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January 24, 2005
Wars of Choice
I see that Jim Henley will be taking a closer look at my discussion of deciding when war is justified. Jim agrees that his definition would keep us out of more wars. He looks at that as a feature, while he assumes that I look at it as a bug. Since that's not quite where I'm going with that, and since I think it's an important issue to consider, I will attempt to further explain myself.
Before I get started, let me start some ground rules: I am trying to establish ground rules for when it is appropriate to go to war, not to retroactively determine the rightness or wrongness of the Iraq war. While I don't think that's a dead issue by any stretch, it seems far more important at this point to establish the rules for initiating future conflict rather than trying to justify or undermine past decisions.
Having a very high threshold barrier to going to war is a good thing. As the past three years have shown anyone who didn't already know it, war is a horrible pastime that is best avoided. Jim and I are wholly in agreement on that. Where we differ is where to draw the line. If I understand Jim correctly, he wants us to go to war only when we have been attacked. Afghanistan was justified in Jim's view (I believe) because the Taliban was housing and supporting al Qaeda. Iraq, because it did not and could not attack us, was not justified. So the line Jim draws is clear and easy to understand. Mine is a bit fuzzier.
The reason I discussed our previous wars was that I wanted to point out that almost none of America's wars met Jim's threshold. For most of them we could probably agree that America would have done just as well to stay out of them. But the World War II in Europe does not meet Jim's standard, yet I think we were correct to fight in that case despite that fact. I don't know if Jim concurs or not, so for sake of argument I'll assume that he would have only fought Japan in World War II and left Britain and Russia to fight on their own since that is in keeping with his stated threshold for warfighting.
Had we not intervened in Europe in World War II, one of two things would have occurred: Hitler would have won the war, or the Russians would have overrun Europe. If we had not provided Russia with Lend Lease, Germany might not have knocked Russia out of the war, but Russia would not have been able to defeat a Germany fighting on a single front either, and the two powers would likely have made a peace favorable to Germany much as Russia did in 1917. Had we stayed out of the fighting but still given weapons and equipment to Russia, the Soviets would have overrun Germany and continued on to the European coast, leaving all of Germany as well as France, Italy, and the Low Countries under Soviet domination. Neither situation would have turned out to America's benefit: rather than Europe divided between the West and the East, we would have had a Europe united under Fascism or a Europe united under Communism. The former would almost certainly have led to another war at some point, while the latter might have left us still struggling with Communism in the Cold War with far less hope of eventual success.
It seems clear to me that restricting war to times when we are directly attacked means that we will end up with more problems than we would have if we didn't fight in limited cases. The trick is determining where that line is. I'll admit that it is tempting to simply go along with Jim's views and don't draw the line, as a review of American history suggests that we're far more likely to draw the line too far in the direction of unnecessary wars of choice rather than avoiding a war in later turns out we should have fought. On the other hand, when we do drop the ball on a war we should have fought, it's likely to be a war like WWII, where that failure may have extremely serious consequences. So as tempting as Jim's solution is, I'm not convinced it leaves us better off than trying to draw a line in the sand.
I'm not sure where the line belongs. I thought that Iraq belonged on one side of the line for a long time, but I'm coming to believe that I had the line in the wrong place. Still, that doesn't mean I was necessarily wrong to draw the line, only that I may have drawn it improperly. More analysis is needed in this area, particularly with the problems of Iran, North Korea, and Syria still threatening.
Update: OK, I'm aware that Germany and Italy declared war on the United States shortly after Pearl Harbor (indeed, I noted that fact in my first post), therefore giving FDR the cover he needed to pursue the agreed-upon Germany first campaign with the British. The fact that they declared war on us does not take us across Jim's threshold, however: neither Germany nor Italy posed any threat whatsoever to the United States, and declarations of war notwithstanding, we had no real quarrel with them. We could have focused out attentions on Japan and not had to worry about being attacked from the Atlantic at any time. If a piece of paper is all we need to cross the threshold of war, then Iraq becomes easy, since Saddam Hussein had violated the terms of the 1991 cease fire repeatedly in the intervening years. Jim's threshold is that you don't go to war unless you have no other choice. In Europe in 1941 we had a choice.
BruceR at Flit catches me out on my extremely limited knowledge of the War of 1812, which belongs in the wars of choice category rather than a necessary war. I don't think that materially affects the larger question, but it's a good reminder of the value of checking your facts. This site seems to have some good information on the war for those that are interested.
Posted at January 24, 2005 10:31 PM
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Tracked on January 25, 2005 05:35 AM
You write "he would have only fought Japan in World War II and left Britain and Russia to fight on their own." Actually, there's an oddity of history that you may not be aware of. I think it is not vital for your argument, because in a world where the US was strongly committed to defense-only, Germany might well not have avoided it and other actions which might bring the US into the war. Still: IIRC, what happened shortly after Pearl Harbor was that Germany demonstrated its solidarity with Japan (_The Onion_: "When Germany stands victorious on a conquered Earth, and Aryan supermen wipe out the undesirable mud races one by one, your like will surely survive to be among the last to be exterminated.") by declaring war on the US. I believe Henley agrees that after the Nazis thus declared open season on the US, it was only natural for the US to address the problem by hunting down the Nazis in turn.
(The "what would an isolationist do?" situation at the time of declaration of war was surprisingly complicated. Among the other complications: even before Pearl Harbor, the US and German forces had already been firing on each other in the submarine war on Atlantic shipping.)
(I'm another heavily-armed-defense basically-isolationist. I agree that WWII is one of the hard cases where reasonable people can make a good case that wise proactive offensive policy would've been in the best interest of the US, and even more in the interest of other parts of the world. I support my position nonetheless, even in that case, in a "utopia is not an option" way. It's for the same kinds of reasons that freedom-of-speech defenders can defend even speech for, as it happens, Nazis (though the coincidental parallel is somewhat superficial in some ways I'm not going to go into). That is: even in the hard cases it's not entirely clear that the principled outcome is worse; even in the hard cases one has to be careful to contemplate realistic levels of decisionmaking, not ideally wise decisionmaking; and sticking to the principle even in the hard cases is a pretty effective way to avoid the marked tendency of professed pragmatists to slide into pragmatically unwise and harmful offensive actions or restrictions on speech in easy cases.)
Posted by: Bill Newman at January 25, 2005 07:08 AM
Bill is correct in that it wasn't our decision to go to war in Europe in WWII. Germany and then Italy declared war on the US in response to the US declaration of war on Japan after the attack at Pearl Harbor. It was part of the TriPartite treaty that created the Axis that the members would come to each other's defense. That it was a blunder on Hitler's part is indisputable, but one that allowed the Allies to wipe out fascism in Europe and Japan.
Therefore the European Theater operations in WWII would qualify under Jim Henley's 'threshold' of justified warfare.
Posted by: DCE at January 25, 2005 09:50 AM
I'm not going to consider all conceivable permutations of WW II. That's an exercise in futility. But with regard to the question of when going to war is justified, it seems to me that this issue is not that dissimilar from the question of when individuals can rightly use violence against other individuals.
Surely we all agree that each of us has a right to defend ourselves against unjust aggression (just aggression is another matter). But I also think we have the right to use violence in order to rescue those in distress. If I leave my office and see a grown man pummeling a little girl, I think I have the right to intervene and use force if necessary. This suggests that wars of rescue or liberation may also be legitimate, provided that:
1) The use of violence is a last resort (other methods have been tried and have failed).
2) The odds are the use of violence will improve the situation (i.e. the expected benefits of using violence exceed the expected costs).
3) One is not likely to harm the very person or persons one is attempting to rescue.
4) The intentions behind going to war are to achieve the good.
I think that if we apply these basic rules to countries we can devise a system where wars will be rare, as they should be.
Posted by: Mike at January 25, 2005 03:22 PM
I think there's a problem with using WWII as an example here. WWII was an inevitable response to the bad policies and choices made at the end of WWI. As has been said before, had we stayed out of WWI (using Jim's threshold), chances are an armistice would have been signed on better terms for the Germans. Eventually, there probably would have been something like the Weimar republic - and a much lower probability of a Nazi party.
That said, that wouldn't stop the inevitable conflict between the USSR and the west, but not before the physicists deduced the atom bomb was possible. This would have given Germany a significant lead in development (as Einstein and crew would not have fled Nazism), but the US/UK and USSR would have figured it out. There would have been a cold war, but a capitalist western Europe/US not devestated by Nazism/Fascism would have been better positioned against the USSR.
A more "libertarian" US foreign policy in the 30's might also have prevented Pearl Harbor. Japan rationalized that conflict as pre-emptive. We were going to get in their way.
People may think this is alot of "what if", but we shouldn't try to define strict policies that work around previous bad decisions that led to more ambiguous conflicts - the sooner we codify something in the constitution and our foreign policy, the safer our grandkids might be.
Few people understood that the "clean" Desert Storm might have some unhappy consequences (US troops stationed in SA/Oman/Bahrain/Jordan/Egypt, OBL enraged, thrown out, yada, yada). People think the consequences of Iraq are Middle-East democracies, Islamofreedom, perpetual war and what-not. I think we don't have a clue, but I can promise that with this crew, the price is going to way higher than anybody thinks, win OR lose.
Posted by: Steve at January 25, 2005 04:45 PM
"Neither Germany nor Italy posed any threat whatsoever to the United States?"
Really? Well Italy only really posed a danger to itself, and maybe Ethiopia on a good day. But Germany is a whole different story.
First, they kept Russia busy. If Molotov-Ribbentrop had stayed in force, you can bet Japan wouldn't have been able to get so uppity, nor would they have been able to engage in any significant actions against the United States. Now this might not in itself justify war, but they were allied to our enemy and at least indirectly aiding them.
Second, the prospect of an Axis victory in Europe presented a strategic threat to the United States. It is not unreasonable to assume that the US would not be able to defeat a Europe-wide Axis mano a mano. Such an outcome would lead to a cold war, at best. This perhaps is a better than usual example of entrusting the security of the United States to the word of a madman. This may or may not justify war , but post-declaration it certainly does.
Third, there's the whole holocaust thing. If you don't feel this justifies war, there's probably not much I can say to convince you otherwise.
Posted by: foolishmortal at January 27, 2005 01:43 AM
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