Reasons to Kill: A Conversation with Richard E. Rubenstein

Q. In REASONS TO KILL, you study the arguments that pro-war advocates have made throughout American history as we’ve mobilized for war. What reoccurring themes did you find in our rhetorical and philosophical strategies?

Richard E. Rubenstein.  This book is not about the factors that motivate elites to make war. Elites have many reasons to fight, including economic interests, geopolitical ambitions, and domestic political motives. The basic question I ask is: What convinces ordinary Americans to send their kinfolk, friends, and countrymen to kill other people and risk their own bodies and minds in battle? The overall answer, I find, is that we are persuaded to fight by appeals to widely shared and deeply held moral values – values associated with what some call our civil religion. The most common themes are these:

* Self-defense. We have a moral right and duty to defend the nation against unjustified attacks. The problem is that we have vastly expanded the definition of self-defense. The “self” we feel justified in defending is not just America’s soil and people but U.S. troops, intelligence agents, civilian employees, private contractors, and allied forces around the globe. Equating this imperial apparatus with American proper creates what I call “imperial circularity” and generates an endlessly expanding war.

* Evil enemies. We have a moral duty to destroy diabolical leaders who commit atrocities against their own people, threaten their neighbors, and seek world domination. The problem is that we often label adversaries absolutely evil when they are not really satanic and can be dealt with in ways short of total war. To justify U.S. participation in World War I, we converted Kaiser Wilhelm II into the “Beast of Berlin,” and to justify attacking Iraq we diabolized Saddam Hussein. Sometimes we label a whole people evil, which can lead to violence on a horrific scale.

* Humanitarian interventions and moral crusades. We have a special mission to secure the values of democracy, human rights, civil order, and moral decency around the world, by military means if necessary. The problem is that the U.S. is a superpower with its own interests and cultural biases, not a disinterested liberator of the oppressed. More often than not, as in the case of the Spanish-American War, we end up acting exactly like the tyrants and aggressors we oppose.

* Patriotic duty. We earned our freedom by fighting for it. When Uncle Sam asks us to fight, even die, for our nation, we should be prepared to do so. The problem is that patriotism has never meant killing and dying on command. Generations of American patriots have demanded that the government justify war by showing that there is a real threat to the nation and that violence is needed to counter it. What I call communal patriotism creates a special problem by excluding anti-war dissenters from the American community.

* National honor. If we don’t demonstrate that we are willing to fight, we will lose face and credibility, bad people will take advantage of us, and we will become a humiliated second-rate nation. For the same reason, once we have committed the nation to a war, we cannot retreat or withdraw without dishonor. The problem is that this is not a moral doctrine; it is an insecure cowboy machismo posing as morality. Most American wars since the end of World War have ended in something short of victory, and most should not have been fought at all.

* No peaceful alternative. Negotiations to avert war have failed, or they would be fruitless, since the enemy cannot be trusted to keep its word. The only alternative to war is therefore dishonorable appeasement. The problems are that the U.S. refuses to negotiate in good faith as much as any other nation, and that, even where it is attempted, negotiation falls short of conflict resolution. Without serious attempts at conflict resolution – that is, ending violence by eliminating its underlying causes – war is never a last resort.

Q. You note the United States has the most bellicose record of all modern nations and in REASONS TO KILL are most curious about why people follow. Can you tell us a bit about your ideas here?

R.R.  There are two common answers to this question. One: Americans are naïve and easy to manipulate and will buy any war that is cleverly packaged and marketed. I call this the innocent dupe theory. Two: Americans are weapons-loving warriors who like to fight: the frontier killer theory. Both theories contain part of the truth, but neither gets to the heart of the matter, which is that we are a people who will not ordinarily fight unless we are convinced that a war is necessary and morally justified.

Americans have been sold a bill of goods in the past, from President Polk’s dubious claim that the Mexican army had invaded America in 1846 to President Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with al Qaeda. But we are not so much tricked into fighting as persuaded to fight by arguments and images that emphasize the evil nature of some adversary and our own innocence and vulnerability. Similarly, the U.S. has incubated the sort of local warrior culture described by Senator Jim Webb in his book, Born Fighting. Nevertheless, we are not impelled to fight because of the Appalachian frontier tradition – if that were true, American history would not demonstrate so many strong and widespread anti-war movements. We choose war, sometimes, because we are convinced that we need to fight for reasons of self-defense or moral obligation, and that there is honorable alternative.

Q. Speaking of anti-war movements, public approval has been low for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet antiwar mobilizations haven’t occurred on the scale that they did during Vietnam. Why do you think this is?

RR. Some think that the principal reason is the absence of the draft and the creation of professional armed forces. Professionalization of the military plays some role, but I do not think that it is the main reason. We drafted men to fight the Korean War, and that did not generate a mass anti-war movement even though the war became very unpopular. Conversely, we did not draft soldiers to fight the War of 1812 or the Iraq War, but there was enormous opposition to those conflicts nevertheless.

Three reasons for today’s passive discontent seem most important to me: fear, cooptation, and recession.

Fear: Americans are still traumatized by the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks, and fears of a new attack are kept alive by reports of new conspiracies hatched and new plots broken up. Of course, there is reason to be concerned about terrorist attacks, but the fear in America goes way beyond that in other nations, such as Britain and Spain, that have experienced more recent attacks. I believe we are panicking because of concerns that are not generally recognized, including the disturbing recognition that are are not a “chosen people” exempted from material, social, and spiritual problems that affect the rest of the world. I think we are beginning to recognize that our empire is tottering – and that’s a scary prospect for many people.

Cooptation: Barack Obama’s election raised expectations for a new deal both in domestic and in foreign policy. Even though many of his supporters are disappointed in the results so far, many are unwilling to abandon their original hopes. So far at least, there has been no Great Betrayal equivalent to Lyndon Johnson’s commitment of half a million troops to Vietnam, which triggered the anti-war movement of the sixties. Moreover, many of Obama’s policies are oracular – they mean what people want them to mean. Conservatives can interpret his escalation of the Afghan War as a sign of his toughness, while liberals can interpret the same escalation as a preliminary to negotiations.

Recession: Technically, the recession is over, but grave economic problems persist. The result is exactly the opposite of what happened at the height of the great economic boom of 1945-65, when people’s expectations soared, inspiring a series of group liberation movements, detonating a cultural revolution, and generating a new sense of entitlement and solidarity among young people. People do not usually mobilize en masse against war if they are worried about finding jobs or defending the cultural gains of the past against attack. By the same token, if America remains bogged down in endless wars, both expectations and anger can be expected to rise as the economy revives and the trauma of September 11 abates. One further condition may be necessary: a shocking event equivalent to the Tet Offensive of February 1968 in Vietnam. It is impossible to say what form this will take – but, given our involvement in violent activities around the world, a significant shock seems likely.

Q. What were your thoughts on Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech?

RR. I found the speech very disappointing – a few hoary cliches about war and peace flimsily disguised as a new foreign policy. “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man,” Obama said. “At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease.” This will be news to most evolutionary scientists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. The evidence suggests that early humans were peaceful creatures and that war did not appear until people began settling in densely populated river valleys, where classes of warriors and priests first appeared. Moreover, almost as soon as this happened, prophetic figures like Isaiah of Jerusalem (8th century BCE) arose to question the morality of collective violence.

Even more questionable was Obama’s use of the theory of the Just War to justify America’s current “war on terrorism.” “Evil does exist in the world,” said the president. “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

How does Obama know this? Has he offered to meet with al Qaeda? Obviously not. The president is quite right about Hitler – but the analogy between the Nazis and Islamist extremists is flawed. Since World War II, every American president who wants to fight a war, from Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam to George W. Bush in Iraq, has labeled the enemy of the moment a new Adolf Hitler. Hitler made an agreement with Britain and France at Munich and then tore it up. But how does Obama know that negotiations with al Qaeda would be useless? He makes this assertion because he is convinced that they are diabolical and that one cannot negotiate with the devil.

This is a mistake. Islamist terrorists are relatively, not absolutely, evil. They are the violent, misguided fringe of a much larger movement with real grievances against America and the West. Bin Laden is the tip of an iceberg that can be melted – but not by the methods of total war used against Hitler and the Nazis. I would not negotiate with Usama bin Laden either, in the sense of bargaining with him, but I would offer to meet with any and all Islamic leaders who want to discuss what is wrong with their relationship with America and what to do about that. Such a meeting should be strictly confidential, open to influential figures who are not official leaders of any nation or group, and facilitated by impartial conflict resolvers. It might mark the beginning of a new era in Western-Islamic relations.

This kind of conflict resolution is exactly what the British and Irish did in connection with Northern Ireland – they used the services of an impartial peacemaker – America’s George Mitchell – to bring together violent extremists on both the Catholic and Protestant sides for serious analytical talks. The result was a split in each movement. The ultras on both sides isolated themselves, and militants who were calling each other children of the devil shortly before conclusion of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended up sharing power in a new Northern Ireland.

The final disappointment in Oslo was the president’s insistence that the U.S. “has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms,” and that we did this not for the sake of power, but out of the goodness of our hearts. This is a grotesque misreading of history. Six decades ago, the U.S. fought the Korean War, which could be justified, up to a point, as an effort to defend South Korean independence against a North Korean invasion. But the vast expansion of American power since then – with hundreds of military bases in more than 60 countries – has far more to do with U.S. geopolitical and economic interests than with “global security.” President Obama equates American power with global security. He is unwilling to say the “E word” – empire – or to recognize that trying to maintain an American empire makes both the world and the United States less secure.

Q. Do you believe there is such a thing as a “good war”?

RR. I believe that there have been a few justifiable wars, although very few, and that even these can be justified only in part. Justifying war involves three requirements: the war must be necessary, it must be fought for a good cause, and it must cause the minimum amount of human suffering consistent with vindicating that cause. No war since Korea has fulfilled these essential requirements . . . and even Korea seems to me a marginal case, since it became a war of conquest when U.S. forces crossed the 38th parallel in order to unify the nation under American control.

World War II was necessary because it proved impossible to negotiate with Hitler or the Japanese government. (Hitler himself would not have been a factor if Germany had been treated decently at the end of World War I, instead of being impoverished and humiliated, but that is another story.) World War II was also fought for a partially good cause, since we could not co-exist with fascist regimes that enslaved and exterminated millions of people, and that commanded the most powerful economies outside the U.S. The violence used to defeat the Axis powers was justified up to a point, but we ended by subjecting enemy civilians to wildly excessive force. It was unnecessary and wrong to cause a firestorm over undefended Dresden, incinerate Tokyo, and drop atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, taking hundreds of thousands of lives when our enemies were on the verge of surrendering.

At present, in my view, there is no way to justify a “War on Terrorism” that obfuscates America’s imperial role, portrays the leaders of mass movements like the Taliban and Hezbollah as isolated terrorists, corrupts and brutalizes societies subject to U.S. intervention, and inflames the structural situation that is generating anti-Western violence. It is not just a new foreign policy we need but a new way of understanding ourselves and the world we inhabit. In developing this new understanding, I think that critical conflict theory has a crucial role to play.

Richard E. Rubenstein is a part of Unrest’s Editorial Cell and a professor of Conflict Resolution and Public Affairs at The School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. His latest book Reasons to Kill: Why Americans Choose War is available now.  Rich can be contacted through his blog:  www.reasonstokill.com