Clean War
By It is certainly true, as many pro-war advocates today have noted, that incidents of this type are inevitable in every war. And it is also true that the mere existence of incidents of this sort does not prove that the war is unjustified, since even the most justified wars have included soldiers engaging in gratuitously cruel, violent and outright criminal behavior. The killings are morally reprehensible but do not constitute direct evidence as to whether the war itself was, from the beginning, a justified war. That’s all true enough.
But what incidents of this type do underscore is that wars are not something that are to be routine or casual tools in foreign policy. The outright eagerness and excitement for more and more wars that we see so frequently from some circles is not only unseemly and ugly unto itself — although it is that — but it is also so reckless and unfathomably foolish. Every war spawns countless enemies, entails incidents which severely undermine a nation’s credibility and moral standing, ensures that the ugliest and most violent actions will be undertaken in the country’s name, and, even in the best of cases, wreaks unimaginable human suffering and destruction.
Right. When young men are sent into dangerous areas with heavy weaponry, these sorts of incidents will happen. The problem in not unique to the United States; recall the Somalia Affair, in which two Canadian soldiers massacred a Somali teenager. Surely, training can reduce or increase the frequency of such incidents, and it’s fair to note that German soldiers in World War II performed atrocities as a matter of policy. The perpetrators of Haditha surely should be prosecuted, but it’s critical to remember that this is not simply a case of a few bad apples; this behavior is the inevitable and predictable consequence of using war as a tool of policy.
Ralph Hitchens asked a while ago in comments why I seem so obsessive about critiquing “effects-based operations”, in particular strategic bombing. I detest concepts like EBO and “shock and awe” because they promise clean war, something that they clearly cannot deliver. The concept of clean war has surely changed over the years; in 1940 it meant that the enemy could be destroyed without the cost of serious friendly casualties, and now it has as much to do with the minimization of collateral damage as it does with force protection. What EBO always promises, however, is that war will be cheap and clean. Too many policymakers and too many war advocates fall for this line, and assume that the morally problematic parts of fighting a war are in the past, or can be safely pushed aside.
Sadly, the grimmer consequences of war can be controlled, but not eliminated. The death of innocent civilians in target countries is inevitable, whether it happens as a consequence of occupation or as a result of poor weapons targetting. It follows then, as Greenwald points out, that the decision to use the military as a tool of foreign policy is always a morally problematic choice. While only the few marines who directly carried out the massacre will be prosecuted, the blood is really on everyone’s hands. This doesn’t mean that military force should never be used in the pursuance of foreign policy goals, but it does mean that every such decision involves a weighty calculus.