Is Citizenship a Fungible Commodity?

Some of you may have heard about the Becky Hammon situation. For those who haven’t, Becky Hammon is a star player in the WNBA—the women’s version of the National Basketball Association. She was left off the American Olympic team over the summer; there have been varying reasons given, but the impression I have gathered from the reading I have done is that there is personal tension between Ms. Hammon and the coach of the American national team, Anne Donovan. Fairly or unfairly, Becky Hammon was left off the team. (As a side note, Ms. Hammon also comes off as quite charasmatic, as fawning and apologetic story after story appear to prove. See: Yahoo sports columnist).

Ms. Hammon, being 31, felt that this would be her last chance to participate in an Olympics. Similarly, she believed that her time for earning money as a professional athlete was running out. So, in what has been rumored to be a package deal, she was given a contract by a Russian team to play women’s basketball in a Russian league that worked out to about $1 million a year, became a naturalized citizen of Russia, and joined the Russian team. She is now in Beijing competing for an Olympic medal; I think the Russian team made the medal round and may actually play the U.S. today or tomorrow.

Her coach has accused her of being un-American, as have a couple of Team USA players (most notably, Lisa Leslie). Her coach actually called her a “traitor.” Ms. Hammon insists that it is just about basketball, that she’s a true American patriot.

I have vacillated on this issue a bit. One the one hand, I feel outrage that someone can so casually take on another country’s citizenship purely for convenience—and personal gain. Such a step seems to me to disrespect our country. The Olympics, as I understand them, are not about the best athletes coming together from around the world to compete, but the best athletes from the various nations around the world coming together to compete. If it were solely about the best athletes, we would have probably 5 American basketball teams and 5 non-American basketball teams going for the gold. Professional leagues are where the actual best athletes in a pure sense compete. To make an end-run around this concept by taking on another nationality seems cynical. It also smacks really strongly of sour grapes.

I am betting that the founders of the Olympics never thought this would happen.

On the other hand, perhaps it is a good thing that nationality does not matter much to some people nowadays. The fact that some feel that one place is just as good as another is not such a bad thing—it shows a level of optimism about the future of world. And there have certainly been enough conflicts that have arisen from a sense of “us” versus “them.”

It seems to me, however, that the age of nations (and nationalism) is still alive and well. Perhaps-- as the old Coca-cola commercial and song went-- if the whole world sang in peace and harmony, it would not matter a hill of beans what country you represent. But right now, it does mean something. And it means a heck of a lot more when you choose your citizenship and whom you are representing, as opposed to simply being a citizen by virtue of your birth.

In the backdrop of the Georgian conflict, would you choose to be a citizen of Russia, to proudly represent Russia around the world? How proud can Ms. Hammon really feel when “her” country of Russia is responsible for the invasion and destruction of Georgia? (And to forestall Iraq comparisons, folks, Georgia has a democratically elected government that is not terrorizing and torturing its people). Of course, to her, it’s not about citizenship or values, it’s about basketball.

That attitude makes her a mercenary. History does not treat mercenaries kindly for good reason: they show no moral conscience. In my opinion, this decision is a moral one. Even if Ms. Hammon fails to recognize or frame it as such, this is not a case where not recognizing the issue excuses moral culpability. By failing to understand the amoral decision she has made, she effectively elects it. It is a complex issue, but this was the wrong decision. She deserves criticism for it.

"Support the troops, not the war"

One often hears the liberal shibboleth, "support the troops, not the war." "Support the troops: bring them home," reads one popular left-leaning bumper-sticker. Let us assume for the moment that the Iraq war is not justified and may be not only improvident, but also immoral. Why, then, support troops when they are the voluntary agents of an unjust war? If those troops generally consent to prosecute war, and then do intentionally prosecute an unjust war, then are they not responsible for their actions?

If they are not, then why not? Perhaps troops are not responsible because they are the mere unfortunate instruments of an unjust and unwise war policy a general or president directs from the top. It is that general or president who is responsible, then, not the troops. So most soldiers enlist primarily for reasons unrelated to the job, i.e., for the reasons most people get jobs: wages, health care, security, etc., and now cannot quit the job for fear of forfeiting those benefits. Moreover, and crucially, because desertion is a criminal offense, soldiers risk court-martial and imprisonment if they refuse to follow orders. There is a whiff of duress, then, in how soldiers are made by law and contract to follow orders, and so their consent and hence responsibility for their actions may be somewhat diminished.

These may be reasons to feel sympathy for soldiers caught in a difficult position; however, they are not moral reasons to support those soldiers in their choice to continue fighting an unjust war, or a fortiori moral reasons for those soldiers themselves to choose to continue fighting. Even in cases of incontrovertible duress, as when someone forces a person to commit a crime by holding a gun to that person's head, then the duress constitutes at best only an excuse, not a justification, for the performance of the immoral act. The act performed is still morally wrong, morally unjustified, though we may excuse it. Those who act under such duress may not deserve punishment - they may be excused - but from a certain purified moral point of view, they should not have done what they did, and no one should support them in so doing. We therefore should not support troops choosing to perform immoral acts such as killing people in support of an unjust war, though we may in some cases excuse them from punishment if we believe that the threat of court-martial and imprisonment or execution, as well as the loss of other benefits, is great enough to constitute duress. Reasons related to duress are in fact strong reasons to support soldiers who refuse to fight, because those are the soldiers who are going to need our support, as they will then probably face grave punishment for their ethical choice. But I doubt "support the troops, not the war" is intended to apply only to troops who refuse to fight.

If Nazi soldiers continued fighting because they feared court-martial, or Sauron's enthusiastic orcs - heh - continued fighting because they feared his wrath, then no one would say these soldiers are making an ethically sound decision, though many people may feel sympathy for their plight, and may even excuse them for not standing up against Hitler (or Sauron), given the circumstances. No one would say "support the troops" in these cases, unless they meant only "feel sorry for the troops." But if a war policy is patently immoral, such as those of the Nazis or Sauron adduced here, then there may not even be room for this weak sense in which we support troops by feeling sorry for them, and excusing them from blame.

Or is there some reason to support troops engaged in an unjust war simply because they are a part of a nation's military organization, because they are our troops?

Perhaps a reason we should support troops engaged in unjust war is that we as a nation need a credible, effective military, and our military would be feckless and unreliable if soldiers could abandon a campaign whenever they morally disagreed with it. There would always be some soldiers who would object to a war mission, and others who would feign moral objection so as to avoid personal peril, and so as a matter of pragmatic course we strive to inculcate in our soldiers an ethos of strict unthinking obedience and loyalty to their military superiors. Hence when we say "support the troops, not the war," we mean support this ethos of obedience that makes our troops effective, so as to preserve and strengthen our nation's military power in general, no matter how wrongly it may be deployed at any particular time.

From this point of view, soldiers are more like tools or other military hardware than they are like independent moral agents. We have to keep these tools in proper order if we want to use them effectively in the future. So "support the troops, not the war" means something like keep our tanks well-oiled, or our machine guns fully-loaded, because if we did not in general support the troops' efforts to carry out their orders, whatever those orders may be, then the troops may start to question what they are doing and become the disorganized ragtag group the rest of us with our differing moral viewpoints often are, and not obedient soldiers at all. Is this the sense in which we mean to "support the troops, not the war"?

I certainly hope not. The virtues of the good soldier should reside on a different, lower plane from those of an ethical human being. Loyalty, sacrifice, and obedience to superiors are indeed necessary for soldiers to make war, and may mean the difference between life or death for a soldier in the field, but these skills and practices of war are not required or even salutary for good moral decision-making as to whether war is justified. To make such weighty moral decisions, it seems to me that patience and wisdom, and above all, a strength and independence of mind, is critical; one should not be unduly swayed by those with vested interests in one's moral decisions. If an Olympic basketball player decides to protest the immoral social policies of the host country by not playing, then that choice has nothing to do with the habits of discipline, obedience, and teamwork the player may have developed in order to be a good basketball player. The purpose of a player's playing skills is to win the game, and those skills have nothing whatsoever to do with whether the player should be playing the game in the first place. Likewise, the purpose of the obedience and loyalty a soldier learns is not to weaken that soldier's independent moral judgment, but instead to enable the soldier to fight well, should the soldier choose to fight. The soldier's duties to obey and be loyal are instrumental virtues that serve his or her purpose in being an effective fighter; they have no bearing on whether that fighter should fight in the first place.

Possibly there are those in power who would prefer soldiers not to consider the morality of a war or campaign, to blindly carry out whatever violent action is ordered. But it seems to me a very good thing, and a powerful brake on despotism, that our soldiers remain independent moral agents. Our military has recently converted an entire fighter wing from manned to unmanned jets. If we "support our troops" despite their entanglement in an unjust cause because we fear weakening our military power in general, then we should greet this new robotic fighter wing with some relief, as its existence will now resolve our moral tension: "support the troops, but not the war" would then quite plainly mean keeping these robotic troops in prime condition so that they may one day fight a morally justified, necessary war, perhaps by "bringing them home" before they are destroyed or damaged. But I doubt we mean to support soldiers as if they were good tools or robotic air wings.

The ancient Greeks at Thermopylae distinguished themselves from the Persian invaders by asserting that they were not slaves fighting out of fear of their masters' whips; unlike the Persians, the Greeks freely chose to fight. Perhaps our troops should likewise be free to selectively choose not to fight a particular war, and only employ the soldierly virtues of obedience and loyalty, and self-sacrifice, for causes they deem just. There may then be fewer troops available for any particular campaign, as many will choose not to fight, but those who do choose to fight will not then be in the awkward moral position of one acting somewhat under duress or of a person treated as a mere instrument of another's moral will, like a drone or robot. And those who support or oppose them could do so wholeheartedly, without the uncertainty as to whether the troops act in moral confusion, and without resorting to tortured political slogans.

Decisions that Come Home to Roost

I am not an international security expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would like to pose a question: Do you think that Russia would be doing what it is doing right now in the Republic of Georgia were it not for the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq?

It seems to me that we set up such a situation by engaging in peremptory war (for shifting policy reasons offered by the Bush Administration). We, being the biggest, most powerful superpower, demonstrated our disdain for the international community by flexing our “hard power.” (While not an expert in international security, I DO know this term, which means military might, versus “soft power,” which means diplomatic and economic pressure.) When others protested or asked for more time, we forged ahead, needing really only a bare pretense, a thin reason, to move forward. In our case, it was the declaration, based on terribly shaky intelligence, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (“WMDs”—remember that term? Not a lot of chatter about it nowadays, is there?). Russia, also, has the thin and debatable reason for crushing Georgia: Russia claims to be preventing the genocide of the South Ossetians at the hands of the Georgians. Of course, the reports out of the region are all about Russian tanks and planes ravaging Georgia, but that doesn’t really matter. The reason seems quasi-legitimate, or at least sounds like it. That was good enough for us when we invaded Iraq, so, of course, our chief rival (this is debatable, but they at least think they are our chief rival) will act in the same manner we did.

This is, of course, cynical policy under the cover of a sort of bizarre PR campaign. I say “sort of bizarre” because anyone with half a brain observing either conflict knows that the proffered reason (the PR) simply cannot be the reason for the action taken. At least in the 19th Century, expanding territory or extraction of resources were sufficient reasons for imperial powers to go to war, and they did not claim to be going to war for some other purpose. I suppose when a country’s government makes a transition from autocracy or monarchy to democracy (or, in the case of Russia, pseudo-democracy), an extra layer of political correctness is required. We've got to fool ourselves, in other words.

The context of each conflict— the war in Iraq and the current conflict in Georgia-- is different, and I am sure that the war in Iraq and the Georgian conflict can be distinguished on a number of factual grounds, but the reaction— swift, aggressive, powerful, and violent-- cannot. Russia’s reaction and disregard of international protest was, I believe, at least partially influenced by our own government’s arrogant refusal to pay proper respect to the international community leading up to the war in Iraq.