WHY WE MUST RESIST ALL WAR
My first political cause—back when I was 13 years old—was to end the Vietnam War. (My second was to support a Palestinian State.)
There were few protests or marches in my hometown of 5000. I attended an event about Kent State tragedy in 1970. I went to a lot more protests and rallies when I went to college. My first campaign was for George McGovern in 1972 largely because of his opposition to the war. In the spring of 1972, when I was 16, I ran the field campaign for McGovern in my hometown. We beat the regulars who were supporting Humphrey. (My dad was among the regulars, although he was against the Vietnam War long before I even know what it was about.) And I was among a group of volunteers for McGovern during my first semester of college that fall.
During those years, I heard many speakers who opposed the Vietnam War. But there were some speakers who spoke not just against that war but against war more generally. They were not necessarily all pacifists although some were. Some of them supported particular wars, usually WW II. But they were insistent on criticizing not just the Vietnam War but on what I’m going to call here the “easy turn to war.” They wanted us to deeply question not just this or that war but the readiness with which most human beings embrace war as a possible solution to national or international difficulties.
The two speakers I most remember who took this line were George Wald, a noble prize winning scientist who taught at Harvard. I heard him speak from one of the first pews in one of the big churches just off Harvard Square in about 1976. Wald was a pacifist. The other was Michael Harrington, the long-time socialist leader and founder of what is now DSA who I met in 1977 or so. He spoke to a small group of about 15 or 20 graduate and undergraduate students brought together by my teacher Michael Walzer, was his friend and a socialist political theorist. Harrington had been a pacifist during his earlier days in the Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker’s movement. But his views had evolved and while he was a strong and early critic of the Vietnam War, he was not a pacifist when I heard him speak. (And while he was critical critic of the Vietnam war, who did not align with those who, in opposing the Vietnam War, sided with the Viet Cong or North Vietnam. I’m certain he would not be happy with DSA’s alignment with Hamas today.)
They were both powerful speakers. I don’t remember what they said but I clearly remember the overall thesis they put forward, the tone of their voice, and some of their gestures.
I enjoyed listening to them. But I have to say I didn’t really embrace their views. I was very far from being a pacifist. Like Walzer, who wrote an important book on the morality of war, I was ready to criticize wars of aggression and attacks on civilians. But there were too many cases, I thought, when war was justified even if it was not carried out well. World War II was the paradigmatic example of a good war. But even in that good war, I believed then and now that the late bombing of cities in the European Theater, the fire-bombing of Japanese cities, and the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were morally unjustified.
I did some work on foreign policy and international relations as a graduate student at Harvard. That was not to make me more critical of war in general. Most of the courses in those fields I took were with Stanley Hoffman whose elegant and skeptical way of thinking about foreign affairs appealed to me. (I was so taken with how he thought that I once wrote a paper that mimicked his style. He commented, “the ideas are good, the style is not quite it.” ) Hoffman was often critical of military action. But, perhaps because deep skepticism about the utility of war was so contrary to most thought in these fields and he wanted to be taken seriously within it, his criticisms were subtle. Looking back, they may have been more subtle than I realized that the time.
At any rate, over the years I’ve protested other US wars and interventions including those in Central America and the Middle East. But I did it on a case by case basis. And for a brief moment I was fooled into thinking that there might be a justification for the second Iraq War because I stupidly trusted Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s assertion that Iraq had nuclear weapons. At the last moment I changed my mind. But looking back, I should have been far more skeptical of those assertions.
For what I realize now is that there are some deep seated reasons that most human beings are far too quick to embrace war as a response to various threats. Those reasons are so powerful that too many of us fail to be critical enough of the case being made for any particular war. Wald and Harrington were right. We need to be extremely cautious before we recommend or support going to war. We need to and hold those who argue for such a course to account for the arguments they make—and the important consideration against war that they ignore.
This was all brought home to me by the debates about the current disastrous war. I’ve seen people I respect make what I think are horrible arguments for this war. And I’ve realized that those arguments are not just wrong in the particular case but are the product of what I think of as cognitive (and as we shall see not just cognitive) defects.
WHY THE REASONS FOR WAR SEEM MORE POWERFUL THAN THEY ARE
We are too often more inclined to go to war for two broad reasons. The first is that we give more credence to the reasons to go to war than they deserve. The second is we have too much confidence in the efficacy of war.
Fear
The argument for war often rests on fear that is heightened far beyond reality. There is no question that it would be better for the world if Iran did not have a bomb. But that’s true of many countries including Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. And while they have atomic weapons, they have not used them and are unlikely to do so. The USSR and China and the US have had nuclear weapons for about 70 years and since their first use by our country, they have not been used again. The danger of these weapons are so great that they heighten concerns about their use so—especially when the possibility of either a response in kind or blowback of radiation is taken into consideration. And we have learned how to create arrangements that include both the possibility of retaliation and conflict moderating measures to keep us from the nuclear brink.
Everything I said about nuclear weapons applies to other weapons as well. No country wants to face a well-armed neighbor. But that has been the fate of most states over most of human history. And those circumstances don’t always lead to war, especially we work to keep conflicts from escalating.
But one of the things that makes it harder to stop such escalation is fear itself. We are often so captured by our fears—and so exaggerate them—that we take steps that lead to war, such as an armaments race that undermine the efforts to avoid war. We see the other side as increasingly dangerous while ignoring how our own actions help encourage the other side to create the military we fear.
Revenge
The argument for war—and unjust war—sometimes rests on the human desire for revenge especially against sneak or surprise attack. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a horrible shock to the US. Resentment about both those who were killed in a sneak attack and against the disruption of peace itself provides some of the explanation I believe for the US war crimes with which the Pacific War ended. Similarly, the rush to war in Afghanistan was in no small part a result of the US seeking revenge for the horrible attack of 9/11. And, of course, the horrors of October 7 explain not just the endless Israeli war on Gaza but the failure of Israel to live up to its usual efforts to reduce civilian deaths and its the inhumane use of humanitarian aid as a weapon.
The desire for revenge not only makes war more likely, more extensive, and more horrible but it also makes it harder for countries to recognize their own role in bringing war on. It does not excuse the attacks of December 7, and October 8 to point out that, in various ways, US and Israeli policy encouraged those attacks and that a different policy might have forestalled them. Islamic radicalism was not created by US policy. It is a native ideological movement that opposed the influence of Western, liberal ideas in the Muslim world. But it is clear that the Islamic radicalism of Al Qaeda or Iran would have been less likely to target the US if not for our support for repressive regimes we supported. Similarly, while the notion that Netanyahu created Hamas is a lie, he certainly encouraged Qatar to fund it as a way of splitting the Palestinian movement. And that was only one way in which Netanyahu strengthened Palestinian extremism. He also stood did so by standing in the way of any progress to a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. (To be clear, Palestinian extremists did the same and strengthened the Israeli right in doing so.)
Humanitarian Reasons
The third cognitive defect is our tendency to embrace war for humanitarian reasons. The Iranian regime is genuinely awful to its own people. And too often use our concern for others to justify our wars although is usually more a public argument politicians offer in defense of their actions than the reasons they act.
The problem with humanitarian reasons for war is that good motives don’t justify war if there is no way to obtain those objectives. And it is very difficult for states to improve life in another country especially if the people in the oppressed country are not ready and organized to fight for themselves—as the Iranians were not. And when one country tries to rescue another, they often assume the burden of a war in a way that undermines indigenous governments as the US arguably did in Vietnam..
There are some examples of useful interventions that tip the balance to the good (or less evil) side (eg in Kosovo) or that stop a humanitarian disaster. There are far more examples where humanitarian intervention leads to disaster itself.
OVERCONFIDENCE ABOUT WAR
So we often give too much credence to weak reasons for going to war. But that is only half the problem. The other half is that we have far too much confidence in the ability of war to bring about good outcomes. This has been a persistent problem for the US. It partly accounts for our failed wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and now in Iran. This overconfidence has a few elements.
The first cognitive issue here is overestimating conventional military strength. Conventional powers like the US and Israel often underestimate the power of asymmetric warfare, that is warfare that uses unconventional warfare to counter a conventionally powerful opponent. Asymmetric warfare often is less costly than conventional warfare but as effective if not in doing damage to the other side but in stopping it from attain its strategic goals. The guerilla warfare of the Viet Cong by itself could not defeat the US. But it could make it impossible for the US to win the war at any reasonable cost. Similarly, the drone warfare of Iran as well as the ability of Iran to create worldwide economic catastrophe by closing the Strait of Hormuz have, so far, overcome the devastating ability of the US to blow things up in Iran.
The second issue here is an overconfidence in one’s own willingness to accept the pain of war. The US military thought the US was winning the Vietnam War because Vietnamese causalities were so much higher than our own. Defenders of the Iran war assert that the US is winning because we are doing so much more damage to the weaponry and industrial base of Iran. But the Vietnamese were fighting for their independence and had been for decades. They were willing to accept far more pain than the US was. Similarly, despite opposition go the Iranian regime, the regime itself and, it appears, many ordinary Iranians are willing to accept deep losses to keep the regime in power. After the experience of Vietnam, the US is unwilling to accept large numbers of combat deaths. And, at some point, the enormous financial costs of our contemporary wars makes even the Defense Department think twice.
Losing Domestic Support
The fourth cognitive issue is a corollary to the last one. Too often major powers fight wars with the expectation that it will have popular support whether because of fear and the desire for revenge or the expectation that the war will be short.
But fear and the desire for revenge are not always sustained especially when countered by military failure that results from overconfidence.
But because war is costly and not everyone shares the cognitive defects that lead to support for war—or back the political faction or party that initiated the war—opposition to war eventually arises in more or less democratic powers. That opposition increases when military failures due to overconfidence arise. It increases even more when moral opposition to a war badly fought arises.
Fear, and even the desire for revenge, tend to dissipate as all these conditions worsen.
Failure to Think Ahead
This last cognitive defect—the failure to plan ahead—is the product of all of the previous ones. Fear and the desire for revenge on the one hand and overconfidence on the other leads major powers to enter into wars without the thorough planning for contingencies. Now planning for war is hard, as Clausewitz made clear. There are always unknown unknowns.
Some of these failures are immediate, as when a major power does not think about what comes after a military victory that overthrows the government of its enemy. Chaos is usually not a better outcome than the continuation in power of the enemy.
Sometimes failures to think ahead take decades to become evident. Even wars that seem successful rebound into future problems. The victory of the allies in World War I, when coupled by the desire for revenge, created the conditions that led to World War II. The successful coup of 1954 in Iran led to the rise of the Islamic Republic in 1970
The failure of the Bush administration to plan for end of the war after in the Iraq War or for the Trump administration to plan for the second week of the war is not just a matter of incompetence. There often is plenty of that, of course, and incompetence is one thing that every political leaders should expect. But planning for war is hard. The overconfidence in our military capabilities leads us to think everything will go so well and that we can handle all contingencies. And fear and revenge lead us to think that we must act no matter what dangers arise from war.
IS THIS NOT A CALL FOR APPEASEMENT?
The common answer to my argument is to cite Chamberlain failed appeasement of Hitler. There is no question that there are times when it is better to fight a war earlier than late or at least to not appease foreign aggression when doing so is likely to lead to further aggression.
I don’t disagree with this idea. But resisting aggression is one thing. There is then amoral basis for resistance. Preemptive and preventive war justified to stop a possible future aggression is something else entirely
And there are many ways to respond to aggression. Churchill rightly criticized the Munich Pact. But I don’t think even he was ready to go to war with Hitler at that moment. Instead. he called on Britain to prepare for war with more determination and resources than it had. He called on allies to work together to prepare for war. And in a world like our own, with far more economic interdependence than in the 1940s, he might have called for alternative to war that would punish Hitler, including economic sanctions.
At any rate, too many of our wars have nothing to do with resisting aggression. And they all need to be questioned.
THE MORAL CASE TO QUESTION WAR
I have presented these arguments mostly in an analytical fashion as I was trained to do in graduate school. But I want to end with the most important reason to question the case for war, the one that actually deserves primacy of place.
War kills. War maims, War orphans children. War creates economic chaos that also kills, creates orphans and disease. War involves a most horrible waste of resources include the most important resource the potential of each and every human life.
There are always reasons to go to war. There are always reasons to say that the sacrifices we make in war are “worth it.” What I have tried to do here is call those reasons into question so that we can focus on the most important reason to question war, that it is injurious to what we should value most, our lives, the lives of people in the countries with which we go to war, and the lives of all of our children.
The defects I’ve been talking about are not just cognitive but moral. Our easy turn to war leads not just to intellectual but moral foolishness and then to humanitarian disaster. The reason to keep in mind all the ways in which mistakenly justify or defend war is not just to avoid intellectual errors but to avoid moral and humanitarian devastation.
CONCLUSION
I don’t recall exactly what George Wald and Michael Harrington said in those speeches I heard forty five years ago. But I remember their moral passion, and their insistence that war must not be seen as a tool of public policy but aa horrible choice which we must resist with all our power. We must rigorously question every war and point to the typical failures human beings tend to make at all times and places. In doing so, we can better ensure that war is always the very last resort, entered into in self-defense, not with the expectation it will lead to something good even for our own side. A war of choice is, to my current thinking, always stupid and immoral.
It has taken me a long time to really grasp this claim, which Wald and Harrington made in their very different ways. But I hope this essay helps more of you to do so.
I’m still not a pacifist. But I now understand just why we must fight long and hard, against temptation to go to war unless there is really no other choice.