The Evil & Irrational Enemy
Laurie Calhoun
Abstract: During the propaganda campaigns preceding the recourse to deadly force by military institutions, enemy leaders are decried by war supporters as both evil and irrational, though these two attributes would appear to be mutually exclusive. The characterization of the enemy as “irrational” serves as a pretext for war in lieu of negotiation, while the characterization of the enemy as “evil” allows leaders to rationalize mass killing in response to the enemy’s crimes. However, the denunciation of leaders as “irrational” conflicts with the standard attribution to them of responsibility for the deaths caused during the wars waged against them. Furthermore, the “evil” doings of leaders are in no way morally redressed through the slaughter of the people living under their rule.
The “irrational” enemy
When people offer arguments for taking up arms, they often begin by claiming that the enemy is irrational, beyond the reach of reason, and must be stopped through the use of military force. So, for example, in his August 11, 1945, letter to Samuel McCrea Cavert (General Secretary of the Federal Council of The Churches of Christ in America), U.S. President Harry S. Truman wrote:
Nobody is more disturbed over the use of atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.[1]
But the rhetoric of irrationality is not exclusive to the leaders of established nations. Consider this statement by Ayman al-Zawahiri, referred to by some as “the right-hand man” of Osama bin Laden:
Our goal is to kill the greatest possible number of people. That is the only language which the West understands.[2]
These examples suggest that the people slaughtered in cases involving what are claimed to be irrational leaders are being used as the means through which the attacking party’s response is communicated. Although war supporters wish to sharply distinguish soldiers from terrorists, the intentional slaughter of civilians has not been the modus operandi only of individual murderers and factional fighters. Grimsley and Rogers explain what has often been the military rationale behind such actions as follows:
Toward the civilians under attack the message is slightly more subtle but easy to discern: see, your regime cannot protect you, so accept our rule. This is the classic rationale for attacks on civilians in areas under revolt. It was also evident in the chevauchées of the Hundred Years’ War, when the English kings coerced the peasants of the contested French provinces to accept their claim to rule. A variant of this has become more prevalent since the rise of mass politics: see, your regime cannot protect you, so pressure your regime to accept our terms… British planners employed it as a rationale for the area bombing of Germany during World War II.[3]
Whenever civilians are killed in order to achieve a military objective, the leaders in question arguably violate the moral principle promoted by Immanuel Kant (The Categorical Imperative)[4] and supported by deontologists more generally, that it is always wrong to use people as the mere means to one’s ends. In other words, military initiatives intended to demoralize the civilian population in order to effect a swifter defeat of the enemy regime actually sabotage the very perspective of morality often claimed to be the pretext for military action. That attacks willfully intended to kill civilians are rationalized by their executors not only by appeal to the fact that enemy leaders cannot understand any other “language”, but also because such attacks are regarded by military planners as strategically efficacious, reveals that the charges of “irrationality” being made are purely rhetorical.
There is also something logically peculiar about denouncing the enemy in moral terms, while simultaneously proclaiming their inability to engage in discourse, for it would be fatuous to expect a truly “irrational” enemy to abide by the “rules” of warfare—ex hypothesi, they are not rational. It is certainly arguable that reasonable people do not desire the needless slaughter of innocent human beings. Strikingly, in the above citations by Truman and al-Zawahiri, the speaker presumes not only that he and his allies are rational, but also that they themselves have no choice but to wield deadly force against the enemy. The above locutions thus rather oddly ascribe a type of overwhelming power to the adversary: the irrational enemy has coerced those who take up arms, by forcing them to fight, effectively stripping them of their own liberty to decide whether to kill or not to kill. Curiously enough, this would seem to imply that the killers thus create their adversaries in their own image: it is precisely the horror of the enemy’s acts of killing which in many cases leads directly to equally horrific killing by those who retaliate. In the firebombing of both Germany and Japan during World War II, the actions were painted as retaliatory and retributive, but the victims were in most cases just as innocent as those destroyed by the enemy who thus “forced” the allies to kill.
More recently, the charge of irrationality has served as a thinly disguised excuse for refusing to negotiate. Given the tragic consequences to which war gives rise, it seems quite reasonable to suppose that an attempt at negotiation is morally incumbent upon leaders considering the possibility of embroiling their nations in war. Yet even the very possibility of negotiation has been dismissed out of hand by some leaders. Consider, for example, President George H.W. Bush’s stance in his January 9, 1991, letter to Saddam Hussein: “Nor will there be any negotiation. Principle cannot be compromised.” Similar statements were echoed in the aftermath of 9/11 by President George W. Bush in decrying the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the “unelected Mullahs” in Iran, and Kim Jong-il in North Korea.
To categorically exclude the possibility of negotiation is to render the idea of waging war as a last resort null and void. Some form of negotiation would seem to be the most obvious, if not the only, way to avoid punishing innocent people for the crimes of their leaders, the inevitable consequence of any modern war. Interestingly enough, the purely propagandistic use of the rhetoric of irrationality would seem to have been definitively demonstrated by the theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD) developed during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The strategy of MAD was developed by military strategists in the United States and the Soviet Union and commenced from the premise that possessing weapons sufficient to destroy the entire population of the enemy would prevent war from ever being waged. The rationale behind MAD was that the enemy comprised a group of rational agents who would act so as to ensure their own survival, even while disagreeing about any number of matters of value and ideology. In other words, MAD presumed precisely the rationality of the enemy which the rhetoric of irrationality denies.
A revealing form of “catch-22” also emerges in some cases. Consider, for example, the George W. Bush administration’s repeated proclamation that the 2003 war on Iraq could be averted if only Saddam Hussein would relinquish his power through voluntary exile. In assessing the value of this “offer,” it is important to be aware that on December 14, 2002, the U.S. administration had publicly issued a “lethal force list” of suspected terrorists whom the CIA had been granted permission by the commander-in-chief to assassinate with impunity. It was also made clear at the time that the list was not exhaustive: other, unnamed, “terrorist suspects” would be subject to assassination as well. This announcement came after the November 4, 2002, evaporation by the CIA of six terrorist suspects in Yemen (using an unmanned air vehicle--“Predator Drone”). Because those people were executed without trial, and in view of the vague terms of the U.S. “lethal force list,” Saddam Hussein had every reason in the world to avoid seeking refuge abroad. In other words, in this case, it was arguably the Iraqi dictator’s very rationality which prevented him from acquiescing to U.S. demands.[6] While some would prefer to ascribe Hussein’s behavior to pride alone, it becomes clear through reflection upon the “offer” from his own perspective that he acted prudentially in refusing to seek refuge abroad, given what he already knew about the CIA.[7]
A similarly vacuous offer was made to the Iraqi people by U.S. President George H.W. Bush during the build-up to the 1991 Gulf War:
It is my hope that somehow the Iraqi people can, even now, convince their dictator that he must lay down his arms, leave Kuwait, and let Iraq itself rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.[8]
The contradiction involved in this “opportunity” is stated starkly in the terms of the offer itself: dictators are, by definition, leaders who disregard the reasons brought forth by people in dissent of the government’s policies.
The “double bind” presented by British Premier Tony Blair prior to the 2003 invasion was similar in
logical form to those of Bush Jr. and Bush Sr. Blair announced that Saddam had to publicly declare that
he possessed weapons of mass destruction and that he would renounce them. François-Bernard Huyghe expresses the paradox implicit in this demand thus:
En psychologie, cela s’appelle une double contrainte (double bind): une demande à laquelle il ne peut y avoir de réponse que contradictoire. Le refus de Saddam était un motif de guerre. Son accord, un aveu. Donc l’offensive était justifiée dans les deux cas.[9]
[In psychology, this is called a double bind: a demand to which there can be no reasonable response. The refusal of Saddam to comply would be grounds for war. His compliance would be an admission of guilt. In either case, the war would be justified.]
Leaders who refuse to negotiate, or offer their adversaries logically preposterous options, effectively assert their own infallibility, which is itself arguably the mark of a deranged mind. At best, the soundness of mind of any person who insists that there is no possibility that he might be mistaken is highly suspect. Yet this presumption (or pretension) of infallibility on the part of leaders is quite common, and is plausibly the reason why 50 million people over the course of the past century alone were slaughtered in wars waged by those who opted for large-scale institutionally sanctioned brutality in lieu of non-violent means of dispute resolution. Both the populace and the soldiers sent to fight tend to accept the rhetoric of those promoting recourse to war and are easily swept up in the maelstrom of wartime propaganda deployed to devastating effect by those who capitalize upon human frailty, most obviously the desire to believe that “We are good, and they are evil.”
The “evil” enemy
The characterization of the enemy as “barbaric” has a long history, going all the way back to ancient times, centuries before Christians were persuaded by just war theorists that they could and should take up arms, and persists to the present day. But denouncing the enemy as irrational, inferior, or otherwise benighted (charges regularly rehearsed by colonizers regarding the inhabitants of the lands invaded and occupied) proves to be no more and no less than yet another rhetorical gesture intended to assuage the consciences of the prospective killers (and their civilian accomplices) when leaders freely choose to wield deadly weapons against the people of another land. The mistake war supporters have made throughout history has been to blithely accept the reigning paradigm according to which their own leaders possess the right to kill people in far away places, provided only that such killing has been adequately dressed in the costume of national defense. The Germans under Hitler provide only the most flagrant example in history of the fundamental confusion firmly embedded in the received view.
That “the irrational enemy” is often denounced at the same time as “the evil enemy” provides still more evidence that belligerent leaders and military spokesmen select their characterization of the enemy according to the rhetorical needs of the moment. First, to maintain that the evil enemy is also irrational would seem to be a contradiction in terms, for evil is a moral concept, and morality arguably presupposes rationality (assuming that ought implies can). Rabid dogs are not evil—they are dangerous. But rabid dogs do not persuade people to kill on their behalf, which of course political leaders do.
If the enemy is truly evil, as those who wield Manichean rhetoric maintain, then they cannot at the same time be irrational, that is, beyond the very reach of reason itself, and a fortiori in view of the fact that enemy leaders themselves use language to convince their troops to kill. A corollary to the contradictory denunciation of the enemy as both evil and irrational is that the standard ascription of blame for civilian deaths to such leaders (“He made us do it!”) cannot be made, if they are in fact beyond the reach of reason. One cannot coherently claim that “the evil enemy” is responsible for collateral damage, if they are irrational. The evasion of moral responsibility by those who order the use of homicidal weapons that result in the deaths of innocent people is thus delusive, to say the least.
Beyond its evident contradictions, the argument from evil and irrationality to the use of deadly force also raises perplexing strategic problems, most obviously that to admit the soundness of such an argument for one’s own self, country, or group, is to validate it for other agents as well. To destroy human beings through so-called “collateral damage” in contending with a tyrannical regime is, from the perspective of those who disagree, to make the same mistake that “the evil enemy” has already made. Does this not then imply, for example, that the United States’ annihilation of innocent people should lead others, who reject the U.S. administration’s interpretation of its own acts of killing as morally innocuous while nonetheless sharing their meta-view regarding the permissibility of collateral damage, to follow their example and attempt to stop U.S. leaders, whom they regard as “the evil enemy”? In fact, this would seem to be precisely what has happened in the most notorious cases of political terrorism in recent history, all of which were claimed by their instigators to be acts of just war.
People who have nothing to lose are the most dangerous people of all, for there are no rational constraints whatsoever upon their actions. “Scorched earth” practices (leaving nothing behind that might be of use to the invaders) have a fairly long history, and were used to dramatic effect in such cases as the Russians in their efforts to defuse the danger of Nazi invaders. But new variations on the scorched earth theme have also been implemented by a relatively new protagonist on the conflict scene: suicidal terrorists. Terrorism emerged as a tool of the state following the French Revolution and was subsequently appropriated by subnational factions in the name of a wide array of “causes”, both concrete and metaphysical. The term terrorism first appeared in dictionaries in 1794—the phenomenon is quite new in the history of human conflict, and arguably arose in emulation of the pro-military paradigm of states.[10] However, despite the fact that most of the war casualties during the twentieth century were civilian non-combatants, war supporters continue to distinguish themselves from those who promote terrorism by insisting that in war such victims are not intentionally targeted. So terrorists are said to be evil because they intend for innocent people to die, while warriors (at least those on one’s own side) are presumed to be good, because they intend to combat evil.
What do political killers intend?
As misguided as the soldiers on the enemy side may be, they probably do not have evil intentions and their actions are undeniably informed by the story told to them by their leaders. Even when factional groups wreak havoc upon civilians, they are in all likelihood interpreting their victims as complicit in the crimes of the government, through their ongoing political, moral, and/or economic support of what the faction takes to be the evil regime in power. Somewhat ironically, the rationale for terrorist killings such as those carried out on 9/11 was clearly articulated by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself on March 4, 2002, in explaining the approach guiding the 2001 bombing of Afghanistan:
We have assumed that where you find large numbers of al Qaeda and Taliban, that there may very well be noncombatants with them who are family members or supporters of some kind, who are there of their own free will, knowing who they’re with and who they’re supporting and who they’re encouraging and who they’re assisting.[11]
With only minor modification, this rationalization might be applied to the intentional killing of all those who support what bin Laden and others decry as the criminal U.S. military: all U.S. residents who pay federal taxes are “supporters of some kind, who are there of their own free will, knowing who[m] they’re with and who[m] they’re supporting and who[m] they’re encouraging and who[m] they’re assisting.” Note here that the executors of 9/11 attacked U.S. citizens in their workplaces, not in their homes, where young children would have been victimized. Accordingly, it is plausible that, in the minds of the killers, the victims of 9/11 were complicit in the crimes of the U.S. government (this most obviously in the case of those working for the Pentagon, but also for those who played a role in financially supporting the military, including those working at the World Trade Center). The problem is fundamentally one of interpretation, for even if we grant the paramount moral importance of intentions, the fact remains that we cannot know whether an act of killing is murder or self-defense without somehow accessing the agent’s intentions, and this epistemological problem applies across the board, to the killings committed by states and by factions alike.
Consider a soldier who claims to be fighting a just war or jihad. Is this killer effecting good or evil? According to his allies, he is killing for peace, justice, God, etc. According to his enemies, through killing he represents evil incarnate. But, in terms of the physical description of what they are doing, the soldiers of both sides are causing bodily harm to other human beings. Empirically, they are engaged in the very same homicidal activities. The leaders of each side characterize the acts of killing committed by their own soldiers as heroic, noble, moral, and just, and the acts of killing committed by those on the other side, though no different in physical consequences (piles of dead bodies), as cowardly, base, and immoral crimes.
In ridiculing arguments to the effect that the proposed cure is worse than the disease in cases such as the 2001 war on Afghanistan, military supporters unerringly make reference to the painfully simplistic distinction between cases by appeal to the intentions of the killers:
A few Left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians actually died in Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible, on the assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the number of people killed in the attacks on the Twin Towers, the war is unjust… But the claim that the numbers matter in just this way—that the 3,120th death determines the injustice of the war—is wrong. It denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing.”[12]
Is this really one of “the most basic and best understood distinctions”? Or does it simply represent a fairytale version of human commerce, according to which the evil enemy has categorically evil intentions, while the killers on one’s own side have only good intentions, no matter what they do? But what if those “good” soldiers drop megaton bombs on metropolitan areas; use atomic weapons against cities teeming with civilians; spray toxic agents that saturate the soil and poison the people who live off the land; bury landmines that will maim and kill children for decades to come; launch depleted uranium missiles; use cluster bombs, napalm, and white phosphorous in regions inhabited by altogether non-threatening people?
Whether or not we accept the Manichean rhetoric used to decry the killings of others and defend those of our own troops, this emphasis upon the intentions of the killers altogether neglects the very people affected by the actions in question. Precisely herein lies the crux of the antiwar position: to claim that the moral permissibility or impermissibility of an act depends solely upon the intentions ascribed to the actors by those who take up arms against them is to disregard altogether the perspective of the victims themselves, who suffer the same
devastating fate whatever their killers may have wished or claimed to aim to achieve. War supporters simply assume that they have access to the intentions of the enemy (by definition “evil”), and that the killers on their own side have uniformly good intentions and are therefore blame free.
Non-combatant immunity, originally treated by Catholic theologians in their attempts to distinguish justly from unjustly conducted wars, is now, in principle, an integral part of military protocol and widely accepted by the populace as well. But the immunity of non-combatants has been understood throughout history to
permit war, despite the inevitable collateral damage to which modern war gives rise. While it is supposed to be the intent to harm that marks an act as criminal, the military itself is given the interpretive prerogative in its own reports of missions that result in collateral damage, invariably concluding that such deaths were regrettable but unavoidable, given military exigencies.
Catholic thinkers since Aquinas have appealed to what is referred to by contemporary philosophers as the principle or doctrine of “double effect”, according to which the immunity of non-combatants does not preclude morally permissible war:
Nothing hinders one act from having two effects, only one of which is intended, while the other is beside the intention. Now moral acts take their species according to what is intended and not according to what is beside the intention.[13]
Aquinas introduced this idea in discussing what he took to be the moral permissibility of self-defense (which Augustine had rejected), but today the doctrine of “double effect” is primarily invoked to exculpate military personnel for civilian deaths, said to be permissible during wartime, even if foreseen, so long as they are unintended, whether as ends in themselves or the means to ends sought. So, for example, if a school or mosque is situated near a crucial military target, then bombing the military target is said to be permissible, though doing so will in all probability result in the destruction of numerous innocent people. In contrast, the doctrine of double effect would not sanction the direct targeting of civilian sites, for non-combatants are immune from attack.
War supporters assume that they have access to the intentions of the enemy (by definition “evil”), and that the killers on their own side have uniformly good intentions. War opponents, in contrast, recognize that both sides regard what they are doing as in some sense “good” —though they may well be and often are both deluded and confused. What matters, according to war critics, is not the “story” told by the killers, but the perspective of the victims. Of course, when the victims are on the war supporter’s own side, then appeals to emotion are everywhere on display:
As the war against terrorism continues, we should recall all those walls lined with handmade signs imploring, ‘Has anyone seen…,’ and the people on television describing sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, grandchildren, fiancés, colleagues—the gallery of grief.[14]
When, however, the victims are on the enemy side, they are nameless, faceless “collateral damage”, said by their killers to have been ultimately destroyed by the evil enemy. This point was illustrated to dramatic effect by the many “documentary” films produced by the U.S. War Department during the 1940s.15 These films show many graphic images of civilian death and suffering,
but only of people victimized by the enemy. For example, Appointment in Tokyo (directed by Jack Hively in 1947), which relays the story of the U.S. response to the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in 1942, is replete with images of the blood and gore brought about by the Japanese. At the end of the film, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are depicted, in stark contrast, through split-second images of large conflagrations in the sky—with no images of any human beings at all.
In reality, the military officers who execute war and thus directly generate collateral damage may not be at all concerned with its quality or extent, as was brought out dramatically through U.S. General Tommy Franks’s candid response, “We don’t do body counts,” when queried regarding the civilian casualty toll during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The classical view on non-combatant immunity and collateral damage would seem indeed to prescribe a tally of the number of deaths (pace Walzer) in order to be able to assess whether or not the cost in lives was outweighed by the military objective achieved. But General Franks’s frank response revealed more than anything else that the idiom of the just war tradition is used today rhetorically, not as a means of determining the actual justice of a military campaign, but in rationalizing whatever action the commanders have already decided to undertake.
While some theorists are always standing by ready to support those political and military officials who promote war, a few have demurred from the ascription of benevolent intentions to perpetrators of violence in cases where the magnitude of allegedly collateral damage has achieved ghastly levels, as it did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. So, for example, Elizabeth Anscombe writes:
This same doctrine [double effect] is used to prevent any doubts about the obliteration bombing of a city. The devout Catholic bomber secures by a ‘direction of intention’ that any shedding of innocent blood that occurs is ‘accidental’. I know a Catholic boy who was puzzled at being told by his schoolmaster that it was an accident that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were there to be killed; in fact, however absurd it seems, such thoughts are common among priests who know that they are forbidden by the divine law to justify the direct killing of the innocent.
It is nonsense to pretend that you do not intend to do what is the means you take to your chosen end. Otherwise there is absolutely no substance to the Pauline teaching that we may not do evil that good may come.[16]
The standard view in the United States is that Truman acted as he did in order to stop the war. But,
in Anscombe’s view, Truman used the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as means to his intended end, which, though presumably good (to stop the war), could never be morally achieved through the action that he took. Nor, in Anscombe’s view, does the principle exculpate those who ordered and carried out obliteration bombing against civilian communities in 1940s Germany.
Advocates of just war invoke the doctrine of double effect in distinguishing between cases where the unintended consequences are or are not a part of the means used to obtain the objective sought. Yet self-proclaimed just war theorist Michael Walzer has observed, “no just war theorist that I know of even pretends to overcome the injustices that are an intimate part of warfare itself.”[17] If Walzer is right, then just war theorists knowingly choose injustice, given that it is “an intimate part of warfare itself,” in advocating war. Just war theorists appeal to the doctrine of double effect in distinguishing permissible from impermissible acts of killing, but if immoral means may never be willed in order to achieve even a moral end, then this would seem to imply that each and every modern war, which necessarily entails the transformation of some non-killers into killers and the annihilation of some innocent people (whether civilian non-combatants or enemy soldiers coerced to fight), is precluded.
Apparently unaware of these implications, many theorists remain to this day strangely enamored of double effect analyses, as though it weren’t obvious that the result of the double effect “test” is finally a function of the level at which the scenario to which it is applied is described. To regard the presence of the civilian inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “accidental” merely underscores the ineluctable problem of interpretation and the inaccessibility of other people’s intentions. The history of warfare is a long list of conflicts between groups led by commanders all of whom have claimed to be fighting and killing for justice and peace.
U.S. citizens are understandably loath to ascribe any but intrinsically evil intentions to the members of al Qaeda. And it is equally true that few people anywhere in the world would today accept an interpretation of Hitler’s campaign according to which what he really intended was to make the world a better place. Yet it was precisely such an interpretation which Hitler’s “willing executioners” had been persuaded to believe,[18] and a recognition of this fact renders it difficult to reconcile a firm denunciation of Hitler (et al.) with military supporters’ exculpation of their own leaders when they kill thousands or even millions of people under the pretext of “justice” and “morality”.
Ultimately, if people act guided by their own values and beliefs, seeking what they take to be good—though they may of course be wrong—then the doctrine of double effect cannot provide the needed means for distinguishing between just and unjust acts of killing. At the end of the day, the conclusion one draws from applying the doctrine of double effect in a particular case derives from one’s antecedent beliefs about the morality of the action in question. The amount of death and destruction that one will tolerate is a function not of the inaccessible intentions of the actors, but of the prior beliefs of the theorist regarding the wisdom of recourse to military force in the case in question. Once war has already been waged, the enormity of the resultant slaughter may continue throughout the duration of the conflict to be viewed by military supporters as acceptable, given what they regard as the obviously good intentions of the killers.
The reason why it may seem ludicrous to assimilate the commander-in-chief of a nation at war with a political terrorist or a military officer acting in violation of the Geneva Conventions is because, in the first of these cases, the perspective of the victim is dismissed as irrelevant. Only in cases where military supporters wish to condemn the action in question do they admit the relevance of the victim’s perspective on what has been done to him or her. But the formal military of a nation is granted the last word on its own acts of slaughter, which they invariably characterize in such anodyne terms that the populace remains largely ignorant of the reality of what they have paid soldiers to do. If, instead, the victims’ perspectives were admitted as relevant, if the victims not only of terrorist attacks but also of bombing campaigns were given the opportunity to speak, military supporters would be forced to face up to the undeniable fact that the horrors of terror and torture have nothing whatsoever to do with whether the executors of terror and torture happen to wear uniforms or not.
The vacuity of the doctrine of double effect may ultimately reflect the Socratic insight that “No one knowingly does evil.” The leader of a first world nation who orders his troops to drop bombs upon another people’s land, the terrorist who plants bombs having essentially the same effects upon innocent non-combatants,[19] and the overzealous military officer who tortures his prisoners in order to obtain information, all believe that they are doing the right thing, in some sense. Otherwise, they would refrain from acting as they do, and their victims would not suffer at the hands of yet another person driven to kill by fanatical political commitments. While some glaringly megalomaniacal leaders such as Hitler may have been psychotic,[20] this could hardly be said of the entire military corps of Germany, nor the many high-level officials (Barbie, Demjanjuk, Eichmann, Goebbels, Göring, et al.) who developed and implemented the specific means used to effect Hitler’s aims.
Conclusion
Conscious agents do not themselves regard their own intentions as evil. All people, including enemy leaders and the soldiers whom they persuade to fight, act on the basis of their own beliefs, misguided and confused though they may be. An instructive example in this regard is recounted by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in an interview by director Errol Morris in the 2003 documentary film The Fog of War. McNamara reveals what was his own apparent readiness to invade Cuba in the face of the 1962 missile crisis (“The first day’s attack was planned at 1080 sorties, a huge air attack”), and then proceeds to explain that Kennedy was finally dissuaded from doing so by Tommy Thompson, the former Ambassador to Moscow, who knew Kruschev personally and thus was able to “empathize with the enemy.”
That all leaders have their own perspectives, which must be taken into consideration in any reasonable approach to international affairs, was expressed by China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan on February 1, 2002, in his response to Bush’s assertion of the existence of an “axis of evil” comprising Iran, Iraq, and North Korea:
We always advocate the principle of equality of all countries when dealing with state-to-state relations, otherwise it can only undermine the atmosphere for seeking resolution and harm the maintenance of world peace and stability.[21]
Quan’s statement expresses the importance of viewing other leaders as persons with values and beliefs. In stark contrast, the reigning paradigm of military solutions to conflict admits the subjective intention of the killers (so long as they are one’s own allies), while dismissing the perspective of innocent victims as irrelevant, and defining the intentions and perspectives of the enemy leaders (and often soldiers as well, by extension) as intrinsically evil, at least in the moment when the use of military force is being promoted.[22] But the interpretations of other people also matter strategically, for they base plans, policies, and actions upon their interpretations, not upon ours. So, for example, from the perspectives of the citizens of nations such as North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba, the ongoing threat of pre-emptive war by the United States is empirically indistinguishable from the threat of terrorist attack. Under this interpretation, civilians continually faced with the threat of the use of deadly force in retaliation to their government’s policies are being terrorized, while the leaders of those nations are placed in the psychologically fragile situation of not knowing whether they will be next in the line of fire.
It is a platitude of no mean significance that yesterday’s allies may become tomorrow’s enemies. Consider, for example, the case of Russia, a U.S. and British ally during World War II that came to be derogated during the Cold War as “The Evil Empire” by leaders such as U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The complete transformation from white to black of the image of the Russians, accomplished through the use of propaganda during this period, reveals, again, the efficacy of Manichean rhetoric in persuading the populace to support rationally dubious initiatives such as the build-up of vast stockpiles of nuclear arms.[23] “The Evil and Irrational Enemy” is an extraordinarily effective rhetorical device which serves not to protect people, but to promote war.
Notes:
1. A photograph of the letter is accessible online at:
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/flip_books/index.php?tldate=1945-08-09&groupid=3705&titleid=&pagenumber=1&collectionid=ihow
2. Cited in Danesch, Mostafa. 2004. Der Krieg gegen den Westen. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, p. 7. The citation (which I have translated) reads in German: „Unser Ziel ist es, möglichst viele Menschen umzubringen. Das ist die einzige Sprache, die der Westen versteht.“
3. Grimsley, Mark and Clifford J. Rogers, eds. 2002. Civilians in the Path of War. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, p. xiii.
4. Kant, Immanuel. 1964[1797]. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, translated by H. J. Paton. New York: Harper & Row.
5. George H.W. Bush, “The Letter to Saddam”, January 9, 1991, in Sifry and Cerf (1991), p. 178.
6. Along similar lines, while some supporters of the 2003 invasion of Iraq maintained that a tyrant such as Saddam Hussein could easily transfer weapons of mass destruction to terrorist factions to do with as they pleased, opponents of the invasion, some among them hard-nosed realists, retorted that Saddam Hussein would never act thus, for to do so would be to render himself vulnerable to a military coup.
7.The U.S. administration’s essentially vacuous “offer” to permit Saddam Hussein to seek asylum elsewhere thus strongly suggested that war had been decided upon long before, and, once members of Congress had renounced their constitutional right and responsibility to check the power of the president, only the date of its waging remained to be decreed by the commander-in-chief.
8. Cited in Sifray and Cerf, eds., 1991, p. 313.
9. Huyghe, François-Bernard, Quatrième Guerre Mondiale: Faire Mourir et Faire Croire (2004), Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, p. 36.
10. See Huyghe (2004), chapter 2, “Terrorisme: action et proclamation,” pp. 53-84.
11. Donald Rumsfeld, in a U.S. Department of Defense transcript cited by Lichterman and Burroughs (2004), p. 257
12. Walzer cited approvingly by Elshtain (2003), p. 79.
13. Thomas Aquinas, cited in McKeogh (2002), p. 64.
14. Elshtain (2003), p. 8.
15. Both Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein availed themselves of this tried and true method. They and their supporters capitalized on the slaughter of civilians by the United States, widely publicizing what they decried as “war crimes”.
16. Anscombe, 1970, p. 51.
17. Michael Walzer, “Michael Walzer responds [to Laurie Calhoun],” Dissent, Volume 48, no. 1, p. 86.
18. This expression derives from Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Knopf, 1996), by Daniel Goldhagen. “The Goldhagen hypothesis”, according to which the Germans were somehow especially vulnerable to the propaganda of the Third Reich (given their antecedent values and horrendous prejudices), fails to account for the support by the leaders and populace of other nations of often brutal and protracted wars such as the U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
19. See Gilo Pontecorvo’s1966 film, La bataille d’Alger, for a persuasive demonstration of this point.
20.Some writers have protested the labeling of Hitler as “insane”, claiming that to do so is to strip him of moral responsibility for his atrocities. But war supporters who wish to maintain that Hitler was “just another leader,” thus would seem to find themselves trapped between Charybdis and Scylla, for if Hitler was “just another leader” (albeit exceptionally ambitious), then he stands in a long lineage of historical figures willing to destroy other people in the name of their own ideas, some of which have been flagrantly confused. The question of moral responsibility thus gets pushed back to the prior question of why Hitler should have had the evil designs that he did. Those who support war on Manichean grounds, viz., that “We are good, and they are evil,” seldom offer accounts about how the evil leaders whom they decry became evil (nor do they care), but surely this process is facilitated through the corruptive effect of power, which would imply that those who militarily empower leaders such as Hitler, Milosevic, Hussein, et al., are to some degree responsible for what they eventually become.
21. China Daily, February 1, 2002; online at: http://www.china.org.cn/english/2002/Feb/26297.htm.
22. Muammar Khadafi (the leader of Libya) is a recent example of an “evil enemy” who was offered the chance (by the United States) to change his ways. The case of Khadafi raises the question why it would not have been possible to negotiate with other “evil” leaders as well, two salient cases in recent history having been Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. See Massimo Nava (2005) Vittime: Storie di Guerra sul fronte della pace, pp. 27-8, for a concise and incisive discussion of the Khadafi case.
23. A particularly telling example in this regard is the “documentary” or “information film” The Battle of Russia, directed by Anatole Litvak in 1945 as a part of the Why We Fight series produced by the U.S. War Department. In this film, the people of Russia and even Stalin himself are depicted as heroic and virtuous defenders of liberty. A similarly positive depiction of the Chinese is found in the companion film, The Battle of China, co-directed by Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak in 1944.
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contact info:
Laurie Calhoun
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
Harvard University
104 Mount Auburn Street
Cambridge, MA 02138