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Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

When is war justified?

From a comment on this post over at Pandagon

Suppose for a moment that the Bushites were right, that Hussein had WMD and the ability and the will to use them against Americans (preposterous but hang in there for a bit). Would you still oppose war, the killing of people bent on killing us, which would of necessity mean killing civilians? When is war justified? Despite seeing the horrors of the Dresden firebombing first hand, Vonnegut still thought WWII was justified.

Here’s the problem I have with the term “justified war” or (even worse) a “just war”:
Today, we tend to think of the term “justified” to mean “it’s OK” or “it’s not wrong”. I don’t think that’s a correct connotation for the legal sense, and it certainly doesn’t apply to war, any war, ever. War is never OK; it is never going to be “just”.

What it has to be is “worth the consequences”. Our goals when we choose to go to war have to be so important, so vital, that we willingly accept the consequences for the horrible things we are about to do.

When we go to war, we are going to kill civilians. There is no way around it: innocent people are going to die, and that means little children and granfathers and grandmothers and mothers with their babies. Even adorable kittens and puppies are going to die because of what we do. Face that fact and accept the consequences.
There will be brutality. Even if you take a 0.1% “bad apple” ratio, by sending in 100,000 combat troops, we’ve just unleashed 100 “bad apples”–rapists, murderers, torturers, sociopaths, psychopaths–on an unprotected populace. Deal with it.

And unless the country we invade is already in chaos (like Bosnia, Afghanistan, or the Sudan), we have to take some responsibility for brutality on the other side, too. By eliminating the (immoral but still functional) power structure in Iraq, we became the catalyst for every kidnapping, every beheading, every militia-driven murder spree that wasn’t possible under the previous regime. When our actions in war create anarchy, we must acknowledge some measure of moral and legal responsibility for the brutality that thrives in that anarchy. The people living under that anarchy are going to blame us as the first cause: we have to understand that, too.

And then there’s the disease and the poverty and the hunger caused by all that destruction of infrastructure and disruption of social safety nets–all those side effects of war that take the longest time to recover from and that Americans don’t even realize exist: we have to take responsibility for that, too.

And we have to recognize the damage done to our own soldiers during war: the dead, the wounded, the traumatized, the broken, and the “brutified”–these are all on our conscience and in our society, and we have to handle that.

There is no way that all this can ever be “OK” or “not wrong”. It is a tragedy. A nightmare. A horrorscape. And it will always be that. Always.

So what can make all that horror “worth it” to you?
What would it take for you to be willing to hand parents the remnants of their children and say, “It had to be done”–and mean it?
What looming threat could allow you to stand inside a blown-up hospital, realize that the walls weren’t painted red, and still convince yourself that an air strike was the right thing to do?
Under what circumstances could you honestly tell yourself and your family and your god that things will be worse–that there will be more death, more chaos, more brutality–if we don’t go to war?

When you find yourself in that situation, then go ahead and do what you have to. Kill and maim and rape your allies along with your enemies; brutalize and destroy your own soldiers as much as any bystanders. But never, for one minute, try to pretend that this isn’t what’s happening.

I hope it will all be worth it.

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