In a recent article published by the New York Times, David Kirkpatrick traces John McCain’s views about foreign conflicts all the way back to 1974.  During that year, McCain submitted an essay to the National War College in which he argued that the American soldiers held captive in prison camps during the Vietnam conflict often collaborated with the North Vietnamese because of the antiwar movement in the United States.  Fidelity to one’s country, no matter how strong at the commencement of a military campaign, can quickly disintegrate when soldiers perceive that there is little or no public support for a war effort.  In McCain’s own words, detainees stuck in these camps “were easy marks for Communist propaganda” because large portions of the American public did not support the conflict in Vietnam.

McCain doesn’t seem to be saying that the antiwar movement was the sole cause of the traitorous collaboration he experienced as a P.O.W.  Rather, the antiwar movement enhanced the emotional appeal of collaboration in the minds of captured American soldiers by making the war seem pointless and immoral.  How did the antiwar movement accomplish this exactly?  Well, that’s where the fundamental premises of McCain’s argument get a bit difficult to articulate and disentangle.  It seems that the underlying logic goes like this:  Where a conflict like Vietnam comes to seem pointless and counterproductive, it becomes natural and reasonable for the soldiers captured during battle to change sides and support the social and political institutions seeking a quick end to the conflict.  And, if you can convince these soldiers that the war has no sound moral or political justification, ceteris paribus their loyalties and sympathies will naturally tend to shift as they increasingly come to identify with the enemy.  As a result they will begin to proactively collaborate with their sworn enemy, despite the fact that doing so makes them traitors.

There is something right about McCain’s view, but something deeply misleading as well.  On the one hand, McCain is generally correct that a person’s ability to persevere depends on his or her understanding about the desirability or achievability of a given objective.  To the extent that the antiwar movement made a clear U.S. victory in Vietnam look less desirable or achievable to some P.O.W.s, they probably did decide to collaborate with the North Vietnamese on the basis of their revised beliefs about the war.  So, as a matter of moral psychology, McCain is right on the money:  Rational human beings tend to pursue with vigor only those goals that they wholeheartedly believe in.  Once faith in a goal is shaken, we tend to lose our resolve.

On the other hand, McCain’s contention that the antiwar movement had a noxious effect on the resolve of American P.O.W.s fudges the question of who is ultimately responsible for traitorous collaboration.  The antiwar movement may have cast the Vietnam conflict in a way that made fidelity to the American military campaign unappealing, but ultimately individual soldiers had to decide for themselves whether the reasons presented by the antiwar movement were cogent.  In other words, before loyalty to the American military wanes, soldiers must as individuals decide that the war effort is morally problematic or destined to fail (or both).  And so we must carefully distinguish questions about human psychology (e.g., what is the psychological impact of reconsidering or rethinking a military conflict for individual soldiers?) from questions about where moral responsibility lies for making certain choices (e.g., when soldiers change their attitudes about a particular conflict, who is to blame for those changes of heart?).

There is an important lesson here for the debate currently raging about the impact of domestic dissent about Iraq on the American military’s ability to successfully prosecute the war.  Soldiers – whether they are engaged in battle or suffering in P.O.W. camps – must make their own decisions about whether they believe in the foreign policy that makes a particular conflict necessary and justified.  It will not do to say that vigorous debate about Iraq unreasonably coerces or encourages American soldiers into second-guessing the campaign in which they’re involved.  And why is that?  First, as we have seen, this subterfuge ignores the fact that soldiers must weigh reasons for and against a particular conflict just like the rest of us.  And second, this specious view ironically denies soldiers like McCain, patriots who resisted their captors while enduring extreme physical pain and psychological torture, the honor they deserve as individuals who made a conscious decision to eschew special treatment during captivity and the hope of an early release to remain loyal to their country.

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