What Is War Anyhow?

War is not just the mayhem that foot soldiers experience. War, first of all, is a political act.

It is only secondarily a military action. To control the military action, a battle plan that subordinates the fighting to its political objective is required. The US military historically has had difficulty defining military actions in such political terms. It tends to think of war as a means to "total victory" defined as the surrender of the enemy army after destroying its ability to resist. Historians and strategists call this point of view "total war".

The political claim for justifying the invasion of Iraq was three-fold: to free the Iraqi people from a heinous dictator, destroy his weapons of mass destruction, and create a democracy in Iraq. The defeat of Al Quaida, which was not present in Iraq at the time of our invasion, was added after Bush's famous landing on the carrier to declare total victory, but before the resistance began in earnest. The resulting quagmire (continued guerrilla warfare spearheaded at first by Al Quaida, led probably by Osama bin Laden) has made the construction of a working democracy in a basically still-tribal culture at least problematic, if not impossible.

Our concept of total war is in defiance of what our culture - and other cultures as well - understands to be just. We have an unrealistic view of freedom, which we perceive to be the purpose of social organization. Other societies see justice as the purpose of social organization. But justice and freedom tend to be enemies, a fact which we ignore to our own peril.

Justice prevails only when individual liberty and social interests are balanced in terms of each other.

Why?

Justice rests on a balance of powers. The strong always try to take advantage of the weak; the knowledgeable, of the ignorant; the rich, of the poor. Self-interest is inbred in the human race - and truthfully, in all of creation. We call this "human nature". The Christian tradition calls it "original sin". Lord Acton put it this way: "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Reinhold Niebuhr, a famous theologian of the last century, called "the sinful lust for power" (his description of Acton's accurate assessment) the primary reason for our social difficulties and political needs. John Adams, in Federalist Paper #51, locates the need for the balance of power theories, which formed the Constitution he helped to author, precisely the same way. Just as within societies, justice prevails among societies which are roughly equal in military power. And relations between nations are not entirely different from relations among individuals. Therefore, it is politically unwise to seek to destroy one's enemies.

This concept of "total war" is not only very expensive (the amount of money we are borrowing to fight the war in Iraq has a huge impact on our current economic problems), it also tempts us to consider ourselves "righteous" and our enemies as "evil" - partly because of our deification of "freedom" and our failure to recognize its social outcome. This simply reinforces the belief that total war is the only justifiable way to fight, and "unconditional surrender" of the enemy the only justifiable outcome.

In the nuclear age, this is a monumental error. Unfortunately, human nature being as susceptible to self-deception as it is, that error is still a factor in our national political life. The so-called "war on terrorism" is a perfect example of the unrealistic grandiosity that characterizes our present administration's self-deception. Unfortunately, James Thurber was right. The moral is not that "you can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time; but you can't fool all the people all the time", but that "you can fool too damn many of the people too damn much of the time."

Chuck