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Why War?
Dr. Michael Bauman examines the idea of war — and, more specifically, the war in Iraq and the broader "war on terror" — and concludes that sometimes war is necessary to create peace.
Take One
Few persons do greater good than those who know how to speak truth to power. To them, we are all indebted. Equally as important is speaking truth to evil, which is not the same thing. The simple and irreducible fact about speaking truth to evil is that it oftentimes is impossible. Here's why:
If evildoers were rational, we could reason them back to virtue. We could negotiate them to goodness. But they are not. Evil is irrational at the root, as are those who embrace it and employ it.
If you think you can talk evil into being something else, you are trafficking in imaginary preferences, not in reality. You have sacrificed fact to hope, to wish and to preference. When those with whom you wish to negotiate cannot and will not negotiate, no political or diplomatic solution is possible. If they cannot and will not negotiate reasonably, then reason itself declares that negotiation is dead. Reason declares that a different approach is required.
Evildoers have learned to evade the weight of argument and goodness. That's part of what it means to be evil. Evildoers are impervious to the requirements of virtue and reason. Other kinds of pressure are required if ever we are to dissuade them from the evil that they do and intend to do. The exact nature of that dissuasion depends upon what the evildoers value most, upon what speaks to them most eloquently and effectively. When we speak to them, we must speak their language, or we are not speaking to them at all. That language might be the language of economics, of politics, of diplomacy or, in the final resort, of war.
You can tell what language evildoers speak, not by listening to what they say, but by watching what they do. What they say is meant for public consumption and manipulation. What they do is meant for achieving their real goal, regardless of what they say. If they were persons of truth and of reason, they would be less dangerous, less evil, and we could talk to them. But if they are persons of violence, we cannot. Terrorists are persons of violence. We cannot get them to stop their terror by talking to them. Talk is not their real language. Their real language is death.
Some well-intentioned folks among us do not agree that evildoers are impervious to reason. Indeed, they often think that evildoers are not really evil. They think and act as if all things were negotiable. They think that if we simply sit down with our enemies and speak to them with respect, if we find avenues of compromise, we can make our enemies our friends. They do not accept that we have deadly enemies, that there are people at large in the world who want us dead — now — and that they will kill themselves if that's what it takes to kill us. With such killers, there is no negotiating. If you did all they asked of you, they'd still want you dead. Yet these well-meaning folks think that to resist evil militarily is itself evil. They seem to think that if we stand up to evil in a way to which terrorists respond violently, that we are evil — a notion from which I dissent in the strongest possible terms. You cannot tell if an action or a policy is wise or foolish, wicked or good, simply by seeing how others respond to it.
Put differently, all too frequently we must fight — which means both killing and dying — for peace. But whether we fight or not, innocent people, lots of them, will be murdered. Life in a fallen world frequently offers us no alternative to killing or being killed.
You can no more negotiate with political pathology than you can negotiate with cancer. You stop it or it stops you.
Pick one.
Take Two
My point can be made from a different direction: While human beings are capable of reason, they are rarely ever reasonable. Their passions and their appetites often prevent it.
That is, given what I take to be the Christian view of human depravity and the correspondingly tragic view of life that arises from it, war, not peace, is our natural state. Mogadishu and Baghdad, not Palo Alto and Topeka, are who we human beings really are. The relative peace of American domestic life is the exception, not the rule, in human existence. In the roughly 2,000 years since Christ, there have been only 121 years without war — in Europe. To say so is not to give an excuse for evil, but to reorient ourselves toward reality, toward realism.
Almost inevitably, fallen human beings smash their brothers and sisters simply by being themselves. That defect is life-wide and soul-deep — which is apparently why Jesus moved the problem of sin from action to disposition (Matthew 5:21ff, NIV). We are murderers at heart. Apart from Him, there are no exceptions. We flatter ourselves to think otherwise.
That fact makes me raise questions about our latest war and the evil we face: "What would have been the death toll in Iraq had we not gone in (again)?" "What was the death toll before we arrived?" and "What would the death toll have been had we waited several years more (if ever) before going in to try to set this evil right?" Only God knows the exact answer to such questions, but the answer has nothing at all to do with whether or not Saddam had WMDs or shipped them to Syria with Russian aid before we arrived. We must answer those difficult questions the best way we can. From every indication known to me, all hell did not break loose in Iraq once we showed up. It had been going on for decades. And it was being exported: Saddam paid more than $20,000 each to the Palestinian families of terrorists who killed themselves murdering Israelis, the same Israelis whom Saddam also tried to murder by lobbing dozens of SCUD missiles into Israel during the first Gulf War. Saddam did even worse to the Kurds, fellow countrymen whom he killed by the tens of thousands.
Given that we face colossal evil in the world, and do so almost continually; given that since Adam war is our natural condition; and given that it takes a force to check a force, I wonder what effective alternative to armed conflict pacifists might reasonably support in their conquest of colossal evil. Sometimes war is the only way left to us. (Please note that the word "sometimes" might be an understatement.)
Take Three
During a faculty debate during the first Gulf War, a pacifist colleague of mine from Costa Rica asked, "Why can't the United States be more like Costa Rica? We don't have a standing army in Costa Rica, but we do have a peace academy."
I replied that we have three peace academies in America: West Point, Annapolis and Colorado Springs. "If you want peace," I said, "you need to learn how to end war quickly. Those folks are the best in the world at ending war quickly."
C O F F E E S H O PBut we've been in Iraq for five years. That's a very long time. But given the depth and breadth of the problem, it might not be long at all. War and murder have been going on there a lot longer than that. If we left Iraq this morning, war and murder would keep going on a lot longer still.
The Iraqis seem to be on their slow and painful way to a sustainable self-government, the sort of government that historically tends to be the most peaceful sort of human government yet devised. Long-term prospects for peace in Iraq are better now than they have been for decades. I suspect our presence there will have brought it about more quickly than it would have been brought about without us, if ever.
Simply talking about it with the evildoers would not have fixed a thing.
Michael Bauman is Professor of Theology and Culture at Hillsdale College, where he is also the Director of Christian Studies. As well as being a former member of the editorial department of Newsweek magazine, he has published nearly 20 books and 50 articles.
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