War -- Summation

[Note -- Some of this is dated because I wrote it just before Obama was elected, but I feel confident that the message remains valid]

The butchery of the twentieth century instructed us that aggressive warfare is intolerable, and the United States played a heroic role in commemorating that lesson at Nuremberg and in the subsequent U.N. Charter. What we are witnessing today, and what the episodes I have discussed bear witness to, is a government powerful and craven enough to unleash the scourge of aggressive war to enforce its political will around the world with impunity. With 761 reported military bases abroad, along with untold numbers of unreported others, the federal government bestrides the globe with a sword. That the same government who framed the Nuremberg Principles is now demolishing them makes this a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions: like Macbeth, the King’s champion has murdered the King in his sleep.

Certainly the United States has no duty to remain a member of the U.N. or to continue participating in the Security Council. The U.N. is a bureaucracy like any other and must therefore be regarded with a strong dose of skepticism, as the succeeding chapters will argue. But the rules governing the use of force have long since matured into customary international law, largely through the efforts of the United States itself at Nuremberg, and membership in the U.N. is not necessary for those rules to retain their force. Even if the United States chose to withdraw from the U.N. and to disavow customary principles, there is no indication that the United States would endorse a right of nations to launch war whenever they please. If anything, the United States routinely criticizes other nations for displaying such bellicose behavior, such as with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, or more recently with Russia’s armed intervention into Georgia’s conflict with the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Despite lambasting these foreign acts of aggression, the United States simultaneously endorses is its own unique right to launch war whenever it pleases, a double standard that is as unworkable as it is hypocritical. 

Dissenters might ask, “but isn’t the United States good?” or  “isn’t the world a better place when the United States pursues goodness free from legalistic restraints?” Such pleas push us back to an earlier question: what was it that made the United States good in the first place? We find the primary answer in the Declaration of Independence, a document proclaiming that a society has the right to govern itself free from outside interference. Surely the British felt more capable of governing America in a wise and beneficial manner than the colonists could, and the rebelling colonists themselves initially sought to secure freedom only within the Empire. Before long, however, it became obvious that no effort to launch the American experiment would be worthwhile unless we as Americans could do it on our own, come what may. To argue now that America should militarily export “freedom” as we understand it into other societies – and for their own good – is to don a red coat. It is a supreme betrayal of our birthright.

Apart from the sanctity of independence, another vital ingredient to America’s goodness was the rule of law, the concept dating back to the Magna Carta that government must obey rules just as individuals do. The rule of law is itself an essential “good” from which so many others flow, and to argue that the United States government should destroy the rule of law in the pursuit of “goodness” is self-defeating and nonsensical. Idealistic fervor to achieve “good” at any price has shattered more lives, liberty, and property than can ever be estimated. Incidentally, it is this same fervor to do “right” that has waylaid our Constitution, and the same fervor that our enemies display when perpetrating their various cruelties in the misbegotten belief that noble ends justify ignoble means.

Playwright Robert Bolt illustrated the point in A Man For All Seasons, recounting Thomas More’s refusal to endorse Henry VIII’s break from the Catholic Church. In a telling scene showcasing More’s reverence for the rule of law, More explains why he will not attempt to arrest Richard Rich, a man whom More admits is evil. Exhorting More to take action are his wife (Alice), his daughter (Margaret), and his daughter’s suitor (Roper). But More chastises them for their destructive willingness to brush aside the law in their quest for “good,” and his words convey wisdom that the United States would do well to regain:

Roper: Arrest him.

Alice: Yes!

More: For what?

Alice: He’s dangerous!

Roper: For libel; he’s a spy.

Alice: He is! Arrest him!

Margaret: Father, that man’s bad.

More: There is no law against that.

Roper: There is! God’s law!

More: Then God can arrest him.

Roper: Sophistication upon sophistication!

More: No, sheer simplicity. The law, Roper, the law. I know what’s legal not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal.

Roper: Then you set man’s law above God’s!

More: No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact – I’m not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can’t navigate. I’m no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I’m a forester. I doubt if there’s a man alive who could follow me there, thank God . . .

Alice: While you talk, he’s gone!

More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

United States foreign policy has fallen into the hands of the Ropers among us, who have made it their self-appointed mission to exorcise “evil” from the world by any means they see fit, the law be damned. Experience shows that this attitude is not confined to the Bush administration or the Republican party, but rather permeates both major parties and will not disappear upon Bush’s departure from office. The Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin fully supports the Bush administration’s foreign policy and promises to continue, or perhaps even amplify, armed interventionism abroad. For his part, Democratic nominee Barack Obama chose to enhance his foreign-policy credentials by selecting Senator Joseph Biden as a running mate, who strongly advocated the interventions into both Serbia and Iraq, and who is now making noises about taking action against Russia with regard to the Georgian conflict (where the Russians are in fact mimicking America’s treatment of Serbia). Obama also receives foreign-policy advice from Zbigniew Brzezinski – President Carter’s hawkish national security advisor during the 1979 Iranian fiasco – who hysterically labels Russia’s Vladimir Putin as “Stalin” and “Hitler” reincarnated. In short, nothing will change after the next president assumes office in January 2009. As the prohibitions on aggressive war come tumbling down, so do the barriers shielding us from chaos. Yet this chaos spurs our Ropers only to redouble their efforts, insisting all the while that letting slip the dogs of war will bring us closer to the promised land known as the “Democratic Peace."