10

Wh y We (C on t i n u e to) F igh t

What he [the fatalist] at first thought to be inevitable, he helps to make

so through his very belief.
—Alain, Mars ou la guerre jugée1

T he long-standing presumption in favor of military means of resolv-

ing disputes is so deeply embedded in the hearts and minds of people
that the prospect of war’s abolition through any means other than the
very annihilation of the species may seem rather bleak. Most people
would probably agree that war should be a last resort, but many also
appear to believe that war is sometimes unavoidable and reject out of
hand the pacifist’s stance, maintaining that other s will wage war, and
so we must be prepared to fight back.
The idea that war is ultimately ineluctable derives from a general
pessimism about the limits of negotiation and the impotence of reason
in the international realm, and rests upon an equally pessimistic view
of human nature (Barash and Webel 2008). There will be corrupt
and evil though charismatic leaders, who keenly and systematically
deceive their people, and we must therefore be prepared to deal with
such creatures—so the reasoning goes. But universal claims regard-
ing the inevitability of war are irrelevant to analyses of particular
situations involving detailed plans of action on the part of individual
conscious agents. Fatalists often support or reject their own leaders’
calls to war. Fatalists either pay federal taxes, thereby contributing to
war efforts, or else they do not. Presumably these choices are under
the fatalist’s control.
Human beings are creatures of habit, including habits of thought,
and received views such as that “war is inevitable” are for this rea-
son quite difficult to dislodge, even as the nature of modern war
continues to transmogrify beyond anything even vaguely reminis-
cent of what was known as war in the past. This conservative cogni-
tive tendency is entirely comprehensible, for received views form the

L. Calhoun, War and Delusion

© Laurie Calhoun 2013
188 Wa r a n d D e l u s ion

basis of our reasoning about more controversial issues and so are

only rarely called into question. In fact, it would be impossible to
question even a fraction of our everyday assumptions without under-
mining our own ability to function (Harman 1986). We accept on
faith the opinions of authorities in virtually every realm of human
activity. Most of the time we do not ask questions at all, and when
we do inquire more deeply into this or that matter, we turn to “the
experts” (Calhoun 1997).
The experts in international politics are naturally considered by the
populace to be those officers, diplomats, and representatives either
appointed or elected to serve the nation. In the United States, how
defense is to be carried out is determined by the people employed
by the Department of Defense, who advise the commander in chief
about when and where to deploy military force. Self-reflective critique
is extremely rare at the upper echelons of military institutions. Only
people who believe in the rational defensibility of recourse to deadly
force freely enter the military, and officers rise in the ranks through
obeying the orders of their superiors. Government officials do some-
times later express misgivings about the initiatives instigated by them
in the name of national defense, as did former US secretary of defense
Robert S. McNamara many years after the end of the US intervention
in Vietnam. But the damage has already been done, in McNamara’s
case, to the detriment of millions of innocent people (McNamara
1996). In spite of such glaring mistakes, defense spending is unerr-
ingly supported by lawmakers, who base their legislation upon the
testimony of military officials, while at the same time answering to
the voters, most of whom simply assume that those in charge are
competent and have the people’s best interests in mind. In this way,
through an ever-accelerating and increasingly perilous spiral of both
psychological and economic forces, the just war paradigm continues
to prevail in a world in which the nature of weapons and aerial trans-
port have irrevocably altered the concept, the conduct, and the con-
sequences of war.
The major military initiatives of recent decades demonstrated
strategists’ remarkable degree of ignorance regarding the cultures
involved. Time and time again, the one-size-fits-all approach of mili-
tary force as a response to conflict proved to be counterproductive. In
Vietnam, military planners failed to recognize that the US invaders
were regarded not as liberators but as colonizers along the lines of the
French. In Afghanistan, the bombing campaign and dismantling of
the Taliban resulted in a veritable explosion in the production of nar-
cotics and the reign of local warlords throughout the land as a result
 W h y W e (C on t i n u e t o) F ig h t 189

of a US-installed puppet government whose authority scarcely reached

beyond Kabul (Danesch 2004, 176–211). The deposing of Saddam
Hussein ignited ethnic conflicts and transformed Iraq into an incu-
bation chamber for terrorists. The ousting of Muammar Gaddafi in
Libya in 2011 led to marked instability and insecurity throughout the
land. The list goes on and on: all over the globe, flames of violence
have been fed, not extinguished, by military “solutions” to conflict.
Despite a lengthy list of military fiascoes, the pretension of cer-
tain knowledge of what will transpire should we fail to take up arms
pervades pro-military rhetoric, leading time and time again to a gen-
eral acquiescence to the alleged necessity of war. In 1991, presuming
knowledge of the catastrophe to follow should soldiers not fight for
their leader’s proclaimed cause, war supporters rehearsed the stan-
dard script, expatiating on the impending doom to ensue if Saddam
Hussein was not stopped. In fact, what we know from history—no
more and no less—is that the use of homicidal weapons will destroy
human beings. There is no logical connection between political goals
and the deployment of deadly force in densely populated regions
plagued by ferment and strife. There is a virtual guarantee that inno-
cent people will through the recourse to war be sacrificed.
The epistemological pretense in the war supporter’s claims is
remarkable in its marshaling of the evidence in favor of war. He claims
to know what will happen if his group does not take up arms, while
at the same time ignoring in the buildup to the war the reality of
the certain consequences of deploying homicidal weapons. To bol-
ster coercively deceptive pro-war propaganda, war critics are painted
as quixotic, if not delusional, for their alleged refusal to face up to
the reality of violent conflict between people. Once the death toll is
tallied, the war supporter holds the enemy alone responsible for the
devastation that transpired: “He made us do it !” The deaths of allied
soldiers and innocent civilians alike are invariably claimed by the kill-
ers to be caused by the enemy, not those who retaliated against them.
But if it is true that people are responsible for all and only the actions
which they choose to carry out or support, then there is something
terribly wrong with a system which destroys innocent people and sol-
diers coerced to fight in response to the actions of entirely different
people.
What has become in modern war the certainty of collateral dam-
age is accepted by extension as necessary by those who advocate
recourse to military force. Walzer is typical in this regard: “No just
war theorist that I know of even pretends to overcome the injustices
that are an intimate part of warfare itself” (Walzer 2001, 86). But if
190 Wa r a n d D e l u s ion

military supporters knowingly choose injustice—an intimate part of

warfare itself —and this is tantamount to saying that evil means are
an unavoidable part of warfare, then the practice of warfare itself fails
the just war theorist’s double effect test. To say that immoral means
may never be willed as a way of achieving even a moral end would
seem to imply that each and every war, which entails the slaughter of
human beings and the transformation of some nonkillers into killers
through military training, is precluded. Whoever wills the end, wills
the means, and by supporting a particular war, one condones the
quite general practice of asking young people to kill on command
complete strangers identified as the enemy by whoever happen to be
the leaders of their land.
To dismiss the antiwar position out of hand, by defining it so as
to be obviously untenable, is to erect and blow down a straw man.
War opponents need not, for example, deny the moral permissibility of
legitimate self-defense. Moreover, some of the most avid war support-
ers in history—notably Augustine, the “father” of just war theory—in
fact rejected the moral permissibility of self-defense. These two views,
then, opposition to war and opposition to self-defense, are entirely dis-
tinct. Pacifists do not deny the existence of violent and bellicose peo-
ple, some of whom eventually become the leaders of groups. Instead,
pacifists are acutely aware that, just as to oppose war in general is to
oppose each particular war, to support any particular war is to support
a practice inconsistent with the most fundamental principles of mod-
ern Western civil societies, including the skeptical basis of democracy
and the framework of universal human rights. As war opponents have
often observed in consternation, the commission of a single act of
intentional homicide within civil society is considered criminal, while
the slaughter of thousands of innocent people, so long as they are
located in a land governed by someone identified as evil, is supposed
to be permissible.
In 1961, US president Dwight Eisenhower presciently warned about
what he termed the “military-industrial complex” (Fogarty 2000).
Subsequent to World War II, the newly established US Department
of Defense (DoD) expanded quickly to become an extremely pow-
erful and wealthy institution whose influence now ramifies radially
and across all borders as a result of subcontracting to ostensibly non-
military corporations in the global economy. Hundreds of billions of
dollars are allocated each year to those who run the Pentagon to use
as they see fit, with far more federal tax dollars allocated to the mili-
tary than to any other institution or program (Higgs 2004). Yet few
taxpayers seem concerned about the size of the blank check written
 W h y W e (C on t i n u e t o) F ig h t 191

to the military each year, for they uncritically assume that anything
labeled “defense” is by definition worthwhile.2
The adoption of policies of conflict resolution consistent with the
principles of democracy and human rights has been severely ham-
pered by the relatively recent capitalization of the weapons industry.
Powerful economic forces conspire to perpetuate the reigning state
security model and foster the conditions for the incessant expansion
of military institutions. During the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury, military institutions became amalgamated with major multifac-
eted corporations, continually guaranteed profits through allocations
of federal income tax, collected and redistributed annually to military
contracts. To make matters worse, the usual prudential and ratio-
nal constraints upon profit-driven capitalists no longer apply when it
comes to military industry, the cost-plus contracts of which effectively
guarantee success whether the businesses are run well or not (Higgs
2006, 54–55).
Twenty-first century war profiteers generate not only weapons,
but also structures and supplies needed to rebuild lands devastated
by bombing. Even pharmaceutical companies have come to profit
from war, through the liberal dispensation of drugs to active duty
soldiers and veterans upon their return home (Calhoun 2011c). With
the privatization of many of the logistical aspects of military service,
modern war has become the most profitable enterprise in the his-
tory of human society. The case of Dick Cheney and Halliburton has
received some attention by war critics, but most Americans appear
not to be aware that Halliburton represents not an anomaly but the
rule. Many of the primary administrators of the DoD are executives
of the very companies hired to produce goods for and provide services
to the military and to repair or erect essential infrastructures in the
aftermath of war (Johnson 2003, 2004).
The fact that military destruction reaps huge profits for corporate
leaders, while purely charitable donations of food and water—or
even measures such as the mere transport of endangered persons
out of high-risk regions—do not, provides the best explanation
(albeit the least flattering) of why political leaders are loath to dole
out significant funds for nonmilitary humanitarian missions, but
when it comes to war, their generosity knows virtually no bounds.
In spite of the salience of such otherwise inexplicable discrepancies,
military supporters persist in their denunciation of war opponents
as naïve, as though they were incapable of facing up to the reality
of the existence of evil. In fact, the willful neglect of the economic
forces propelling the incessant expansion and reach of the military
192 Wa r a n d D e l u s ion

is the consummate expression of political naïveté. Of the many blind

spots inherent to the pro-military, just war paradigm, none is per-
haps more conspicuous than the nearly total neglect of economic
issues, including the capitalized weapons industry, the privatization
of logistics and service, and the economic forces involved in “volun-
tary” enlistment.
Eisenhower could not have seen the form that the military-industrial
complex would eventually take once conjoined with the mainstream
media, creating what has by now become the military-industrial-con-
gressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics complex. Elected
officials are dependent upon campaign funds deriving from not only
contractors but also subcontractors. The pro-military paradigm is
promoted by the direct producers and distributors of deadly weap-
ons, but also many others, including corporate backers of the media
who stand to profit from war. The result, diagnosed by Chomsky and
Herman (2002), Solomon (2003), and others, is that the voices of
war opponents and dissenters have been muffled by the mainstream
media, thus assaulting in a most insidious way the free marketplace of
ideas essential to democracy.3

* * *

There is certainly no dearth of war profiteers in the twenty-first cen-

tury, but not all people who support war benefit financially from it,
and the self-propelling forces in support of war are not merely eco-
nomic: psychological factors may be just as important. Why do we
continue to fight? Stanley Hauerwas offers this answer:

We fight wars because our ancestors have fought wars. Wars provide us
a way to realize our continuity with our ancestors, to locate ourselves
within their continuing saga, and in the process, to give to that saga an
otherwise absent coherence over time (Hauerwas 2001, 408).

Narratives are not, in and of themselves, nocent. However, to pro-

mote the destruction of human beings by other human beings as a
way of clinging to a constructed notion of identity (usually national-
istic) is morally indefensible, under any plausible conception of moral
personhood (Calhoun 2011b). Such narratives are based upon the
elevation to the status of essential feature of one’s self the manifestly
fortuitous property of birthplace, in addition to the delusive accep-
tance of credit for one’s ancestors’ past victories and the concomitant
denial of responsibility for their crimes.
 W h y W e (C on t i n u e t o) F ig h t 193

It is a stark testimony to people’s wish to believe in the self-

congratulator y pictures of themselves and their brethren inscribed in
history by the victors of wars past that, centuries after the Protestant
Reformation—through which the claims of political leaders to be act-
ing at God’s behest were discredited—the divine right of kings con-
tinues to be affirmed, even in ostensibly democratic societies, when
it comes to warfare.
The populace is inclined to accept the moral rationales offered by
its own leaders for waging war; it seems clear to many that the use of
force is sometimes necessary and that anyone who does not recognize
this fact must live in a dream. To those raised in military families, it
may also seem obvious that serving in the military is a respectable
and even admirable career. A rather enthusiastic subset of military
proponents, sometimes labeled war romantics, maintain that war is a
positive enterprise, which strengthens and unites peoples while build-
ing the characters of individual men.
The age-old aura of nobility and virtue associated with the mili-
tary appears to be presumed by its most vocal advocates to be shared
vicariously, through their use of moral rhetoric in persuading other
people to kill. But in what sense does it require courage for a leader to
send other people abroad to fight, kill, and die, or for a war advocate
to support such action? And do the modern soldiers who remotely
direct Predator drone unmanned aerial vehicles to home in on and
kill targets without risking harm to themselves bear any resemblance
whatsoever to the virtuous warrior praised by Aristotle and others in
ancient times?
As a result of military remembrance rituals and the pictures they
promote, war supporters regard as offensive suggestions to the effect
that soldiers might not instantiate the virtues attributed to them
throughout history. However, those who already lost their lives in
battle can hardly be harmed by criticisms of the general enterprise of
war.4 In contrast, potential soldiers can still be saved, and to sacrifice
their lives (to say nothing of their victims) as a means of honoring the
memory of dead soldiers as a part of a collective, delusive, and chime-
rical myth is a dubious practice, to say the least.
To appreciate some of the many complex forces sustaining a
pro-military outlook, suppose for a moment that the pacifist is right
in his belief that killing in war is morally indistinguishable from kill-
ing outside of war. In that case, a simple psychological explanation
would account for the widespread popular support of the military:
to face up to the wrongness of war, one would have to admit that
the “heroes” of one’s country were mere assassins. But the same
194 Wa r a n d D e l u s ion

explanation applies equally well to the popular support of particular

wars, for one’s ongoing participation in or support of an unjust war
can only be buoyed by the difficulty of facing up to the implications
of having made a very grave mistake, indeed the gravest moral mis-
take that there could possibly be: to wrongfully kill human beings.
Economically speaking, nearly all of modern society is in complic-
ity, whether directly or indirectly, with the military. Obviously, all
people who pay federal taxes aid and abet the military and may be
similarly driven to interpret their own personal contributions as hav-
ing been in the service of justice. The perpetual expansion of a military
culture is further ensured by the dynamics of political campaigns in
a capitalism-driven media market. Whenever their local constituents
are employed in the production of weapons and other military equip-
ment, politicians are predisposed to favor military initiatives. Those
candidates who support the military can be said to hold an electoral
advantage in many cases, given that people do vote to further their
own interests, of which gainful employment is obviously one. But,
ultimately, the psychological and economic factors conspiring to pro-
mote a military society derive their persuasive force from what is by
and large an unreflective acceptance of the long-standing tradition
according to which war is a noble and just enterprise, conjoined with
the uncanny ability of people throughout history to persuade them-
selves to believe that “we are good, and they are evil.”
The rhetoric of justice is brandished by all leaders, and the idiom of
just war theory continues to be mouthed by military figureheads and
politicians. But just war theory does not provide the resources needed
to distinguish just wars from those involving false and self-delusive
interpretations on the part of leaders, and this is not a problem soluble
through exegesis, as it is structurally inherent to the paradigm itself.
If moral absolutism is true, then some people act immorally, while
if moral relativism is true, then morality is a vain delusion and chi-
merical notion.5 Any person could, in principle, be the leader of any
nation, and all nations are conventionally delimited and historically
contingent. Because just war theory assumes absolutism while imply-
ing relativism, it is self-contradictory and hence rationally untenable
(Calhoun 2001b).
That the metaethical paradox of just war theory should have gone
unnoticed by thinkers throughout its lengthy and sanguinary history
is hardly surprising. The earliest expositors and most avid proponents
of just war theory were Catholic theologians who conceived of legiti-
mate authority in a world yet to witness the Protestant Reformation.
Without affirming a substantive metaphysical and religious view akin
 W h y W e (C on t i n u e t o) F ig h t 195

to that of Augustine and Aquinas, so-called collateral damage cannot

be coherently dismissed as morally innocuous, for if such victims are
not redeemed in the afterlife, then their destruction constitutes the
gravest possible injustice that there could possibly be.
Augustine himself rejected the very possibility of legitimate
self-defense, it being, in his view, sinful to cling so desperately to merely
terrestrial existence. But this would seem definitively to demonstrate
the motley and mosaic nature of the just war paradigm defended still
today by theorists. They invoke the pieces likely to be intuitive to
contemporary people, while ignoring the peculiarities of Augustine’s
own views, including not only his religious metaphysics and his ada-
mant rejection of what most everyone today regards as the obvious
permissibility of literal self-defense, but also his support of the prac-
tice of slavery. Augustine’s defense of both slavery and killing in war
was grounded in the doctrine of original sin. Moreover, Augustine
maintained that, through killing people, soldiers actually helped their
victims, by preventing them from sinning further (McKeogh 2002).
A version of this twisted line of reasoning is found in the rhetoric of
those who claim to wage war in support of democracy and end by
slaughtering many of the people “liberated.” What survive today as
the tenets of just war theory are as plausible as they are vacuous. Yes, if
anything is wrong, then murder is wrong. Yes, a just war would have
to be waged for a just cause, but this tells us nothing.
To support any particular war is to support the practice of war, the
transformation through training of human beings into killers who
agree to fight without questioning their commanders’ objectives. The
pro-military worldview further sanctions the production of deadly
weapons, both human and nonhuman, to be used for good or evil
purposes over which military supporters have no control. Decisions
regarding the use of those weapons remain the prerogative of the
leaders upon whom political authority has been or will be bestowed,
whoever they may be.

* * *

The fact that militaries have been held in high esteem throughout
human history does not show that war is ever just or right. The fact
that many or even most people may believe in just wars does not show
that any ever are, and the fact that wars exist does not imply that they
should.6 Those who choose to ignore economic reality, appealing to
tradition as their basis for supporting the military, fail to recognize
(or remember) that every single immoral practice finally abandoned
196 Wa r a n d D e l u s ion

by civilized people was also a part of “tradition” up until the moment

when it was abandoned. Slavery, the legal ownership of wives by their
husbands, the abandonment of unwanted infant girls in ravines, and
the refusal to grant poor people access to education were all once
a part of “venerable” tradition. It is true that people today gener-
ally embrace the pro-military view, criticizing not the general practice
but, at most, specific missions such as in Vietnam and Iraq. But the
support by the populace of a particular moral stance results, more
often than not, from an uncritical conflation of legality and morality.
People do tend to accept the status quo as correct, but wrongheaded
practices can be and have been eradicated.7
The fact that it is difficult to admit a mistake does not detract in
any way from its having been a mistake. It was no doubt difficult,
perhaps even painful, for Confederate slave owners to face up to their
error in enslaving human beings for the purposes of their own per-
sonal economic enrichment. The difficulty of facing up to that mistake
did not diminish its wrongness; instead, it provided the best expla-
nation for the vehement resistance to what with time became more
and more difficult to deny: that slavery was indeed wrong. Rather
than categorically refusing to listen to the reasons offered by people
who oppose war in general, military supporters should pause to con-
sider the real possibility that Augustine—supporter of war and slavery
alike—might have been wrong in exhorting Christians to kill.
The oft-repeated claim by fatalists that war is inevitable proves more
often than not to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.8 War becomes necessary
because leaders call for war, the media support such calls, and the
people accept the testimony of the officials who have been charged
with protecting the nation and armed with the weapons of war. This
vicious mode of rationalization of wars has been rehearsed at regular
intervals throughout history. If we were to add up all of the civilians
slaughtered by leaders who waged their wars in the name of justice and
peace, and then asked what would have happened, had their soldiers
refused to fight in and the populace refused to pay for those wars,
the balance sheet would clearly favor the pacifist’s categorical rejec-
tion of the practice. Had pacifists prevailed during the first months
of Vietnam, for example, millions of people’s lives would have been
saved. What did anyone in the world gain through the vehement sup-
port of the Vietnam War by those who ridiculed pacifists as naïve?
People throughout history have exhibited an inability to invert the
Necker cube at a given moment in time, to admit the possibility that
what is being called a justification for war might be no more than an
elaborate ruse or yet another catastrophic mistake. Perhaps, then, what
 W h y W e (C on t i n u e t o) F ig h t 197

is needed is a spatial inversion. War supporters may not be able to take

seriously the possibility that their own leaders are downright evil or
profoundly misguided, but any one of them might have been born
somewhere else. In particular, consider the land governed by a leader
whom we currently believe to be a criminal. Any one of us might have
been born there. What would follow then? That they are good cowboys
in white hats, while we are evil rogues in black masks? That they cham-
pion democracy, freedom, and truth, while we oppress, tyrannize, and
deceive? That they believe in God and country, while we are the devil’s
conspirators? Perhaps, then, we are aiding and abetting the enemy of
humanity who lies and kills out of selfish desire. Perhaps, then, we are
currently preparing the way for the new “Hitler du jour.”
That people wish to believe that they are good and virtuous,
affirming to themselves their own righteousness through condemn-
ing the immoral and evil actions of others, is beyond dispute. People
also enjoy being associated with victors, whether they be professional
sports teams or their own country against its adversaries. Riding the
wave of World War II victory, US strategists managed during the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century to rationalize an astonishing array
of military interventions abroad, many of which served not to sup-
port but to undermine nascent democracies in the third world (Boggs
2003b, Chomsky 2003a, 2003b, 2006). The predictably homicidal
results of vast amounts of military aid poured into poor nations so
as to determine political outcomes by favoring one of two (or more)
rival groups has been witnessed time and time again, all over the
world. These harsh realities are in no way altered by the fact that most
US citizens know little or nothing about the long string of abortive
interventions paid for by their tax dollars on the grounds that “we are
good, and they are evil,” as was supposedly demonstrated for all time
by World War II, and a point of which military supporters regularly
“remind” their readers:

The fight against German fascism and Japanese militarism put us in

the world to stay. With our great power comes an even greater respon-
sibility (Elshtain 2003, 6).
There are acts of aggression and acts of cruelty that we ought to
resist, by force if necessary. I would have thought that our experience
with Nazism ended this particular argument, but the argument goes
on . . . (Walzer 2004, xi).

In view of the overwhelmingly negative consequences of post–World

War II intervention, to continue to support the use of military force
198 Wa r a n d D e l u s ion

abroad on the grounds that “we defeated the Nazis!” is to be literally

blinded by wishful thinking and delusion. This mistake in reasoning
also represents a further instance of the fallacy of hypostatization or
reification, according to which, in this case, the United States (or the
Allies) is a static and eternally good thing.9 In the end, the govern-
ments of nations are only as good as the people who run them, and
a wide range of moral characters should be expected to be found
among any group of human beings, no matter where they happen to
live.10
Morality is undermined, not supported, when soldiers and civil-
ians are treated as means to the ends sought by leaders promoting
war (see chapter 9). Leaders who deploy moral rhetoric and exagger-
ate threats to deceive people into supporting wars, thereby compro-
mising their ability to make informed decisions, are propagandists,
not champions of morality, and such behavior reflects not democratic
values but tyrannical pretension. But if war is morally wrong, anti-
democratic, and strategically foolish, then this is not because one war
is. Rather, the tyranny and folly of war in general make particular
wars wrong. The demigod status ascribed to leaders by the just war
tradition is always a mistake, given the reality of human fallibility, but
the consequences of that mistake will vary greatly depending upon
the particular properties of a given leader. The fact that a leader has
been provided with the opportunity to use his power in such a way is
the ultimate cause of the devastation he wreaks. For this reason, it is
in some ways surprising that the very paradigm which permitted the
ascent of Hitler to an unprecedented position of power should have
thrived in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
What about Hitler? is an important question, but unfortunately
exactly the wrong moral is drawn from the story of the Third Reich
by military supporters. Hitler rose to power when Germany was a
republic, and he was electorally confirmed by the Germans years
before he began his murderous rampage across the continent and his
enslavement of millions of people in concentration camps. The affir-
mation of Hitler as a great military leader with the right to wage war
against other nations is what permitted the Holocaust to happen. As
in every other mass slaughter throughout history, soldiers ensnared
in the delusive rhetorical web of honor and nobility enthusiastically
agreed to fight Hitler’s war, aggressively marketed as “just.” Weapons
are used by those who wield them for their own purposes, whatever
they may be, and nothing could be more obvious than that through
the course of their lives people change. Accordingly, nothing pre-
cludes the possibility of a creature such as Hitler being elected in a
 W h y W e (C on t i n u e t o) F ig h t 199

country with arsenals already stocked with nuclear arms. Were such a
person to arise as the leader of the United States, he would indeed be
able to achieve Hitler’s dream of controlling the entire world.
The legacies of the Holocaust have been neither the lesson that
might does not make right, nor that the slaughter of innocent people
is never permissible. Nor even the eminently reasonable idea that no
leader of one nation has the right to invade and kill the people of
another. Instead, modern militaristic societies have inherited from
the Nazis the use of propagandistic euphemism and coded language
in camouflaging the atrocities committed still today in the name of
nations and, what is equally regrettable, the wholesale diffusion of
moral responsibility for the innocent people slaughtered in the name
of justice.

* * *

In this work, I have attempted to transcend the superficial plane of

rhetorical debate where military supporters and war opponents have
long been trapped at an impasse. Rather than focusing upon a specific
war or leader, I have examined the “intuitively obvious” tenets of the
received view assumed by both sides in every war. These widely shared
assumptions have proven to be relics of ancient and medieval times.
They no longer correspond to the reality of modern warfare and radi-
cally conflict with modern views on democracy and human rights.
This “conventional wisdom” is of course extremely resilient, having
been transmitted from generation to generation over the course of
human history. While superficially plausible, the pro-military, just war
paradigm survives not for its coherence, nor for its efficacy, but simply
because human beings are creatures of habit, including highly resis-
tant habits of thought. The resilience in this case is easy to explain:
to renounce the pro-military view would require the Herculean act of
reinterpreting the fables of history in highly unflattering ways. This
difficulty notwithstanding, the pro-military view does not cohere
with our other more general moral views, or even commonsense, as
becomes clear once one penetrates the mirage-like veneer produced
through the use of euphemism and self-congratulatory moral rhetoric
in rationalizing wars.
This critique is not of any particular regime, but of an entire
quasi-medieval and politically authoritarian schema in which most
current governments are complicit. The preponderance of examples
involving the United States is a result of the fact that its incursions into
the affairs of other nations have been the most visible and sanguinary
200 Wa r a n d D e l u s ion

in recent history, made possible by the unparalleled might of the US

military, which effectively precludes restraint by rival nations. But I
do not claim that the United States is any more mistaken in its general
approach to international affairs than are most other contemporary
nations. Nor do I believe that Americans are somehow more vul-
nerable to self-delusion than are any other human beings. Historical
circumstances, not nationally or racially determined qualities, led to
episodes such as Nazi Germany, the mass killing by the US military in
Vietnam, and the renunciation by US congressmen in 2002 of their
right and responsibility to prevent the US president from waging war
at his own caprice. As Stanley Milgram’s experiments revealed in the
1960s, human beings are often ready and willing to surrender their
faculty of reason to other human beings, provided only that they
have been designated authorities (Milgram 1963, 1974). But there is
no epistemologically sound basis for following orders to kill handed
down by the merely human beings who become political leaders.
It is a matter of historical fortuity that the United States should
today be the sole military superpower. Had history followed a differ-
ent course, my examples would have drawn primarily upon the crimes
of another regime. The difference between the United States and its
weaker and often conciliatory allies is that the latter do not possess
anything even vaguely approaching the military capacity to be able to
flout international law without risk of reprisal by other states. But the
reigning paradigm is propagated also by the leaders of the vast major-
ity of contemporary nations, through their public approval of, com-
plicity in, and complacency toward US interventions.11 This complex
system, which defends amoral and immoral policies through the use
of moral rhetoric, while enriching war profiteers-cum-policymakers
along the way, pervades virtually all facets of contemporary society,
making it extraordinarily difficult to assail. When might is on one’s
own side, it becomes all too easy to mistake it for right.
We have known since US president Harry Truman—before the Cold
War—that some leaders are ready and willing to deploy entirely indis-
criminate weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Truman deployed
the atomic bomb against Japan before the US-USSR stand off and the
emergence of the strategy of mutually assured destruction (MAD),
the vast production of nuclear weapons stockpiled in arsenals for the
purpose of deterrence. Truman’s pilots followed their commander in
chief’s orders to drop the atomic bomb, not only upon the densely
populated city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, but also, three days
later—in full cognizance of its atrocious effects—upon Nagasaki,
somewhat ironically, the only Christian center in Japan.12
 W h y W e (C on t i n u e t o) F ig h t 201

Tragically, with the end of the Cold War, the specter of nuclear
holocaust may become more rather than less likely, as weaker nations
develop such weapons surreptitiously to protect themselves from pre-
emptive attack by the United States, which explicitly asserted—in a
truly Orwellian definition of the first-strike use of nuclear arms as
defensive action—the right to use such weapons whenever and wher-
ever it sees fit (NSSUSA 2002). When it comes to something as poten-
tially disastrous as the use of nuclear warheads—which can set off a
ricochet of mass murder—one must, rationally speaking, ask whether
those political and military leaders who alone have privileged access
to effective nuclear fallout shelters should also possess the prerogative
to use such weapons at their discretion.
Given the rate and range of technological innovation, it may not
be possible fully to predict what war will eventually become, but if
it remains on its current technological trajectory, the specter of the
combatant-free war may loom ahead, with unmanned aerial vehicles
(Predator drones) dropping neutron bombs to destroy the people
of enemy lands while leaving their property intact. If both sides to
conflicts were to adopt such means, then war would have reached
the acme of absurdity, for there would be no soldiers even pretend-
ing bravely to protect human beings. Instead, small committees of
political elites sequestered far away within impenetrable fortresses in
their “undisclosed places” would destroy the people of enemy lands
governed by other small committees of political elites, who would
themselves be the only ones among their compatriots to enjoy effec-
tive immunity from harm (they, too, would watch the war broadcast
for them in their secret and secure shelters).
Given the dominance of the United States, the administrators of
which appear intent upon neither ceding its preeminent political posi-
tion nor tolerating any genuine rival to US military might, war may
continue to instantiate the post-9/11 model, with the application of
overwhelming and indiscriminate force against tenuously related nations
in response to the crimes of individual people and small factions. The
outrage against US-inflicted atrocities is unlikely to abate so long as the
behemoth continues to wage wars abroad, perfunctorily dismissing all
of the innocent persons destroyed as “collateral damage.” It is therefore
plausible that the increase in global terrorism witnessed subsequent to
the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq will continue, leading some
who protest US military aggression abroad to develop further innova-
tive means for exacting their equally indiscriminate revenge.
The ongoing and widespread practice of weapons exportation
reveals that the war system is not what it purports to be, for it does
202 Wa r a n d D e l u s ion

not enhance but rather undermines the security of human beings

and is driven by extraordinarily powerful economic forces, buoyed in
large part by the unreflective affirmation by most of the populace of
the pro-military, “just war” view. To pretend that the United States
had nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein’s mass murders
and to continue to export homicidal weapons to potential despots is
to guarantee that history will repeat itself.
Rather than persisting in the morally objectionable practice of
bombing the inhabitants of nations led by criminals armed by the
international community, we should cease empowering future des-
pots and promote the free flow of information made possible by the
internet, through which the people of lands governed by criminals
can learn the facts and be persuaded to withdraw their support. The
establishment of an effective international tribunal through which
leaders themselves can be made to answer for their crimes may also
serve as a deterrent to those contemplating war. The alternative, to
blithely capitulate to “might makes right,” permitting the fallible
administrators of the currently most militarily powerful nation to
serve as judge, jury, and executioner wherever and whenever they
deem fit, is to forsake the moral framework upheld within civil soci-
ety by the people of the modern Western world.