perfidy

Some time ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to an essay by science fiction writer Ken McLeod.

The Palestinians launch rockets at the Israelis, killing civilians. The Israelis drop bombs on the Lebanese, killing civilians. Iraqis plant bombs in roadways, killing American Soldiers. We attack Iraqi cities, killing insurgents. Al Qaeda kills 3000 Americans with hijacked airplanes; we kill Al Qaeda wherever we find them.

There is, when laid out in that fashion, a symmetry to these acts of violence. Tit for tat violence in an unending cycle. A cycle of violence. (I have a mental picture of what a bicycle of violence looks like, but that is beside the point.) A while back, a friend of mine sent me an essay by Scottish science fiction writer and communist Ken McLeod. It is entitled, "Against Civilized Warfare." Like many a product of a bright and well-read mind, it is well-written, includes facts, is compelling on the surface and utterly wrong.

Go take a read.

McLeod makes the argument that

Nothing has done more to corrupt humanity than the attempt to civilise warfare. Just War Theory is an utter perversion of the moral sense, a doctrine of literally mediaeval barbarism, invented by clerics to regulate wars between Christian kings. Its finest moral discrimination to date is that it's legitimate to kill a munitions worker on his way to work, but a crime to kill him on his way home.

Well, that's an interesting premise. It is the job of science fiction writers to challenge assumptions, and maybe that one is, actually a real boner of an assumption. I thought to myself, "Hey, maybe he's got something there." After all, Just War Theory gave the high sign to unrestricted strategic bombing in the big one, and most current research leads one to believe that it was strategically dubious at best.

Just War Theory and the architects of the British and American strategic bombing campaigns held that killing enemy civilians who worked in vital war industries was a valid exercise of military force. The lamentable lack of accuracy of the state of the art in bombing technology meant that attacks were of necessity bloody – we had to drop a lot of bombs to be assured of killing the target. We were attacking our enemies' capacity to wage industrial war. Collateral damage was regrettable, but justified.

However, German war production increased over the period of the most intense Allied bombardment, and there is no evidence that German civilian morale was lowered as a result of the bombing. In fact, it may have stiffened enemy resolve – much as the Blitz stiffened British morale earlier. Attacking enemy productive capacity and "breaking the enemies' will" are usually cited as the primary strategic justifications for the bombing campaign. And if neither of those desired results ever actually, you know, happened – then what you have is the unjustified slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent German and Japanese civilians.

Just War Theory takes a hit on that one. Let's read on.

It tells us that to aim a bomb at an enemy soldier and kill a hundred civilians is - if the necessity is there – legitimate collateral damage, but to deliberately aim one bullet at one enemy civilian is murder. In its pedantic, casuistic jesuitry it still stinks of the cringing, quibbling fusspots who invented it, and retains too its usefulness to a useless and barbaric ruling class. It does nothing whatsoever to restrain their behaviour. Its only function is to befuddle those who oppose, protest and fight them. It justifies every horrific, predictable consequence of imperialist assault as an unintended consequence, and condemns every horrific, predictable consequence of resistance to that assault as an intended consequence. Their violence against civilians is mass murder, ours is collateral damage.

Subtract the cant, and you have the argument that civilized warfare is morally and ethically empty, does nothing to restrain violence or evil, and in fact confuses those who would argue against it. Further, it creates a false separation between acts of violence committed by opposing sides in a conflict.

He goes on, using as an example the recent unpleasantness between Hezbollah and Israel. His conclusion, to deny Israel's claim of justification. This is not in itself surprising. He continues,

The doctrine itself is false. Its preaching should be regarded as a crime against humanity. We are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our willful acts. These include the consequences of restraint, of pity, of not hurting the enemy in any way you can. They also include the consequences of attempting to make war an accepted part of civilised life, which is to institutionalise war and thus to perpetuate it.

War is not civilized, but a regression to the state of nature, and in the state of nature there is no sin. In the state of nature there are, however, necessary and unnecessary evils, and in that respect we still have to make judgements. 'All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient.'

Now this is an odd thing to say. But we'll get to that in a minute. McLeod, throughout this piece, denies that intent is a factor in weighing moral justifications for violence. If I understand him right, the Israeli F-16 dropping a precision munitions on a target is no wronger, (or at least no righter) than a Hezbollah cell launching a rocket at Israel.

But intent is central, not just to Western conceptions of just war and the rules of war, but to our entire legal system. In law, we recognize that there is a real moral difference between someone who loses control of a car and kills a college coed on the sidewalk, and someone who uses a car to purposely run over and kill, say, and ex-girlfriend named Margaret. The end result in both cases is the same – a dead young woman. The means, in both cases, is the same – a vehicle striking and killing.

But most people would agree instantly that the cases are separate in nature. One is murder, and reprehensible. The other is negligence or incompetence, and is tragic but not criminal. We know that there is a distinction between accident and will.

This is the heart of the moral equivalence argument. You tally up the dead bodies, and whoever killed more is more to blame, if anyone is. It ducks the question of intent, as does McLeod. Strangely, when the number of US casualties inevitably crosses the number killed in the 9/11 attacks, some will find that occasion to castigate the West, and America, for its evil throughout the world, as if the crossing of the two numbers has some mystical significance.

But that is entirely wrong.

I have never made the argument that war, in itself is a good thing. Sometimes, though, it is the least bad thing. And whether a war is justifiable centers clearly on questions of intent. Both at the national level, and on the level of the individual soldier.

McLeod ended his piece with an appeal to protest against the Israeli actions in Lebanon. But if we examine the intent of the two parties, we find similar results as with our parable of the cars. Hezbollah did not just magically cause the death of x number of civilians in Northern Israel, nor did the Israelis do likewise in Southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah launched rockets at civilian targets in Israel. Happily, these attacks were not as successful as the attackers hoped, thanks to the inaccuracies of the rockets. Yet, they caused many civilian casualties. The intent, so far as I can determine, was to cause grievous harm to innocent civilians in order to provoke the Israeli government and army into conflict, and the ultimate aim is the total elimination of Israel, and I presume all Jews everywhere.

After many of these attacks, Israel struck back. They mounted air assaults on known and suspected Hezbollah positions in order, primarily, to end the rocket attacks on their own civilians. Lebanese civilians died in these attacks. But the fact that the Israelis were trying very hard not to kill them is significant – if the laws of war were no hindrance on Israel's actions in this conflict, then surely the IDF could have caused much more fearful destruction than they did. But those laws are a restraint on Israel.

Even more significant is the Hezbollah practice of locating its depots, command centers, and rocket launchers in the midst of as many civilians as possible. One would think that they are inviting civilian casualties on their own side purely for the propaganda value those images have in the Western press.

For me, at least, there is a clear moral difference in the conduct of these two forces. But still, I pondered. War is not after all, murder writ large. Or at least, not exactly. The laws of civilized warfare – where they are observed - are a restraint on the western powers. They do reduce, if not eliminate, the horror and injustice (on the local scale) of war. They limit the conduct of our military, and the Israelis, and the Brits, and so on. So much so, that groups like Hezbollah and the Iraqis during the invasion could count on it to such an extent that it informed their tactics. That’s why they use civilians, women and children as shields because they know that we will do everything in our power not to kill them. If war is in fact, “not civilized, but a regression to the state of nature, and in the state of nature there is no sin. In the state of nature there are, however, necessary and unnecessary evils, and in that respect we still have to make judgements. 'All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient.'” then we would make the expedient judgment and lay waste to everything around those we wish to kill, having no qualms about any ‘collateral damage’ – the death of innocent civilians.

We would use the most horrific weapons, fuel air explosives, gas, nukes, whatever, so long as we achieved our objectives. Whenever there was a roadside bomb, we’d line the streets with the dead as a warning. Terror is a valuable weapon, but one that we, thankfully, do not use. The rules of engagement for our forces, and indeed for the Israelis, give the lie to McLeod’s view.

We are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions. We know that we will kill the innocent, and in the past we have killed great numbers of them. Nevertheless, in the case of that McLeod cites, as well as others too numerous to name, so is the other side responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their actions. To be sure, “Now look what you made me do” is a weak moral argument. But, and this is an important but, self defense is recognized as a valid exercise of violence in the personal world, and is equally valid in the larger world. If you are attacked, you have a right to self defense. Hezbollah attacked Israel, specifically targeting civilians. Then, they hid amongst the civilians of Lebanon.

If you poke a tiger and then hide behind a mother and her children and the tiger kills the children to get to you, not all the blame, not even most of the blame, lies with the tiger.

McLeod says, “They also include the consequences of attempting to make war an accepted part of civilised life, which is to institutionalise war and thus to perpetuate it.” This is also wrong. The attempt, going back to the 1500s and earlier, to institutionalize war was not to perpetuate it. It was an attempt to control, to limit, to ameliorate its effects. To civilize it, to the extent that it could be civilized. It was stepping back from barbarity, from the war of all against all. It is analogous to the Capitalism, another thing that McLeod no doubt hates, where another dark side of human nature, greed, is civilized to the greatest extent possible.

Human nature is. It’s the stuff we have to work with. To our shame, it includes things like greed, hatred, rage, violence, bigotry, and communism. However, we are more civilized than those who came before us – thanks in large part to the efforts of those who incrementally made some things, some actions, morally unacceptable. The rules of civilized warfare mean that we – when we do go to war – are not unprincipled savages who kill without compunction. Unlike most of those we fight now, or for that matter communists throughout history.