sometimes war is necessary essay

Is war a necessary evil?

In this book’s chapters on the history of war, its causes and effects, and the effort to control war through ethics and law, it becomes clear why the author of this very useful volume wishes he were a pacifist but is not. A cursory review of the history of warfare and its effects is enough to demonstrate that war is a great evil, even if at times a necessary one. We should work to end war, and knowing its history, what causes it and how we might mitigate the harm it does are important parts of that work.

Yale University Press, 288p, $26

A. C. Grayling’s three chapters on the history of war lead to the question of what causes war, an exploration not of the causes of this or that war but of war as a phenomenon. He explores two main answers to this question: 1) Humans are innately violent, or 2) human societies are organized in such a way that war becomes more likely than not. The or in the last sentence should be an and, because Grayling recognizes that even if humans are instinctively violent, war—as opposed to conflict—is possible only where political and social structures create the capacity to conduct a war.

This insight is probably the most important in the book, and it is twin to another: Once political and social structures provide the framework for war, they create institutions that make war likely. I write these words the day after Memorial Day in the United States, and no more evidence is needed for Grayling’s claim that the idea of war is carried in the DNA of society and the economy than to see the sentimentalism and commercialization so prominently on display on this holiday.

There are points to quibble with in this volume, but in the end Grayling’s call for an “aversion therapy of truth” that does not romanticize war but shows us war’s “mangled bodies, blown apart children, blood running into gutters,” not to mention the pain and suffering of those whose family members are fighting the war, is compelling. Yet this therapy of truth is not what any society really wants; it is certainly not what the United States wants. Watch or listen to any baseball game on Memorial Day and you will hear the announcers solemnly intone the virtues of those who “made the ultimate sacrifice” in between hawking the goods of the local car dealers and alerting fans to the next bobblehead giveaway.

Historians are likely to find Part One, “War in History and Theory,” the most interesting part of the book, as political scientists or psychologists may find Part Two, “The Causes and Effects of War.” But for this ethicist, Part Three, “Ethics, Law, and War,” is particularly helpful, noting as it does the complementary nature of classic just war tradition and international humanitarian law. In seeking to limit the damage of war, these traditions represent the highest aspirations of humankind. They speak to the human capacity for compassion that is every bit as innate as our propensity to violence.

At the same time, Grayling does not spare his reader from the “frightening evidence of cruelty and barbarism” that war everywhere provides. His brief discussion of rape as a strategy of war is extremely important, even if such a discussion is almost inescapably pornographic. Nevertheless, attending to the relationship between war and rape is a bracing antidote to the unfortunate tendency to discuss just war theory in the language of the seminar room rather than the profanity-laced argot of the battlefield.

What does Grayling see as the future of war? Here the sections on the history, causes and ethics of war are joined in the recognition that war has always been and will always be driven by technological innovation. Acknowledging this is also to acknowledge that the political and social conditions necessary for technological innovation are universally associated with war. Technology determines the kind of fighting that is possible, and the fighting reveals where technology needs to evolve next.

At this juncture, says Grayling, the most worrisome development on the horizon is so-called lethal autonomous weapons, or LAWS. Like many novel warfighting technologies, LAWS pose serious challenges to just war thinking and international law. Necessity, discrimination and proportionality are conditions that are important to the ethics and law of war, but each requires nuanced judgment when applied. Will the killer robots that future battlefields may see be capable of that kind of nuanced judgment? As Grayling puts it, will a robot be able to discriminate between a terrified civilian trying to surrender and an enemy soldier about to attack?

Grayling tells us at the start of his book that he is as close to being a pacifist as it is possible to be without actually being one. He is not a pacifist because he admits that, sometimes, war is a necessary evil. Yet accepting the judgment that war can be justified is not incompatible with working to make it exceptionally rare. Here the pacifist and the just war thinker can make common cause. And the place to begin, says Grayling, is to recognize the fact that the very idea of war is far too easily and thoughtlessly accepted. Alas, war is not the exception but the rule. If war were genuinely the exception, it would not be a “permanent presence in the budgets, decisions, and attitudes of states.”

Grayling is not a flamethrower or culture warrior. He is that rarest of breeds: a careful, sober scholar who is a prophetic witness to the need for change.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “A necessary evil?,” in the August 21, 2017 , issue.

Paul Lauritzen is a professor of religious ethics at John Carroll University in Ohio.

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• The Five Reasons Wars Happen

Christopher Blattman | 10.14.22

Whether it is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats of nuclear strikes or Chinese belligerence in the Taiwan Strait , the United States seems closer to a great power war than at any time in recent decades. But while the risks are real and the United States must prepare for each of these conflicts, by focusing on the times states fight—and ignoring the times they resolve their conflicts peacefully and prevent escalation—analysts and policymakers risk misjudging our rivals and pursuing the wrong paths to peace.

The fact is that fighting—at all levels from irregular warfare to large-scale combat operations—is ruinous and so nations do their best to avoid open conflict. The costs of war also mean that when they do fight countries have powerful incentives not to escalate and expand those wars—to keep the fighting contained, especially when it could go nuclear. This is one of the most powerful insights from both history and game theory: war is a last resort, and the costlier that war, the harder both sides will work to avoid it.

When analysts forget this fact, not only do they exaggerate the chances of war, they do something much worse: they get the causes all wrong and take the wrong steps to avert the violence.

Imagine intensive care doctors who, deluged with critically ill patients, forgot that humanity’s natural state is good health. That would be demoralizing. But it would also make them terrible at diagnosis and treatment. How could you know what was awry without comparing the healthy to the sick?

And yet, when it comes to war, most of us fall victim to this selection bias, giving most of our attention to the times peace failed. Few write books or news articles about the wars that didn’t happen. Instead, we spend countless hours tracing the threads of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or the two world wars. When we do, it distorts our diagnosis and our treatments. For if we follow these calamitous events back to their root causes and preceding events, we often find a familiar list: bumbling leaders, ancient hatreds, intransigent ideologies, dire poverty, historic injustices, and a huge supply of weapons and impressionable young men. War seems to be their inevitable result.

Unfortunately, this ignores all the instances conflict was avoided. When social scientists look at these peaceful cases, they see a lot of the same preceding conditions—bumblers, hatreds, injustices, poverty, and armaments. All these so-called causes of war are commonplace. Prolonged violence is not. So these are probably not the chief causes of war.

Take World War I. Historians like to explain how Europe’s shortsighted, warmongering, nationalist leaders naively walked their societies into war. It was all a grand miscalculation, this story goes. The foibles of European leaders surely played a role, but to stop the explanation here is to forget all the world wars avoided up to that point. For decades, the exact same leaders had managed great crises without fighting. In the fifteen years before 1914 alone, innumerable continental wars almost—but never—happened: a British-French standoff in a ruined Egyptian outpost in Sudan in 1898; Russia’s capture of Britain’s far eastern ports in 1900; Austria’s seizure of Bosnia in 1908; two wars between the Balkan states in 1912 and 1913. A continent-consuming war could have been ignited in any one of these corners of the world. But it was not.

Likewise, it’s common to blame the war in Ukraine overwhelmingly on Putin’s obsessions and delusions. These surely played a role, but to stop here is to stop too soon. We must also pay attention to the conflicts that didn’t happen. For years, Russia cowed other neighbors with varying degrees of persuasion and force, from the subjugation of Belarus to “ peacekeeping ” missions in Kazakhstan. Few of these power contests came to blows. To find the real roots of fighting, analysts need to pay attention to these struggles that stay peaceful.

Enemies Prefer to Loathe One Another in Peace

Fighting is simply bargaining through violence. This is what Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung meant in 1938 when he said , “Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.” Mao was echoing the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz who, a century before, reminded us that war is the continuation of politics by other means.

Of course, one of these means is far, far costlier than the other. Two adversaries have a simple choice: split the contested territory or stake in proportion to their relative strength, or go to war and gamble for the shrunken and damaged remains. It’s almost always better to look for compromise. For every war that ever was, a thousand others have been averted through discussion and concession.

Compromise is the rule because, for the most part, groups behave strategically: like players of poker or chess, they’re trying hard to think ahead, discern their opponents’ strength and plans, and choose their actions based on what they expect their opponents to do. They are not perfect. They make mistakes or lack information. But they have huge incentives to do their best.

This is the essential way to think about warfare: not as some base impulse or inevitability, but as the unusual and errant breakdown of incredibly powerful incentives for peace. Something had to interrupt the normal incentives for compromise, pushing opponents from normal politics, polarized and contentious, to bargaining through bloodshed.

This gives us a fresh perspective on war. If fighting is rare because it is ruinous, then every answer to why we fight is simple: a society or its leaders ignored the costs (or were willing to pay them). And while there is a reason for every war and a war for every reason, there are only so many logical ways societies overlook the costs of war—five, to be exact. From gang wars to ethnic violence, and from civil conflicts to world wars, the same five reasons underlie conflict at every level: war happens when a society or its leader is unaccountable, ideological, uncertain, biased, or unreliable.

Five Reasons for War

Consider Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. What do these five tell us about why peace broke down?

1. Unaccountable. A personalized autocrat , Putin doesn’t have to weigh the interests of his soldiers and citizens. He can pursue whatever course helps him preserve his regime’s control. When leaders go unchecked and are unaccountable to their people, they can ignore the costs of fighting that ordinary people bear. Instead, rulers can pursue their own agendas. That is why dictators are more prone to war .

2. Ideological. Consider Putin again. Most accounts of the current war dwell on his nationalist obsessions and desires for a glorious legacy. What costs and risks he does bear, Putin is willing to pay in pursuit of glory and ideology. This is just one example of intangible and ideological incentives for war that so many leaders possess—God’s glory, freedom, or some nationalist vision.

Societies have ideological incentives too. Unlike the people of Belarus or Kazakhstan, the Ukrainians refused to accept serious restrictions on their sovereignty despite what (at first) seemed to be relative military weakness. Like liberation movements throughout history—including the American revolutionaries—they have been willing to undertake the ruin and risks of fighting partly in pursuit of an ideal.

3. Biased. Most accounts of Russia’s invasion stress Putin’s isolation and insulation from the truth. He and his advisors grossly underestimated the difficulty of war. This is a story of institutional bias—a system that is unwilling to tell its leader bad news. Autocrats are especially prone to this problem, but intelligence failures plague democracies too . Leaders can be psychologically biased as well. Humans have an amazing ability to cling to mistaken beliefs. We can be overconfident, underestimating the ruin of war and overestimating our chances of victory. And we demonize and misjudge our opponents. These misperceptions can carry us to war.

4. Uncertain. Too much focus on bias and misperception obscures the subtler role of uncertainty. In the murky run-up to war, policymakers don’t know their enemy’s strength or resolve. How unified would the West be? How capably would Ukrainians resist? How competent was the Russian military? All these things were fundamentally uncertain, and many experts were genuinely surprised that Russia got a bad draw on all three—most of all, presumably, Putin himself.

But uncertainty doesn’t just mean the costs of war are uncertain, and invasion a gamble. There are genuine strategic impediments to getting good information . You can’t trust your enemy’s demonstrations of resolve, because they have reasons to bluff, hoping to extract a better deal without fighting. Any poker player knows that, amid the uncertainty, the optimal strategy is never to fold all the time. It’s never to call all the time, either. The best strategy is to approach it probabilistically—to occasionally gamble and invade.

5. Unreliable. When a declining power faces a rising one, how can it trust the rising power to commit to peace ? Better to pay the brutal costs of war now, to lock in one’s current advantage. Some scholars argue that such shifts in power, and the commitment problems they create, are at the root of every long war in history —from World War I to the US invasion of Iraq. This is not why Russia invaded Ukraine, of course. Still, it may help to understand the timing. In 2022, Russia had arguably reached peak leverage versus Ukraine. Ukraine was acquiring drones and defensive missiles. And the country was growing more democratic and closer to Europe—to Putin, a dangerous example of freedom nearby. How could Ukraine commit to stop either move? We don’t know what Putin and his commanders debated behind closed doors, but these trends may have presented a now-or-never argument for invasion.

Putting the five together, as with World War I and so many other wars, fallible, biased leaders with nationalist ambitions ignored the costs of war and drove their societies to violent ruin. But the explanation doesn’t end there. There are strategic roots as well. In the case of Russia, as elsewhere, unchecked power, uncertainty, and commitment problems arising from shifting power narrowed the range of viable compromises to the point where Putin’s psychological and institutional failures—his misperceptions and ideology—could lead him to pursue politics by violent means.

The Paths to Peace

If war happens when societies or their leaders overlook its costs, peace is preserved when our institutions make those costs difficult to ignore. Successful, peaceful societies have built themselves some insulation from all five kinds of failure. They have checked the power of autocrats. They have built institutions that reduce uncertainty, promote dialogue, and minimize misperceptions. They have written constitutions and bodies of law that make shifts in power less deadly. They have developed interventions—from sanctions to peacekeeping forces to mediators—that minimize our strategic and human incentives to fight rather than compromise.

It is difficult, however, to expect peace in a world where power in so many countries remains unchecked . Highly centralized power is one of the most dangerous things in the world, because it accentuates all five reasons for war. With unchecked leaders , states are more prone to their idiosyncratic ideologies and biases. In the pursuit of power, autocrats also tend to insulate themselves from critical information. The placing of so much influence in one person’s hands adds to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the situation. Almost by definition, unchecked rulers have trouble making credible commitments.

That is why the real root cause of this current war is surely Putin’s twenty-year concentration of power in himself. And it is why the world’s most worrisome trend may be in China, where a once checked and institutionalized leader has gathered more and more power in his person. There is, admittedly, little a nation can do to alter the concentration of power within its rivals’ political systems. But no solution can be found without a proper diagnosis of the problem.

Christopher Blattman is a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. This article draws from his new book, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace , published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Oles_Navrotskyi , via depositphotos.com

27 Comments

War, in the end, is about Armed Robbery writ large; whether Committing it, Preventing it, or Redressing it. It is all about somebody trying to take somebody else's stuff.

Peace is the time of waiting for war. A time of preparation, or a time of willful ignorance, blind, blinkered and prattling behind secure walls. – Steven Erikson

That is the right reason, I do not know about the others, but I will give you a+ on this one

its beeches thy want Resorces

Wars often come when a group of nations (for example the USSR in the Old Cold War of yesterday and the U.S./the West in New/Reverse Cold War of today) move out smartly to "transform"/to "modernize" both their own states and societies (often leads to civil wars) and other states and societies throughout the world also (often leads to wars between countries).

The enemy of those groups of nations — thus pursuing such "transformative"/such "modernizing" efforts — are, quite understandably, those individuals and groups, and those states and societies who (a) would lose current power, influence, control, safety, privilege, security, etc.; this, (b) if these such "transformative"/these such "modernizing" efforts were to be realized.

From this such perspective, and now discussing only the U.S./the West post-Cold War efforts — to "transform"/to "modernize" the states and societies of the world (to include our own states and societies here in the U.S./the West) — this, so that same might be made to better interact with, better provide for and better benefit from such things as capitalism, globalization and the global economy;

Considering this such U.S./Western post-Cold War "transformative"/"modernizing" effort, note the common factor of "resistance to change" coming from:

a. (Conservative?) Individual and groups — here in the U.S./the West — who want to retain currently threatened (and/or regain recently lost) power, influence, control, etc. And:

b. (Conservative?) states and societies — elsewhere throughout the world — who have this/these exact same ambition(s).

From this such perspective, to note the nexus/the connection/the "common cause" noted here:

"Liberal democratic societies have, in the past few decades, undergone a series of revolutionary changes in their social and political life, which are not to the taste of all their citizens. For many of those, who might be called social conservatives, Russia has become a more agreeable society, at least in principle, than those they live in. Communist Westerners used to speak of the Soviet Union as the pioneer society of a brighter future for all. Now, the rightwing nationalists of Europe and North America admire Russia and its leader for cleaving to the past."

(See "The American Interest" article "The Reality of Russian Soft Power" by John Lloyd and Daria Litinova.)

“Compounding it all, Russia’s dictator has achieved all of this while creating sympathy in elements of the Right that mirrors the sympathy the Soviet Union achieved in elements of the Left. In other words, Putin is expanding Russian power and influence while mounting a cultural critique that resonates with some American audiences, casting himself as a defender of Christian civilization against Islam and the godless, decadent West.”

(See the “National Review” item entitled: “How Russia Wins” by David French.)

Bottom Line Thought — Based on the Above:

In the final paragraph of our article above, the author states: "That is why the real root cause of this current war is surely Putin’s twenty-year concentration of power in himself."

Based on the information that I provide above — which addresses the "resistance" efforts of entities both here at home and there abroad — might we beg to differ?

From the perspective of wars between nations relating to attempts as "transformation" by one party (and thus not as relates to civil wars which occur with "transformative" attempts in this case) here is my argument above possibly stated another way:

1. In the Old Cold War of yesterday, when the Soviets/the communists sought to "transform the world" — in their case, so that same might be made to better interact with, better provide for and better benefit from such this as socialism and communism:

a. The "root cause" of the conflicts that the U.S. was engaged in back then — for example in places such as Central America —

b. This such "root cause" was OUR determination to stand hard against these such "transformative" efforts and activities — which were taking place, back then, in OUR backyard/in OUR sphere of influence/in OUR neck of the woods.

2. In the New/Reverse Cold War of today, however, when now it is the U.S./the West that seeks to "transform the world" — in our case, so that same might be made to better interact with, better provide for and better benefit from such things as market-democracy:

“The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement, enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies,’ Mr. Lake said in a speech at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University.”

(See the September 22, 1993 New York Times article “U.S. Vision of Foreign Policy Reversed” by Thomas L. Friedman.)

a. Now the "root cause" of the conflicts that Russia is engaged in today — for example in places such as Ukraine —

b. This such "root cause" is now RUSSIA'S determination to stand hard against these such "transformative" efforts and activities — which are taking place now in RUSSIA'S backyard/in RUSSIA'S sphere of influence/in RUSSIA's neck of the woods.

(From this such perspective, of course, [a] the current war in Ukraine, this would seem to [b] have little — or indeed nothing — to do with "Putin's twenty-year concentration of power in himself?")

It’s easy to put the whole blame on Putin himself with his unchecked power . But this is a gross simplification of the reality in case of the Ukraine war. NATO expansion everywhere and especially into the very birthplace of Russia was a huge irritator , perceived as unacceptable, threatening, arrogant with no regard to Russia’s interests. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a clear warning, that was completely ignored. Without NATO’s ambitions there would be no war in Ukraine. Or Georgia .

When the Soviet Union installed missles in Cuba , the democratic and presumably the country with all checks and balances in place almost started a nuclear war with the Soviets. It was a reckless gamble that could end the world Why expect anything less from the modern Russia that feels threatened by NATO encroachment?

In the end, whether it's about committing, preventing, or rectifying, war is all about armed robbery. The main plot is around a thief trying to steal from another person.

One of the main causes of war is nationalist garbage. This nationalist site conveniently omits this as they push their preferred chosen nationalist enemy(cold war leftovers in this case) on the reader. What do you expect from OVRA/NKVD reruns?

In addition to the reasons explored to further explain the cause of war, there are also self-defeating schema in thought structures that deteriorate over time. They become compromised by the wear-and-tear grind of life of individuals seeking natural causes and solutions collectively and apart. This is particularly relevant to the matter of war dynamics. When energies used to pursue peace are perceived as exhausted, unspent warfare resources appear more attractive. Particularly in the instances of deteriorating leaders who are compromised by psychopathy, war can quickly become nearly inevitable. Add a number of subordinated population that are unable to resist, and the world can quickly find itself following in the footsteps of leaders marching to their own demise. On the broader sociopolitical battlefield, with democracy trending down and the deterioration in global leadership increasing, the probability of both war and peaceful rewards increase. The questions that arise in my mind point to developing leaps forward to the structures of global leadership, particularly for self-governing populations, leveraging resources that mitigate the frailties of societal and individual human exhaustion, and capping warfare resources at weakened choke points to avoid spillovers of minor conflicts into broader destruction. Technology certainly can be used to mitigate much more than has been realized.

Wow, I could say all those things about the U.S. and its rulers.

We don't have a dictator.

Trump came pretty close to being a dictator, what with the way people were following him blindly, and the ways that all parties, (Both republicans AND democrats) have been acting lately I wouldn't be surprised if a dictator came into power

War happens because humans are predatory animals and preditors kill other preditors every chance they get. The 3 big cats of africa are a prime example. We forget that we are animals that have animal insticts. There will always be war.

The cause of war is fear, Russia feared a anti Russian Army in Ukraine would come to fruitinion in the Ukraine threatening to invade Moscow!

it takes one powerful man in power to start war and millions of innocence people to die, to stop the war . / answer!,to in prison any powerful person who starts the war , and save your family life and millions of lives, / out law war.

The biggest cause of war is the demonstration of weakness among democratic nations facing a well-armed dictator with irrational ambitions. In the case of Russia, the democratic world turned weak on Vladimir Putin at a time when both democratic institutions and peace might have been preserved. Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first-ever freely elected president, had given the newly democratic Russia a real chance to enter the community of free nations in 1991. But when Putin was elected in 2000, we saw the warning signs of trouble. Putin already was undermining democracy. In Russia’s transition from socialism, he used his old KGP connections to buy up all the political parties (except ironically the Communist Party, which now was tiny and unpopular). He also declared he yearned for the old greater Russia, with those Soviet Union borders. The U.S. and NATO didn’t take Putin’s greater-Russia statements too seriously. After all, once their economy stabilized after the transition from socialism, the Russian people were pleased with their new and free Russia, the removal of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, and the new openness to the West. There was no popular call for retaking old territory. But Putin had his own plans, and as Christopher Blattman’s article observes, when you’re dictator (and even with ‘elections’ you are dictator if you own all the political parties) you can go your bloody way. Then came America’s ‘Russian re-set.’ As Putin consolidated his power, and forced the parliament, the Duma, to give him permission to run for several unopposed ‘re-elections,’ the U.S. decided to go gentle on Putin, in hopes he’d abandon his authoritarian course. This was the fatal mistake. When the U.S. should have been publicly encouraging Putin to commit himself to international borders and to democracy in Russia, the U.S. leadership instead was asking what it could do to make Putin happy. Putin saw this as weakness, an opening for his insane territorial desires, which focused mainly on Ukraine. He let a few more years go by, prepared secretly, and then in 2014, he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, killing about 14,000 people and claiming Ukraine’s Crimea for Russia. The U.S. imposed economic sanctions on Russia, but the terrible damage had been done. Because the Free World’s leaders had let down their guard, an awful precedent had been set. A new Russian dictator had murdered to steal territory. To him, the price was low. That told him he could do it again someday. And in 2022, again sensing weakness from the West, Putin invaded Ukraine once more. Not only have tens of thousands of Ukrainians been killed in this new war, but the Russian people themselves are now locked in an even tighter, more brutal dictatorship. Peace through Strength is not just a slogan. It’s as real as War through Weakness. My father, who fought in Europe in World War II, said an American soldier’s first duty was to preserve America’s rights and freedoms, as described in the Constitution. He said an American soldier also has two jobs. A soldier’s first job, he said, is to block the tyrants. Just stand in their way, he said, and most tyrants won’t even try to pass. That’s Peace through Strength. A soldier’s second job, he said, is to fight and win wars. He said that second job won’t have to be done often if we do enough of the first job.

I hope there will be no more wars in the world

This, pandemic of wars will soon make us realize and accept the fact that the global society’s compassion towards its individuals is numbed and will eventually be completely absent as it is transformed into a human super-organism, just as one’s body is not concerned about the millions of cells dying daily in it, unless it affects the body as a whole like the cancer cells where we consider them to be terrorists and actively kill them.

Boghos L. Artinian MD

I hope there is no more war in this world

war it not good for all humans

Ultimately, be it engaging in, averting, or resolving, war can be likened to organized theft. The central theme revolves around a thief attempting to pilfer from someone else.

In the end, whether involving, preventing, or resolving, war can be compared to organized theft. The core idea centers on a thief attempting to steal from someone else.

No nation would wage a war for the independence of another. Boghos L. Artinian

And I will give you one word that sums up and supersedes your Five Reasons: Covetousness James 4:2, ESV, The Holy Bible.

Christopher Blattman offers a comprehensive analysis of the five key reasons wars occur, shedding light on the complexities underlying conflicts and peacekeeping efforts. Blattman emphasizes the importance of understanding the incentives for peace and the institutional mechanisms that mitigate the risk of war. By examining factors such as accountability, ideology, bias, uncertainty, and reliability, he provides a nuanced perspective on the decision-making processes that lead to conflict. Blattman's insights underscore the significance of promoting dialogue, minimizing misperceptions, and strengthening institutions to preserve peace in an increasingly volatile world.

Excuse me, but why all the Russia focus? Also, can all these "reasons of war" be applied to Israel also – autocratic rule, biases in information, etc? Finally, most wars in the last 70 years have been started by the US (either directly invading, or by supporting a nationalist faction in bloody coups and civil wars) – do the same reasons apply to those wars, as in the US has essentially autocratic leadership which has biased views and fears competition?

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War is Necessary

Updated 18 October 2023

Subject Experience

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Category Life ,  War

War and its Justifications

War refers to the occurrence of armed engagement pitting societies, nations and governments or even unorganized groups like militias and mercenaries against each other. Wars are usually typified by extreme aggression and violence with mortality, destruction, and suffering being some of the associated outcomes. Since time immemorial, war has been a common feature of human interaction with the earliest recorded instance of war being the 14,000-year old Site 117 whereby approximately 45 percent of the skeletons present manifest characteristics of a violent demise (Keeley 37).

The Necessity of War

Whereas the horrors that result from war would ordinarily suggest that war is unnecessary sometimes, it is both necessary and justifiable for example during the pursuit of maintenance of hegemonic power, the removal of a destructive leadership or the preservation of human dignity, rights, and justice.

Justice and Freedom

Justice and freedom are fundamental rights that are critical to human existence and whose denial leads to massive suffering thus imposing a moral responsibility on those with the ability to do so to ensure that these rights are safeguarded. Under the just ad bellum principle, which is one of the two primary elements of war ethics, unfriendly circumstances or acts provide sufficient premise for the declaration of war by a party. However, it is imperative that the just belligerents be seeking to eliminate some evil, ensure that their use of aggression does not result in worse disorder and evil than that which they originally sought to curtail, and that all other strategies of resolving the issue must have been attempted and proven ineffective (Tompkins 139).

Examples of Justified Wars

In the case of the Afghanistan and the Iraqi wars, for example, the USA has invoked this principle as a justification for their engagement in military activity. For example, in Afghanistan, the tyrannical rule of the Taliban occasioned massive civilian suffering and the denial of human rights while also facilitating terrorism, which was enough reason for a military intervention that would liberate the people from the evil regime.

In the case of Iraq, the apparent existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction stockpiles, which under the possession of a dictator and potentially even terrorist organizations constituted a great evil that needed to be stopped thus providing a premise for the 2003 invasion and subsequent war. The presence of such weapons is evidenced during the conflict when Travis, a marine on duty in Fallujah, has to wade through Chlorine gas in a heroic attempt to rescue his fellow soldiers (Yeoman). The use of Chemical weapons, whether on combatants or otherwise, is considered a war crime and it exemplifies the evilness of the dictatorial regime. Left to itself, it is evident that such a regime would not hesitate to turn those weapons on even innocent civilians. The war in this region, like any other conflict, results in a lot of devastation and casualties, including brave servicemen like Travis. However, despite these losses, the war is inherently justifiable because it helps to rid the world of an evil tyrant, whose continued grip on power would have resulted in far worse outcomes.

Poor Governance and the Desire for Freedom

When a regime fails to serve the interests of the populace it leads and does not ensure human dignity, a natural and reasonable consequence may be a citizen uprising demanding for rights. In the poem London, Blake bemoans the mind-forg'd manacles, of the English people who are suffering under the poor leadership of the Palace and the Church, which has led to suffering and woes such as infant deaths from illness (Blake par. 2). The citizens curse and moan but are still not ready to rise up against their oppressors unlike their counterparts the French who were in the fifth year since their Revolution at the time of publication of the poem. Blake thus appears to lament the apparent inability and reluctance of Londoners to follow the French example and free themselves. Consequently, through this poem, it is apparent that poor governance is detrimental to citizen welfare and brings about immense suffering. The desire to be free of the poor leadership is thus another time in which war may be necessary.

Maintaining Hegemonic Power

In international relations, powerful nations often seek to exercise hegemony over other smaller and less powerful nations and thus to exercise and maintain this superiority, war may sometimes become a necessity. Whereas hegemons have a stabilizing effect on global order, their power is constantly challenged and consequently, they may engage in war to preemptively suppress potential challengers (Levy 145).

Example of a Necessary War

One example of such a situation is the Vietnam war in which the USA sought to stem the growing communist influence in Southeast Asia, which could potentially have led to an alteration in the global balance of power. The Communist influence on the Vietnamese nationalists was evident even from the weapons used by the Vietnamese soldiers with AK-47's and Simunov carbines featuring heavily thus suggesting Soviet military support (O'Brien 369). Thus, limiting the spread of competing ideologies as the American military engagement in Vietnam sought to do with communism is another situation whereby war may be necessary.

Conclusively, it is evident that war, which has been a part of human experience for eons, is a horrendous experience with brutal outcomes for both combatants and non-combatants. Consequently, it is necessary, in as far as possible, to avoid it although this is not always possible. Some instances in which the engagement in violent conflicts may become a matter of necessity include where human rights and dignity are at stake, where regimes do nor serve their citizens interests, and where a hegemon seeks to retain and consolidate its power.

Works Cited

Blake, William. "London." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43673/london-56d222777e969. Accessed 23 Nov. 2018.

Keeley, Lawrence H. War Before Civilization: [the Myth of the Peaceful Savage]. Oxford Univ. P, 2007.

Levy, Jack S. "The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace." Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 1, 1998, pp. 139-165, doi: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.1.1.139.

O'Brien, Tim. "The Things They Carried." The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, edited by Tobias Wolff, Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 366-384, www.cengage.com/custom/static_content/OLC/s76656_76218lf/obrien.pdf. Accessed 23 Nov. 2018.

Tompkins, Daniel P. "The Question of Just War Theory and the Augustinian Caveat Praeemptor." Augustinian Just War Theory and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: Confessions, Contentions, and the Lust for Power, edited by Craig J. De Paulo, Daniel P. Tompkins, and Patrick A. Messina, Peter Lang Publishing Inc, 2012, pp. 133-153, www.academia.edu/8082575/Augustinian_Just_War_Theory_and_the_Wars_in_Afghanistan_and_Iraq_Confessions_Contentions_and_the_Lust_for_Power._Edited_by_Craig_J_N_De_Paulo_Patrick_A_Messina_Daniel_P_Tompkins_New_York_Peter_Lang_2011._The_Question_of_Just_War_Theory_and_the_Augustinian_Caveat_Praeemptor.

Yeoman, Barry. "Brothers Forever: How Two Friends Came to Rest Side by Side at Arlington National Cemetery." Community Table, 10 Oct. 2014, communitytable.parade.com/297011/barryyeoman/brothers-forever-how-two-friends-came-to-rest-side-by-side-at-arlington-national-cemetery/.

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More From Forbes

Why war is good.

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By Robert D. Kaplan

Some of the most terrifying moments of my life have been in the midst of conflict: with American marines in Fallujah in 2004 and with armed bands in Sierra Leone in 1993. I stood next to mounds of dead Iranian soldiers, teenagers actually, during the Iran-Iraq War in 1984. The horror of war is a reality I have experienced firsthand. And yet an analyst must never give in to his or her emotions. He or she must view history with a heart of ice to find patterns that others miss. This is what Stanford classics professor Ian Morris does in his new book, War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots. Morris, both an archaeologist and a historian, surveys thousands of years of history and comes away with the seemingly startling thesis that human progress has been helped, rather than hindered, by war.

As he writes, "by fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die violently."

Indeed, in the Stone Age, you had as much as a 20 percent chance of dying violently at the hands of another human being. But in the 20th century -- even with the trenches, even with Hitler, with Hiroshima, with terrorism and with a panoply of Third World wars -- you had only a 1 or 2 percent chance of dying violently. Yes, as many as 200 million people may have died in wars throughout the 1900s, but roughly 10 billion lives were lived during that period. One may argue that this has merely been a matter of food production outpacing the production of assault rifles, so that violence has not so much been suppressed as overwhelmed by science. But Morris sees another factor: the rise of Hobbesian Leviathans that could only come about by war itself.

A Leviathan is the horrifying monster that Job beheld in the Bible, the "king over all the children of pride." The 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the concept as a metaphor for a strong central government that, by monopolizing the use of force, would make men no longer fear each other but only the authorities above them . Such was the way toward peaceful progress. Morris shows that, ironically, throughout history Leviathan has generally been created not by reasoned discussion but by war. He laments that this is so but demonstrates that humanity has thus far found no other way.

Morris recounts the sheer dreadfulness of Rome's conquests over the northern tribes of Europe. "Rome had made a wasteland and called it peace," went the famous adage. But that wasteland, he goes on, became the most productive and the most developed part of Greater Europe and the Mediterranean basin , even as life under Roman rule was safer and more predictable for the average person compared to any of the so-called barbarian precincts adjacent to Rome. Leviathan quelled violence, even as it demanded it. The political philosopher Francis Fukuyama in his 2011 book, The Origins of Political Order, posed the question, how do we get to Denmark -- Denmark being a metaphor for a humane and efficient polity? Morris essentially answers that we get to Denmark by starting with Rome.

A theme that runs through Morris' book is that while some idealists worship primitive societies and the noble savages who populate them, primitive societies rather than idyllic retreats have more often been filled with the terrifying human monsters associated with William Golding's 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. Thus, the idea is to incorporate primitive societies within Leviathan, and that has usually happened through military conquest.

Of course, Leviathan can periodically be worse than the less organized societies it conquers. Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were Leviathans. So, too, on a smaller scale, were Hafez al Assad's Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But remember, Morris is writing about grand patterns throughout the entire sweep of history, and therefore his generalizations cannot, by definition, be perfect. He admits that "theorizing about how war works over a timescale of millennia would surely have seemed like a cruel joke" to the real people being killed in armed conflicts as far back as antiquity, so that the "moral implications" of his thesis are, perforce, "unsettling." For as Shakespeare put it in Henry V, "few die well that die in a battle."

Moreover, the march toward a more peaceful humanity from the Stone Age to the 20th century has not been steady but full of wild zigzags. In particular, Morris calls the anarchy of the Middle Ages the culmination of a millennium of "counterproductive wars that followed the breakdown of the ancient empires." Hard as it may be to believe, in general, imperialism has advanced humanity by making it safer and wealthier, and by aspiring to a universalism beyond tribe and ethnicity. Hitler's attempt at imperialism burnt out after a few years because of his very extremism, whereas Rome, ancient Persia, Venice, Holland, France, Great Britain and America have all fostered, more or less, human development through various kinds of imperialist or imperial-like enterprises. And they have all done so in significant measure through war.

Imperialism has led ultimately to what Morris calls a "globocop," a role that the United States has played, however imperfectly, since the collapse of the Soviet Empire. America may get into Middle Eastern quagmires, but its Navy and Air Force, not to mention the reputation of its land forces and intelligence apparatus, project power sufficiently throughout the world so as to reduce the level of conflict and so far eliminate major interstate war. The United States, for its part, has become the complex and productive society it is largely thanks to the rigors it has passed through in planning for armed conflict, especially World War II and the Cold War. Morris might have added to his text that mass college education, the explosion of suburban life and civil rights for minorities were all expressions of the further democratization of American life that would have been hard to imagine without the national unity enforced by having to fight the Nazis and the Japanese.

Morris explores various scenarios for future warfare, from guerrilla insurgencies to robotic warriors to missiles in space. He tends to be optimistic, believing that humanity after millennia of war may reach a culmination point, in which the number of humans killed by other humans continues to drop dramatically. In this, he is in league with Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker's 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which also sees a continuation in the decline of human violence.

Keep in mind, though, that these optimistic scenarios and others may, among other things, be products of their times. For we still live in the relatively benign aftermath of World War II, in which the greatest interstate war in history has led to 70 years without interstate war between the great powers. The 19th century in Europe, between the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of World War I, was a similar period when many people lost their sense of the tragic only to be shocked by what came afterward. We can only hope that Morris' defense of war actually proves accurate so that we can continue to enjoy relative peace.

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Myth: War Is Necessary

Fact: defense of freedom, democracy, and life itself, is better accomplished with nonviolent power. only undemocratic domination over others requires violence and war..

It has become uncommon for war makers to advertise their wars as desirable, and standard policy to claim that every war is entered into as a last resort. This is progress to be very pleased with and to build on. It is possible to show that the launching of any particular war was not, in fact, the last resort, that superior alternatives existed. So, if war is defensible only as a last resort, war is indefensible.

For any war that occurs, and even many that do not, there can be found people who believe at the time, and after, that each particular war is or was necessary. Some people are unconvinced by claims of necessity for many wars, but insist that one or two wars in the distant past were indeed necessary. And many maintain that some war in the future could conceivably be necessary — at least for one side of the war, thus requiring the permanent maintenance of a military ready to fight.

War Is Not “Defense”

The U.S. War Department was renamed the Defense Department in 1947, and it is common in many countries to speak of the war departments of one’s own and all other nations as “defense.” But if the term has any meaning, it cannot be stretched to cover offensive war making or aggressive militarism.  If “defense” is to mean something other than “offense,” then attacking another nation “so that they can’t attack us first” or “to send a message” or to “punish” a crime is not defensive and not necessary.

In 2001, the Taliban government in Afghanistan was willing to turn Osama bin Laden over to a third nation to be tried for crimes the United States was alleging he’d committed. Instead of pursuing legal prosecutions for crimes, the United States and NATO chose an illegal war that did far more damage than the crimes, continued after bin Laden was said to have left the nation, continued after bin Laden’s death was announced, and did serious lasting damage to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to the United States and NATO nations, and to the rule of law.

According to a transcript of a meeting in February 2003 between U.S. President George W. Bush and the Prime Minister of Spain, Bush said that President Saddam Hussein had offered to leave Iraq, and to go into exile, if he could keep $1 billion. A dictator being allowed to flee with $1 billion is not an ideal outcome. But the offer was not revealed to the U.S. public. Instead, Bush’s government claimed a war was needed to defend the United States against weapons that did not exist. Rather than losing a billion dollars, the people of Iraq saw the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, millions made refugees, their nation’s infrastructure and education and health systems destroyed, civil liberties lost, vast environmental destruction, and epidemics of disease and birth defects — all of which cost the United States $800 billion, not counting trillions of dollars in increased fuel costs, future interest payments, veterans’ care, and lost opportunities — not to mention the dead and injured, increased governmental secrecy, eroded civil liberties, damage to the earth and its atmosphere, and the moral damage of public acceptance of kidnapping, torture, and murder.

Read also: Myth: China Is a Military Threat

War Preparation Is Also Not “Defense”

The same logic that would claim that attacking another nation is “defensive” can be used to try to justify the permanent stationing of troops in another nation. The result, in both cases, is counterproductive, producing threats rather than eliminating them.  Of some 196 nations on earth, the United States has troops in at least 177.  A handful of other nations also have a much smaller number of troops stationed abroad. This is not a defensive or necessary activity or expense.

A defensive military would consist of a coast guard, a border patrol, anti-aircraft weapons, and other forces able to defend against an attack.  The vast majority of military spending, especially by wealthy nations, is offensive. Weapons abroad, on the seas, and in outerspace are not defensive. Bombs and missiles targeting other nations are not defensive. Most wealthy nations, including those with numerous weapons that serve no defensive purpose, spend well under $100 billion each year on their militaries. The extra $900 billion that brings U.S. military spending up to roughly $1 trillion annually includes nothing defensive.

Defense Need Not Involve Violence

In defining recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as non-defensive, have we left out the viewpoint of Afghans and Iraqis? Is it defensive to fight back when attacked? Indeed, it is. That is the definition of defensive. But, let’s remember that it is promoters of war who have claimed that defensiveness makes a war justified. Evidence shows that the most effective means of defense is, far more often than not, nonviolent resistance. The mythology of warrior cultures suggests that nonviolent action is weak, passive, and ineffective at solving large-scale social problems. The facts  show just the opposite . So it is possible that the wisest decision for Iraq or Afghanistan would have been nonviolent resistance, non-cooperation, and appeal to international justice.

Such a decision is all the more persuasive if we imagine a nation like the United States, with great control over international bodies like the United Nations, responding to an invasion from abroad.  The people of the United States could refuse to recognize the foreign authority.  Peace teams from abroad could join the nonviolent resistance.  Targeted sanctions and prosecutions could be combined with international diplomatic pressure.  There are alternatives to mass violence .

Here is a list of successful uses of unarmed nonviolent action in place of war .

War Makes Everyone Less Safe

The important question, however, is not how the nation attacked should respond, but how to prevent the aggressive nation from attacking.  One way to help do that would be to spread awareness that war making endangers people rather than protecting them .

Denying that war is necessary is not the same as failing to recognize that there is evil in the world. In fact, war needs to be ranked as one of the most evil things in the world.  There is nothing more evil that war can be used to prevent . And using war to prevent or punish the making of war has proven a dreadful failure.

War mythology would have us believe that war kills evil people who need to be killed to protect us and our freedoms. In reality, recent wars involving wealthy nations have been one-sided slaughters of children, the elderly, and ordinary residents of the poorer nations attacked. And while “freedom” has served as a justification for the wars, the wars have served as  a justification for curtailing actual freedoms .

The idea that you could gain rights by empowering your government to operate in secret and to kill large numbers of people only sounds reasonable if war is our only tool. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Thus wars are the answer to all foreign conflicts, and disastrous wars that drag on too long can be ended by enlarging them.

Preventable diseases, accidents, suicides, falls, drowning, and hot weather kill many more people in the United States and most other nations than does terrorism.  If terrorism makes it necessary to invest $1 trillion a year in war preparations, what does hot weather make it necessary to do?

The myth of a great terrorist threat is wildly inflated by agencies like the FBI that regularly encourage, fund, and entrap people who could never have managed to become terrorist threats on their own.

A study of real motivations for wars makes clear that necessity hardly figures into the decision making process, other than as propaganda for the public.

“Population Control” by Mass-Murder Is Not a Solution

Among those who recognize how damaging war is, there exists another mythical justification for this peculiar institution: war is needed for population control.  But the planet’s capacity to limit human population is beginning to show signs of functioning without war.  The results will be horrible.  A solution might be to invest some of the vast treasure now dumped into war into the development of sustainable lifestyles instead.  The idea of using war to eliminate billions of men, women, and children almost renders the species that could think that thought unworthy of preserving (or at least unworthy of criticizing Nazis); fortunately most people cannot think anything so monstrous.

• World War II could not have happened without World War I, without the stupid manner of starting World War I and the even stupider manner of ending World War I which led numerous wise people to predict World War II on the spot, or without Wall Street’s funding of Nazi Germany for decades (as preferable to communists), or without the arms race and numerous bad decisions that do not need to be repeated in the future.
• The U.S. government was not hit with a surprise attack. President Franklin Roosevelt had quietly promised Churchill that the United States would work hard to provoke Japan into staging an attack. FDR knew the attack was coming, and initially drafted a declaration of war against both Germany and Japan on the evening of Pearl Harbor. Prior to Pearl Harbor, FDR had built up bases in the U.S. and multiple oceans, traded weapons to the Brits for bases, started the draft, created a list of every Japanese American person in the country, provided planes, trainers, and pilots to China, imposed harsh sanctions on Japan, and advised the U.S. military that a war with Japan was beginning. He told his top advisers he expected an attack on December 1st, which was six days off. Here’s an entry in Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s diary following a November 25, 1941, White House meeting: “The President said the Japanese were notorious for making an attack without warning and stated that we might be attacked, say next Monday, for example.”
• The war was not humanitarian and was not even marketed as such until after it was over. The United States led global conferences at which the decision was made not to accept Jewish refugees, and for explicitly racist reasons, and despite Hitler’s claim that he would send them anywhere on luxury cruise ships. There was no poster asking you to help Uncle Sam save the Jews. A ship of Jewish refugees from Germany was chased away from Miami by the Coast Guard. The U.S. and other nations refused to accept Jewish refugees, and the majority of the U.S. public supported that position. Peace groups that questioned Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his foreign secretary about shipping Jews out of Germany to save them were told that, while Hitler might very well agree to the plan, it would be too much trouble and require too many ships. The U.S. engaged in no diplomatic or military effort to save the victims in the Nazi concentration camps. Anne Frank was denied a U.S. visa. Although this point has nothing to do with a serious historian’s case for WWII as a Just War, it is so central to U.S. mythology that I’ll include here a key passage from Nicholson Baker:

“Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, who’d been tasked by Churchill with handling queries about refugees, dealt coldly with one of many important delegations, saying that any diplomatic effort to obtain the release of the Jews from Hitler was ‘fantastically impossible.’ On a trip to the United States, Eden candidly told Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, that the real difficulty with asking Hitler for the Jews was that ‘Hitler might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.’ Churchill agreed. ‘Even were we to obtain permission to withdraw all the Jews,’ he wrote in reply to one pleading letter, ‘transport alone presents a problem which will be difficult of solution.’ Not enough shipping and transport? Two years earlier, the British had evacuated nearly 340,000 men from the beaches of Dunkirk in just nine days. The U.S. Air Force had many thousands of new planes. During even a brief armistice, the Allies could have airlifted and transported refugees in very large numbers out of the German sphere.” [vii]

Perhaps it does go to the question of “Right Intention” that the “good” side of the war simply did not give a damn about what would become the central example of the badness of the “bad” side of the war.

• The war was not defensive. FDR lied that he had a map of Nazi plans to carve up South America, that he had a Nazi plan to eliminate religion, that U.S. ships (covertly assisting British war planes) were innocently attacked by Nazis, that Germany was a threat to the United States. [viii] A case can be made that the U.S. needed to enter the war in Europe to defend other nations, which had entered to defend yet other nations, but a case could also be made that the U.S. escalated the targeting of civilians, extended the war, and inflicted more damage than might have occurred, had the U.S. done nothing, attempted diplomacy, or invested in nonviolence. To claim that a Nazi empire could have grown to someday include an occupation of the United States is wildly far fetched and not borne out by any earlier or later examples from other wars.
• We now know much more widely and with much more data that nonviolent resistance to occupation and injustice is more likely to succeed—and that success more likely to last—than violent resistance. With this knowledge, we can look back at the stunning successes of nonviolent actions against the Nazis that were not well organized or built on beyond their initial successes. [ix]
• The Good War was not good for the troops. Lacking intense modern training and psychological conditioning to prepare soldiers to engage in the unnatural act of murder, some 80 percent of U.S. and other troops in World War II did not fire their weapons at “the enemy.” [x] The fact that veterans of WWII were treated better after the war than other soldiers before or since, was the result of the pressure created by the Bonus Army after the previous war. That veterans were given free college, healthcare, and pensions was not due to the merits of the war or in some way a result of the war. Without the war, everyone could have been given free college for many years. If we provided free college to everyone today, it would then require much more than Hollywoodized World War II stories to get many people into military recruiting stations.
• Several times the number of people killed in German camps were killed outside of them in the war. The majority of those people were civilians. The scale of the killing, wounding, and destroying made WWII the single worst thing humanity has ever done to itself in a short space of time. We imagine the allies were somehow “opposed” to the far lesser killing in the camps. But that can’t justify the cure that was worse than the disease.
• Escalating the war to include the all-out destruction of civilians and cities, culminating in the completely indefensible nuking of cities took WWII out of the realm of defensible projects for many who had defended its initiation—and rightly so. Demanding unconditional surrender and seeking to maximize death and suffering did immense damage and left a grim and foreboding legacy.
• Killing huge numbers of people is supposedly defensible for the “good” side in a war, but not for the “bad” side. The distinction between the two is never as stark as fantasized. The United States had a long history as an apartheid state. U.S. traditions of oppressing African Americans, practicing genocide against Native Americans, and now interning Japanese Americans also gave rise to specific programs that inspired Germany’s Nazis—these included camps for Native Americans, and programs of eugenics and human experimentation that existed before, during, and after the war. One of these programs included giving syphilis to people in Guatemala at the same time the Nuremberg trials were taking place. [xi] The U.S. military hired hundreds of top Nazis at the end of the war; they fit right in. [xii] The U.S. aimed for a wider world empire, before the war, during it, and ever since. German neo-Nazis today, forbidden to wave the Nazi flag, sometimes wave the flag of the Confederate States of America instead.
• The “good” side of the “good war,” the party that did most of the killing and dying for the winning side, was the communist Soviet Union. That doesn’t make the war a triumph for communism, but it does tarnish Washington’s and Hollywood’s tales of triumph for “democracy.” [xiii]
• World War II still hasn’t ended. Ordinary people in the United States didn’t have their incomes taxed until World War II and that’s never stopped. It was supposed to be temporary. [xiv] WWII-era bases built around the world have never closed. U.S. troops have never left Germany or Japan. [xv] There are more than 100,000 U.S. and British bombs still in the ground in Germany, still killing. [xvi]
• Going back 75 years to a nuclear-free, colonial world of completely different structures, laws, and habits to justify what has been the greatest expense of the United States in each of the years since is a bizarre feat of self-deception that isn’t attempted in the justification of any lesser enterprise. Assume I’ve got numbers 1 through 11 totally wrong, and you’ve still got to explain how an event from the early 1940s justifies dumping a trillion 2017 dollars into war funding that could have been spent to feed, clothe, cure, and shelter millions of people, and to environmentally protect the earth.

[vii] War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing , edited by Lawrence Rosendwald.

[viii] David Swanson, War Is A Lie, Second Edition (Charlottesville: Just World Books, 2016).

[ix] Book and Film: A Force More Powerful, http://aforcemorepowerful.org

[x] Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Back Bay Books: 1996).

[xi] Donald G. McNeil Jr., The New York Times , “U.S. Apologizes for Syphilis Tests in Guatemala,” October 1, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.html

[xii] Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little, Brown and Company, 2014).

[xiii] Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (Gallery Books, 2013).

[xiv] Steven A. Bank, Kirk J. Stark, and Joseph J. Thorndike, War and Taxes (Urban Institute Press, 2008).

[xv] RootsAction.org, “Move Away from Nonstop War. Close the Ramstein Air Base,” http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=12254

[xvi] David Swanson, “The United States Just Bombed Germany,” http://davidswanson.org/node/5134

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• Leaving WWII Behind
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The Power of Independent Thinking

Those who are quick to support unnecessary wars typically pay lip service to war’s horrors, but then support fighting anyway. Their excuses often follow predictable patterns based on historical errors, ill-founded speculations, and appeals to patriotic emotion and knee-jerk loyalty, rather than on fact-based argumentation.

Anyone who has done even a little reading about the theory and practice of war— whether in political theory, international relations, theology, history, or common journalistic commentary—has encountered a sentence of the form “War is horrible, but . . . .” In this construction, the phrase that follows the conjunction explains why a certain war was (or now is or someday will be) an action that ought to have been (or still ought to be) undertaken, notwithstanding its admitted horrors. The frequent, virtually formulaic use of this expression attests that nobody cares to argue, say, that war is a beautiful, humane, uplifting, or altogether splendid course of action and therefore the more often people fight, the better.

Some time ago—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for example— one might have encountered a writer such as Theodore Roosevelt who forthrightly affirmed that war is manly and invigorating for the nation and the soldiers who engage in it: war keeps a nation from “getting soft” (Morris 1979). Although this opinion is no longer expressed openly with great frequency, something akin to it may yet survive, as Chris Hedges has argued in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002). Nowadays, however, even those who find meaning for their lives by involvement in war, perhaps even only marginal or symbolic involvement, do not often extol war as such.

They are likely instead to justify a nation’s engagement in war by calling attention to alternative and even more horrible outcomes that, retrospectively, would have occurred if the nation had not gone to war or, prospectively, will occur if it does not go to war. This seemingly reasonable “balancing” form of argument often sounds stronger than it really is, especially when it is made more or less in passing. People may easily be swayed by a weak argument, however, if they fail to appreciate the defects of the typically expressed “horrible, but” apology for war.

Rather than plow through various sources on my bookshelves to compile examples, I have availed myself of modern technology. A Google search for the exact phrase “war is horrible but” on May 21, 2012, identified 58,100 instances of it. Rest assured that this number is smaller than the entire universe of such usage—some instances most likely have yet to be captured electronically. Among the examples I drew from the World Wide Web are the following fourteen statements. I identify the person who made the statement only when he is well known.

1. “War is horrible. But no one wants to see a world in which a regime with no regard whatsoever for international law—for the welfare of its own people—or for the will of the United Nations—has weapons of mass destruction.” (U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage [2003])

This statement was part of a speech Richard Armitage gave on January 21, 2003, shortly before the U.S. government unleashed its armed forces to inflict “shock and awe” on the nearly defenseless people of Iraq. The speech repeated the Bush administration’s standard prewar litany of accusations, including several claims later revealed to be false, so it cannot be viewed as anything but bellicose propaganda. Yet it does not differ much from what many others were saying at the time.

On its own terms, the statement scarcely serves to justify a war. The conditions outlined—a regime’s disregard of international law, its own people’s well-being, and the will of the United Nations, combined with possession of weapons of mass destruction—apply to several nations. They no more justified a military attack on Iraq than they justified an attack on Pakistan, France, India, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, Israel, or the United States itself.

2. “War is terrible, war is horrible, but war is also at times necessary and the only means of stopping evil.”

The only means of stopping evil? How can such singularity exist? Has evil conduct never been stopped except by war? For example, has shunning—exclusion from commerce, financial systems, communications, transportation systems, and other means of international cooperation—never served to discipline an evil nationstate? Might it do so if seriously tried? (If these questions give the impression that I am suggesting the possibility of resort to embargo or blockade, that perception is not exactly correct. Although I support various forms of voluntary, peaceful withdrawal of cooperation with evil-doing states, I do not endorse state-enforced—that is, violent or potentially violent—embargoes and blockades.) Why must we leap to the conclusion that only war will serve, when other measures have scarcely even been considered, much less seriously attempted? If war is really as horrible as everyone says, it would seem that we have a moral obligation to try very hard to achieve the desired suppression of evil doing by means other than resort to warfare, which is itself always a manifest evil, even when it is seemingly the lesser one.

3. “No news shows [during World War II] were showing German civilians getting fried and saying how sad it was. It was war against butchers and war is horrible, but it’s war, and to defend human decency, sometimes war is necessary.” (Ben Stein [2006])

Ben Stein is a knowledgeable man. He surely knows that the U.S. government imposed draconian censorship of war news during World War II. Perhaps the censors had their reasons for keeping scenes of incinerated German civilians away from the U.S. public. After all, even if Americans in general had extraordinarily cruel and callous attitudes toward German civilians during the war, many of them had relatives and friends in Germany.

Stein appears to lump all Germans into the class of “butchers” against whom he claims the war was being waged. He certainly must understand, however, that many persons in Germany—children, for example—were not butchers and bore absolutely no responsibility for the actions of the government officials who were. Yet these innocents, too, suffered the dire effects of, among other things, the terror bombing that the U.S. and British air forces inflicted on many German cities (“Strategic Bombing” n.d.).

To say, as Stein and many others have said, that “war is war” gets us nowhere; in a moral sense, this tautology warrants nothing. Many people, however, evidently consider all moral questions about the conduct of war to have been settled simply by their having labeled or by their having accepted someone else’s labeling of certain actions as “war.” Having chanted this exculpatory incantation over the state’s organized violence, they believe that all transgressions associated with that violence are automatically absolved—as the saying goes, “all’s fair in love and war.” It does not help matters that regimes treat some of the most egregious transgressors as heroes.

Finally, Stein’s claim that “to defend human decency, sometimes war is necessary” is at best paradoxical because it says in effect that human indecency, which war itself surely exemplifies, is sometimes necessary to defend human decency. Perhaps he had in mind the backfires that firefighters sometimes set to help them extinguish fires. This metaphor, however, seems farfetched in connection with war. It is difficult to think of anything that consists of as many different forms of indecency as war does. Not only is war’s essence the large-scale wreaking of death and destruction, but its side effects and its consequences in the aftermath run a wide range of evils as well. Whatever else war may be, it surely qualifies as the most indecent type of action people can take: it reduces them to the level of the most ferocious beasts and often accomplishes little more than setting the stage for the next, reactive round of such savagery. In any event, considered strictly as a way of sustaining human decency, it gets a failing grade every time because it invariably magnifies the malignity that it purports to resist.

4. “War is horrible, but slavery is worse.” (Winston Churchill as quoted in Dear and Foote 1995, xv)

Maybe slavery is worse, but maybe it’s not; it depends on the conditions of the war and the conditions of the slavery. Moreover, if one seeks to justify a war on the strength of this statement, one had best be completely certain that but for war, slavery will be the outcome. In many wars, however, slavery was never a possibility because neither side sought to enslave its enemy. Many wars have been fought for limited objectives, if only because more ambitious objectives appeared unattainable or not worth their cost. No war in U.S. history may be accurately described as having been waged to prevent the enslavement of the American people. Some people talk that way about World War II or the Cold War, if it be counted as a war, but such talk has no firm foundation in facts.

Some may object that the War Between the States was fought to prevent the ongoing slavery of the blacks then held in thrall. But however deeply this view may be embedded in American mythology, it is contrary to fact. As Abraham Lincoln made crystal clear in his letter of August 22, 1862, to New York Tribun e editor Horace Greeley, he had not mobilized the armed forces to free the slaves, but only to prevent the seceding states from leaving the union: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” [1] When Lincoln brought forth the Emancipation Proclamation— a document carefully drawn so that at the time of its promulgation it freed not a single slave—he issued it only because at that time it seemed to be a useful means for the attainment of his “paramount object,” preserving the union. The slaves, including those in states that had not seceded, were ultimately freed for good by ratification (at gunpoint in the former Confederate states) of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which is to say as a ramification of the war, which itself had not been undertaken in 1861 in pursuit of this then-unforeseen outcome.

5. “You may think that the Iraq War is horrible, but there may be some times when you can justify [going to war].”

Perhaps war can be justified at “some times,” but this statement itself in no way shows that the IraqWar can be justified, and it seems all too obvious that it cannot be. If it could have been justified, the government that launched it would not have had to resort to a succession of weak excuses for waging it, each such excuse being manifestly inadequate or simply false. The obvious insufficiency of any of the reasons put forward explains why so many of us put so much time and effort into trying to divine exactly what did impel the Bush administration’s rush to war.

6. “War is horrible, but sometimes we need to fight.”

Need to fight for what? The objective dictates whether war is a necessary means for its attainment. If the objective was to preserve Americans’ freedoms and “way of life,” the U.S. government certainly did not need to fight most of the enemies against whom it waged war historically. Oddly enough, the only time the enemy actually posed such a threat, during the Cold War, the United States did not go to war against that enemy directly, although it did fight (unnecessarily) the enemy’s less-menacing allies—North Korea, China, and North Vietnam. In the other wars the United States has fought, it might well have remained at peace had U.S. leaders been sincerely interested in peace rather than committed to warfare.

7. “Of course war is horrible, but it will always exist, and I’m sick of these pacifist [expletive deleted] ruining any shred of political decency that they can manage.”

Many people have observed that wars have recurred for thousands of years and therefore will probably continue to occur from time to time. The unstated insinuation seems to be that in view of war’s long-running recurrence, nothing can be done about it, so we should all grow up and admit that war is as natural and hence as unalterable as the sun’s rising in the east each morning. Warfare is an inescapable aspect of “how the world works.”

This outlook contains at least two difficulties. First, many other conditions also have had long-running histories: for example, reliance on astrologers as experts in foretelling the future; affliction with cancers; submission to rulers who claim to dominate their subjects by virtue of divine descent or appointment; and many others. People eventually overcame or continue to work to overcome each of these longestablished conditions. Science revealed that astrology is nothing more than an elaborate body of superstition; scientists and doctors have discovered how to control or cure certain forms of cancer and are attempting to do the same for other forms; and citizens learned to laugh at the pretensions of rulers who claim divine descent or appointment (at least, they had learned to do so until George W. Bush successfully revived this doctrine among the benighted rubes who form the Republican base). Because wars spring in large part from people’s stupidity, ignorance, and gullibility, it is conceivable that alleviation of these conditions might have the effect of diminishing the frequency of warfare, if not of eliminating it altogether.

Second, even if nothing can be done to stop the periodic outbreak of war, it does not follow that we ought to shut up and accept every war without complaint. No serious person expects, say, that evil can be eliminated from the human condition, yet we condemn it and struggle against its realization in human affairs.We strive to divert potential evildoers from their malevolent course of action. Scientists and doctors continue to seek cures for cancers that have afflicted humanity for millennia. Even conditions that cannot be wholly eliminated can sometimes be mitigated, but only if someone tries to mitigate them. War should belong to this class of events.

Finally, whatever else might be said about the pacifists, one may surely assert that if everyone were a pacifist, no wars would occur. Pacifism may be criticized on various grounds, as it always has been and still is, but to say that pacifists “lack any shred of political decency” seems itself to be an indecent description. Remember: war is horrible, as everybody now concedes but many immediately put out of mind.

8. “Every war is horrible, but freedom and justice cannot be allowed to be defeated by tyranny and injustice. As hideous as war is, it is not as hideous as the things it can stop and prevent.”

This statement assumes that war amounts to a contest between freedom and justice on one side and tyranny and injustice on the other. One scarcely commits the dreaded sin of moral equivalence, however, by observing that few wars present such a stark contrast, in which only the children of God fight on one side and only the children of Satan fight on the other. One reason why war is so horrible is that it invariably drags into its charnel house many—again, the children are the most undeniable examples—who must be held blameless for any actions or threats that might have incited the war.

Even if we set aside such clear-cut innocents and consider only persons in the upper echelons of the conflicting sides, it is rare to find only angels on one side and only demons on the other. In World War II, for example, the Allied states were led by such angels as Winston Churchill, who relished the horrific terror bombing of German cities; Josef Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers of all time; Franklin D. Roosevelt, of whose moral uprightness the less said the better; and Harry S Truman, who took pleasure in annihilating hundreds of thousands of defenseless Japanese noncombatants first with incendiary bombs and last with nuclear weapons. Yes, the other side had Adolf Hitler, whose fiendishness I have no desire to deny or minimize, but the point is that the overall character of the leadership on both sides sufficiently attests that there was enough evil to go around. As for the ordinary soldiers, of course, everyone who knows anything about actual combat appreciates that the men on both sides quickly become brutalized and routinely commit atrocities of every imaginable size and shape.

So it is far from clear that war is always or even typically “not as hideous as the things it can stop and prevent.” On many occasions, refusal to resort to war, even in the face of undeniable evils, may still be the better course. When World War II ended, leaving more than 62 million dead, most of them civilians, and hundreds of millions displaced, homeless, wounded, sick, or impoverished, the survivors might well have doubted whether conditions would have been even more terrible if the war had not taken place. (The dead were unavailable for comment.) To make matters worse, owing to the war the monster Stalin gained control of an enormous area stretching from Czechoslovakia to Korea; and because of the defeat of the Japanese Empire, the monster Mao Zedong would soon take complete control of China and impose a murderous reign of terror on the world’s most populous country that cost the lives of perhaps another 60 million persons (as many as 73 million, according to one plausible estimate). [2]

It is difficult to believe that the situation in China would have been so awful even if the Japanese had succeeded in incorporating China into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

9. “I grant you the war is horrible, but it is a war, after all. You have to compare apples to apples, and when I do that, I see this war is going well.”

This statement about the U.S. war in Iraq exemplifies what some call the “not as bad as Hamburg-Dresden-Tokyo-Hiroshima-Nagasaki” defense of brutal warfare. If we make such pinnacles of savagery our standard, then, sure enough, everything else pales by comparison. But why should anyone adopt such a grotesque standard? To do so is to concede that anything less horrible than the very worst cases is “not so bad.” In truth, warfare’s effects are sufficiently hideous at every level. What the Israelis did in Lebanon a few years ago bears no comparison with the February 1945 Allied attack on Dresden, of course, but the sight of even one little Lebanese child dead, her bloody body gruesomely mangled by an explosion, ought to be enough to give pause to any proponent of resort to war. Try putting yourself in the place of that child’s mother.

10. “[Certain writers] all agreed that war is horrible but said the Bible gives government the authority to wage war to save innocent lives.”

For almost two thousand years, biblical scholars have been disputing what Christians may and may not do in regard to war. The dispute continues today, so the matter is certainly not resolved among devout Christians. Even if Christians may go to war to save innocent lives, however, a big question remains: Is the government going to war for this purpose or for one of the countless other purposes that lead governments to make war? Saving the innocent makes an appealing excuse, but it is often, if not always, only a pretext. “Just war” writers from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to Grotius to the latest contributors have agonized over the ready availability of such pretexts and warned against the wickedness of advancing them when the real motives are less justifiable or even plainly immoral. [3]

For centuries, European combatants on all sides invoked God’s blessing for their wars against one another. As recently as World War II, the Germans claimed to have “Gott mit Uns,” a declaration that adorned the belt buckles of Wehrmacht soldiers in both world wars. Strange to say, in 1917 and 1918 Christian ministers of the gospel in pulpits across the United States were assuring their congregations that their nation-state was engaged in a “war for righteousness” (the title of Richard M. Gamble’s [2003] splendid book about this repellent episode). So the invocation of biblical authority really doesn’t get us very far: the enemy may be invoking the same authority.

Nowadays, of course, one side invokes the Jewish and Christian God, whereas the other calls on the blessing of Allah. Whether this bifurcated manner of gaining divine sanction for the commission of mass murder and mayhem among the sons of Abraham represents progress or not, I leave to the learned theologians.

11. “War is horrible, but thank God we have men and women who are willing and able to protect our people and our freedom.”

These men and women may be willing and able to supply such protection, but do they? Our leaders constantly proclaim that their wars are aimed at protecting us and our freedoms—“We go forward,” declared George W. Bush, “to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world” (Bush 2001)—but one has to wonder about the truth of that proclamation, considering that in the entire history of warfare, each major U.S. war (with the possible exception of the War for Independence) left the general run of the American people with fewer freedoms after the war than they had enjoyed before the war.

In my book Crisis and Leviathan (1987, 123–58, 196–236), I document this ratchet effect in detail for the two world wars. After World War I, the government not only kept taxes far above their prewar levels but also retained newly court-sanctioned powers to conscript men for foreign wars, to interfere with virtually any private transaction in international trade and finance (Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917), and to suppress free speech in a draconian manner (Sedition Act of 1918). After World War II, the government again kept taxes much higher they had been before the war, retained for the first time a large peacetime military apparatus, created the CIA as a sort of personal presidential intelligence and quasi-military group, continued to draft men for military service even during peacetime, and engaged much more pervasively in central management and manipulation of the private economy. The people, for their part, gained the privilege of living with the very real threat of nuclear holocaust hovering over them for four decades while the U.S. government kept the Cold War pot boiling.

The so-called war on terror has struck deeply into Americans’ rights to privacy by vastly enhancing the government’s surveillance activities and virtually gutting the Fourth Amendment’s protection against warrantless searches and seizures. It has also led the government to create an agency now empowered to commit acts in U.S. airports that if committed by others would be prosecuted as sexual assault and battery and as criminal molestation of children. This “war” has also served to justify one of the greatest military-spending run-ups in U.S. history, leaving U.S. military-related spending—if correctly measured—greater than the comparable spending of all other nations combined. Nevertheless, Americans are no safer because of these sweeping infringements of their liberties, many of which have been de facto pork barrel projects and others of which have been nothing more than security theater. War, whether real or make-believe, serves to justify huge increases in government spending, taxing, borrowing, and exertion of power over private affairs, and such government surges attract opportunists galore while doing little or nothing to improve people’s real security or to protect their freedom. Indeed, in the war on terror, the government has added fuel to the fire of Muslim rage against Americans in the Middle East but achieved nothing positive to compensate for this heightened threat. [4]

Every time the rulers set out to protect the village, they decide that the best way to do so is to destroy it in the process. Call me a cynic, but I can’t help wondering whether protection of the people and their freedoms was really the state’s objective, and after fifty years of thinking about the matter, I have come up with some pretty attractive alternative hypotheses. One of them is that, as Marine General Smedley Butler famously expressed it, “war is a racket,” but I have other alternative hypotheses, too.

12. “War is horrible but some economic good came out of World War II. It brought the United States out of one of the greatest slumps in history, the Great Depression.”

This venerable broken-window fallacy refuses to die, no matter how many times a stake is driven through its heart. Most Americans believe it. Worse, because less excusable, nearly all historians and even a large majority of economists do so as well. I have been whacking at this nonsense for several decades, but, so far as I can tell, I have scarcely made a dent in it. Should anyone care to see a complete counterargument, I recommend the first five chapters of my 2006 book Depression, War, and Cold War .

In brief, the government did not—indeed, could not—create wealth simply by spending vast amounts of money (much of it newly created as a result of cooperative Federal Reserve policies) on soldiers and weapons. The government did wipe out unemployment during the war, but only by putting millions of men in the armed forces. During World War II, these forces absorbed, primarily by conscription, 16 million persons at one time or another (about three times the number of persons officially counted as unemployed in 1941), while causing a similar number of people to be employed in military-supply industries. The economy looked prosperous because everybody was working and (except those in the armed forces) earning seemingly good wages and salaries. Yet the supply of civilian goods and services actually shrank, and many ordinary goods were not available at all (for example, new cars) or were available only in limited, rationed amounts (for example, meats, sugar, canned foods, gasoline, and tires). Private investment also dropped sharply as the government took over the allocation of capital, directing it into arms-related projects. So the apparent “wartime prosperity” was spurious. Only when the war ended and the military machine was largely dismantled did genuine prosperity return, for the first time since 1929.

13. “War is horrible, but whining about it is worse. Either put up or shut up.”

Some people always reject the denunciation of any familiar social institution or conduct unless the denouncer offers a “constructive criticism”—that is, unless he puts forward a promising plan to eliminate the evil he denounces. I admit at once that I have not discovered a cure for the human tendency to resort to war when much more intelligent and humane alternatives are available. I am trying to convince people that on nearly all such occasions they are allowing their rulers to bamboozle them and turn them into cannon fodder for purposes that serve the rulers’ interests, not the people’s. I am getting nowhere in this effort, but I am going to keep trying.

14. “Of course, war is horrible, but at present it’s still the only guarantee to maintain peace.”

This statement as it stands is self-contradictory because it affirms that the only way to make sure that we will have peace is by going to war. Perhaps, if we are feeling generous, we may interpret the statement as the time-honored exhortation that to maintain the peace, we should prepare for war, hoping that by dissuading aggressors from moving against us, our preparation will preserve the peace. Although this reworded policy is not self-contradictory, it is dangerous because the preparation we make for war may itself move us toward actually going to war. For example, preparation for war may entail increasing the number of military officers and allowing the top brass to exert greater influence in making foreign policy. Those officers may believe that without war their careers will go nowhere, and so they may tilt their advice to civilian authorities toward risking or actually making war even when peace might easily be preserved. Likewise, military suppliers may use their political influence to foster international suspicions and fears that otherwise might be allayed. Wars are not good for business in general, but they are good for the munitions contractors. Certain legislators may develop an interest in militarism; perhaps it helps them to attract campaign contributions from arms contractors, veterans’ groups, and members of the national guard and military reserve organizations. Pretty soon we may find ourselves dealing, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower did, with a military-industrialcongressional complex, and we may find that it packs a great deal of political punch and acts in a way that, all things considered, diminishes the chance of keeping the country at peace. [5]

From the foregoing commentary, a recurrent theme may be extracted: those who argue that “war is horrible, but . . .” nearly always use this rhetorical construction not to frame a genuinely serious and honest balancing of reasons for and against war, but only to acknowledge what cannot be hidden—that war is horrible—and then to pass on immediately to an affirmation that notwithstanding the horrors, whose actual forms and dimensions they neither specify nor examine in detail, a certain war ought to be fought.

The reasons given to justify a war’s being fought, however, generally amount to claims that cannot support a strong case. They often are not even bona fide reasons, but mere propaganda, especially when they emanate from official sources. They sometimes rest on historical errors, such as the claim that the armed forces in past wars have somehow kept foreigners from depriving us of our liberties. And the case for war usually rests on ill-founded speculation about what will happen if we do not go to war.

People need to recognize, however, that government officials and their running dogs in the media, among others, are not soothsayers. None of us knows the future, but these interested parties lack a disinterested motive for making a careful, wellinformed forecast. They have, as the saying goes, an agenda of their own. “The best and the brightest” of our leaders and their kept experts generally amount to little more than what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realists,” and on occasion, specifically since September 11, 2001, they do not meet even that standard (see Leebaert 2011). Hence, these geniuses, equipped with all of that secret information they constantly emphasize their critics do not possess, have recently put forward forecasts of a “cake walk” through Iraq, a “slam dunk” on finding lots of weapons of mass destruction there, and liberal-democratic dominoes falling across the Middle East— forecasts that fit more comfortably in a lunatic asylum than in a discussion among rational, well-informed people.

The government generally relies on marshalling patriotic emotion and reflexive loyalty rather than on making a sensible case for going to war. Much of the discussion that does take place is a sham because the government officials who pretend to listen to other opinions, as U.S. leaders did most recently during 2002 and early 2003, have already decided what they are going to do, no matter what other people may say. The rulers know that once the war starts, nearly everybody will fall into line and “support the troops.”

If someone demands that the skeptic about war offer constructive criticism, here is my proposal: always insist that the burden of proof rests heavily on the warmonger. This protocol, which is now anything but standard operating procedure, is eminently judicious precisely because, as we all recognize, war is horrible. Given its horrors, which in reality are much greater than most people appreciate, it only makes sense that those who propose to enter into those horrors make a very, very strong case for doing so. If they cannot—and I submit that they almost never can—then people will serve their interests best by declining an invitation to war. As a rule, the most rational, humane, and auspicious course of action is indeed to give peace a chance.

1. Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley , August 22, 1862.

2. The new estimates of the casualties of Mao’s reign compiled by R. J. Rummel .

3. For an excellent assessment of the most recent scholarship in the “just war” tradition, see Calhoun 2011.

4. On the war on terror, see my books published in 2005 and 2007 and, for more recent years, my continuing posts at the Independent Institute’s group blog The Beacon .

5. On the military-industrial complex, see Higgs 1990 and Ledbetter 2011.

Armitage, Richard. 2003. Speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace. January 21. Available at: http://www.acronym.org.uk/docs/0301/doc12.htm .

Bush, George W. 2001. 9/11 Address to the Nation. Available at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/9/11_Address_to_the_Nation .

Calhoun, Laurie. 2011. Political Philosophers on War: Arguments inside the “Just War” Box . The Independent Review 15, no. 3 (Winter): 447–61.

Dear, I. C. B., and M. R. D. Foot, eds. 1995. Oxford Companion to World War II . New York: Oxford University Press.

Gamble, Richard M. 2003. The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation . Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books.

Hedges, Chris. 2002. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning . New York: Random House.

Higgs, Robert. 1987. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government . New York: Oxford University Press.

————, ed. 1990. Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives . New York: Holmes and Meier.

————. 2005. Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis since 9/11 . Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute.

————. 2006. Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy . New York: Oxford University Press.

————. 2007. Neither Liberty nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government . Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute.

Ledbetter, James. 2011. Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex . New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Leebaert, Derek. 2011. Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy . New York: Simon and Schuster.

Morris, Edmund. 1979. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt . New York: Ballantine.

Stein, Ben. 2006. Out of Disproportion. American Spectator , July 21. Available at: http://spectator.org/archives/2006/07/21/out-of-disproportion .

Strategic Bombing during World War II. n.d. Wikipedia .

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880 Words Essay on Is War Necessary?

No doubt war is an evil, the greatest catastrophe that befalls human beings. It brings death and destruction, disease and starvation, poverty, and ruin in its wake. One has only to look back to the havoc that was wrought in various countries not many years ago, in order to estimate the destructive effects of war.

A particularly disturbing side of modern wars is that they tend to become global so that they may engulf the entire world. But there are people who consider war as something grand and heroic and regard it as something that bring out the best in man, but this does not in any way alter the fact that war is a terrible, dreadful calamity. This is especially so now that a war will now be fought with atom bombs.

Some people say war is necessary. A glance at the past history will tell now war has been a recurrent phenomenon in the history of nations. No period in world history has been free from the devastating effects of war. We have had wars of all types-wars lasting for a year or so. In view of this it seems futile to talk of permanent, everlasting peace or to make plans for the establishment of eternal peace. We have had advocates of non­violence and the theory of the brotherhood of man and fraternity of God.

We have had the Buddha, Christ and Mahatma Gandhi. But in spite of that, weapons have always been used, military force has always been employed, clashes of arms have always occurred; war has always been waged. War has indeed been such a marked feature of every age and period that it has come to be regarded as part of the normal life of nations. Machiavelli, the author of the well-known book The Prince, defined peace as an interval between two wars.

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Moltse, the famous German Field Marshal, declared war to be part of the God’s World-Order. Poets and prophets have dreamt of a millennium, a Utopia in which war will not exist and eternal peace will reign on earth but these dreams have not been fulfilled.

After the Great War of 1914-18 it was thought that there would be no war for a long time to come and an institution called the League of Nations was founded as a safeguard against the outbreak of war. The occurrence of another war (1939-45), however, conclusively proved that to think of an unbroken peace is to be unrealistic and that no institution or assembly can ever ensure the permanence of peace. The League of Nations collapsed completely under the tensions and stresses created by Hitler.

The United Nations Organization, with all the good work that it has been doing, is not proving as effective as was desired. A large number of wars, the most recent ones being the one in Vietnam, the other between India and Pakistan, or Indo-China war, Iran-Iraq war or Arab- Israel war, have been fought despite the UN.

The fact of the matter is that fighting is a natural instinct in man. When even a number of individuals cannot live always in peace, it is, indeed, too much to expect so many nations to live in a state of eternal peace. Besides, there will always be wide differences of opinion between various nations, different angles of looking at matters that have an international importance, radical differences in policy and ideology and these cannot be settled by mere discussions so that resort to war becomes very necessary in these cases.

Before the outbreak of World War II, for instance, the spread of Communism in Russia created distrust and suspicion in Europe; democracy was an eyesore to Nazi Germany; British Conservatives were apprehensive of the possibility of Britain being communized. In short, the political ideology of one country being abhorrent to another, the state of affairs was certainly not conducive to the continuance of peace.

Add to all this traditional enmities between nations and international disharmony that have their roots in past history. For example, Germany wished to avenge the humiliating terms imposed upon her at the conclusion of the war of 1914-18 and desired, to smash the British Empire and establish an empire of her own. Past wounds in fact do not perfectly heal up and are constant goads to an effort at vengeance. A feverish arms race is going on between the hostile nations in anticipation of such an eventuality, and disarmament efforts are proving futile. The Indo-Pakistani war was fought over the Kashmir issue. The war in Vietnam was due to ideological differences.

It also appears that if peace were to continue for a long period, people would become sick of the monotony of life and would seek war for a change. Man is a highly dynamic creature and it seems that he cannot remain contented merely with works of peace—the cultivation of arts, the development of material comforts, the extension of knowledge, the means and appliances of a happy life. He wants something thrilling and full of excitement and he fights in order to get an outlet for his accumulated energy. It must be admitted, too, that war has its good side. It spurs men to heroism and self-sacrifice. It is an incentive to scientific research and development. War is obviously an escape from the lethargy of peace.

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