for a long time, requiring a constant supply of body bags and maybe even the resumption of the draft. And wow, pacifism amidst the college crowd might become popular again! Maybe those guys from England won’t have died in vain.

P.S., Al Qaeda’s ultimate aim is to install fundamentalist regimes throughout the Arab world. If we shake things up in Iraq too quickly and then leave too quickly, which seems to be the American way, we may be playing right into Osama’s hand.