The Case For War

We love peace, but not peace at any price. There is a peace more destructive of the manhood of living man, than war is destructive of his body. Chains are worse than bayonets. -- Douglas Jerrold.

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, almighty God! -- Patrick Henry.

If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. -- Winston Churchill

War, even the smallest and least bloody example thereof, is undeniably horrible. But virtually any rational man will allow that worse things are possible, and have occasionally visited us in the course of recorded history. This forces us to confront a huge mass of considerations and quandaries. Some of these are intertwined with one another. Some are matters of relative priority that descend to the level of opinion. Some are never answerable except by educated guesses.

My purpose here is to tabulate and address the most important of those questions. What I hope will emerge is the schematic by which to make the case for America going to war -- ever -- as reasonable, moral men would pose it in some abstract situation.

1. Is There A Problem A War Might Solve?

Problems that might be addressed by warmaking are not numerous by category. All of them appear to have their roots in evil politics: specifically, some government's use of force to violate rights, whether by military aggression against other countries or by the oppression, expropriation, torture and slaughter of its own subjects.

For example, in 1861 the Union went to war with the Confederacy. Today, we are told that the genesis of the conflict was slavery. Though it's possible that other considerations loomed even larger -- Abraham Lincoln's avowed purpose in going to war was to compel the secessionist states to remain within the Union -- the abolition of slavery was regarded as the paramount justification for war, then as now. It is possible that, had the Confederacy differed with the Union over tariffs alone -- the other major point of contention between the sections -- the North would not have been able to rally enough popular sentiment to mount or sustain the war.

Today there exist a number of brutal regimes that oppress, plunder and torture their subjects. These states possess an overwhelming monopoly of coercive force within their domains, enough that their subjects are unable to resist them. A war of liberation appears to be the only near-term solution to the sufferings of their people.

Honest antiwar advocates seldom argue against the moral case for making war on an evil tyrant. However, they might counter that the time is not yet, that impatience for the liberation of the oppressed would carry an unacceptable cost in casualties, both military and civilian. It's not possible to refute this contention absolutely. The disagreement is largely over whether the liberated survivors will be enough better off that even those slain by a war would regard their deaths as a price worth paying for their countrymen's freedom.

Other problems conceivably soluble through war are few, but the newest, state-supported terrorism, commands the attention of the world at this time. We will return to this topic in due course.

2. Can One Forecast The Costs And Risks Of The War?

Military forecasting is inherently uncertain, as is all prognostication. One can be reasonably certain of victory, as America has been in Iraq, without being at all certain about the costs to get there, either in blood or in gold. Indeed, sometimes the possession of overwhelming military advantages carries a compensating constraint: not to use the most powerful weapons in one's arsenal, for example.

Operation Iraqi Freedom was distinguished by its low body counts: very few Iraqi casualties, whether military or civilian, and American casualties that were an order of magnitude fewer. Yet the war cost an estimated $80 billion to wage, which is not to be ignored in our calculations. Had American war planners felt no constraints about sparing Iraqi lives, the use of nuclear weapons could have held the cost of eliminating Iraq to less than $1 billion -- but of course Washington would not have allowed this.

Things were different in 1945, when President Truman contemplated the costs of a full-scale invasion of Japan. The president confronted reliable-looking estimates of a million American casualties from such an invasion. The use of our first atomic bombs to obviate the necessity followed naturally.

Today, precision guided munitions and vastly improved intelligence gathering have narrowed the uncertainties of warmaking considerably -- but not to zero. "Best case" and "worst case" estimates are still submitted. There's often quite a range between them.

When the opponent is powerful enough to engender uncertainty about the outcome of a possible war, matters become still cloudier. In practice, this makes it necessary for the objectives to be so compelling that even a large risk of defeat is preferable to peaceful acquiescence to the status quo and the likely developments from it. The prospect of national dismemberment or annihilation will suffice, but few other things will.

3. Under What Range Of Conditions And Eventualities Will War Achieve Its Objective?

This can be harder to answer than one might suppose.

The purpose of war is to bring force to bear on the implementation of a government's decisions, against opposition by another government or quasi-governmental organization (e.g., a militia or terrorist group). But one's objective in setting forth to war is seldom just to destroy the opposition. It's almost always to achieve some other result that the opposition is determined to prevent -- and that simply defeating the opposition on the battlefield will not necessarily bring about.

The Afghani War of 2001 - 2002 presents a good example of how things can go astray if one thinks solely in military terms. The objective there was twofold:

1. To liberate the people of Afghanistan from the brutal Taliban regime;

2. To locate, close with, and destroy the main body of al-Qaeda, especially its leaders, who were believed with high confidence to be sheltering under the Taliban's protection.

The war did destroy Taliban dominance over Afghanistan. It also did substantial damage to al-Qaeda, though whether it reaped the life of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda's mastermind and financier, remains unknown. But neither job was accomplished in full. The war needed a follow-through that remains incomplete: the careful construction of an acceptably liberal government sound enough to keep order and resist the warlords' attempts to reassert themselves. By not following through with proper thoroughness, it appears that we've allowed some of the gains we hoped for from the war to escape us.

Another example comes from Vietnam. Our failure to achieve a worthwhile result there arose, not from a lack of military power, but from a confusion of objectives, a continuous reshuffling of priorities, and a highly successful political opposition to the war, both in Vietnam and here in America. Our original involvement was as a bribe to France. Later, our political leadership became concerned with enforcing containment on Communism in Southeast Asia. The Pentagon was more interested in testing various tactical doctrines and getting combat experience for its younger command officers. The American public was never certain of what we were in Vietnam for. The South Vietnamese were unable to distinguish us from the previous colonial power in their land, the French. Washington was perpetually beset by fears of Chinese entry into the war, bringing about a replay of Korea. In consequence, the necessary civilian and political support for prosecuting the war to a real conclusion in the only practical fashion -- invasion of North Vietnam and destruction of the Communist regime there -- was inadequate. Under assault by antiwar forces here and abroad, it diminished over time.

4. What About Postwar Considerations?

Political context is important not just before deciding on war, but also after the war is over. In the event of defeat, the context would be imposed on us without our assent. In the event of victory, we will decide the context -- but not free of costs and constraints. Whether we can bear the costs and endure the constraints is a major consideration in deciding whether or not to go to war.

American military victories this past century have involved us in large charitable aftermaths, for example in the reconstruction of Germany and Japan. It's no good saying that we could have ignored those chores if we chose; our magnanimity forced them on us. Our nature is, if anything, even more benevolent today. We want to be certain that what we'll leave behind us will be better than what we invaded to correct.

In this light, the first Persian Gulf War stands as a considerable exception to our pattern. Since we didn't invade Iraq, but rather expelled her forces from Kuwait, we undertook no reconstruction duties in our defeated adversary's land. Today, having deposed Saddam Hussein, we face once more the need to rebuild a shattered country, even though what shattered it was not our campaign against its ruler, but that ruler himself.

There's considerable irony here. Our strength is what presses this sense of obligation upon us. Our national interests demand the liberalization of as much of the Middle East as possible, and one of the war objectives was the creation of a linchpin state from which to pursue that goal. But our forces in Iraq are now surrounded by states all of which are at least covertly hostile to our objectives. How they'll act toward the new Iraq, and the ongoing American presence there, cannot yet be known -- but whatever costs arise from their behavior must be counted as part of the cost of the war.

Add to this the decision to liberate Iraq in the face of opposition from a number of diplomatically significant countries, that were at least overtly supportive of the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq. The overall cost to the United States in international good will cannot yet be known. The bill could come due in any of several forms, including opposition to future American initiatives, trade sanctions or boycotts against the United States, and covert assistance to anti-American factions in contentious places.

5. The Overall Picture.

The fundamental fact of warmaking is uncertainty, as the numerous cliches about "the fog of war" attest. However, uncertainty is never a conclusive, irrefutable argument against going to war. Even immense uncertainty can be dwarfed by particular certainties, or by particular probabilities that cannot be permitted to come to fruition.

Old-style wars precipitated by old-style disputes -- e.g., disputes over borders, over the treatment of one another's nationals or their extraterritorial property, over violations of treaties or other agreements, etc. -- will remain fairly susceptible to analysis, both for moral soundness and the predictability of the contest. Such wars, waged by governments against one another, feature a relatively small number of "active ingredients": armies, navies, air forces, alliances, and popular opinion.

With regard to the recent American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is ample evidence to justify our exertion of force. Both the regimes we toppled were hideous violators of the most basic rights of Man. Both had given aid and comfort to terrorists who'd operated against the United States and its allies. Both were weights around the necks of their subjects, preventing economic and social progress and perpetuating grinding poverty. No one could argue that either the Taliban or the Baathist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein had a right to remain in power over their thralls. The only remaining questions were practical: whether it was in America's interest to take them down; whether matters were sufficiently urgent to do so at once; and whether we could improve matters sufficiently to justify the costs in blood and treasure. The national consensus was strongly positive on all three counts.

The Vietnam War was a far more ambiguous action. The objectives of our entry to the theater were low-grade, and unstable to boot. As previously mentioned, our initial involvement there was due to extortion by France, which had intimated to the Truman Administration that American assistance at reclaiming its Annamese colonial territory could purchase French participation in NATO. Once we were engaged there, national pride and more dubious motives kept us there, committing ever more lives and ever greater resources to the attempt to stabilize a country -- South Vietnam -- that possessed no will to defend itself, and saw the American expeditionary force as simply one more colonial occupying power. What followed was confirmation by counterexample of one of the oldest of military maxims: Know what you want to achieve, and work toward that, not something else.

But wars such as these are not likely to be the most important wars of the foreseeable future.

The essential new feature of modern geopolitics is the ease with which a few angry people -- terrorists or militant cultists -- with a little money can take huge numbers of lives. This wasn't possible fifty years ago, when "just war" theory reigned among the civilized nations of the West. It's a development that radically reduces the margin for optimism about one's security inside one's own borders. It also radically improves the argument for preventive war, if a causal connection can be established between a particular regime and the sustenance stream of terrorist groups.

Given time to develop a record, terrorist groups will establish a pattern of action by which their targets can be categorized and, to some not-entirely-useful degree, predicted. For example, it became predictable after the first World Trade Center bombing that Middle Eastern terrorists would try to strike Americans and their possessions again in the future. That didn't allow us to foresee a second attack on the World Trade Center, but it did help to establish a case for military action against any Middle Eastern regime that helped to sustain terrorism.

Yet, even a war whose ultimate purpose is to undercut terrorism is overwhelmingly likely to be a war between governments. Making war on a terrorist movement as such, without focusing on some harboring, nurturing regime, will remain next to impossible. Aiming the materiel of war at terrorists is like trying to take out an infestation of cockroaches with a shotgun.

But even this is not a conclusive argument against war. For states with unwholesome agendas have made increasing use of non-state actors in recent years. Those actors -- terrorists; professional assassins; other shadowy players in rapine and violence -- find their capabilities much reduced by the elimination of their state sponsors. The 1983 assault on Libya reduced that nation's backing for terrorist groups effectively to zero. The Afghani War appears to have crippled al-Qaeda, which has not succeeded in any further attacks in the Western Hemisphere since the fall of the Taliban regime.

In these more elusive cases, much emphasis will be laid on how narrowly we can circumscribe the costs, especially how few lives, both military and civilian, it will cost to pull the state pillar out from under the terrorist group. The moral dimension will remain paramount, for war is only justified, in the exact sense of that term, if it can be kept less horrible than the available alternatives, as far forward as we can see.