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Tough Reading:

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/soundings.97.2.0207

2161-6302

Cian O’Driscoll,

Military History and Strategy

Every year I commence my undergraduate seminar on the ethics of war by playing Edwin Starr's “War: What Is It Good For?” The answer to the titular question is, of course, “absolutely nothing.” War, Starr sings, has Shattered many a young man's dreamsMade him disabled, bitter and meanLife is much too short and preciousTo spend fighting wars these daysWar can't give lifeIt can only take it away. Yet few of the students that I encounter identify with his position. On average, each year, only two students from a class of fifty admit an affinity with pacifism. The majority, it seems, are sufficiently versed in the harsh verities of realism to know that if the lamb lies down with the lion, the lamb will have to be replaced frequently. There is, then, a ready readership for Nigel Biggar's wonderfully argumentative In Defence of War (2013). This can only be a good thing, because books as fine as this one deserve to be widely read. However, I want to argue here that this book is also a tough read—not tough in the sense that it is hard work, but tough in the sense that it is has an abrasive edge. This edge is arguably the key to its appeal, but I wish to submit that it may also be its Achilles's heel.I am not embarrassed to say that Nigel Biggar's In Defence of War is a beautiful piece of work. It is an honest, personal, and courageous book in which the author brings the weight of his own family history and considerable learning to bear on a subject that is far too often treated as a detached intellectual fancy or parlor game. There is a genuinely unflinching quality to the way Biggar grapples with, for instance, both the tenets of his Christian faith and the legitimacy of those wars that took the lives of his own uncle and granduncle. If John Howard Yoder (whom Biggar discusses in chapter 1) has called upon scholars to be “honest” in their just war thinking (1996), Biggar amply meets this challenge. And lest it be misconstrued as such, I should be very clear that these words of praise are not merely a platitudinous prelude to a more substantive critique still to follow. Actually, these sentiments are both sincerely meant and provide the cornerstone for the argument I wish to present in the following pages. They are sincerely meant insofar as I believe that thinking ethically about the use of military force is a subject that demands our full attention, not just in an academic or intellectual sense, but also on a spiritual or existential register (see O'Driscoll 2013). To give it any less than this is not only to run the risk of trivializing the challenges posed by thinking about right and wrong in relation to war and killing; it also invites that strain of hypocrisy wherein scholars are tempted to publish provocative arguments that even they must struggle to agree with. By contrast, Biggar gives himself over to his inquiry, heart and soul.It is the tone of Biggar's wholehearted engagement that forms the basis of the argument I wish to develop. In particular, it is the adversarial framing of his argument. For a start, the title of the book, In Defence of War, implies an element of confrontation. Beyond this, the first two chapters—“Against the Virus of Wishful Thinking” and “Against Christian Pacifism”—seem almost to be picking a fight. This tone continues in chapter 5, “Against Liberal Positivism and Liberal Individualism”—a robust rebuttal of David Rodin's claims that just war theory is both a moral and practical failure. All this is, of course, fair enough. Academia is, after all, a contact sport, and jousting is an essential and sometimes beneficial part of it. Indeed, it is in this spirit that aspiring doctoral candidates are often asked to identify the “enemies” whom they seek to refute. But I would like to consider for a moment the possibility that there is something more going on here, something that speaks to a particular challenge that necessarily confronts everyone who wishes to write about just war.This something is a basic moral sensitivity that has been calloused to meet the needs of a violent world. Biggar displays an acute awareness of, and grief for, the human suffering caused by war. Time and again he refuses to shy away from the nastiness of the endeavor and the sadness it all too often leaves in its wake. Even while recognizing that it is important to be able to stand back from the phenomena we are studying so that we can achieve a certain level of objectivity in our analysis, he lays bare what he calls the “flesh-and-blood instances of the evils of war” (4). The tragic story of Duncan Crookston is recounted to this end, and the carnage of the World War II reported in graphic terms (5). But Biggar's empathy is also evident in, on the one hand, his horror at the death toll at the Somme and, on the other, his courageous refusal to condemn General Sir Douglas Haig on account of it (chapter 5). Elsewhere, as in his discussion of the principle of double effect (chapter 4), Biggar shows himself anguished by both the difficulty and tragic character of some of the decisions that have to be made in war. In these passages, and others, it is easy to see Biggar's “love” for his fellow human, including soldiers, and the compassion and humanity that informs his writing.But, as Thucydides (3.82) observed, war can be a “violent teacher” (1998). And it is in this spirit that Biggar advises that military leaders like General Haig must “callous” themselves to the suffering that it causes (116–18). “There is a sense,” he writes, “in which any military commander who is going to do his job has to be able to callous himself—to thicken his skin. He has to be emotionally capable of ordering his troops to risk their lives, and in some cases he must be capable of ordering them to their probable or certain deaths” (117). He later adds to this by proposing that “a certain kind of callousness is a military virtue” (148). Callousness is distinct from carelessness and indifference to losses, according to Biggar, but it is a means to fomenting the kind of ruthlessness essential to military success (117). It is also incompatible with the practice of compassion in battle, where we understand compassion to connote “a certain emotional identification, an entering into the suffering of others” (118). Biggar is emphatic on this point: compassion during battle is “exactly what a commander must callous himself against” if he is to perform the role required of him (118).Biggar's defense of “professional callousness” (119) arguably bleeds into his own work as a moralist. He thickens his skin and steels himself to offer a number of judgment calls that he presents as harsh but essential to the prosecution of a just war. Two examples spring to mind. The first comes from a discussion in chapter 3 of the experience of a U.S. soldier who served on the Pacific Theatre in World War II.An American infantryman, Sidney Stewart, leapt into a bomb crater and found himself face to face with a Japanese soldier who had done the same thing: “I knew I couldn't take him prisoner. We didn't have time…. He said something in Japanese…. I knew it was surrender…. He didn't cringe or sneer, nor did he show any hatred. Why, I don't hate this guy. I can't hate him. This man was like a friend.” Nonetheless, when ordered to move out, Stewart ignored the prayer board the Japanese was tugging from his pocket and shot him dead. He did this, Biggar adds approvingly, “neither out of hatred nor without necessity” (86–87). Without wishing to be quarrelsome, it seems to me that Biggar gives the American soldier rather an easy ride here. Was the killing of a surrendered and prayerful Japanese soldier truly necessary, as he suggests, or could Stewart have disarmed him and left him behind, alive, to take his chances? This is, to be sure, a tough call, but Biggar's approval of the killing displays a toughness to match. The second example also arises in chapter 3. This time it is the actions of a member of the British armed forces, Patrick Bury, in Afghanistan in 2009 that are the focus. Biggar dispassionately reports the factors that prevailed upon Bury to order a colleague to shoot a small Afghan boy whose behavior was consistent with scouting for the enemy (106). What is noteworthy about this passage is not Biggar's conclusion, but his failure to emphasize the awfulness of both the need to play percentages with a young boy's life and the prospect of getting it wrong.My intention here is not to second-guess Biggar's conclusions but to highlight the ruggedness of his general point of view. It is interesting in this respect that Biggar, as noted earlier, landed on the concept of callousness, because “coolness” in the discharge of violence against others was a recurring motif in the text even before the author acknowledged it (57n159, 78). This is probably a by-product of Biggar's debt to Augustine. Following the bishop of Hippo, Biggar is keen to warn warriors of the degrading effects of malevolence, intemperate anger, and the zeal for vengeance (65, 78). Against this, he vaunts the ideal of love for one's neighbor as the only worthy motivation for the use of force (61). Moreover, he draws upon the testimony of soldiers to demonstrate that the possibility of fighting for love is not just a theological conceit but is an actuality (91). Within this matrix, dominated on the one side by love and on the other by animus and cruelty, callousness necessarily occupies a gray zone. Without directly associating it with love, and while ceding that it is incompatible with compassion, Biggar appears tolerant and even occasionally encouraging of callousness. I cannot do justice to the richness of his argument here, and to the subtle way he picks around this thorny issue, but I would like to earmark it as a source of qualms for me. For instance, callousness in war is dangerous insofar as it often gives rise to dehumanizing practices, and flies in the face of Emer de Vattel's hard-learned injunction that we must always remember that our enemies are human, the same as us.It would be interesting to discover whether Biggar has more to tell us about callousness, for this is an intriguing issue that presses directly upon the principal point of tension in military ethics. If indeed callousness (or a certain kind of it) is a military virtue, how should it be inculcated in soldiers? What exercises should be undertaken to ensure that soldiers are properly habituated to the right kind of callousness? And how would one ensure that the right kind of callousness wouldn't swiftly degenerate into the wrong kind and spread through the ranks like a virus? Perhaps these questions do not really trouble Biggar's position on a conceptual level, but they do raise practical issues that bear on whether and how it can—to use Biggar's turn of phrase—get up and walk on the battlefield (and indeed the training ground). At the very least, the model Biggar offers for when an officer should practice callousness is flawed. An officer, he contends, should practice carefulness before battle begins, callousness in it, and compassion after it (118). First of all, one might like to ask whether this model applies only to commanders, or if it extends to front-line soldiers too. Second, and more seriously, one might query the tidy sequencing that Biggar's model assumes. Clear breaks marking the commencement and conclusion of a military exchange are often absent from contemporary warfare. What counts as “before” and what qualifies as “after” are hard to identify, leaving it unclear whether compassion, carefulness, or callousness should govern at a particular time. This is not to categorically rule against the general principle that Biggar is proposing—which merits further attention than I can give it here—but merely to suggest that its implementation raises some practical questions that require further thought.Callousness is a trait that all just war theorists must at least flirt with. As Michael Walzer (2004) has argued, the just war idiom is a language of power. That is to say, it is the lingua franca of many of today's political and military leaders. Presidents, prime ministers, and generals alike have deployed the concepts and categories of the just war to justify their preferred policies and courses of action. The most notable example in recent years is perhaps President Barack Obama's Nobel Address, but President George W. Bush was not shy about invoking the just war tradition either (Brunstetter 2013). Prime Minister Tony Blair also engaged the idiom of the just war tradition on occasion (Lee 2011), while General Rupert Smith (2007) has written about it in some depth. The implication of this for us, as scholars and commentators, is that just war is, so to speak, a colonized language. As such, it cannot provide a pure form of resistance (whatever that would look like). But the wager is that it can provide a form of internal critique. If we learn to speak the language of just war theory, the language of power, we may well be able to gain some normative leverage over those leaders in a way that those who practice external critique (e.g., pacifists) surely never will. It boils down to a wager, then. How close is it possible to stand to the flame of power without getting burned? In placing this wager, just war theorists must callous themselves to the fact that they are necessarily a part of the war machine that they are seeking to constrain.This callousing need not be final or irreversible. In fact, it is more likely to be part of a dialectic, or back-and-forth, between the poles of acute sensitivity and hard-won coolness. At some points in his or her life, every scholar will feel an emotional tug that harps on the human costs of war and makes it hard for him or her to look beyond them; at other points, he or she will rise above this disposition and steel him- or herself to accept the legitimacy of war in this or that instance (or even just in principle or prospect). What is often most interesting is how scholars arrive at the latter position. By his own admission, Biggar arrives at it via historical experience. His opposition to pacifism is “not a priori but based on historical experience” (10, 77). A rifle through history reveals, he argues, that wrongdoing is rife and that it is sometimes best countered by force. In respect of the first point, he mentions the examples of Wilhelmine Germany and Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia (10). In respect of the second, he claims that it is “historically and empirically clear” that because soldiers can “suffer moral constraint” they provide a viable means of protecting and promoting what is good (31). Biggar's position is thus quite close to that articulated by Obama in his aforementioned 2009 Nobel Address. “To say that force may sometimes be necessary,” Obama declares, “is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; of the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.” The problem according to Biggar is that too many people do not acknowledge “the prudence that cumulative common experience teaches us” (77). “What experience would teach and what humans are prepared to learn are often discrepant” (77). The lesson that Biggar would impart here is that careful attendance to the sum of human experience regarding warfare reveals that it is sometimes justified and that any other point of view is tainted by wishful thinking.Human experience is apparently a very different beast from the Bible, because while the latter is adjudged to contain “a plurality of voices, which are sometimes in tension with one another” (35), the former is endowed with no such complexity. Rather, it is distilled into a series of stark moral dilemmas. Should the world have stood idle while Saddam Hussein's regime suppressed the Shi'a revolt in southern Iraq in 1991 (6)? Should Europe have refrained from involvement in the former Yugoslavia until 1995, by which time Ratko Mladic had already overseen the July massacre at Srebrenica (168)? Should the West have turned its back on Rwanda in April 1994, thereby allowing the Interahamwe a free hand to pursue a genocide that led to the death of at least eight hundred thousand people (168)? The answer that Biggar wants to lead us to in each case is no. Of course, Biggar does not suppose that the use of force should be countenanced in all or even most cases. He is consistent in his view that the use of force is justifiable only in certain circumstances in which stringent conditions are met. It is in this context that his reference to the Shi'a revolt, Bosnia, and Rwanda make sense: they are, we must suppose, exceptionally clear-cut cases that force the reader to cede the possibility that war is sometimes superior to “peace.” I would not wish to deny the force of these questions, or their rhetorical power, but it is also important to note that by asking these particular questions we occlude others. Should the West have devoted more support to the 1993 Arusha Accords? Should Europe have engaged more extensively with nonviolent opposition leaders like Ibrahim Rugova? And what have two major wars done to solve the intercommunal tensions that plague Iraqi society? My point is that historical experience does not speak with a single voice or in a determinate way, as Biggar's presentation often seems to imply, but is instead multivalent.I am especially keen to press Biggar on the claim that history endorses the view that soldiers can and commonly do fight with love in their hearts, primarily for their comrades and kith and kin, but also for their enemies. As noted earlier, Biggar cites firsthand testimony in support of this claim. It is curious then that he also cites testimony that indicates soldiers are frequently prone to animus in battle (85–87). Biggar dismisses the latter point in a breezy fashion by noting that his argument requires him to demonstrate only that malevolence is not a necessary part of the soldier's psychology. This is true enough, perhaps. But it is not the entire story. Most notably, it does not grapple with the reality that, regardless of what a colonel in the Royal Marines or dozens of war memoirs may claim, significant numbers of soldiers are afflicted by rage, regret, and trauma, even long after the fighting has ceased for them. Indeed, the depressing figures for suicides among active duty soldiers and the murder of military spouses, only just coming to light, suggest that there is a hidden history here—an excess that is not treated in Biggar's analysis. Of course, Biggar does not need to account for these things if his aim is only to show that war can be justified. But by omitting them he discounts an important concomitant of modern war—one that hints at spiritual decay rather than vitality.There is, I think, something unsettling in the close association between callousness and the detached love of the just warrior. Nor am I alone in admitting a sense of unease here. J. Glenn Gray, whom Biggar cites more than once, expresses his misgivings on this subject in a memorable passage of The Warriors. Gray's views first emerge (1970, 7) in response to an experience he had as a soldier in 1944 when he complied with orders to destroy the leftovers from soldier's meals rather than distribute them to hungry locals thirty miles to the rear of the Italian front. Although they occasioned some dismay for him, Gray “steeled” himself to carry these orders through: “And though it wrenches my heart to see them [the local Italians begging for food] … I soon grow accustomed to the sight and eat my fill. How hard is the heart of man!” Later, however, upon observing the actions of a French security officer with whom he was temporarily working, he is moved to lament the “hardening” of his heart (1970, 8–10).The officer's actions involved a French woman who, having had a fling with a Gestapo captain, now sought official protection from the vengeance of the Maquis. After calmly interrogating the woman and signing a decree that she should be executed, but not having divulged his judgment to her, he engaged her in conversation, sharing jokes and stories. “The girl admired the family snapshots and the two of them laughed and joked for many minutes. Passers-by might have easily mistaken them for lovers.” Gray is struck by the incongruity of this scene: There was little savagery or blood lust in this French officer. He did not hate this girl, so far as I could tell, though he hated her deeds. He would, in fact, have been quite willing to sleep with her the night before ordering her execution. When I remonstrated with him about such callousness, he made clear to me that he regarded himself as an army officer in a quite different way from himself as a human being. The two personalities could succeed one another with lightning rapidity…. As a human being, he was capable of kindness, even gentleness, and within limits he was just and honest. In his capacity of functionary, he could be brutal beyond measure without ever losing his outward amiability and poise. I observed precisely the same qualities in the Fascist and Nazi politicians and police with whom it was my fate to deal. (1970, 8–9) The Nazi reference belies Gray's feelings regarding the officer's conduct. He elaborates these feelings over the following pages (9–10), explaining “with a kind of horror” a link between becoming “inured to cruelty” and a readiness to practice it.The experience is a chastening one for Gray, and he confesses to being haunted by it. He describes how episodes such as that of the French officer and the woman led to his growing “bitter and sarcastic” and to the corruption of his values and coarsening of his conscience. At times he seems hardly able to confront this “dirty, lousy business” in which he partook. He explains that he finds himself getting “overwhelmed by brutality and suffering” and concludes one reflection, for example, with an abrupt “But enough of this.” On other occasions, when he dwells longer on what he calls the “whole rotten mess,” he admits to despairing of himself (1970, 9–10). At root, what appears to trouble Gray most deeply is the fear of sliding into the kind of callousness—to “becoming a functionary”—that Biggar holds up as part and parcel of the realization of the just war idea. It is, he intimates, only by resisting this slide that soldiers can hope to avoid being “too deeply stained by the monstrous cruelty of war” (1970, 10).Returning to the focus of this article, Biggar's book, the charge must be that he does not consider callousness in the round but only treats it from a very particular, or even partial, perspective. I am inclined to think that if Biggar does not exactly gloss over the monstrous cruelty of war—he laments it on numerous occasions—nor does he do quite enough to listen to the minor voices that, buried in the subtexts of history, evidence the depths of its awfulness. I am referring here to the stories of those “disabled, bitter, and mean” young men mentioned by Edwin Starr who have been utterly broken by war and the victims and loved ones whose lives they have damaged. Or, indeed, the many vignettes recounted by Gray in The Warriors. These are, of course, stories of which Biggar is painfully aware. But perhaps they are also stories to which he has, to some degree, hardened his heart. What is lost or sacrificed by this callousing? Or is this the wrong question, and should I instead be asking what is enabled by it? Is it the case that, rather than being detrimental to it, callousing is integral, nay necessary, to what we, as scholars of the ethics of war, do? Is this an Achilles heel or a basic prerequisite of our vocation?Leaving this question aside, I earlier called Biggar's book a work of some beauty. This is justified, I believe, not just by the fact that it reflects a lifetime of learning about the just war tradition, and that it relates that learning elegantly, but also because it provokes us to think more deeply about how we approach what we do. In Defence of War is a personal and courageous book, and all the better for it. Perhaps ironically, its integrity is nowhere better exemplified than in the author's discussion of callousness. He lays bare what it takes, both emotionally and intellectually, to think earnestly about vexing questions like whether the Battle of the Somme satisfied the principle of proportionality and how we should understand double effect today. Complacency and easy answers are scorned. Instead, Biggar reminds us, almost on every page, that war is a tough business and that one needs a very thick skin to even entertain the idea that it may ever be justified. This book should challenge the rest of us to be so daring.