War As Chaos Enforcement

Wars, we are told, can never end for the same reason why crime-fighting can never end. There will always be thieves and murderers, and there will always be terrorists and "rogue states." The former are suppressed by the cops and judges, and the latter by soldiers.

There are at least five problems with this analogy. Let’s start with the most obvious one, that major wars, despite the relative decline of the state, are still nation-against-nation wars. This is a variant of crude collectivism, in which few distinctions are made between the innocent and the guilty. Wars in today’s highly interdependent world are such a technologically primitive way of resolving disputes, so that innocent folks die, economies ruined, and freedoms repressed even as a few of the bad guys are killed as well, that their costs seem to far outweigh the benefits.

Why is that? The ever-deepening specialization, division of labor, mutual dependence, and in the end even differences in individual personalities as a result of both the increasing variety of occupations, of consumer goods and services, and of personal pursuits, are what Mises called the "cosmic becoming" of society. This becoming, as if a flower grows from a seed into a fully-developed thing, is utterly incompatible with war. War and its precursors such as sanctions and trade barriers destroy the people with whom we do business. If America were now to go to war with Japan, American consumers would have to bear with using inferior and more expensive transport equipment, cars, semiconductors, electrical machinery, chemicals, electronics, and whatever else Japan exports to the US, or even do without them at all. The intricate structure of production within which the numerous US and Japanese companies and workers are now intertwined would be annihilated. Exporting and importing would come to an end; foreign-owned enterprises would be expropriated; jobs would be lost. And the repercussions would be felt everywhere, not merely in the US and Japan. Wars tear societies apart instead of knitting them together into a planetary web of economic, scientific, and cultural production, cooperation, and exchange, thereby bringing prosperity and the fruits of civilization to everybody. The more advanced a society is, the greater the damage and disruption done by wars.

The problem is not only due to the nature of war as such, but of technology, as well. Hence, second, the weapons used in wars are imprecise. Unlike the cops’ handguns (and I am talking about normal cops, not the SWAT ninjas), they cannot be used only on the guilty parties. They don't discriminate and kill everyone in the vicinity. This is especially true of nuclear arms, but applies to a lesser degree to all military weapons. Some may disagree by pointing to devices such as "smart bombs" that are able to target the enemy while sparing the innocent better. To that I reply that these innovations are not nearly good enough. When war is as efficient as the city police searching for a thief, then the peace lovers will be satisfied. However, I find such possibility difficult to take seriously. In short, poorly directed and unfocused force replaces careful discernment. So even the best attempts of the US to conduct wars look like using a chainsaw to do cancer surgery. A lot of eggs are broken, and the omelet is never made.

Third, crime-fighting results in exactly four things: justice or retribution, deterrence of future crime, rehabilitation of the offenders, and protection of society as a result of removing the criminals from it, all ideally properly balanced. (So, e.g., the third outcome is like putting a criminal through a purgatory, and the fourth is like sending him to hell.) To what extent does war imitate these effects? Let’s go through them very quickly one by one.

Which of the recent wars have been just? I can't think of any. Maybe you can, though don't tell me that the entry of the US into WW2 was to enforce justice. In order to prove any such claim you would have to identify a group of people, comprising an enterprise association, who committed specific crimes for which a war punished them and only them. I’d say that the mass slaughters of wars have been the second greatest injustice ever to visit this planet.
The arrest of a criminal does not cause his buddies to step up their efforts to resist the state. Deterring conflict through wars does not appear to work; in fact, the effect is likely to be completely opposite, because of the political significance of killings. Attempts to impute "self-interested rationality" to the enemy and devise strategies to manipulate him into surrendering as quickly as possible fail to come to grips with the fact that many people naturally consider things other than narrow costs and benefits. Just think of suicide bombers. In addition, wars unleash a wave of private lawlessness and crime.
Has the war in Iraq improved that country? I think that a civil war, currently going on, is hardly progress. If there are seething hatreds among different groups in a country, suppressed by force and clever politicking, then some of the possible solutions are: secessions, laissez-faire free markets, and ideological work promoting religious or ethnic tolerance. It is only in these ways that peace could be achieved. Simply "decapitating" a regime that kept the peace, however coercively, is utter foolishness. Thus nation-building has so far been a losing project, in which all the subtleties of the losing side’s culture, internal and foreign politics, economic relations, etc., are ignored. Once again, the effect has been opposite: we have made our "ward" worse.
It is true that Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to anybody, not that he threatened the United States. But as one Iraqi said, "the Americans took Saddam out but put many Saddams in the street." I doubt that anyone, including us, is better protected. On the contrary, we are very likely in greater danger than we had been before Bush sent troops to Iraq.

Fourth, soldiers are nothing like policemen also in the sense that the latter deal with citizens, and the former with enemy. And the enemy has no legal protections. For them there is no presumption of innocence, no right to a trial, no right to confront accusers, no right against cruel and unusual punishment or torture, and so on and so forth. Instead, they get swift deaths from "surgical strikes" or are spirited away to some gulag.

Finally, society can deal with sporadic criminals, including terrorists, who arise every now and then. In a war violence is over the top, and it is perpetrated by the very governments that are supposed to protect people from violence. So, on the one hand, the intensity of wartime conflict causes society to unravel; and on the other hand, there is no one to appeal to for protection. The military is not a protector; it is a destroyer of law and order, from whom people, normally, flee. Not for nothing is war one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Any time someone says that soldiers protect your freedom, think something like "Napoleon" or "Genghis Khan," or even, as Roderick Long has brilliantly argued, "Hezbollah and the Israeli government."

(Here it may be objected that Hezbollah is trying to maximize civilian casualties, while Israel is trying to minimize them. Suppose that’s true. Then we are forced to conclude that the first gang is evil, while the second one is incompetent. Thanks, both. By the way, in that Krauthammer piece, did you notice the phrase "dual-use infrastructure"? That means the stuff that can be used both for peaceful purposes and for war, which includes, get this: "bridges, roads, airport runways." So roads are fair targets, because enemy troops can use them? What about, say, schools, in which children can imbibe bad ideas that will eventually lead to wars (ideas such as that roads and schools are "dual-use"), or hospitals that treat wounded soldiers who, upon recovery, will get back into battle? And why is the power grid excluded? Is not the electricity it supplies of use to Hezbollah? And why stop there? What about trees, whose cherry blossoms (let’s say) might inspire enemy warriors? Why not napalm them, too? The absurdity of the "dual-use" distinction should be evident when it is realized that in this world every piece of technology can be used for both good and evil. It is hard to find a good employment for nukes, as I argue above, but roads and bridges? Shame, Krauthammer. And to continue with this a little bit further, the police does not blow up roads, bridges, and airport runways in order to prevent a kidnapper or bank robber from escaping.)

For these reasons, therefore, comparing wars to police actions is futile.

August 9, 2006

Dmitry Chernikov [send him mail] is a graduate student in philosophy at Kent State University.

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