ContentiousDebateMachine, Go!
Radley has the poll of polls: which American wars were justified? He’s got two between two and a half and three, depending on how you count them. As an increasingly hardcore peacenik I am probably down, at this point, to half of WWII (vs the Germans – and yes, I believe American policy needlessly provoked war with Japan); sort of Afghanistan; maybe the American Revolution and probably some form of the Civil War. I’d also argue that the war to eject Iraq from Kuwait was justified under international law (collective self-defense), just not wise.
Most people will consider the above to be ethically obtuse or pragmatically blind, except for most movement libertarians, who will consider it viciously bloodthirsty. Hey, that’s fair. The other side of it, though, is an argument I don’t think can stand. Previously, in generally thoughtful responses to my arguments for very strict justifications for warmaking, James Joyner has objected that, according to those principles, most US wars should never have happened:
That said, the extreme conclusion — “Any war you can describe as “a war of choice” is a crime.” — is unjustified. The United States has never fought a war that couldn’t legitimately be called a “war of choice.”
He goes on to cite the Big Three – the Revolution; the Civil War and WWII – but I’m pretty sure there are other places he has at least implied that it is a problem for war skeptics that most sets of jus ad bello rules we construct would leave most American wars unjustified. (See Radley’s list. And it’s worth noting that Radley doesn’t even count the serial cleansing of the continent’s original inhabitants from their homes as wars.) The war skeptic says that the fact that the United States has never fought a war that couldn’t legitimately be called a "war of choice" is a problem for America, not for the war skeptic.
Comment by Carlos —
August 11, 2008 @ 9:39 am
Hm. having just read a boatload of internal Japanese military policy discussions during the 1930s, I am honestly not sure what American policy wouldn’t have provoked Japan. To put it into bloggy terms, it’s as if Japan’s Overton Window had moved to the point where Josh Trevino would be on the far left.
It’s really quite interesting to see how it was done domestically. It was a bottom-up movement among middle-ranked officers and management. I am only thinking the words Oliver North and Douglas Feith. The ominous parallels, you know? Fortunately they never ran hit squads against their political enemies in this country. The mainstream Japanese press loved it — it was great for sales.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 11, 2008 @ 9:44 am
Carlos: I would love to read that stuff. Can you tell me where you found it.
Interwar Japan was an increasingly ugly place, no doubt, in terms of aggression. But I think it was a fool’s errand to try to pick between Japan, the Chinese Communist Party and Soviet Russia, one of whom was going to end up running China, not us. Where my argument is weakest is in Southeast Asia, where Japan may eventually have tried to grab the oil for its war machine even in the absence of sanctions, when the British and French war machines needed it for the war against Hitler. I go back and forth on the question.
Comment by grahami —
August 11, 2008 @ 9:48 am
The whole exercise is tendentiously contentious (and possibly pretentious) but libertarians who cast aspersions on the American frackin’ Revolution should consider the dismal state of libertarianism in jollye olde England. Wikipedia states:
On our side of the pond libertarians at least make it out of bed. And isn’t any state action libertarians don’t like “of choice”? The state didn’t have to tax your box of Cracker Jack. The USDA goon didn’t have to stop by your plant that day the e. coli got all over everything. The cops didn’t have to chase the guy who stole your car. They get paid either way! To be fair, the cops didn’t have to bust down your door and shoot your dogs, either. Okay, I’m rambling.
Comment by Jeff Darcy —
August 11, 2008 @ 10:00 am
“the fact that the United States has never fought a war that couldn’t legitimately be called a “war of choice” is a problem for America, not for the war skeptic.”
Well put.
Comment by Frank —
August 11, 2008 @ 10:40 am
I’m wondering if this topic means you have Georgia on your mind?
Comment by shirt —
August 11, 2008 @ 10:45 am
There is one poll regarding the impact of wars on the american psyche: Go to any consumer based bookshop and look at the space taken up by books about various wars. # 1, the Civil war; #2, WW2; #3, Vietnam.
The Revolutionary War space is also besett with treatises regarding the founding of the nation, democracy and revolutionary biographies. If you were to count it all, it be between 1 and 2.
Carlos, I second Jim Henley.
Comment by Leonard —
August 11, 2008 @ 10:52 am
Sure. Any state action at all is “of choice”. Almost by definition, you can’t force a state to do anything. (Except perhaps by conquering it to the point where it is not a state any more, but a subunit of a more powerful state.)
But so what? The point here isn’t that “choice” is in itself morally charged. It is that the things one chooses are. By some theories of the state, i.e. democracy, the state owns us all collectively, and so doing things like taxing (American) crackerjack or inspecting (American) slaughterhouses are OK. We’re doing it to ourselves, and that’s OK! Whereas, other things, like killing Iraqis, are still off the table.
Of course, in yet other theories, the state is itself morally unbound. Right is might is right.
All this gets back to the unfortunate choice of the word “justified”. As I’ve pointed out before in other contexts, “X was justified” can mean two things only loosely related:
(a) I believe that X was just according to my own ideas about justice.
(b) Someone argues that X was just.
Under construction (a), I’ll anti-all-those wars, except for the American revolution. And even that, I’m not sure on. Under (b), I’ll freely grant that every single war has been justified. That’s what intellectuals are for, from the point of view of the state: to justify its actions. One of points of relationship (and confusion) here is that every notion of justice is polluted by generations of intellectuals’ work in the pay of the state. You have to work hard to escape from state-sponsored ideas in general, and triply so when it comes to war.
Comment by Jesse Walker —
August 11, 2008 @ 10:53 am
What would “some form of the Civil War” entail? “You can keep Georgia, but we’ll fight to the death for Tennessee?”
Comment by Jennifer —
August 11, 2008 @ 10:58 am
I disagree that our policy “provoked” Japan into war. They were using our scrap metal and oil to make a war machine that did utterly vile things in Asia; were we supposed to overlook this and keep fueling their aggression? I say no, not just for moral reasons but for pragmatic ones as well: helping a small nasty country turn into a big, powerful nasty country would bite us in the ass sooner or later.
Comment by Carlos —
August 11, 2008 @ 12:02 pm
Jim, I was reading accounts of the Washington Naval Conference for the Japanese perspective. One of those cases where Canute — in this case, Adm. Tomosaburo Kato — did hold back the tide for a while. Sadao Asada’s From Mahan to Pearl Harbor, and Asada’s essay in Goldstein and Maurer’s collection on the Washington Conference are good on this.
The wingnut junior officer death squad stuff should be in any halfway decent history of interwar Japan. Googling, I see Wikipedia has some nice articles on the May 15 Incident, the 2-2-6 Incident, and the League of Blood Incident. (Those are just the high profile ones.) Fortunately, their equivalents in the contemporary U.S. eat Cheetos and watch the Hitler Channel instead. John Dower is excellent on how Japanese militarism related to Japanese popular culture of that era, including the media.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 11, 2008 @ 1:23 pm
Would it have been possible to fight Germany in WWII without fighting Japan? Would Japan have attacked US shipping in the Pacific if the US went to war with Germany?
Comment by Hesiod —
August 11, 2008 @ 1:51 pm
Well, I guess you can say the US “provoked” the war with Japan. Mostly by implementing an Oil embargo as a way to hinder Japan’s Manchurian and other East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere endeavours.
So, technically, if we impose economic sanctions on Iran, and they somehow nuke Chicago — we’d actually be at fault for the ensuing war then?
I was a bit surprised you picked the German side of WWII ads the justfiable war. Usually it’s the other way around as, of course, the Japanese attacked us militarily first at Pearl harbor.
And, our provocation of Germany was far greater than what we did to Japan. After all, we were shipping Great Britain military equipment as part of the lend lease program! All we did to Japan was stop selling them oil.
Comment by Carlos —
August 11, 2008 @ 2:24 pm
Um. Hitler declared war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor (although his casus belli used incidents between the U.S. and Germany from earlier in the year). So that would be a little difficult.
Japan behaved basically correctly towards the Soviet Union after Hitler invaded Russia, all the way to April, 1945, when the Soviet Union opted out of their joint neutrality pact. However, the key phrase here is “neutrality pact”. Japan made one with the Soviet Union after they got kicked halfway across Mongolia in 1939.
It’s interesting how a single — although admittedly major — defeat against Moscow caused Japanese diplomacy to suddenly become much more rational, while repeat setbacks against the U.S. in the Pacific did not. But the United States was the “enemy of destiny” for Japanese wingnuts, while Russia wasn’t. Japan had naval wingnuttery going on — Mahan influenced its geopolitical thinking, not Mackinder.
Incidentally, it’s why Japan was obsessed by oil. Japan’s industry was based on coal and hydroelectric power. But they needed oil to fuel their warships. An embargo on oil meant powering down the Navy’s shiny new toys.
Comment by First Little Pig —
August 11, 2008 @ 2:41 pm
Maybe it is hindsight but I cannot but believe that the US would have ended up at war against the axis at some point….
As for Civil War… It would have been cheaper just buying up all the slaves and freeing them. But that truly is hindsight…. As is my opinion that had the South gone its own way the US would be a much more progressive place with a barely tolerable almost-english speaking neighbor to the South (or several since I do not think that the Confederacy would have held together as an entity…)
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 11, 2008 @ 3:07 pm
But what if the war skeptic says that any of those wars are justifiable, as you have? If some choices to go to war are justifiable, then “war of choice” is just a tautology that has nothing to do with justification.
Comment by Jaybird —
August 11, 2008 @ 3:35 pm
One wonders what a non-”war of choice” would look like. Is there an example, in human history, of a war that was not a “war of choice” for the main actors? (Because, surely, they could have done more beforehand to prevent the war in the first place.)
Comment by Scott H —
August 11, 2008 @ 5:41 pm
Jaybird @16:
While you can certainly argue that there’s still some element of choice involved in how you handled diplomacy and relations beforehand, I don’t think that most people consider wars started when enemy forces actually invade your territory to be ‘wars of choice’ per se. Even most libertarians grant communal defense as a legitimate function of government….
Comment by Jaybird —
August 11, 2008 @ 6:03 pm
Sure. Fine. Wonderful.
I’m more wondering if the bar being set is “Poland in WWII” for wars that do not qualify as a “War Of Choice”… and everything above that is one. If that’s the case, it strikes me that a War of Choice is a fairly useless category if we’re talking about (surely we will eventually be talking about) Justice.
Comment by Ian —
August 11, 2008 @ 10:09 pm
If “war of choice” just means that the war resulted from a decision, then it’s an unhelpful category — there are no non-wars-of-choice (you could always surrender unconditionally). So, let’s try something else.
War of choice = there existed some alternative which was less bad than war.
Given that war is exceedingly awful, very few wars are not wars of choice, but there are enough candidates that it is not a meaningless category.
On this view, the Korean war was not a war of choice. Lots and lots of people were killed/wounded/made refugees etc. by the war, but reasonable people could think that even all that was defensibly less bad than decades of a totalitarian unified Korea. Loosely, such people might say that the US had no choice but to intervene. Strictly speaking, if the US had chosen not to intervene to help its ally, that would have been a bad choice.
(this is crude utilitarianism, but it’s a place to start)
Comment by Barry —
August 12, 2008 @ 10:36 am
Once the “I’m not a confederate but G-D f*cking Lincoln” guys show up, the debate’s over. Which does tend to limit libertarian debate, IMHO.
As for James Joyner, he’s a standard poli sci ‘think tanker’; you don’t get far there without totally accepting US exceptionalism and Divine Right of Conquest. All that’s to be discussed is pragmatic issues.
Comment by Vermont Scott —
August 13, 2008 @ 6:24 am
Barry – do you really think things like mass murder (I’m sorry – “collateral damage”) of civilians, food as a weapon (I’m sorry – “a blokade”) and suspension of Habeas without Congressional authorization (I’m sorry – “Unconstitutional under almost any reading”) is an ender of debates? Or do you simply bow down before the official mythology? There is much evidence out there that slavery could have been ended without war. Sorry, but all you have shown is that statist schools have been pretty effective at proving the “moral necessity” of warmongering.