Rome wasn't built in a day

Colby Cosh's blog ^ | Feb 23, 2003 | Colby Cosh

[jodorowsky]

In the world of flesh and bone, the world offline, people keep making inappropriate assumptions about how I stand on the Possibly Upcoming War Of The U.S. And Others Against Iraq. It's not anyone's fault but mine, since I've avoided categorical statements about the war. Antiwar friends assume me to have a "kill them all, God will know his own"-type position, and militarist friends think I will enjoy picking apart, or simply pointing and laughing at, arguments against the war. I do enjoy it, sometimes. There is a sense of satisfaction in finding the weak premise in an otherwise convincing case. There isn't much, on the whole, in defecating on pacifism, or on the far more abundant alternative: namely, disingenuous rhetorical misdirections designed to advance a pacifist agenda. Pacifists are self-discrediting and I wish they could simply be marginalized by the common consent of mankind, as Nazis now are. Whenever I engage somebody who obviously really believes that all war is ipso facto morally wrong, but chooses instead to nitpick about oil companies and Kurds, I feel implicated in their dishonesty.

The first question to answer in setting out a position on the war is this: What kind of war is justified? And unfortunately the to- and-fro of the past year has revealed a certain poverty in all categorical answers to this question. The old just-war doctrines of the Christian church used to have a certain appeal to me, in their seductive logicalness. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia teaches:

The primary title of a state to go to war is: first, the fact that the state's right[s] (either directly or indirectly through those of its citizens) are menaced by foreign aggression not otherwise to be prevented than by war; secondly, the fact of actual violation of right not otherwise reparable; thirdly, the need of punishing the threatening or infringing power for the security of the future.

There is much to admire in this little sentence, not least in how it foretold the concerns around which our present-day war debate would revolve. Yet what universally satisfying standard of "menace" can be framed? And what transnational doctrinal authority in morals now exists to say whether the standard has been met? I'm not content to refer such questions to the UN, that Hydra of socialistic folderol, as a final arbiter. And neither is anybody else, really. If Vanuatu had the military might of the United States, its relations with the UN would be just as tumultuous as the U.S.'s are now. I am unwilling to say that America is wrong only because she is strong.

Simply put, pre-emptive war is obviously justified under certain conditions of "menace". And in 1911 there was really little ambiguity about this concept. It was well understood then that a general infantry mobilization on the part of a neighbouring state was the activating casus belli, so much so that war broke out three years later, against the wishes of nearly all European statesmen, simply because mobilization had its own remorseless logic. We think of the Great War as a puzzling, demented thing, but locating a specific point at which anyone in authority might have acted differently has proven very difficult indeed, despite 85 years of questing. Thousands of historians have given their lives to the search without establishing the ghost of a consensus on the matter.

Now "menace" has necessarily become a matter of--what? Vials? Barrels of chemicals? A few kilos of uranium? We no longer have the luxury, certainly, of waiting for hussars to mass on the border. And so we plunge into the dilemma thus presented. The means of warfare involving mass destruction are largely uncontrolled and, in principle, impossible to detect without the permission of the state in question. ("Weapons inspectors" are a sham designed to shore up the perception that there remains an enforceable standard of "menace" under the old Christian rule.) Thus are we forced to choose between unpalatable policies. One is to constantly X-ray the hearts of other heads of sovereign governments for signs of generalized dodginess, and to behave imperially--and, sub specie aeternitatis, somewhat randomly. Under this policy you will certainly be wrong about what your enemies are up to sometimes, and the innocent will die for no reason at all. The alternative is to await an actual act of war--one which may, in fact, destroy your society altogether--and hope you may identify the perpetrator after the fact, and be able to do something about it, which you probably won't.

The situation, it seems to me, is that any state claiming the hypothetical right to act militarily faces a choice between two equally unacceptable principles of conduct. In a certain way, this makes the whole war/antiwar debate stupid; it makes it stupid for us to think that the American authorities are going to let their actions be determined by considerations of domestic politics, anyway. President Bush has said, more or less, that he wakes up every morning waiting for news of a second, and worse, 9/11--for the real 9/11, so to speak. You can assemble all the protestors you like, but in the end he's got the responsibility and the power. He isn't listening to you (or to me), and most probably, he shouldn't.

I mean, what I really find myself thinking about the war debate lately is: I don't give a crap. Invade Iraq, don't invade Iraq... why, exactly, was I supposed to care again? Right: because...

· if the U.S. invades Iraq, it will usher in (or perhaps merely signify) a new era of sanguinary imperialism and trample the last remnants of the old Republic.

· if the U.S. does not invade Iraq, we may awaken one morning to find some American city quarantined by the National Guard, with communications cut off and rumours of bulldozers pushing dead bodies by the thousands into shallow trenches...

And boy, that will certainly be healthy for American liberty, won't it, folks? Perhaps you're not convinced that Iraq is really a threat to the United States. With apologies to Colin Powell, I'm not entirely convinced either. But let us say the unsaid: the alternative to invading Iraq is, now, going home and issuing an unspoken apology to Saddam for mussing up his porch. Does this really seem like a wholly good idea? One must, I think, dislike America greatly not to be somewhat sickened by the prospect. It makes me suspicious--since I favour America very strongly on non-political grounds as well as political ones-- when people denounce the war, as they nearly all do, without expressing an awareness of the absurdity of bringing home those 150,000 troops, the real blow, like it or not, to American prestige. It is not a mere question of "face" or of honour, though James Bowman has discussed the war supportively in those terms, and others challenge the war effort in the same terms. It is a question of setting out firmly on a policy of non- pre-emption; of limiting the executive branch's power to make war on secret pretexts, which may sometimes be necessary in the new order; and of creating a practical incentive for foreign governments to act as bad as imaginable towards their own citizens and to use delay, bluster, and the leverage of pacifist sympathy amongst American citizens to weaken America's will.

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