Debating
the morality
of going to war
PressInfo #
199
August
18, 2004
By
Jonathan
Power, TFF Associate
Do you wonder how
the operatives of Al Qaeda sleep at night? No problem, I
think. After swallowing the double narcotic of killing
unbelievers and promised sensuality they sleep the peace
of the just, despite the lack of approval for such
beliefs in Islamic theology.
A more interesting
question is how George W. Bush and Tony Blair get a good
night's sleep. What have they imbibed? There are no
virgins in the sky awaiting them and their wars have
fallen well short of the Augustinian principles of the
just war. Yet they are men of a religious conviction and
it cannot be easy to switch off the light knowing one has
given the orders for a greater slaughter of innocents
that happened at the World Trade Center on September
11th, 2001. In our Western culture one is judged to be
either fully engaged with one's emotions and one's deeds
or one is dangerously pathological.
No one has
epitomized this dilemma more than Robert McNamara whose
steely tenure as U.S. Secretary of Defense under both
president Kennedy and Johnston is still the subject of
awed conversation. Imagine the sang froid of the present
incumbent, Donald Rumsfeld, and then square it. He
presided over the Pentagon during both the Cuban missile
crisis and during the great build up in Vietnam when he
initiated the concept of "body counts" to measure the
progress U.S. forces were making.
He obviously did
sleep at night, despite his self-confessed "moral
tension", until one day on November 2nd, 1965, a young
Quaker, a father of three, burned himself to death within
40 feet of McNamara's office window. This act, McNamara,
later confessed, took him to "the breaking point".
McNamara wrote: "Norman Morrison's action dramatized for
me the tremendous discrepancy between the moral
imperative- the prohibition on the killing of other human
beings that I had subscribed to all my life- and what was
occurring daily in Vietnam."
From that tragic
moment on McNamara changed gears. He continued to run the
war but he devoted more of his attention to negotiations.
At his initiative a month after the suicide the U.S.
decided on a 37 day bombing pause. In the end McNamara
quietly resigned. Looking back he admits, "We thought we
were acting in the interests of mankind, but the cost in
lives was far greater than we or others had predicted."
He realizes now that the U.S. could have ended the war as
early as 1962, ten years before it was finally concluded
with an American retreat, if it had explored more fully
non-military ways of achieving U.S. goals. In that case
we might have "saved our soul", he concluded.
Mikhail Gorbachev,
the former president of the Soviet Union, has answered
the question I have always wanted to pose to great power
leaders. In an interview with Jonathan Schell who asked
if he could ever have initiated a nuclear war he replied,
"Even during training, although the briefcase was always
there with my codes I never touched the button." By his
actions, for all his compromises with the brutal hand of
the communist system, it is clear that Gorbachev drew his
personal line at violence. He refused to authorize the
deployment of troops in the Baltic states despite
formidable pressures from his military in the lost cause
of preventing their independence.
Neither was he
prepared to use force to stop the break out of refugees
from Eastern Europe, the opening of the Berlin wall and
later the break up of the Soviet Union. Nor was he
prepared to put his country through a civil war when
Boris Yeltsin made his grab for power. Gorbachev is by
far and away the most remarkable of all twentieth century
leaders. "You can destroy your enemy", Gorbachev once
observed, "You can destroy your ideological foe. But
historically this does not win." One cannot imagine
Gorbachev countenancing today's war with
Chechnya.
"And there is this
earth, this mud where the flesh rots, where eyes
decompose. These arms, these legs that crunch in the jaws
of the boars. The souls ulcerated and foul from killing,
the bodies so starved of tenderness they haunt stables in
search of pleasure. There is this gangrene that eats at
the heart..." writes Duong
Thu Huong in her searing "Novel Without a
Name", based on her own
experiences as a fighter on the side of the Vietcong. But
equally it could be about Iraq or Chechnya. After putting
the book down you feel your own eyes have been gouged
out, your own corpse hung from a branch, and the
"dizzying sense of carrion and gunpowder". To sleep is
very difficult.
Note for editor 1)
Copyright Jonathan Power 2) dateline Lund, Sweden, 3) I
can be reached by e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com or by
phone:+44 7785 351172
© TFF and the author 2004
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