[Peace-discuss] while still an active-duty officer, he published his first book, Will War Ever End? A Soldier’s Vision of Peace for the 21st Century

[Karen Medina]

[Sam and Allison introduced Stuart to The Sun Magazine. I thought you
might enjoy this article, or even use some of it on AWARE on the Air.
-karen medina]

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/424/fighting_with_another_purpose

THE SUN INTERVIEW  APRIL 2011 | ISSUE 424
Fighting With Another Purpose: Veteran Paul Chappell On The Need to End War
by LESLEE GOODMAN
The complete text of this selection is available in our print edition.

Paul Chappell was born in 1980 and raised in Alabama, the son of a
Korean mother and a half-white, half–African American father who’d
served in Korea and Vietnam. Though Chappell had seen how his father
was troubled by his war experiences, he chose to pursue a military
career himself, graduating from the United States Military Academy at
West Point in 2002 and serving in Iraq as an army captain in 2006 and
2007. But even as he signed up for a tour of duty, Chappell was
starting to doubt that war was ever going to bring peace in the Middle
East, or anywhere else.

A year later, while still an active-duty officer, he published his
first book, Will War Ever End? A Soldier’s Vision of Peace for the
21st Century. “I am twenty-eight years old,” he writes, “and I have
been obsessed with the problem of war for most of my life.” He went on
to write The End of War: How Waging Peace Can Save Humanity, Our
Planet, and Our Future. Both books are written in a direct, accessible
style that avoids blaming the Left or the Right, and his arguments for
peace have appealed to people of all political persuasions.

Chappell now works at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and travels the
country talking about the necessity of ending war and “waging peace.”
He has a website (www.paulkchappell.com) and is involved with the
American Unity Project (www.americanunityproject.com), which features
a free online series of documentaries about waging peace. He also
trains peace activists — a pursuit he believes should be undertaken
with at least as much forethought and strategy as training soldiers
for war. He emphasizes that activists must learn to be persuasive, to
control their emotions, and to empathize with their opponents. Finally
they must take their calling seriously — as seriously as soldiers
going into battle. In The End of War, Chappell quotes civil-rights
activist Bernard Lafayette: “Nonviolence means fighting back, but you
are fighting back with another purpose and other weapons. Number one,
your fight is to win that person over.”

Chappell teaches through example. I met him at a weekly peace vigil on
a downtown Santa Barbara, California, street corner, where he
demonstrated how to engage even strident opponents with empathy and
respect. I had lost patience with one such person after ten minutes of
unproductive dialogue. Then Chappell showed up. He respectfully
engaged my critic for a full forty-five minutes. Their conversation
ended with the man thanking Chappell for listening to him and
accepting a copy of The End of War. A few weeks later Chappell ran
into the man and learned that he had read the book and had changed his
mind about war as a means of ending terrorism.

Goodman: Your father was traumatized by his experiences in the Korean
and Vietnam Wars. Given that knowledge, why did you pursue a career in
the military?

Chappell: Growing up, I was taught that you must wage war to end war.
Comic books, action movies, video games, politicians — all said that
if you wanted to make the world safe, you needed to use violence to
defeat the bad guys. War was presented to me as the price you had to
pay for peace, and I thought that peace was a goal worth fighting for.

My father didn’t talk much about his wartime experiences, but I do
remember him telling me about the suffering children he saw during the
Korean War. The message I got was that if soldiers had to be
traumatized to save children in Korea, or to save the Jews in Europe,
or to protect innocents elsewhere, that’s a sacrifice they were
prepared to make. I saw soldiers as people who are willing to give
their lives in order to protect others.

I think a lot of people join the military believing they’re going to
make the world safer. In the abstract the idea makes sense, because if
you had a murderer in your home, of course you’d want an armed police
officer there to protect you. But war is a completely different
matter. It creates massive casualties — mostly civilian. It wasn’t
until I got to West Point that I learned war isn’t the best way to
make the world safe.

Goodman: This is something they taught you at West Point?

Chappell: Yes, West Point teaches that war is so dangerous, it should
be used only as a last resort. I learned that the United States needs
to rely more on diplomacy; that politicians don’t understand war and
are too quick to use it as a means of conflict resolution. West Point
also teaches that if you want to understand war, you have to
understand its limitations and unpredictability. World War i and World
War ii both started out as limited conflicts and grew into global
blood baths. War is like a natural disaster. You can’t control it.
Propaganda has made the word war synonymous with security, but in fact
peace is synonymous with security. In the twenty-first century war
actually makes us less secure. The United States has military bases in
about 150 countries; we spend more on war than the rest of the world
combined; we have the most powerful military in human history; and
we’re some of the most terrified people on the planet. War and
military occupation haven’t made us more secure. They’ve made us more
hated in many parts of the world.

Goodman: Some say we’re hated because we’re free.

Chappell: If that’s the case, then how come the terrorists aren’t
attacking the many other free countries around the world that don’t
have soldiers deployed in the Middle East? How come they’re focusing
so much on us and, to some extent, our nato allies? Look who Osama bin
Laden was fighting before he fought us: the Soviets. They weren’t
free. Moreover, when bin Laden was our ally, he apparently didn’t care
that we were free.

Another factor to consider is that wars are now fought on cnn, Fox
News, Al Jazeera, and the Internet as much as they’re fought on the
battlefield. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, said recently that the future of war is about perception, and
that how we are perceived in the Middle East is vital to American
security. It’s just common sense that the more we are in the news for
invading Muslim countries, the less safe we are, because terrorism is
not a government we can overthrow or a country we can occupy.
Terrorism is an idea, a way of thinking. A terrorist can plan an
attack from New York or San Francisco or Miami. Terrorism is a
transnational criminal organization, and you cannot defeat it by
invading a country. In fact, when you invade countries, you make the
problem worse, because you kill civilians and create more resentment,
more hatred, more enemies. I am increasingly of the mind that there
are always preferable alternatives to war. Even if war could be
justified, it’s just not effective.

Goodman: Why do politicians miss this point?

Chappell: When you have the strongest military in history, you want to
use it. That’s our country’s strength, and people tend to rely on
their strengths. Diplomacy puts us on more of an equal footing with
other countries, and we don’t want to give up our advantage. Another
reason is that there’s so much money to be made from war. In wartime
the few make huge profits at the expense of the many. Major General
Smedley Butler, a veteran of World War i, said, “War is a racket. It
always has been. . . . It is conducted for the benefit of the very
few, at the expense of the very many.”

Goodman: But don’t we all benefit from our military securing the
world’s resources?

Chappell: I’m not sure that the Iraq War is just about oil, but I
think most people will agree that if there were not a single drop of
oil in the Middle East, we would not be over there. It’s a strategic
economic interest, but only a very small group of people benefit from
it.
It’s not about Americans having access to oil. The primary reason we
want to control the oil tap in Iraq is because we know that China,
Russia, India, and other emerging industrialized nations need oil, and
we want to be the ones who sell it to them. The problem is how much
these wars cost. Consider what President Eisenhower said about all the
other things we could invest in — schools, hospitals, highways,
houses, food — if we weren’t spending so much money on the war
machine, and you realize that the majority of the population is hurt
by war. General Douglas MacArthur said that if humanity abolished war,
the money could be used to wipe poverty from the face of the earth and
produce a wave of economic prosperity around the world.

It’s not just the ones who go into battle who are harmed. We’re all
hurt by mounting national debt and lack of funding for social programs
and infrastructure, while most of the people who benefit from military
buildups are already rich. You and I are not getting rich off the war
in Iraq.

Goodman: You’ve said that the military is a “socialist” organization. How so?

Chappell: The military gives you three meals a day, pays for your
healthcare and your college, and even pays for your housing. On an
army field exercise, the highest-ranking soldiers eat last, and the
lowest-ranking soldiers eat first. Leaders are supposed to sacrifice
for their subordinates. In civilian society we’re told that the only
thing that makes people work hard is the profit motive. The army’s
philosophy is that you can get people to work hard based on the ideals
of selflessness, sacrifice, and service. It demonstrates that people
will even sacrifice their lives for the sake of others. The military
also has a motto: “Never leave a fallen comrade.”

If I said to most Americans that we should have a society that gives
everyone three meals a day, shelter, healthcare, and a college
education, and that it should be based on selflessness, sacrifice, and
service rather than greed, they’d say, “That’s socialism.” But that’s
the U.S. military. A lot of conservative Republicans who think
socialism is the ultimate evil admire the military.

Goodman: What do they say when you point out to them that the military
is socialist?

Chappell: I don’t usually use the word socialist with them. When I try
to persuade people that America should have universal healthcare, I
say, “You know, in the military we have universal healthcare, and the
military believes that you should never leave a fallen comrade behind.
You take care of everyone.” They usually agree that this makes sense.

Goodman: When did this idea first occur to you?

Chappell: When I was at West Point. I don’t think I really knew what
socialism was at that point, but I knew that West Point was different
from how I’d grown up. You have a sense in America that you’re all
alone. It’s survival of the fittest. But at West Point they have a
saying: “Cooperate and graduate.” Your classmates will tutor you in
chemistry, physics, calculus — whatever you need. If anyone fails a
class because of not understanding the material, his or her fellow
students are partly responsible, because they didn’t aid a classmate
who needed help. Every professor has to give you his or her home phone
number and allot two hours a day to additional instruction for any
students who need it. So you feel as if people care about you. There’s
a sense of camaraderie and solidarity. Your classmates aren’t trying
to get a better grade than everyone else; they’ll actually help you
excel and graduate.

I am not saying that the military is a utopia — far from it. The
military as an institution has a lot of things wrong with it, but it
also has some admirable characteristics.

Goodman: After you graduated from West Point, were you initially happy
to be sent to Iraq? When did you really start to change your mind
about the war?

Chappell: A lot of my friends at West Point were reading Noam
Chomsky’s and Howard Zinn’s critiques of American foreign policy, and
that’s what started to change my mind. In 2006, while I was stationed
in Iraq, West Point invited Chomsky to give a lecture about whether
the war in Iraq was a “just war.” I’d never believed that the war in
Iraq was just. It violated international law, the United Nations
Charter, and the Nuremberg Principles. It also violated the U.S.
Constitution, which says that treaties are the supreme law of the
land. I did see the war in Afghanistan as a necessary evil — at least,
initially. As I studied Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., however, I
learned that waging peace is similar to preventive medicine: a more
effective healing method than the drastic step of war.

Goodman: It’s surprising to me that West Point has students critically
analyze current military conflicts. How can soldiers risk their lives
or kill people if they think the conflict they’re engaged in is wrong?

Chappell: Soldiers are always supposed to be thinking. That’s what
West Point teaches its cadets, who are officers in training. You’re
supposed to question the orders you’re given, to see whether they
conform to the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war. Nevertheless it
can be difficult to go against your fellow soldiers. Take the example
of Hugh Thompson Jr., the U.S. helicopter pilot who tried to rescue
Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai Massacre, in which hundreds of
unarmed women, children, and elderly men were killed by U.S. soldiers.
He told his machine-gunner to open fire on the Americans if they shot
at the people he was trying to save. He was given the Soldier’s Medal
and brought to West Point to lecture, as a way of saying, “Do the
right thing.” But that was about thirty years after the fact. For the
first twenty years or so he was an outcast. He received death threats
from people in the military. So really the message was “Do the right
thing, and in twenty or thirty years people might appreciate it.”

Goodman: You actually volunteered to deploy in Iraq in 2006.

Chappell: Yes, the mission I volunteered for was to install a new
system called “Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar.” A mortar is a
projectile bomb launched from an upright tube. The radar system would
detect incoming rockets or mortars, and machine guns would shoot the
explosives down in midflight. So it was a defensive role. If I did my
job properly, fewer people would be killed.

The way I rationalized my choice was that Gandhi had volunteered as a
medic in the Boer War and the Zulu War. He didn’t believe in violence,
but if these wars were going to happen, he thought he should do what
he could to minimize the loss of life. I don’t know if I made the
right decision, but that was the way I thought about it at the time.

Goodman: Were you ever in a situation where you felt that your values
were compromised?

Chappell: No, the biggest dangers I faced were mortar attacks, ieds
[improvised explosive devices] while we were traveling from base to
base, and sniper fire while we were installing the radar on the
perimeter of the bases. I worked closely with a small team of
soldiers, and unfortunately one of them was killed by a sniper not
long after I left Iraq.

I have a good friend who changed his job in the army from being a
shooter to explosive-ordnance disposal — disarming bombs, like the
soldiers in the movie The Hurt Locker. He wanted a role that was more
defensive; he didn’t want to kill anybody. You might ask why he didn’t
leave the military if he was opposed to fighting, but in his position
is he any more culpable than the rest of us who are paying taxes that
support the war? Not many Americans are willing to risk going to
prison to voice their opposition.

Goodman: You said you originally thought the war in Afghanistan was justified.

Chappell: At the time I thought some wars might be necessary, and I
thought that the Taliban were training terrorists. I didn’t understand
the nature of terrorism then as well as I do now. Terrorism is an
ideology, a way of thinking. To fight it, we need to change U.S.
foreign policy. Eisenhower, the first president to identify Middle
Eastern unrest as a threat to the United States, said that the reason
people in the Middle East hate us is that we suppress freedom there.
We support dictatorships. We prevent democratic progress, which is the
opposite of what we say we’re doing. We have to practice what we
preach, which means we can’t talk about human rights and also support
dictators.

The seed of terrorism grows in the soil of hopelessness, depression,
and fear; of poverty, hunger, and injustice. Killing civilians and
occupying countries only exacerbate terrorism. Even the middle-class
or affluent terrorists feel oppressed and estranged from their native
culture. We need to fight terrorism the way we go after the Mafia:
break up their networks, attack their funding, arrest the leaders, put
them on trial, and send them to prison.

Imagine if America’s reputation around the world were strictly for
providing humanitarian aid and disaster relief; if, whenever there was
a disaster, the Americans came, helped, and left. Then, if terrorists
attacked the U.S., world opinion would be on our side. We wouldn’t
have to defend ourselves against terrorists; the rest of the world
would do it for us.

Another big problem with the war in Afghanistan is that the Karzai
government is corrupt, because any government that cooperates with an
occupying foreign power is always going to be corrupt. Think of the
Indians who cooperated with the British. Think of the French who
cooperated with the Germans. The Karzai government is notoriously full
of warlords and drug lords. Many Afghans prefer the Taliban — that’s
how bad it is. Marine lieutenant colonel Christian Cabaniss,
interviewed on 60 Minutes last year, said that if you kill a thousand
Taliban and two civilians, it’s a loss. General Stanley McChrystal,
former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has said the same.
That was the whole point of the counterinsurgency doctrine: to avoid
killing civilians, because it creates more insurgents. But when you
realize that most of the people killed in modern war are civilians,
you see that we’re fighting a losing battle.

One thing I learned at West Point is that in order to think
strategically, you must be able to see the world from your opponent’s
point of view. And from the point of view of the average Afghan, the
U.S. military is there to keep a corrupt government in power. Many
don’t see us as peacekeepers.

Goodman: What about in the capital, Kabul? The nongovernmental aid
organizations there seem to value our presence.

Chappell: We are providing some security in the cities, but
Afghanistan is predominantly a rural country. If you don’t win the
hearts and minds of the rural population, you can’t win over the
Afghan people. The Taliban have a lot of influence in the vast rural
areas, which are more difficult for American forces to occupy and
control.

Goodman: What will happen to the rights of Afghan women if we leave
the country to the Taliban?

Chappell: I think we have to look at why the Taliban came to power in
the first place. After the Soviets left, the warlords took over, and
many of them were raping women and pillaging villages. The Taliban
gained support by stopping the rapes. The leader of the Taliban,
Mullah Omar, reportedly led his soldiers in the rescue of two girls
who had been kidnapped and raped by a warlord. So if you’re a
villager, and you have to choose between your daughter not being able
to go to school and your daughter being raped by a warlord, which is
the better alternative? It’s not that the people want the Taliban.
They just fear the warlords more. Now the Karzai government is
treating segments of the population so badly that it is making the
Taliban look like a better alternative. Moreover, the Karzai
government is no champion of women’s rights.
Greg Mortenson, the author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones into
Schools, went to Afghanistan in the 1990s and asked the people what
they wanted, and their reply was schools, especially for their
daughters. He says that if you educate Afghan girls to fifth grade,
three things will happen: birthrates and infant-mortality rates will
drop; the quality of village life will improve; and mothers will say
no when their sons ask for permission to make jihad, or holy war.

Americans have a difficult time imagining ways of solving problems
that don’t involve bombing. That is why many countries question
whether our intentions are truly to promote liberty, human rights, and
women’s rights, or whether our motivations are imperialistic in
nature. If we are occupying Afghanistan to liberate women, for
example, how do we explain our close alliance with the Saudi Arabian
government, which oppresses women? Other countries notice that when
governments cooperate with us and give us access to their oil, we
couldn’t care less about their human-rights records, and that makes us
look like hypocrites. Saddam Hussein was executed for crimes he
committed while he was our ally. We actually increased our support for
him after he committed those crimes. The only way our actions appear
consistent is if you assume our foreign policy is about protecting our
own economic interests.