Posted on 01/08/2003 2:07:53 PM PST by vannrox
Prevention and Pre-Emption
When is starting a war not aggression?
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, January 8, 2003, at 10:33 AM PT
It is said that during the 1973 Yom Kippur War—known on the other side as the Ramadan War—an Israeli military spokesman was asked for the fourth or fifth time whether the Jewish state would use nuclear weapons if its ground forces continued to suffer defeat. He repeated the official mantra—"Israel will not be the first country to deploy nuclear weapons in this region"—and then stepped back from the microphone (which he believed to have been switched off) and whispered to himself, "And we won't be the second one, either."
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Most of this discussion is impossibly abstract and subject to the rule of blind contingency. The only certain way of preventing World War II, for example, would have been for the Germans to have won World War I. (This outcome would also have forestalled the rise of Nazism.) But the British and French military planners of 1918, with their American allies, could obviously not be induced to see things that way. The other, rather belated, way of preventing World War II from becoming a world war would have been a united front between Britain, Russia, and France to crush the Hitler-Mussolini forces before they could get properly started. It's not as if there would have been a shortage of pretexts. But then many Germans to this day would be insisting that their country had been a victim of aggression, and the political consequences of that might have been nasty as well.
The United Nations Charter reserves to all member states the right to use unilateral force if they can invoke the clause that specifies "self-defense." But this means by definition that an aggressor must have shown his hand and initiated a war before any compensating or retaliatory action can be taken. Some nations don't care to be branded as "aggressors" and will go to some trouble to avoid the charge, but in general it's a bit like the old "no spitting" signs that I used to see on British buses. Who, likely to expectorate on public transport, will be deterred from doing so by a notice? These injunctions apply only to those who would obey them without being told.
Take the extremely flammable situation along the Indo-Pakistan frontier. Pakistan is much smaller than India and has a much smaller army. It also has a "waist," geographically speaking, which means that a sudden Indian "conventional" strike could punch across the border, cut Pakistan in half, and separate its capital city, Islamabad, from its only seaport in Karachi. It is this strategic nightmare that determined the Pakistanis on the acquisition of a nuclear capacity, with which they could destroy Indian armor and infantry as it was massing. Which side would then be the aggressor? The one that was massing, or the one that vaporized the potential assault force? In the early Clinton years, the Pakistanis became sure that they were about to be attacked and prepared to launch, and the American officials who stopped the clock with only minutes to go are still inclined to shiver as they recall the moment. Gen. Pervez Musharraf has since boasted publicly that if India had taken one extra step over the Kashmir question in late 2001, he would have ordered a pre-emptive nuclear attack. But this demented logic holds for all nuclear powers, all of whom are aware that the only real use for such devices is in an overwhelming first strike.
Israel's classic pre-emptive war in June 1967, which destroyed the Arab air forces on the ground, was also justified as preventive because it stopped an attack before it could get started. But the Nasser side could and did reply that in 1956 Israel had attacked without any such provocation, so this was just their slow-motion retaliation for an original first strike. Winston Churchill spent much of his career hoping to entice Germans or Japanese into attacking American ships, the better to lure them into war with the United States and then get the United States to declare for Britain. This was pre-emption of a high order, by means of proxies who unwittingly did what was wanted of them and widened the war in order to shorten it.Â
In the present case of Iraq, a pre-emptive war is justified by its advocates on the grounds of past Iraqi aggressions and the logical presumption of future ones—which would make it partly retaliatory and partly preventive. This is fraught with the danger of casuistry since if no sinister weaponry is found before the war begins, then the war is re-justified on the grounds that it prevented such weapons from being developed. (And if the weapons are found, as one suspects they will be, after the intervention has taken place, then they could be retrospectively justified as needful for defense against an attack that was obviously coming.)
Surveying the bloody past, one can only wish for the opportunity to rerun the tape so that enough judicious force could have been employed, in good enough time, to forestall greater bloodshed. Everyone will have their favorite example. If only, for instance, the U.N. troops in Rwanda had been beefed up and authorized to employ deadly force as a deterrent. But tautology lurks at every corner, and the distinction between "pre-emptive" and "preventive" becomes a distinction without a difference, and only hindsight really works (and not always even then). The lesson is that all potential combatants, at all times, will invariably decide that violence and first use are justified in their own case.
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How True!
There should be a more descriptive word....
How about this....
Idiot 2.
Or
Idiot 3.
I agree, to some extent. But the logical conclusion of your statement is that all tactics are moral for the "good guys," and none are moral for the "bad guys."
This makes perfect sense when the moral position is (fairly) obvious, as in WWII. What do you do, however, when moral standing is quite arguable, as in WWI, the WBTS or the Mexican War?
Does this mean that it is impossible to discuss the relative morality of different tactics?
Not necessarily. Perhaps the Brits and French would have wanted a rematch. It would have been a different WWII, but we still could have had one.
Definitely not. My post is mainly a reaction to Hitchens' sort of throwing up his hands in futility. He ends in a tautology because he is looking at the calculus of war too theoretically. Logical conundrums can always be invented.
He seems to conclude that guiding principles aren't all that useful, or that they don't emerge as a pattern when examining past examples of preemption.
My response to that is, no kidding. War is largely a cost-benefit calculation. The moral equation is directly addressed only by western democracies. Besides, the political landscape, war technology, and the geopolitical relationships among combatants are so variable between wars that it's difficult to find hard-and-fast rules even if they do exist.
Hardly. The real use is to prevent others from using theirs. Either launch on warning stategy, that is shooting when you see the other guys missles on the way, or even a "pure" second strike capability, if your missles are sufficiently "hard" or hidden, as in submarines, can serve the detterent role quite handily. It worked for us for decades as a matter of fact.
Iraq initiated the present conflict by invading Kuwait. We came to Kuwaits defense and despite the fact that there hasn't been all out war since 1991 the conflict has never ended. So according to Hitchens opening premise Iraq has lost on the field of moral principles.
Same scenerio, but you have a Winchester 4 shot pump shotgun. Sawed off and loaded with .00 buck. Now YOU control the situation. Fire and pump, and fire and pump, until you have guts and dead people in your dining room. The big difference is....your wife and kids are safe and alive, and dirtbags are dead and dying on your dining room floor. You make the choice, douchebag! Be a man, protect your family with deadly force, or get down on your knees and die like a yellow dog. It's the American way! You die on your feet, or you live on your knees.
I've made my choice and those coward, marxist, gun grabbing bastards are NOT going to take away my right to defend and protect the ones that I love. Not now, not in the near future, and not in the far future, not ever. They will take these guns from my cold, dead, hands, but I'll take some of them with me.
My Daddy told me, "Cowards die a thousand deaths, a brave man dies but one". He also said, "You don't talk to a criminal, you shot him".
Beg to differ. We could, theoretically, choose to respond by killing all people of Arab ancestry anywhere in the world. We have the capability to do so, but it would be highly immoral, as I'm sure you will agree.
The fact that a people is the victim of an immoral and unprovoked attack does not remove them from the obligation to respond in a moral manner.
I think that's his point.
Agreed, but I'll take allies wherever I can find them. And he does have guts, to stand against the almost unanimous voice of his colleagues.
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