| War Is Horrible, but . . . |
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| The Independent
Institute |
| Saturday, September
16, 2006 |
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Robert Higgs |
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...the sight of even one little Lebanese child,
dead, her bloody body gruesomely mangled by an
explosion, ought to be enough to give pause to
any proponent of resort to war. Try putting
yourself in the place of that child’s mother. |
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Anyone
who has
done even a little reading about the theory and practice
of war, whether in political theory, international
relations, theology, history, or common journalistic
commentary, has encountered a sentence of the form “war
is horrible, but . . . .” In this construction, the
phrase that follows the conjunction explains why a
certain war was (or now is or someday will be) an action
that ought to have been (or ought to be) undertaken
notwithstanding its admitted horrors. The frequent,
virtually formulaic use of this expression attests that
nobody cares to argue, say, that war is a beautiful,
humane, uplifting, or altogether splendid course of
action and therefore the more often people fight, the
better.
Some time ago—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, for example—one might encounter a writer, such
as Theodore Roosevelt, who forthrightly affirmed that
war is manly and invigorating for the nation and the
soldiers that engage in it: war keeps a nation from
“getting soft.” Although this opinion is no longer
expressed openly with great frequency, something akin to
it may yet survive, as Chris Hedges argues in War Is a
Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002). Nowadays, however,
even those who find meaning for their lives by
involvement in war, perhaps only marginal or symbolic
involvement, do not often extol war as such.
Instead, they are apt to justify a nation’s engagement
in war by calling attention to alternative, even more
horrible outcomes that, retrospectively, would have
occurred if the nation had not gone to war or,
prospectively, will occur if it does not go to war. This
seemingly reasonable “balancing” form of argument often
sounds stronger than it really is, especially when it is
made more or less in passing. People may easily be
swayed by a weak argument, however, if they fail to
appreciate the defects of the typically expressed
“horrible, but” apology for war.
Rather than plow through various sources on my
bookshelves to compile examples, I have availed myself
of modern technology. A Google search for the exact term
“war is horrible but” on September 11, 2006, identified
1,450 instances. Rest assured that this sample is
smaller than the entire universe of such usage—some
texts have yet to be captured electronically. Among the
examples I drew from the World Wide Web are the
following fourteen statements. I identify the person who
made the statement only when he is well-known.
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(1) “War is horrible. But no one wants
to see a world in which a regime with no regard
whatsoever for international law—for the welfare of its
own people—or for the will of the United Nations—has
weapons of mass destruction.” [U.S. Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage]
This statement was part of a speech Armitage gave on
January 21, 2003, shortly before the U.S. government
unleashed its armed forces to wreak “shock and awe” on
the nearly defenseless people of Iraq. The speech
repeated the Bush administration’s standard prewar
litany of accusations, including several claims later
revealed to be false, and so it cannot be viewed as
anything but bellicose propaganda. Yet it does not
differ much from what many others were saying at the
time.
On its own terms, the statement scarcely serves to
justify a war. A regime’s disregard of international
law, its own people’s wellbeing, and the will of the
United Nations, combined with possession of weapons of
mass destruction—these conditions apply to several
nations. They no more justify a military attack on Iraq
than they justify an attack on Pakistan, France, India,
Russia, China, the United Kingdom, Israel or, for that
matter, the United States itself.
(2) “War is terrible, war is horrible,
but war is also at times necessary and the only means of
stopping evil.”
The only means of stopping evil? How can such an
exclusivity exist? Has evil conduct never been stopped
except by war? For example, has shunning―exclusion from
commerce, financial systems, communications,
transportation systems, and other means of international
cooperation―never served to discipline an evil
nation-state? Might it do so if seriously tried? Why
must we leap to the conclusion that only war will serve,
when other measures have scarcely even been considered,
much less been seriously attempted? If war is really as
horrible as everyone says, then it would seem that we
have a moral obligation to try very hard to achieve the
desired suppression of evil-doing by means other than
resort to warfare, which is itself always a manifest
evil, even when it is the lesser one.
(3) “No news shows [during World War II]
were showing German civilians getting fried and saying
how sad it was. It was war against butchers and war is
horrible, but it’s war, and to defend human decency,
sometimes war is necessary.” [Ben Stein]
Stein is a knowledgeable man. He surely knows that the
U.S. government imposed draconian censorship of war news
during World War II. Perhaps the censors had their
reasons for keeping scenes of incinerated German
civilians away from the U.S. public. After all, even if
Americans in general had extraordinarily cruel and
callous attitudes toward German civilians during the
war, many Americans had relatives and friends in
Germany.
Stein appears to lump all Germans into the class of
“butchers” against whom he claims the war was being
waged. He certainly must understand, however, that many
persons in Germany—children, for example—were not
butchers and bore absolutely no responsibility for the
actions of government officials who were. Yet these
innocents, too, suffered the dire effects of, among
other things, the terror bombing the U.S. and British
air forces inflicted on many German cities.
To say, as Stein and many others have said, that “war is
war” gets us nowhere; in a moral sense, this tautology
warrants nothing. Evidently, however, many people
consider all moral questions about the conduct of war to
have been settled simply by their having labeled or by
their having accepted someone else’s labeling of certain
actions as a “war.” Having uttered this exculpatory
incantation over the state’s organized violence, they
believe that all transgressions associated with it are
automatically absolved—as they say, “all’s fair in love
and war.” It does not help matters that regimes treat
some of the most egregious transgressors as heroes.
Finally, Stein’s claim that “to defend human decency,
sometimes war is necessary” is, at best, paradoxical,
because it says in effect that sometimes human
indecency, which war itself surely exemplifies, is
necessary to defend human decency. Perhaps he had in
mind the backfires that fire fighters sometimes set to
help them extinguish fires. This metaphor, however,
seems farfetched in connection with war. It is difficult
to think of anything that consists of so many different
forms of indecency as war does. Not only is its essence
the large-scale wreaking of death and destruction, but
its side effects and its consequences in the aftermath
run a wide range of evils as well. Whatever else war may
be, it surely qualifies as the most indecent type of
action people can take: it reduces them to the level of
the most ferocious beasts and often accomplishes little
more than setting the stage for the next, reactive round
of savagery. In any event, considered strictly as a way
of sustaining human decency, it gets a failing grade
every time, because it invariably magnifies the
malignity that it purports to resist.
(4) “War is horrible, but slavery is
worse.” [Winston Churchill]
Maybe slavery is worse, but maybe it’s not; it depends
on the conditions of the war and the conditions of the
slavery. Moreover, if one seeks to justify a war on the
strength of this statement, he had best be completely
certain that but for war, slavery will be the outcome.
In many wars, however, slavery was never a possibility,
because neither side sought to enslave its enemy. Many
wars have been fought for limited objectives, if only
because more ambitious objectives appeared unattainable
or not worth the cost. No war in U.S. history may be
accurately seen as having been waged to prevent the
enslavement of the American people. Some people talk
that way about World War II or, if it be counted as a
war, the Cold War, but such talk has no firm foundation
in facts.
(5) “You may think that the Iraq war is
horrible, but there may be some times when you can
justify [going to war].”
Perhaps war can be justified at “some times,” but that
statement itself in no way shows that the Iraq war can
be justified, and it seems all too obvious that it
cannot be. If it could have been justified, the
government that launched it would not have had to resort
to a succession of lame excuses for waging it, each such
excuse being manifestly inadequate or simply false. The
obvious insufficiency of any of the grounds put forward
explains why so many of us have been struggling to
divine exactly what did impel the Bush administration’s
rush to war.
(6) “War is horrible, but sometimes we
need to fight.”
Need to fight for what? The objective dictates whether
war is a necessary means for its attainment. Certainly,
if the objective was to preserve Americans’ freedoms and
“way of life,” the U.S. government did not need to fight
most of the enemies against whom it waged war
historically. Remarkably, the only time the enemy
actually posed such a threat, which was during the Cold
War, the United States did not go to war against that
enemy directly, although it did fight (unnecessarily)
the enemy’s less-menacing allies, North Korea, China,
and North Vietnam. In the other wars, the United States
might well have remained at peace had U.S. leaders been
interested in peace rather than committed to warfare.
(7) “Of course war is horrible, but it
will always exist, and I’m sick of these pacifist
[expletive deleted] ruining any shred of political
decency that they can manage.”
Many people have observed that wars have recurred for
thousands of years and therefore will probably continue
to occur from time to time. The unstated insinuation
seems to be that in view of war’s long-running
recurrence, nothing can be done about it, so we should
all grow up and admit that war is as natural, and hence
as unobjectionable, as the sun’s rising in the east each
morning. It’s “how the world works.”
This outlook contains at least two difficulties. First,
many other conditions also have had long-running
histories: for example, reliance on astrologers as
experts in foretelling the future; affliction with
cancers; submission to rulers who claim to dominate
their subjects by virtue of divine descent or
appointment; and many others. Eventually, people
overcame each of these long-established conditions.
Science revealed that astrology is nothing more than an
elaborate body of superstition; scientists and doctors
discovered how to control or cure certain forms of
cancer; and citizens learned to laugh at the pretensions
of rulers who claim divine descent or appointment (at
least, they had learned until George W. Bush
successfully revived the doctrine among the benighted
rubes who form the Republican base). Because wars spring
in large part from people’s stupidity, ignorance, and
gullibility, it is conceivable that alleviation of these
conditions might have the effect of diminishing warfare,
if not of eliminating it altogether.
Second, even if nothing can be done about the periodic
outbreak of war, it does not follow that we ought to
shut up and accept it without complaint. No serious
person expects, say, that evil can be eliminated from
the human condition, yet we condemn it and struggle
against its expression in human affairs. We strive to
divert potential evildoers from their malevolent course
of action. Scientists and doctors continue to seek cures
for cancers that have afflicted humanity for millennia.
Even conditions that cannot be wholly eliminated can
sometimes be mitigated, but only if someone tries to
mitigate them.
Finally, whatever else one might say about the
pacifists, one may surely say that if everyone were a
pacifist, no wars would occur. Pacifism may be
criticized on various grounds, as it always has been and
still is, but to say that pacifists “lack any shred of
political decency” seems itself to be indecent.
Remember: war is horrible, as everybody now concedes but
many immediately put out of mind.
(8) “Every war is horrible, but freedom
and justice cannot be allowed to be defeated by tyranny
and injustice. As hideous as war is it is not as hideous
as the things it can stop and prevent.”
This statement assumes that war amounts to a contest
between freedom and justice on one side and tyranny and
injustice on the other. One scarcely commits the dreaded
sin of moral equivalence, however, by observing that few
wars present such a stark contrast, in which only the
children of God fight on one side and only the children
of Satan fight on the other. One reason why war is so
horrible is that it invariably drags into its charnel
house many—again, the children are the most undeniable
examples—who must be held blameless for any actions or
threats that might have incited the war.
Even if we set aside such clear-cut innocents and
consider only persons in the upper echelons of the
conflicting sides, it is rare to find all angels on one
side and all demons on the other. In World War II, for
example, the Allied states were led by such angels as
Winston Churchill, who relished the horrific terror
bombing of German cities; Josef Stalin, one of the
greatest mass murderers of all time; Franklin D.
Roosevelt, of whose moral uprightness the less said the
better; and Harry S Truman, who took pleasure in
annihilating hundreds of thousands of defenseless
Japanese noncombatants first with incendiary bombs and
ultimately with nuclear weapons. Yes, the other side had
Adolf Hitler, whose fiendishness I have no desire to
deny, but the overall character of the leadership on
both sides sufficiently attests that there was enough
evil to go around. As for the ordinary soldiers, of
course, everyone who knows anything about actual combat
appreciates that once engaged, the men on both sides
quickly become brutalized and routinely commit
atrocities of every imaginable size and shape.
So, it is far from clear that war is always or even
typically “not as hideous as the things it can stop and
prevent.” On many occasions, refusal to resort to war,
even in the face of undeniable evils, may still be the
better course. When World War II ended, leaving more
than 62 million dead, most of them civilians, and
hundreds of millions displaced, homeless, wounded, sick,
or impoverished, the survivors might well have doubted
whether conditions would have been even more terrible
had the war not taken place. (The dead were unavailable
for comment.) To make matters worse, owing to the war,
the monster Stalin had gained control of an enormous
area stretching from Czechoslovakia to Korea; and soon,
because of the defeat of the Japanese Empire, the
monster Mao Zedong would take complete control of China
and impose a murderous reign of terror on the world’s
most populous country that cost the lives of perhaps
another 60 million persons (as many as 77 million,
according to one plausible estimate). It is difficult to
believe that the situation in China would have been so
awful even if the Japanese had succeeded in
incorporating the Chinese into the Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere.
(9) “I grant you the war is horrible,
but it is a war, after all. You have to compare apples
to apples, and when I do that, I see this war is going
well.”
This statement about the current war in Iraq exemplifies
what some call the
not-as-bad-as-Hamburg-Dresden-Tokyo-Hiroshima-Nagasaki
defense of brutal warfare. If we make such pinnacles of
savagery our standard, then sure enough, everything else
pales by comparison. But why should anyone adopt such a
grotesque standard? To do so is to concede that anything
less horrible than the very worst cases is “not so bad.”
In truth, warfare’s effects are sufficiently hideous at
every level. What the Israelis have been doing in
Lebanon recently bears no comparison with the February
1945 Allied attack on Dresden, of course, but the sight
of even one little Lebanese child, dead, her bloody body
gruesomely mangled by an explosion, ought to be enough
to give pause to any proponent of resort to war. Try
putting yourself in the place of that child’s mother.
(10) “[Certain writers] all agreed that
war is horrible but said the Bible gives government the
authority to wage war to save innocent lives.”
Biblical scholars have been disputing what Christians
may and may not do with regard to war for almost two
thousand years. The dispute continues today, so the
matter is certainly not resolved among devout
Christians. Even if Christians may go to war to save
innocent lives, however, a big question remains: is the
government going to war for this purpose or for one of
the countless other purposes that lead governments to
make war? Saving the innocent makes an appealing excuse,
but often, if not always, it is only a pretext. “Just
war” writers from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to Grotius
to the latest contributors have agonized over the ready
availability of such pretexts and warned against the
wickedness of advancing them when the real motives are
less justifiable or even plainly immoral.
For centuries, European combatants on all sides invoked
God’s blessing for their wars against one another. As
recently as World War II, the Germans had “Gott Mit Uns,”
a declaration that adorned the belt buckles of Wehrmacht
soldiers in both world wars. Strange to say, in 1917 and
1918, Christian ministers of the gospel in pulpits
across the United States were assuring the congregations
that their nation-state was engaged in a “war for
righteousness” (the title of Richard M. Gamble’s
splendid book about this repellent episode). So invoking
Biblical authority really doesn’t get us very far: the
enemy may be invoking the same authority.
Nowadays, of course, one side invokes the Jewish and
Christian God, whereas the other calls upon the blessing
of Allah. Whether this bifurcated manner of gaining
divine sanction for the commission of mass murder and
mayhem represents progress or not, I leave to the
learned theologians.
(11) “War is horrible but thank God we
have men and women who are willing and able to protect
our people and our freedom.”
These men and women may be willing and able to supply
such protection, but do they? Our leaders constantly
proclaim that their wars are aimed at protecting us and
our freedoms—“we go forward,” declares George W. Bush,
“to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our
world”—but one has to wonder, considering that in the
entire history of warfare in the United States, each war
(with the possible exception of the War for
Independence) has left the general run of the American
people with fewer freedoms after the war than they
enjoyed before the war. Every time the rulers set out to
protect the village, they decide that the best way to do
so is to destroy it in the process. Call me a cynic, but
I can’t help wondering whether protection of the people
and their freedoms was really the state’s objective, and
after forty-five years of thinking about the matter,
I’ve come up with some pretty attractive alternative
hypotheses. One of them, as Marine General Smedley
Butler famously expressed it, is that war is a racket,
but I have others, too.
(12) “War is horrible but some economic
good came out of World War II. It brought the United
States out of one of the greatest slumps in history, the
Great Depression.”
This venerable broken-window fallacy refuses to die, no
matter how many times a stake is driven through its
heart. Most Americans believe it. Worse, because less
excusable, nearly all historians and even a large
majority of economists do so as well. I’ve been whacking
this nonsense for several decades, but so far as I can
tell, I’ve scarcely made a dent in it. Should anyone
care to see a complete counterargument, I recommend the
first five chapters of my book Depression, War, and Cold
War (2006).
(13) “War is horrible, but whining about
it is worse. Either put up or shut up.”
Some people always reject the denunciation of any
familiar social institution or conduct unless the
denouncer offers a “constructive criticism,” that is,
unless he puts forward a promising plan to eliminate the
evil he denounces. I admit at once that I have
discovered no cure for the human tendency to resort to
war when much more intelligent and humane alternatives
are available. I’m trying to convince people that on
nearly all occasions, they are allowing their rulers to
bamboozle them and to turn them into cannon fodder for
purposes that serve the rulers’ interests, not the
people’s. I’m getting nowhere in this effort, but I’m
going to keep trying. I’m also going to continue to
denounce stupidity, ignorance, ugliness, bullying, bad
breath, and rap music, even though I don’t expect to
succeed in those quests, either.
(14) “Of course, war is horrible, but at
present, it’s still the only guarantee to maintain
peace.”
The statement as it stands is self-contradictory because
it affirms that the only way to make sure that we will
have peace is to go to war. Perhaps, if we are feeling
generous, we may interpret the statement as the
time-honored exhortation that to maintain the peace, we
should prepare for war, hoping that by dissuading any
aggressor from moving against us, our preparation will
preserve the peace. Although this policy is not
self-contradictory, it is dangerous, because the
preparation we make for war may itself move us toward
actually going to war. For example, preparation for war
may entail increasing the number of military officers
and allowing the top brass to exert greater influence in
policy making. Those officers may see that without war,
their careers will go nowhere, and hence they may tilt
their advice to civilian authorities toward risking or
actually making war, even when peace might easily be
preserved. Likewise, military suppliers may use their
political influence to foster international suspicions
and fears that otherwise might be allayed. Wars are not
good for business in general, but they are good for the
munitions contractors. Certain legislators may develop
an interest in militarism; perhaps it helps them to
attract campaign contributions from arms contractors,
veterans’ groups, and members of the national guard and
military reserve organizations. Pretty soon we may find
ourselves dealing, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower
did, with a military-industrial-congressional complex,
and we may find that it packs a great deal of political
punch and acts in a way that, all things considered,
diminishes the chances of keeping the country at peace.
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From the foregoing commentary, a recurrent theme may be
extracted: those who argue that “war is horrible, but .
. .” nearly always use this rhetorical construction not
to frame a genuinely serious and honest balancing of
reasons for and against war, but only to acknowledge
what cannot be hidden—that war is horrible—and then to
pass on immediately to an affirmation that
notwithstanding the horrors, whose actual forms and
dimensions they neither specify nor examine in detail, a
certain war ought to be fought.
The reasons given to justify its being fought, however,
generally amount to claims that cannot support a strong
case. Often they are not even bona fide reasons, but
mere propaganda, especially when they emanate from
official sources. Sometimes they rest on historical
errors, such as the claim that the armed forces in past
wars have somehow kept foreigners from depriving us of
our liberties. Often the case for war rests on
ill-founded speculation about what will happen if we do
not go to war.
People need to recognize, however, that government
officials and their running dogs in the media, among
others, are not soothsayers. None of us knows the
future, but these interested parties lack a
disinterested motive for making a careful, well-informed
forecast. They have, as the saying goes, an agenda of
their own. “The best and the brightest” of our leaders
and their kept experts generally amount to little more
than what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realists,”
and on occasion, such as the present one, they don’t
meet even that standard. Hence, lately, these geniuses,
equipped with all that secret information they
constantly emphasize their critics don’t possess, have
put forward forecasts of a “cake walk” through Iraq, a
“slam dunk” on finding lots of weapons of mass
destruction there, and liberal-democratic dominoes
falling across the Middle East—forecasts that fit more
comfortably in a lunatic asylum than in a discussion
among rational, well-informed people.
The government generally relies on marshalling patriotic
emotion and reflexive loyalty rather than on making a
sensible case for going to war. Much of the discussion
that does take place is a sham, because the government
officials who pretend to listen to other opinions, as
U.S. leaders did most recently during 2002 and early
2003, have already decided what they are going to do, no
matter what other people may say. The rulers know that
once the war starts, nearly everybody will fall into
line and “support the troops.”
If someone demands that the skeptic about war offer
constructive criticism, here is my proposal: always
insist that the burden of proof rest heavily on the
warmonger. This protocol, which is now anything but
standard operating procedure, is eminently judicious
because, as we all recognize, war is horrible. Given its
horrors, which in reality are much greater than most
people appreciate, it only makes sense that those who
propose to enter into those horrors make a very, very
strong case for doing so. If they cannot―and I submit
that they almost never can―then people will serve their
interests best by declining an invitation to war. As a
rule, the most rational, humane, and auspicious course
of action is indeed to give peace a chance. |
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