War makes violence a habit: the horror disappears in the routine, and we come to accept it as part of human nature. And there is a shade of truth in that acceptance. War appeals to the propensity (keener in men than in women) to cut short all reasoning and go fast and hard into a physical assault that stops all argument. The violent thrust bespeaks decision, a pride beyond challenge in the person who commits it: the act acquits itself, and postpones any weighing of motives. War thus forms an exception to the rule of empirical prudence, in favor of a vainglory that human nature has always found ways to permit. War stands outside the usual priority of moral considerations. It must often be, for many people, a relief from the day-to-day routines of work and responsibility. And in the conditions of modernity, where inaction is the normal human state, war appeals to the craving for action. We are taught early that nothing is so honorable as to act decisively in an approved cause; and war is the preeminent instance of such action—as much for the spectacle it affords as for the change it effects.
But there is also a quasi-moral seduction in the violence of war. It commits the individual who supports the otherwise abstract entity that is a nation. It makes each of us a little bigger. Even in a vicarious war such as the American fight against Russia by alliance with Ukraine, the consciousness of sympathy links the anonymous citizen with a remote effect: a satisfaction that is hardly available in the ordinary rounds of social engagement or political work. As a site of impressive action, in which one person can see the difference he makes, the only rival of war might be the construction of a new city. But that is a long-term ameliorative project that requires imagination and the passage of time. Destruction is faster.
I’m certainly not onboard with every point he makes in this essay, and like many in the anti-intervention camp, he misses much of the forest for the criticisms. But still… Oof:
And the program of drone assassinations, initiated by George W. Bush and greatly expanded in the two terms of Barack Obama… “Terror Tuesday” meetings, led by John Brennan at the CIA and President Obama, arrived in the latter years of the War on Terror: a fair alternative (it was thought) to the Bush policy of capturing terror suspects for transportation to an indefinite imprisonment in Guantanamo. Though their names were not always known—a pattern of suspicious contacts was enough to convict—they could now be killed individually by presidential command. Death may somehow have seemed cleaner than the kidnapping and torture and the consequent twilight legal status of a suspect who fitted the category of “enemy combatant.”
Two things must strike an American looking at a pattern that now extends from the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia to the three-year trench war in Ukraine. First, to repeat, these wars have all been preventive wars. They have had to travel an extraordinary distance in the cause of safety. The other curious feature is the pride with which American leaders have announced that most of these wars required no sacrifice of American lives. (This is said in a bluff shorthand: we have no “boots on the ground.”) All the killing and dying is done by other people.