War and Delusion

A Critical Examination

L. Calhoun

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137294630
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Calhoun examines the centuries-old paradigm of just war theory to determine whether modern 'just war' rationalizations constitute sound justifications or pro-military propaganda. Her work reveals how the practice of modern war contradicts the most basic values and principles of modern Western democracies.

1

SELF-DEFENSE AND WAR

I can’t really blame these people for not wanting us to be here . . . I wouldn’t want some other country to come in and just take over our country and drive through our streets. And I got to admit, we’re pretty intimidating when we roll in, you know, we got fuckin’ weapons pointed every which way . . . Yeah, I’m sure it scares the shit out of these people, and I guess they figure they have to fight back.

—US private first class Thomas Turner¹

The recourse to military force violates the proscription within civil society against the killing of human beings, which is why every decision to wage war must be defended. The rationalizations offered by political leaders are nearly always assumed uncritically by the bulk of the populace to be sound. Numerous propagandistic uses of just war rhetoric have been retrospectively analyzed by historians, but the people of most nations persist in their generous financial support of the armed forces under the assumption that their activities are forms of legitimate self-defense.

The sometimes vituperative critique by military supporters of those who express doubts and misgivings about the wars waged by their leaders appears to derive in large part from their belief in the self-evident truth that any reasonable person should care about self-defense. Military theorists have often commenced from the assumption that war is a form of community self-defense, but this assumption needs to be subjected to scrutiny, not simply accepted as true by definition. How, for example, does one get from the moral permissibility of self-defense to the obliteration of a water treatment facility located in another part of the world? To answer the question whether war is a form of self-defense, we must first understand what self-defense is and under what circumstances we deem it to be legitimate.

To intentionally and physically destroy another human being in civil society is to commit a capital crime. Nonetheless, self-defense, the use of force to protect oneself from an aggressor, is considered an acceptable justification for injuring and sometimes even killing another person, provided that doing so is the only way to prevent equally serious harm to one’s self. There are violent people, who cannot control their own behavior or derive pleasure from inflicting harm. Others are willing to kill to obtain the objects of their desire. The practice of literal self-defense seems relatively uncontroversial and intuitively sound: an innocent person directly threatened with harm may defend him- or herself against such unjust attack.

The paradigmatic case of self-defense involves an agent who perceives himself to be in peril and adopts violent means in order to protect himself. A convenience store employee confronted by an armed robber may swiftly surrender the contents of the cash register under the assumption that the criminal is threatening the use of deadly force with one aim in mind, to obtain money. By not attempting to frustrate the robber’s plan, the cashier may well save his own life. But a mercenarily motivated criminal may also decide to kill the witness to his crime, and if that person recognizes that his only chance to survive will to be to neutralize the threat at hand, then the use of force in self-defense seems obviously justified. If the robber were somehow to indicate that he intended to liquidate the clerk, then certainly the clerk would have good reason to attempt, even through the use of violent means, to protect himself, in legitimate self-defense.

What if a cashier were to shoot a customer who seemed suspicious but posed no direct physical threat? The laws of civil society do not permit the use of force against persons who might possibly be dangerous, but only those who directly threaten real physical harm. Appearance and reality sometimes tragically collide, as in the case of Amadou Diallo, a black immigrant from Guinea who was shot by four New York City policemen a total of forty-one times, under the erroneous belief that when the man reached for his wallet, he was reaching for a gun (Rushdie 2000).² The policemen implicated in the Diallo case were acquitted of homicide because they were able to explain to the jury how the perceived threat generated their response. Policemen are often in the situation of protecting themselves from dangerous criminals, and the jury was able to sympathize with the defendants, though they may have overreacted in the heat of the moment.

In stark contrast, a person who feared that his neighbor was dangerous and therefore trespassed into his home to kill him would be charged with murder. People are legally permitted to defend themselves from threatened acts of aggression, but not to summarily execute suspects who seem to pose a potential menace. Still, even justified self-defense has limits, admitting only such action as is necessary to protect oneself from harm, which often does not require killing anyone. Criminal law proscribes the wanton slaughter of people under the pretense of self-defense. Had the men who killed Amadou Diallo shot him forty-one times over the course of an hour (rather than only a few seconds), they might well have been convicted of murder.

Once a danger has been defused—which happens the moment a person is injured so as to prevent his deployment of a weapon—the aim of self-defense has been achieved.³ This is why in cases where the force wielded allegedly in self-defense would have been sufficient to kill the aggressor multiple times, the killer is typically charged with criminal homicide. The solicitor for Tony Martin, a Norfolk, UK, farmer convicted of homicide for killing a teenage burglar in Martin’s home, posed the following question: “Bearing in mind you can only use enough force to defeat the threat, do you look at it in objective terms or in the eyes of the person under threat?” (Morris 2001). The Martin case sparked a grassroots movement in Britain dedicated to promoting the rights of homeowners to defend themselves from harm. However, an equally vehement group insisted that the killing was not an act of self-defense, for Martin shot at the burglars as they attempted to flee the house through a window.

Such scenarios raise an interesting question relating to the felony murder rule, according to which any death that occurs during the commission of a crime is entirely the criminal’s responsibility. An agent threatened by attack may of course overreact, wielding excessive force in self-defense because his powers of judgment have been temporarily impaired by his emotional response of fear to the dangerous situation in which he has found himself. But such cases are distinct from those in which the fact that a person has trespassed is taken as an “opportunity” to commit homicide. Obviously, juries must carefully assess the details of what transpired in such cases in order to arrive at appropriate conclusions regarding culpability.

Martin was initially convicted of murder, but his sentence was later commuted to manslaughter, and he was released after having served only three years in prison, a much lighter sentence than that usually imposed upon capital criminals. While people continue to disagree about whether Martin’s use of force was excessive, all parties to the dispute seem to concur that what distinguishes self-defense morally from murder is its complete lack of premeditation. The intention underlying a calculated, planned attempt to kill another human being is regarded as morally significant and marks the distinction between first-degree murder and other grades of homicide, including involuntary manslaughter. The physical consequence for the victim may be the same, but the killer’s intention determines the morality of his action, according to the laws of civil society.

Legitimate instances of self-defense involve an agent protecting himself from the menace posed by an aggressor who is armed and dangerous and clearly intends to harm the person who wields force to deter the threat. The person is surprised by the perilous situation in which he has found himself and decides in the moment, as a direct result of his own perceptions, to take action against the aggressor so as to neutralize the threat with which he has been confronted through no fault of his own. Cases of legitimate self-defense highlight the intuitive concepts of proportionality and last resort, for while people are justified in defending themselves from attack, they may wield only so much force as is necessary to thwart a clear and present deadly threat. Premeditated killings are not acts of self-defense, for when there is time to formulate a plot, there is also time to take cover or leave (Calhoun 2004d).

* * *

Stripped down to its most basic elements, setting to one side the procedural differences which have evolved over millennia, war is essentially the intentional use of homicidal force by groups against other groups. This definition covers the entire panoply of deadly group conflicts throughout the history of human society, whatever the implements of death may be: spears, arrows, knives, bayonets, machetes, machine guns, landmines, missiles, or bombs of one or another kind. During wartime, individual soldiers working in tandem attempt to destroy through the use of weaponry designed expressly for this purpose adversarial soldiers who are also working in tandem. The ultimate goal of each side is to defeat—to neutralize—the enemy. The groups for which soldiers fight may constitute either nations or factions, internal fractions whose members dispute the status quo distribution of power. But the social hierarchy governing the conduct of war is the same on both sides: a commander orders his troops to kill other troops who are following the orders of the enemy commander to do the same.

One immediate problem with the assimilation of war with self-defense is that, in the latter case, it is considered impermissible to kill an aggressor when a lesser form of violence would achieve the same aim of defusing the danger at hand. Moreover, it is not thought to be permissible within civil society to kill other, nonthreatening people in deflecting a threat to oneself. Military supporters may respond that, during wartime, to leave an enemy soldier intact is to fail to protect one’s self and one’s comrades. Accordingly, the intention of soldiers who are deliberately attempting to kill their adversaries can be construed as self-defensive, under the assumption that only the complete destruction of an active combatant will achieve the aim of self-defense. In this view, that innocent people may be destroyed during attempts by soldiers to neutralize enemy combatants is an unfortunate but unavoidable tangential effect.

The superficial plausibility of the “war as self-defense” picture notwithstanding, what an individual soldier does during wartime cannot be an instance of literal self-defense, in the strictest sense of the term, for he could save his own life simply by surrendering or, even more assuredly, by refusing altogether to go to the battlefield to fight.⁴ Lt. General Hal Moore has observed that “American soldiers don’t fight for what some president says on T.V., they don’t fight for mom, apple pie, the American flag . . . They fight for one another.”⁵ Is a soldier defending his comrades? No, Elaine Scarry explains, for “if it were this, he would have led those comrades to another geography” (Scarry 1985, 3). A further problem is that the “self-defense” characterization can apply only to one side of any military conflict at a time, though both describe their own acts of homicide in essentially indistinguishable terms (Lackey 2004).

Military supporters will retort that this simply shows that one side is wrong. The “just warriors” are fighting in self-defense against the aggressors, who are not doing the same, regardless of what their commanders may claim. Nonetheless, many war supporters have advocated “taking the battle to the enemy,” sending soldiers to far away places to address threats before they reach the homeland. Since none of the wars fought by the United States over the course of the past century involved directly protecting territory invaded by outsiders, supporters of those interventions have implicitly rejected the literal self-defense constraint according to which one may not trespass other people’s property in order to neutralize a potential future threat. In other words, they support the activity of war in spite of the fact that the analogous “self-defense” scenario—involving an individual who travels to a locale away from his home to kill a person perceived as dangerous—seems on its face preposterous. Many regard the US response to the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor as obviously justified, but that response, too, transcended the purely self-defensive action of fortifying US borders and installations against further attack.

The self-defensive “battle” against the perpetrators of the attacks of September 11, 2001, was in this sense lost, for the invaders achieved their aim of destroying Americans on US territory even, remarkably, within a wing of the Pentagon itself. The perpetrators also succeeded in terrorizing the rest of the inhabitants of the nation for months to come, and their actions were characterized by US political and military leaders as a declaration of war. The 2001 war on Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq were supported by many Americans on the grounds that the defense of the US homeland required, again, “taking the battle to the enemy.”⁶ While some who praised the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan did not extend their support to the war against Iraq in 2003, the former alone suffices to show that the widely affirmed self-defense constraints within domestic contexts are not regarded as prohibitive by those who condone war abroad.

There can be little doubt that soldiers fighting a ground war on their own territory view themselves as engaged in literal self-defense when directly faced with physical threats, but combat soldiers fighting abroad do not simply find themselves on the battlefield. They have been sent there by the commander in chief to meet the enemy soldiers whom they fight. Comparing the bare structure of war to that of legitimate self-defense, then, the most immediate difference between the two is that the reason for which soldiers fight does not emerge from their own interpretation of the alleged danger, but derives instead from the version of the story relayed to them by their commanders. Rather than perceiving a danger and thwarting it, the soldiers are told that the danger exists and that they must neutralize it through killing enemy soldiers and eliminating their caches of weapons, wherever they may be said to hide.

Wars fought abroad involve an intention on the part of the commander in chief to engage his troops in battle, while self-defense involves a person who finds himself in a dangerous situation by chance and, in desperation, defends himself from harm. When a country has been invaded by enemy soldiers, then the people of the invaded land do find themselves in that situation by chance, and so their use of force to repel acts of aggression by the invaders is much easier to construe in terms of self-defense, for they may quite reasonably regard themselves along the lines of an abruptly awakened person who reaches for his gun to protect himself from a trespasser.

* * *

There is evidently a difference between an individual defending his physical person and the military personnel of a nation defending other people. Still, some war supporters appear to think of the military as analogous to the head of a household or a parent-protector figure, who would naturally defend his children from attack in the very manner in which he would defend himself. Children are incapable of defending themselves from aggressors, and it is commonly thought to be the duty of parents to care for and protect their own progeny. The parents in such cases act on behalf of their children, and the war analogy is supposed to be that, just as helpless children have the right to be defended by their parents (assuming that duties imply correlative rights), so, too, do civilians have the right to be defended by the military, which has been charged with this responsibility and armed for this purpose.

Rhetorical allusions to self-defense have proven to be highly effective throughout history in rallying the populace and troops to support leaders’ military campaigns. However, the analogy between war and self-defense is extremely weak, even when the former is compared to the defense of a family by a parent-protector figure. No father would bomb the school in which his children were attending class as a means of “protecting” them from an aggressor on the premises. Yet modern war results in the deaths of people who pose no danger to others, people who happen by chance to be located in the vicinity of a perceived threat. The most glaring problem with equating war and self-defense, then, would seem to be that the former involves an excessive use of force. The extraordinarily destructive weapons of modern war invariably kill innocent people who threaten no harm to anyone.

In fact, beyond the threat of death itself, none of the features of legitimate self-defense is present in wars fought by soldiers abroad. First, while legitimate self-defense culminates only sometimes in death, war always does. In addition, the military bears no resemblance to the heads of households who protect their children, for military personnel generally fill their roles as a matter of profession: either they are paid to wield deadly weapons, or else they are conscripted by law. In either case, military officers and soldiers are not defending people out of concern and love for individuals, as typically occurs within a family. The obligation of a father to protect his children is grounded in the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1   Self-Defense and War
• 2   The Triumph of Just War Rhetoric
• 3   Truth and Consequences
• 4   Bombs and Charity
• 5   The Other Side of the Story (Neglected Perspectives)
• 6   Real Leaders
• 7   Real Soldiers
• 8   The Moral Fog of War
• 9   Democracy, Human Rights, and War
• 10   Why We (Continue to) Fight
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Films Cited
• Index