The Fallacy of Moral War
I just finished reading Obama’s remarkable Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. There’s some really lovely stuff in there, especially towards the end, where he tackles the gulf between the ideals of the great peacemakers in history — the Martin Luther Kings, the Ghandis — and the ugliness of human nature:
But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their faith in human progress – must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
The art of seeking peace in a world choked with violence, hatred and apathy has to be premised on something like this: a pure, naked hope that both rises above and obviates the hard truths of the world — that exists free of the taint of the real. This is what religion, in its purest form, gives us: a transcendent hope that survives every kind of setback, because it’s based not on the here and now but on the cherished future: on what’s possible.
But, having said all that — the rubber has to meet the road somewhere. Ideals are worthless if they don’t eventually lead to something concrete. And this is where Obama’s speech falls grievously short.
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world … to say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
The sting of all this is softened somewhat by what follows, but the points he’s making here are at least as important as all his subsequent peans to peace and hope: because they lay out a justification for war based not on necessity, but on morality:
We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
I’m certainly not quibbling with the notion that violence is inevitable, and ubiquitous. But all the violence in the world does not in any way justify an ideology that deems war — the absolute apex of violence — moral. War is, by its nature, a crime. The United States and its allies have killed thousands upon thousands of civilians — in Dresden, in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki, in Laos, in Fallujah, in Afghanistan — in pursuit of its wars. The question of whether these murders were justified in the grand scheme of things is a subject for a different debate. But even if we manage to rationalize the killings, we really can’t call them moral. There’s a difference between calling something moral and calling it necessary.
This isn’t semantic hair-splitting. Words matter, because the ideas behind them matter. If you raise a child to believe that slaughtering thousands of blameless Japanese civilians was a moral good — because, the argument goes, it prevented the death of thousands more by cutting the war short — then you plant the seed of the notion that killing someone can be a moral act. If, on the other hand, you tell your child that children just like him were murdered in cold blood, and that this murder was an immoral act, offset and justified by a desire to prevent death elsewhere — then, yes, you’ve introduced that poor kid to the excruciating world of moral compromise. But you have not taught him that killing all those people was morally justified. Only that it was an immoral act, justified by temporal, human, ratiocinations.
There is only one moral imperative that matters here: killing people is wrong, no matter who does it, or why.
The same goes for the notion of moral wars. Once you lay out a framework for justifying wars based on morality, it’s incredibly easy to slot other wars into that framework — because in stretching out and distending the definition of “moral” to meet your present needs, you’ve laid the groundwork for further redefinitions. All recent wars have been justified as moral imperatives, from the first Gulf war, to the second, to present-day Afghanistan.
I think this is one of Hitler’s unacknowledged sins: giving people who want to believe in moral war something to hang their hat on. It’s basically impossible to argue that our entry into World War II was wrong: it came in response to an actual honest-to-god military attack on our country, it delivered a large swathe of Europe from Nazi domination, and it halted a systematic — and, yes, evil — campaign to extinguish the jews. But, ever since then, Hitler has been used as a justification, by proxy, for all manner of wars. The first and second Bush administrations told us that Saddam Hussein was like Hitler. The neocons bolster their case for bombing Iran by manufacturing an Ahmadinejad/Hitler analogy. And, most depressing of all, Obama compares Al Qaeda to Hitler in his Nobel speech, in order to justify a war in a country in which Al Qaeda no longer resides:
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.
I admire Obama’s honesty in tackling this stuff head-on, in a speech that was supposed to be about peace: it’s to his credit that he chose not to ignore the elephant in the room. But I wish he hadn’t decided to justify his escalation by constructing a framework around it. If he feels that this war is necessary, he should simply say that it’s necessary, in this case, and then tell us why. In positing a whole category of “moral” wars, he justifies not only this war, but all the ones that are to follow.
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