Moral Outrage May Not Be Enough to Justify War — especially When the Outrage Lacks Comprehensible Strategic Direction

09 September 2013

The intellectually toughest arguments are those with someone with a compassionate heart, but an untrained brain

Sense does not always prevail, when feelings get involved.

Take the following understandable — but poorly developed — thought from (emergency medicine) Professor Adam C. Levine, regarding the need to intervene in the Syrian blood bath:

The organophosphate poisonings that I've witnessed have been largely accidental, as children and adults consumed water or food unknowingly contaminated with concentrated pesticide. The thought of one human being, or a group of human beings, purposefully unleashing this fate on another group of human beings while they lie sleeping in their beds at night makes me want to vomit.

And as an emergency physician who has seen horrific trauma in my life, from gunshot wounds in Soweto, South Africa to blast injuries from exploding mortars near Misurata, Libya, I can attest that almost nothing makes me feel like vomiting.

I know that very smart, very rational individuals have argued that the 1500 deaths on August 21 were a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands who have died in Syria over the past two years. These individuals, however, have not heard what I've heard, smelled what I've smelled, and felt what I've felt.

Chemical weapons are different, which is why the nations of the world came together nearly a century ago to draw a thick red line around their use and place a large X across the middle.

To be clear, I am not necessarily advocating for unilateral military strikes against targets in Syria. I am sympathetic to the arguments made by so many I respect that such attacks without UN Security Council authorization would be illegal under international law and might even lead to more civilian deaths in Syria.

What I cannot stand, however, is the arguments made by those on both the left and the right that Syria is simply "not in our strategic interest."

Crimes against humanity are the responsibility of all of humanity. This is precisely why we call them crimes against humanity.

So, vomit is the guiding line?

Apparently professor-physician Levine believes that whatever makes him vomit should constitute the “do not cross” line in international and humanitarian affairs.

But an identical argument could have been made against virtually any other new and horrible weapon. Perhaps Dr. Levine would not vomit at the sight and smell of roasted flesh on an emergency room gurney, but I might upon the first time — for example — seeing dozens of folks running (hopelessly) around with burning napalm (or phosphorus) glued to them.

And if Professor Levine would not have wanted to vomit during the fire bombings of World War II, there’s something wrong with him.

Distinguishing moral levels between the various atrocious modes of inducing tortuous death in others is a silly exercise

The soulful horribleness of all these acts is the moral line.

Once we tacitly approve killing folks for the variety of reasons — which we constantly dream up — stopping ourselves from incorporating new weapons into the process is a virtually impossible errand.

By way of left handed example, the only reason that mutually assured destruction (in nuclear affairs) worked was because it was pretty darn certain, and the super powers knew it. Most other weapons are too restricted in their effects to harvest that kind of reason-encouraging finality.

As I have indicated before, we tend to use whatever is necessary to our (presumed) survival. Witness the United States’ use of nuclear weapons in Japan in 1945 and its approval of Saddam Hussein’s repeated use of nerve gas during the Iran-Iraq War.

If we strip away the logical arbitrariness of his argument, Professor Levine’s point appears to be that the shocking nature of chemical agents should be harnessed to motivate a humanitarian end to the conflict.

I certainly do not disagree with that. But I do contend that the moral arguments that distinguish armed intervention from non-intervention (or unarmed intervention) need to be rationally sounder than the one he came up with.

In the case of American messing about, I tend to be more humbly and realistically inclined than those who want to intervene without a plan and without a (somewhat) statistically sound way of predicting the intervention’s results. Most recent American interventions, by the way, have taken place because it was in some plutocratic group’s self-interest to do so.

Logical arbitrariness

“Makes me vomit” is an arbitrary distinction, whose standard would change from historical age to age and from person to person.

The vomit factor also predicts nothing about which anti-vomit intervention is likely to work. Even Professor Levine tacitly admits that:

The question we should be asking today with regards to Syria is not whether to intervene, but how best to intervene.

If there are non-military means to put a stop to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, then let us discuss them quickly, and implement them as rapidly as possible, either as a nation or as a community of nations. If we choose to do nothing, however, then four years from now it won't be President Obama standing before the Syrian people, delivering an apology speech for his inaction. It will be all of us instead.

The moral? — Moral outrage gets us nowhere, when we lack both the brain and the experience to see our foggy way through the applicable circumstances

I have not heard a whit of realistic sense from the Obama Administration on the Syrian matter. Its policy appears to be based on a combination of moral impulse and camouflaged support for the Military Industrial Complex’s instinct for profit.

In regard to moral impulse, we are all outraged, much of the time. But a sensible person only rarely lights his or her fury into something that is probably going to harm others and themselves, when put into action.

What is going on in Syria is soulfully offensive. But lacking a realistic means to end it quasi-permanently — and without causing yet more conflagration — we are stymied.

Unlike the Rwandan genocide — which Dr. Levine mentions in support of his amorphously supported interventional argument — the consequences of a Syrian intervention are less predictable, given (i) the multiplicity of players, (ii) the local complexity of the Middle East cauldron, and (iii) the strong-armed constraints that Russia, China, and Iran are exerting in the matter.

I see no way to militarily exert substantial influence in the Syrian matter. And I see no clear way to politically influence the evil Assad regime to stop attempting to survive. Professor Levine doesn’t either. He’s just sounding off the way most of us do, most of time — yet with no clear plan regarding how we’re going to get to where we “know” we should go.

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Moral Outrage May Not Be Enough to Justify War — especially When the Outrage Lacks Comprehensible Strategic Direction