Reconsideration of War

A conundrum of modern national and international life is when and whether force should be used to achieve political objectives. We can all agree that aggressive wars in the sense of attempts to take over or even destroy another country for the benefit of the aggressor can no longer be justified. Today, this is illegal according to "international law", but it was clearly not regarded as unthinkable in the past. The present map of the world is the result of such wars. In our world, the use of force to attain national objectives is more carefully justified, often in terms of some real or imagined injustice committed in the past. Today, American and United Nations policy leads us to ask whether we can justify the use of force and violence in attempts to extend the sphere of human rights in the world. The whys and wherefores and legalities of the use of force also includes the issues of capital punishment, torture, and indefinite incarceration without trial.

This essay asks the reader to question today's liberal consensus that war and violence are never justified, that the work of the world in the future can and should be within the context of universal peace. I would like to see this consensus more deeply questioned by liberals everywhere, by all who see themselves as "enlightened". For unfortunately, the liberal consensus does not seem congruent with the world as we understand it historically or as we understand it today. (This is not to say that by questioning this consensus, we are saying that violence and war are often, or even ever, justified. The essence of enlightenment thinking is not to wield yet another sword in the struggle of ideologies, but to open up questions that have lain dormant intellectually within both leftist and rightist thinking. The reader should note that these and other essays will often not have conclusions. Sometimes there are no answers; sometimes we cannot find them.)

All will agree that the political and cultural shape of the world as we find it today is the result of historical processes in which war (or sustained organized violence) played a major part. The examples are all around us. China would not have had the boundaries it has today without centuries of warfare to subdue peoples and states that did not at the time consider themselves Chinese. The states of Africa as we find them today were almost universally the result of African, Arab, and finally European wars of conquest. The Americas are the result of another series of bloody conquests.

There would not be a State of Israel unless the Israelis had persistently fought for it. The Palestinians and their Arab backers feel that to preserve anything out of the life and property to which they had undisputed rights sixty years ago they will have to win it back through violence. Robert Fisk, in his highly detailed account of Middle East conflict over the last half-century, The Great War for Civilization, shows how violence has repeatedly afflicted the region on a massive scale. No group, neither outside imperialists, colonists, or native peoples comes off well in his account. The violence seems in the end to be pointless. Yet he does not show how many of those involved had alternatives to violence when it came to a showdown. He does not really give us alternatives for the direct participants.

As for the violent intrusions of outsiders, the message of "why not leave them alone" is more convincing. Yet the choices remain ambiguous. The life South Koreans enjoy today is due to the bloody efforts of the Americans and their allies, combined with the vigorous efforts of the South Koreans themselves. Since the Korean War, the North Koreans have never made any attempt to disguise their intention to retake the South when and if they have the opportunity. Nor should anyone doubt that if they succeeded, they would foist their extremely oppressive system on the South. Yet in spite of all evidence, the wealthy South seems to be convinced that peaceful dialogue can make their country whole again. This is perhaps the most terrifying myth in East Asia, yet it is one to which friends of peace everywhere cannot help but be attracted.

Understanding the value of war or nonwar has often been attempted through writing "what if" histories. What would the world look like if we had capitulated to the Japanese in 1941 or the British had allowed the Germans to land and take the British Isles as they had hoped to do about the same time? Many books have been written about such what ifs. However one may judge the verisimilitude of such efforts, the pictures painted in these scenarios are often not pretty.

There have been wars for which the weight of evidence suggests they were not worth the blood expended. The costs of these wars appear to be greater than what was achieved, even for the victor. I would put World War I and the American Civil War in this category. The losses for all participants in these wars were horrific. In the case of the Civil War, it seems likely that the world was moving away from slavery, and that with time and a buyout (for the Southern planters did not so much value slavery as the investments they had in slaves and plantations), slavery would have ended in another generation or two in the United States. In fact, this was the fear that led the South to initiate conflict. In the absence of war the country might have avoided some of the post-war aftereffects, such as the semi-slavery blacks lived in for many more generations. Before World War I, Germany and Austria were not the oppressive ogres that they were painted to be in the allied propaganda of the time. They were civilized states with democratic systems not too different from the ones they fought. The only really oppressive state involved in the war was the Russian Empire, and it fought on our side! An early surrender of France to Germany (after all, France survived its surrender to Germany in 1871 without collapse) might also have avoided the massive problems that war brought to Russia, with the resultant rise of the communist USSR. An early French surrender would surely have eroded the ground from which Nazism grew in Germany between the wars.

One way to look at war is to examine the individual lives of those volunteering or forced to fight them. I suspect that if we could hear from those whose lives were snuffed out in wars, we would hear much less of heroism in war. These young people lost their one irreducible value, their life, because others judged that for reasons of humanity, or of the state, or of human progress, yes, even of human rights, they should sacrifice this value.

Understanding war, and those who participate in it, forces us to face an unresolved tension in our culture. In most circumstances, we understand the individual to be the central value. Each life is to be lived to the fullest, and lived in terms that individuals define for themselves. Our society is geared to allowing the individual to be the "best he can be". Yet at the same time, we tell this individual that we have the right to take away any hope for a satisfying life because this individual has a responsibility to the community that transcends "petty individual lives". I am not sure this contradiction can be resolved. Perhaps it can be when service in war is actually voluntary; with conscription, the case becomes much more difficult. But the psychological pressures surrounding volunteering in many wartime situations make this difference more apparent than real.

We must face up to such issues, not necessarily resolve them, but face up to them. This means in the first place, not taking a simple pacifist position that says all war is wrong, or that is informed by a pacifist attitude to the point where discussions of all wars comes down to the proposition that they were great crimes against humanity.

Let us look, for example, at the endemic violent tragedies that afflict Africa. Right now the struggle in Darfur is on the front burner of human rights advocates (even though there are many other tragic conflicts going on today that are not as well publicized). What is clear is that the international community is not putting the troops and dollars into defending the unfortunate inhabitants of Darfur that it might. On the one hand, we could stay passive and allow continued killings and destruction by the Sudanese. It is, in fact a very complex situation. Much of the killing is by guerrilla organizations fighting the government. The conflict is also spreading into Chad, with both government and guerrilla groups involved on both sides of the border. There is also the complication that the United States has worked hard to achieve a peace between the Sudanese government and a quite different revolutionary movement in the south of the country. If we push too hard on the government, they might simply abandon their seemingly peaceful intentions in the South, causing us to lose all that we have gained in that area. On the other hand, the international community could intervene more forcefully in Darfur, killing many people on both sides, in the hope that the eventual outcome would be a peace that will have made it all worthwhile. Initial skirmishes may lead the UN or NATO to do more, up to the point of establishing a military presence within western Sudan that ends up producing endless killings to prevent endless killings. The outsiders might be forced to go even further and attempt to occupy the whole of Sudan. Initial success in such an effort would be likely to be followed by a long-term insurgency, similar to that in Afghanistan. Where is the peaceful solution?