Au Jus
Chris Bertram and Jane Galt kick around not asymmetrical warfare but asymmetrical war law, starting from a Steven Poole article about how the laws of war are rigged to favor the strong. Who, of course, write and rewrite them at their convenience. Thus terror-bombing civilians becomes good and right and necessary as strong nations develop the technology to do so – the European powers, Japan and the US in the middle decades of the 20th Century – but very wrongbadfun once strong nations can afford more precise weapons. Taking a couple of soldiers prisoner is “terrorism” but bombing people and infrastructure only tangentially connected with the kidnapping is self-defense. Jane writes
No doubt some of my readers are about to hop on my back for siding with the terrorists. But it is an interesting–and imperative–moral question: what to do if just aims can only be achieved by unjust means? Those of us who were willing to tolerate the deaths of innocent Iraqi civilians in order to liberate their countrymen should be wiling to stare that question hard in the face, not just rely on easy customary distinctions, levened by a healthy dose of self-justification, and hardened by long repetition into something like instinct. If Dresden and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not wrong because they hastened the end of the war, then why is Islamic terror different if it achieves aims that seem to the perpetrators to be at least equally just? If we cannot answer this in a convincing way–convincing to millions of muslims still enjoying the fruits of colonialism (as well as, like all humans, a full measure of self-inflicted wounds)–then I see little chance of our defeating terrorism in the near future.
For me, the answer is that violence and terror – war regular and irregular – are very unlikely to achieve justice, by which I mean anything like a lasting classically liberal order. That’s because justice requires disinterest leavened with empathy while war requires strong draughts of hatred chased with bracing shots of arrogance. The recent American innovation has been to reverse the recipe: strong draughts of arrogance with a hatred tincture. I won’t argue that war of all kinds has never provided at least equivocal increases in justice. I won’t argue that violent revolution has never provided at least equivocal increases in justice – you can reel off ending American slavery and overthrowing Hitler and probably one or two others. But the odds against it are long.
This has been a big reason America’s Iraq adventure came a’cropper. Our lips say “liberal order” but our eyes – what we actually do – say, “The big guns say what goes.” It’s not like Iraq lacked for people to teach them this lesson, but instead of refuting the idea that power flows from the barrel of a gun, we reinforced it. Algeria produced no end of apologists for freedom-through-terror; what it got was a repressive government interrupted by insurgencies using the tactics the former revolutionaries had already legitimated. Two southern African nations fought violent revolutions against racial segregation, a legitimate evil. Of the two, South Africa is more or less okay while Rhodesia/Zimbabwe is a hellhole.
War makes people stupid and mean. It just doesn’t work otherwise. It’s a cliché to say “The Palestinians should have tried nonviolent resistance,” especially if you’re also hoping to, say, whip Iran’s Azeri minority into an insurrectionist frenzy. But I think the habits of mind necessary to prosecuting terror campaigns really did sabotage the habits of mind necessary to building a liberal order in those parts of Palestine Israel felt like letting Palestinians sort of run.
The counter to all this is that, by urging the suffering weak to forego violence, I’m counseling them to suffer oppression longer than they might otherwise. That’s probably true. But if you want to make a just revolution you want to make it for something more than yourself, your clan or even your generation. That’s not quick work. “Justice will take us millions of intricate moves,” William Stafford warned us.
I almost wrote “We need to rethink the concepts of struggle and casualties,” but I suspect many, many nonviolence advocates have been here before me. If a war is worth years of struggle, billions squandered and thousands or tens of thousands of dead on both sides, why isn’t peaceful change worth as much? Why is it a “bold initiative” to announce a “generational struggle” to transform a region of the world through a war that might or might not achieve its ends, but preemptively absurd to launch a generational struggle to transform the same region through nonintervention, to instill liberalism and justice by exemplifying it? Because people might get killed? People get killed the other way. Because it might not work? Look around you. The other way isn’t working now.
Comment by abb1 —
July 14, 2006 @ 3:32 am
You have to make a distinction between a war of choice initiated by a small clique and violent mass-movement of national liberation or a revolution.
You can counsel and argue in the first case, but not the second, it would be like counseling a hurricane. One is a deliberate choice made by a group of individuals, the other is pretty much an act of nature.
Comment by Grant Gould —
July 14, 2006 @ 6:30 am
It all comes down to that old principle, Oppressed People Suck. Whatever the means or reason, if you bomb people, they become worse people. The more bombs you drop on or detonate amongst a given people, the less fit that people will become for anything resembling justice.
Comment by Jane Galt —
July 14, 2006 @ 6:31 am
I don’t think I agree that war is always a bad way to achieve a classical liberal order–The AMerican Revolution, WWII, and the Korean War all at least protected, and arguably achieved, just that. I make a distinction between the Azeris and the Palestinians not on a moral level, but on a practical one: Palestinian terrorism makes the Palestinians feel good about being manly and heroic, but also gives the Israelis the excuse to continue their military control of the West Bank. If they’d gone the Gandhi route, they’d already have a state now, and a much better one than Israel has given them. Particularly after 9/11, it was suicidal for the Palestinians to continue armed resistance. On the other hand, there are all sorts of regimes that will fall no other way, and as imperialist interference from France is the only reason that we won our independance, I can’t find a good way to condemn it unilaterally.
Comment by abb1 —
July 14, 2006 @ 7:06 am
”…and the Korean War…”
The Korean War achieved a brutal fascist dictatorship. It took the people of S.Korea something like 30 years to get rid of the US-supported fascist regime there.
”If they’d gone the Gandhi route, they’d already have a state now, and a much better one than Israel has given them.”
How do you reckon? One could say ”they’d all be dead” and it would sound just about as plausible as ”they’d already have a state now”.
Comment by Barry —
July 14, 2006 @ 8:53 am
Considering that that Israelis did practice ethnic cleansing, and morally got away with it in the western world, anybody claiming that Palestinian Ghandiism would have worked has the burden of proof. In addition, Israel’s settlement strategy for the past few decades has been slow-motion ethnic cleansing and the US supported Isreal through this time. This makes it makes it far more doable than if Israel had to actually be in the position of S. Africa’s apartheid regime. I’d argue that the GOP/Evangelical Wrong specifically supports the ethnic cleansing as a good in and of itself.
Comment by Erstwhile —
July 14, 2006 @ 12:12 pm
This seems an inordinate amount of handwringing, over _someone_else’s_ right to use violence.
The primary question, as always, is whether _our_own_ use of violence is justified. And the violence Israel uses may quite reasonably be judged our responsibility (if we’re the US) — as we could certainly both end our direct support for it and excercise our influence to prevent it, powers that we lack entirely in regard to Palestinian or Hizbollah violence.
Comment by Pithlord —
July 14, 2006 @ 12:57 pm
abb1-
If you read your Lenin, you’d know that revolutions are rarely spontaneous hurricanes. They require a lot of manifesto drafting, newspaper selling, long meetings, heresy hunting, hanging around cafes, and the odd bank robbery. Somebody’s got time to ask whether this is the right thing to do, whether it will really accomplish what the revolutionaries say they are trying to accomplish.
Comment by Leonard —
July 14, 2006 @ 1:25 pm
People just don’t equate inaction with action. Thus any attempt to sell isolationism as a “bold initiative” or a “generational struggle” or whatever must fail.
Isolationism has no advantages when it comes to propaganda. (Hence its fate in mass democracy.)
Comment by abb1 —
July 14, 2006 @ 1:28 pm
Pithlord, nah, I do know my Lenin, he didn’t say that. What you described there is an effort to grab the power using revolution as an opportunity.
Lenin describes something he calls a ”revolutionary situation”. Here, read this, it’s from ”The Collapse of the Second International”:
To the Marxist it is indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classesâ€, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want†to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable†to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace timeâ€, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes†themselves into independent historical action.
Comment by BruceR —
July 14, 2006 @ 3:02 pm
Re #4: South Korea was already in a dictator’s hands before 1950 (see also, Cheju). Regardless, the value of Korea was that it laid down the not entirely un-useful principle that unsanctioned military invasions like North Korea’s were de facto evil and should/would be opposed by the UN, its members, and particularly the United States, a principle that had some demonstrable residual calming effects on the world until, oh, about April of 2003.
Comment by abb1 —
July 14, 2006 @ 3:36 pm
Bruce,
I completely agree with the concept of a collecive response to an aggression. It’s the idea of war as a tool for creating this ’classical liberal order’ (whatever it means) that I find utterly ridiculous.
Cheers.
Something’s wrong with this software, btw, hard to post a comment. At least with a Firefox.
Comment by Pithlord —
July 14, 2006 @ 7:08 pm
abb1-
Lenin was saying that a revolutionary situation is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a revolution. You also need a revolutionary party having meetings and selling papers. That’s rather the theme of ”What is to be done?”:
Comment by abb1 —
July 15, 2006 @ 1:46 am
Nah, it’s not sufficient condition for a _successful_socialist_ revolution. I was talking about mere violence.
When people on the bottom are unwilling and the people on the top are unable to maintain the social order, there’s going to be violence no matter what you preach.
Comment by Pithlord —
July 15, 2006 @ 11:41 am
abb1-
Lots of social orders have been overturned with minimal violence. Even in the Russian Revolution, it wasn’t the spontaneous insurrection from below in March that killed many people. It was the Bolsheviks’ attempt to consolidate a state between November 1917 and 1921 that killed millions. (And then millions more over the next few decades — all of it from above.)
Comment by The Sanity Inspector —
July 15, 2006 @ 2:09 pm
Why is it a “bold initiative†to announce a “generational struggle†to transform a region of the world through a war that might or might not achieve its ends, but preemptively absurd to launch a generational struggle to transform the same region through nonintervention, to instill liberalism and justice by exemplifying it?
If you’re referring to Israel here, Israel already exemplifies the Western virtues of justice, equality, and democracy, in retina-searing contrast with her despotic, tribalized Arab neighbors. Amazingly, they haven’t swooned with admiration for the shining example set before them. Rather, they regard Israel as an interloper to be eliminated.
Dennis Prager postulates a distinction between moral violence and immoral violence. The distinction is likely to be rejected by those who live by the watchword, ”Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.”
If you’re in the mood for some abstract arm-waving about war, though; let me present you with this passage from Solzhenitsyn, from November 1916:
Comment by Jim Henley —
July 15, 2006 @ 3:02 pm
Dude, where on earth did you get that? Israel never announced ”generational struggle to transform the region.” That’s the Bush Administration.
Comment by The Sanity Inspector —
July 15, 2006 @ 3:21 pm
Sorry for the mis-read, then.
But Israel does exemplify the same Western virtues the U.S. does, and that by itself hasn’t been enough.
Comment by Erstwhile —
July 15, 2006 @ 3:38 pm
”Israel already exemplifies the Western virtues of justice, equality, and democracy.”
A proposition in two parts:
–Justice, equality and democracy are ”Western virtues.”
–Israel ”exemplifies” justice, equality and democracy.
The racism inherent in the first, and the willful anti-empiricism in the second proposition are indeed ”retina-searing.” Also ugly. And saddening.
And finally, in an unasked-for, but welcome demonstration that official heros are typically far from what they’re cracked-up to be, we have, without irony, ”The state was created to protect us from evil.”