“I took that oath seriously, and I believe that taking that oath means that I need to respect, and do respect, my service to the president.”
- Sara Taylor, President Bush’s former political director

This casual, soft-spoken affirmation of circumstantially treasonous allegiance earned their speaker a scathing admonition from Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) reminding her that she has sworn to uphold and defend the constitution first, not George W. Bush. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlSIwJgX5J4)

Issues of civil service oaths and to whose authority oath-takers promise their obedience are becoming increasingly contentious issues in American politics. This pervasive problem underpins the outgrowth of many other issues, and is especially pertinent for members of the armed forces. Understanding that irresolvable ambiguity concerning their true meaning straightjackets efforts at meaningful government reform, I decided to dig deeper into the historical backgrounds and significance of these oaths.

While Taylor’s oath, as eloquently pointed out by Senator Leahy, is fairly cut and dry in its Constitution-first edict, our oath as soldiers doesn’t offer much direction in terms of prioritizing our authorities: the constitution, the commander and chief. Why does the oath allow for variation and interpretive individuation when it’s penned for the military, an entity whose membership is supposed to behave in lockstep? I hypothesize that the oath itself presupposes Constitutional obedience on the part of the commander in chief. If the oath’s designers could have foreseen even the possibility of the commander in chief’s abrogating the Constitution, then why would they demand loyalty to two mutually-contravening authorities? Constitutional integrity in a “democratically-elected” leader must have seemed so obvious that advance clarification of uncertainty would have appeared redundant and unnecessary.

Centuries later, this technical oversight traps 21st century soldiers in jurisprudential checkmate. All avenues forward present a different conflict of conscience or of law: default on your oath of service, fight a war you believe illegal against an opponent you believe innocent, refuse compliance and accept the consequences, flee the court’s judgment for fear that the odds are stacked against you, or, perhaps most popular of all, wait out your term of service while pretending these issues are trivial or do not exist. All paths but the last will likely lead to or derive from the knowledge that our military’s criminal justice system is generally disinterested with resistance, no matter its nature or what justifies it. Recurring trials that all principally follow the same script have taught us that when folks from the military attempt democracy, they find the system inhospitable and the repercussions drastic.

One strategy that I think takes a fairly practical, within-the-rules approach is the Appeal for Redress organized by marine veteran Liam Madden. In Madden’s appeal to congressional representatives, written while on active duty, he formally and respectfully requests that they withdraw American forces from Iraq and discontinue the campaign (the appeal is viewable on its official website: http://www.appealforredress.org/). Madden does not, however, threaten disobedience or reprisal of any kind if his representatives fail to act in accordance with his wishes. It is simply his expression of position and perspective, his participation in the political process.

Not everyone, unfortunately, has responded to Madden’s politics in the same openness and respect with which he has presented them. The July/August Atlantic Monthly features an article by Andrew Bacevich, professor of international studies at Boston College, sharply critical of Madden and his work, prophesizing a gloomy and disastrous-ridden future for any society that makes the innocent but unforgivable mistake of allowing their own military a voice in affairs of national security.

Among Bacevich’s criticisms of Appeal for Redress, I was surprised to discover his displeasure that its distribution of power does not adhere to traditional models of top-down dominance: “In an arena where things typically start at the top, here the impetus comes from below.” Aside from the obvious counter-rebuttal that, by their very nature, redresses ascend hierarchies, Bacevich implies that not even extenuating circumstances can allow space for soldiers’ civil participation. This implication is alarming, especially considering that the current congress, who won the people’s vote last November on their promise of swiftly terminating the quagmire in Iraq, has now occupied office for almost a half a year and still do scant more than mouth empty platitudes -unsubstantiated by meaningful action- about bringing our troops home. They talk incessantly, but the freedom birds are still in the hanger.

Elsewhere in his article, Bacevich attributes the recent influx of outspoken veterans to a higher standard of education within its enlisted ranks. He implicitly suggests that because modern war machines require greater technical skills for their effective and appropriate operation, their operators must possess a heightened propensity for independence of mind, criticality of institutional authority, and radical organizing -skills more commonly associated with liberal arts institutions. Between the elements of his analysis, I see no logical relationship.

Continuing to condemn soldiers behaving as citizens, Bacevich goes on to disparage even the notion that a tiny minority of soldiers “expect their opinions to be taken seriously.” He apparently forgets the doctrinal political organization of the country those soldiers defend. We have, in the United States, at least a cosmetic democracy. The undertaking of that democracy’s defense does not constitute forfeiture of the civic privileges that it affords its people. His sarcastic assertion that “national-security policies somehow require the consent of those in uniform” doesn’t mesh well with any political framework that is allegedly legitimized by and representative of its people, essentially the lifeblood of democracy. ‘Ours is to protect democracy, not to practice’ is an adage I’d often heard myself during my own years of military service, but while the words themselves are poetic and catchy, they aren’t explicitly supported by any laws and are therefore unenforceable. Abstention from democratic practice may be the chosen lifestyle of some who serve, but is not a binding statute for everyone who serves. It is a personal choice, not codified legislation.

Regarding analysis in the following paragraph, I think Bacevich misleads his readers by offering a false historical backdrop for the Vietnam-era draft and the significance of its discontinuance. Renowned scholarly perspectives, notably those of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, contend that the retirement of the draft resulted from a different sort of variance between the Vietnam-era armed forces and those in service at present than Bacevich suggests. That our current armed services, to use Bacevich’s words “do not represent a cross section of America,” is precisely the problem. When everyone faces the same potential compulsory service, then everyone desires no wars fought over frivolous pretenses in which they may die. During Vietnam, government arrogance and indifference to this truism prompted widespread ground-level veterans’ movements. Wealthy kids with liberal ideals and their unwillingness to die for elitist agendas overwhelmingly resisted, and the Southeast Asian campaign became unsustainable. This is more likely the principle cause of the draft’s end. There is less concern over losing society’s downtrodden “all volunteers” who “choose” to fight than over involuntarily sacrificing one’s own ass. Reconsidered on these terms, I am not so sure Bacevich is accurate in suggesting today’s military is more politicized than the one in ’73; I would propose that just the opposite, in fact, is true.

Once these murky contradictions are disentangled, the reader is left with little guess as to what “further evidence of advancing constitutional decay” Bacevich is referring to. Of all the examples of constitutional decay surely rampant in today’s United States, citizen soldiers working responsibly within the parameters of their first amendment rights can scarcely be counted among them. George Bush’s continuous assaults on the first amendment, and virtual annihilation of fourth and fourteenth, might constitute “advancing decay,” but oddly do not draw such scrutiny from Bacevich here.

More discrediting than his contempt for democratic principles and poor interpretation of the historical record is his imagined role of our troops as mindlessly obedient. As Liam himself pointed out in a Members Speak post “Silence is not an Option,” the “manifestation of conscience within our ranks” must not be evaluated in a vacuum; there is a context. The fact of executive power operating outside of its bounds confounds the issue of a military becoming politicized. Until we’re able to acknowledge that a president undertaking criminal activities and abusing executive privilege matters, that it informs what constitutes appropriate behavior for those who would live or die under his charge, we are not ready to formally appraise the acceptability of current soldiers’ political affairs. We never swore to obey; we swore to defend, and if defending requires our disobedience of an autocratic war criminal, then we are so bound by our oath.

Lastly, Bacevich forewarns the dangers of unwarily maintaining a powerful military, a forewarning whose reasoning is at odds with itself. In the sentence immediately following Bacevich’s acknowledgment that our society is, indeed, a “democracy,” he speaks of the pressing need of “renewed attention to hallowed principles of civilian control,” a humorous if not mortifying lapse of contiguous thought that hardly needs my pointing out. ‘Civilian control,’ in the context of a ‘democracy,’ might be more concisely termed ‘self-control;’ it is neither the mandate nor the prerogative of this government to ‘control;’ it is only to ‘represent.’ From all the scary prophecies Bacevich offers in his article to enlighten us, I take little to heart and see no need to fear.

Troops would be well-advised to follow the directives of Senator Leahy rather than those of Professor Bacevich, lest they want to risk appearing before a court unsympathetic to the “I was just following orders” defense, which has proven weak for Sara Taylor in front of congress, Army Reservists standing court martial at Fort Hood over Abu Ghraib, and the unhappy defendants of Nuremburg Tribunals sixty years ago.