War is Not Hell
Some try to argue that moral considerations have no place in discussions of nuclear weapons. “War is Hell,” they say, quoting General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous remark, and presume that in Hell no rules of morality apply. Or they quote Lazare Carnot, a military leader during the French Revolution, "War is a violent condition. One should make it a l'outrance [to the utmost] or go home." The implied point is that war is an area where rules don’t apply -- it is all violence -- so trying to bring morality into it is inappropriate and naive. This argument is often made with a swagger and flourish that imply that only the arguer is sufficiently realistic to look clearly at the horror of war and accept it and try to make realistic plans about it.
This point of view is only possible if one seriously distorts the nature of warfare. War, far from being an activity where ‘rules don’t apply’ is constricted on all sides by the very same things that grip all other human activities: moral feeling, tradition, legal limits, mutual agreements (spoken and unspoken), culture, instinct, and so on.
It’s only necessary to imagine real senseless violence for a moment to realize how rule-guided war is. For example: A group of armed people -- twelve men and two women -- edge across a bridge. Suddenly another group emerges from an ally, takes cover behind several cars, and begins firing at them. The first group, pinned down on the bridge, returns fire but can't withdraw. Four are killed, one is wounded. A third group appears on the river's edge to the right and opens fire on the group from the alley. One of them also throws hand grenades at the group on the bridge. The group from the alley turns and opens fire on the river group, killing eight or nine of them. The group by the river's edge withdraws and the group from the alley follows, carefully, after them. The group on the bridge, forgotten, holds a sullen debate in the middle of the bridge and then two of them with angry gestures proceed across while the rest withdraw. The dead are left where they fell.
Six men emerge suddenly from a side street. Two wear uniforms, the rest do not. All carry weapons. They grab three women who were weeping over two dead bodies and begin to beat them. One woman has her clothes torn off. A small boy grabs the leg of one of the men and bites it. The man shoots him. In the confusion a dog steals a few bites from one of the corpses. A plane, the pilot apparently attracted by the commotion, swoops down and four of the men, the three women, and the dog are crushed and burned by a fiery explosion.
If war were really senseless violence it would be like this: disorganized, aimless, without meaning. But this is not war. This is what we call mayhem.
For war, you have to have organization. You need sides. You usually wear uniforms or tokens of your allegiance. Not everyone directs, there aren't constant arguments about what to do next. You have a command structure. And the army’s leaders are usually guided by some plan, some goal. It may be a foolish goal, it may be ridiculous, but it is some end.
War lets loose violence, and violence always has the potential to get out of hand. But the very fact that we know the difference between war and violence that has "gotten out of hand" shows that war is not an activity without organization or rules.
War is awful, horrible. It condones violence that is repugnant. But war without leaders, without organization, without a point would not be war. We would call it melee, donnybrook or riot.
War is a human activity. It is not some special activity outside of all other human activity. --Some special arena where we can set aside our humanity and act with abandon, without restraint. War is an awful human activity. It is enormously destructive. But it is a part of us and all the rules and restrictions that apply in other human activities apply here. There is no arena where we can (perhaps with a certain secret sense of relief) cast aside the rules of behavior imposed by our humanity and act with complete freedom.
Sometimes the rules of war are broken. But that does not mean that the rules do not exist. We are not tempted to say there is no legal system in the U.S. because some people break the laws. Why should the same argument be any more persuasive when applied to war?
If wars are bound by the guideposts of human action and organization there is no reason to think that morality cannot also play a part in how we think about war, that morality can guide us in making choices about how we prepare, plan for, and wage war.