Atrocities and psychological harms are predictable consequences of war ─ considering both before starting a war should be ethically mandatory

© 2010 Peter Free

 

12 May 2010

 

Unnecessary war makes the predictable costs of war less defensible

 

The price of war includes the atrocities and psychological harms that accompany what war-making forces (or encourages) us to do.  Unnecessary war makes these costs less defensible.  Consequently, the United States needs to rethink its too-convenient use of armed conflict as a primary instrument of national policy.

 

Americans apparently only pretend to dislike war

 

Americans pretend to dislike military action, yet too readily resort to it ─ forgetting that predictable ramifications of government-sponsored killing contradict the benevolent image we say we want to project.  This hypocrisy occurs because the public is increasingly isolated from the effects of combat.  Most of us do not see that atrocity and wide-spread psychological harm are foreseeable consequences of the use of deadly force.

 

War predictably and uncontrollable triggers barbarity

 

War necessarily triggers barbarity that violates international conventions regarding the proper conduct of violent confrontations.  In combat, staying alive and keeping one’s unit unharmed are the only goals.  In the heat of the moment, humanity understandably regresses down civilization’s ladder.  Under threat of imminent death (whether from immediate combat or from hostile-harboring noncombatants), applicable treaties and social conventions are easily seen as meaningless.

 

People who deny this are lying or have not been sufficiently tested.

 

Our survival-oriented genes are responsible

 

The regression into less civilized behavior is the result of a genetic makeup that allowed us to survive and procreate during difficult evolutionary times.  Keeping an opponent’s innocents unharmed and un-enslaved runs counter to basic evolutionary impulses. 

 

Not every one will act badly under threat, but many will.  And many who did not act badly will, if tested again and again.

 

Life and death often catch us at our weakest.  Assuming otherwise is a manifestation of deliberate stupidity.

 

Atrocities are inevitable and need to be considered before going to war

 

Atrocities in war are inevitable, given the range of character types the military must recruit.

 

My Lai (Vietnam) and Abu Ghraib (Iraq) ─ and thousands of unreported smaller horrors ─ are foreseeable consequences of putting a wide variety of personal character types into violent situations.  In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the enemy’s ability to conceal himself among non-combatants accentuated the likelihood that non-combatants would be harmed, deliberately or by not-so-careful mistake.  This, too, is a predictable consequence of armed conflict.

 

Cover-ups camouflage war’s predictable excesses

 

From an honest (as opposed to hypocritical) leadership’s perspective, there is no point to punishing people for doing what comes naturally under difficult circumstances.  Only armchair philosophers and saints think that war can be constrained to the morally good side of the field.  For purposes of show, as a general rule, only the lowest ranking people are sacrificed to hypocrisy’s purity.  The rest pretend that a sprinkling of allegedly bad people tainted war’s (non-existent) moral purity.

 

Moral good in the conduct of war is necessary, though unattainable

 

Paradoxically, moral good in the conduct of war is what we (as a society) should be after.  Although armed force is arguably justified in any pursuit of the national interest, a national interest that lacks morality is not one most Americans feel comfortable pursuing.  Most of us seem to think that what sets the United States apart from history’s example is our nation’s adherence to doing right as often as we can.

 

Consequently, given that war breeds atrocities and psychological harms, it would be wise to commit only to those wars that absolutely have to be fought.  It is easier to live with the negative effects of regressing down the civilization scale, when war is the only effective solution to a major problem.

 

If I kill someone (under the pressure of a fast-evolving situation) who turns out to have been a non-combatant, it is easier to live with the memory when the war was absolutely justified.  It is much more difficult, when (a) the conflict was questionably brought and/or (b) leadership should have recognized that such kill/no-kill decisions would come much too often for combatants to competently distinguish.

 

As with policing, it is foolish and morally unjustified to put warriors in situations in which their survival instincts will frequently be proven wrong.

 

Our recent history refutes the do-good illusion

 

Our recent war pattern refutes the American do-good illusion.  In part, because we have initiated unnecessary wars without first considering their foreseeably high toll on honorable behavior.  Torture (Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, extraordinary and irregular renditions) and collateral damage that predictably kills numerous innocents are supposedly not the American way.

 

Yet we continue to do both.

 

Almost worse, we regularly put our warriors in immensely difficult, yet strategically unnecessary, situations which only a lucky saint could traverse without moral compromise.

 

The price of missed strategy and an ill-balanced assessment of consequences

 

Effective war requires (i) intelligent strategy and (ii) a balanced assessment of the predictable behavioral and psychological evils that come from committing to it.

 

Afghanistan and Iraq lacked strategy and a wise balancing of moral evils at the outset.  These wars (a) escalated worldwide resistance to our geopolitical efforts, (b) diminished our standing as a moral example to other nations, (c) did psychological harm to thousands of our warriors by putting them in geopolitically unnecessary survival situations, and (d) killed and maimed innumerable Afghanis and Iraqis for no persuasively good reason.

 

These moral and strategic losses are the price of leadership's ignorance, cynicism, and moral vacuity.