by
Robert Higgs
Independent
Institute

Recently by Robert Higgs: What
Is the Point of My Libertarian Anarchism

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 still 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 have encountered a writer such as Theodore
Roosevelt who forthrightly affirmed that war is manly and invigorating
for the nation and the soldiers who engage in it: war keeps a nation
from “getting soft” (Morris 1979). Although this opinion
is no longer expressed openly with great frequency, something akin
to it may yet survive, as Chris Hedges has argued 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 even only marginal or symbolic involvement, do not often
extol war as such.

They are likely
instead to justify a nationÂ’s engagement in war by calling
attention to alternative and 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 phrase “war is horrible but” on May 21, 2012,
identified 58,100 instances of it. Rest assured that this number
is smaller than the entire universe of such usage – some instances
most likely 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.

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 [2003])

This statement
was part of a speech Richard Armitage gave on January 21, 2003,
shortly before the U.S. government unleashed its armed forces to
inflict “shock and awe” on the nearly defenseless people
of Iraq. The speech repeated the Bush administrationÂ’s standard
prewar litany of accusations, including several claims later revealed
to be false, 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. The conditions
outlined – a regime’s disregard of international law,
its own peopleÂ’s well-being, and the will of the United Nations,
combined with possession of weapons of mass destruction – apply
to several nations. They no more justified a military attack on
Iraq than they justified an attack on Pakistan, France, India, Russia,
China, the United Kingdom, Israel, or 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 singularity 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 nationstate? Might it
do so if seriously tried? (If these questions give the impression
that I am suggesting the possibility of resort to embargo or blockade,
that perception is not exactly correct. Although I support various
forms of voluntary, peaceful withdrawal of cooperation with evil-doing
states, I do not endorse state-enforced – that is, violent
or potentially violent – embargoes and blockades.) Why must
we leap to the conclusion that only war will serve, when other measures
have scarcely even been considered, much less seriously attempted?
If war is really as horrible as everyone says, 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 seemingly
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 itÂ’s war, and to defend human decency,
sometimes war is necessary.” (Ben Stein [2006])

Ben 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 of them 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 the government officials who were. Yet these
innocents, too, suffered the dire effects of, among other things,
the terror bombing that the U.S. and British air forces inflicted
on many German cities (“Strategic Bombing” n.d.).

To say, as
Stein and many others have said, that “war is war” gets
us nowhere; in a moral sense, this tautology warrants nothing. Many
people, however, evidently consider all moral questions about the
conduct of war to have been settled simply by their having labeled
or by their having accepted someone elseÂ’s labeling of certain
actions as “war.” Having chanted this exculpatory incantation
over the stateÂ’s organized violence, they believe that all
transgressions associated with that violence are automatically absolved
– as the saying goes, “all’s fair in love and war.”
It does not help matters that regimes treat some of the most egregious
transgressors as heroes.

Finally, SteinÂ’s
claim that “to defend human decency, sometimes war is necessary”
is at best paradoxical because it says in effect that human indecency,
which war itself surely exemplifies, is sometimes necessary to defend
human decency. Perhaps he had in mind the backfires that firefighters
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 as many different forms of indecency
as war does. Not only is warÂ’s 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 such 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
as quoted in Dear and Foote 1995, xv)

Maybe slavery
is worse, but maybe itÂ’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, one 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 their cost. No war in U.S. history may
be accurately described as having been waged to prevent the enslavement
of the American people. Some people talk that way about World War
II or the Cold War, if it be counted as a war, but such talk has
no firm foundation in facts.

Some may object
that the War Between the States was fought to prevent the ongoing
slavery of the blacks then held in thrall. But however deeply this
view may be embedded in American mythology, it is contrary to fact.
As Abraham Lincoln made crystal clear in his letter of August 22,
1862, to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, he had
not mobilized the armed forces to free the slaves, but only to prevent
the seceding states from leaving the union: “My paramount object
in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save
or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing
any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the
slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and
leaving others alone I would also do that.”[1]
When Lincoln brought forth the Emancipation Proclamation –
a document carefully drawn so that at the time of its promulgation
it freed not a single slave – he issued it only because at
that time it seemed to be a useful means for the attainment of his
“paramount object,” preserving the union. The slaves,
including those in states that had not seceded, were ultimately
freed for good by ratification (at gunpoint in the former Confederate
states) of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which is to say as
a ramification of the war, which itself had not been undertaken
in 1861 in pursuit of this then-unforeseen outcome.

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 this statement
itself in no way shows that the IraqWar 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 weak excuses for waging it, each such excuse being
manifestly inadequate or simply false. The obvious insufficiency
of any of the reasons put forward explains why so many of us put
so much time and effort into trying to divine exactly what did
impel the Bush administrationÂ’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. If the objective was to preserve AmericansÂ’
freedoms and “way of life,” the U.S. government certainly
did not need to fight most of the enemies against whom it waged
war historically. Oddly enough, the only time the enemy actually
posed such a threat, during the Cold War, the United States did
not go to war against that enemy directly, although it
did fight (unnecessarily) the enemyÂ’s less-menacing allies
– North Korea, China, and North Vietnam. In the other wars
the United States has fought, it might well have remained at peace
had U.S. leaders been sincerely 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 warÂ’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 unalterable as
the sunÂ’s rising in the east each morning. Warfare is an inescapable
aspect of “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. People eventually overcame
or continue to work to overcome each of these longestablished conditions.
Science revealed that astrology is nothing more than an elaborate
body of superstition; scientists and doctors have discovered how
to control or cure certain forms of cancer and are attempting to
do the same for other forms; and citizens learned to laugh at the
pretensions of rulers who claim divine descent or appointment (at
least, they had learned to do so until George W. Bush successfully
revived this doctrine among the benighted rubes who form the Republican
base). Because wars spring in large part from peopleÂ’s stupidity,
ignorance, and gullibility, it is conceivable that alleviation of
these conditions might have the effect of diminishing the frequency
of warfare, if not of eliminating it altogether.

Second, even
if nothing can be done to stop the periodic outbreak of
war, it does not follow that we ought to shut up and accept every
war without complaint. No serious person expects, say, that evil
can be eliminated from the human condition, yet we condemn it and
struggle against its realization 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. War should belong to this class of events.

Finally, whatever
else might be said about the pacifists, one may surely assert 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 an indecent description. Remember: war is horrible,
as everybody now concedes but many immediately put out of mind.

Read
the rest of the article

September
21, 2012

Robert
Higgs [send him mail] is
senior fellow in political economy at the Independent
Institute and editor of The
Independent Review. He
is also a columnist for LewRockwell.com. His
most recent book is Neither
Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government.
He is also the author of Depression,
War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Resurgence
of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against
Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.

Copyright
© 2012 Robert
Higgs

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