More on War

The trouble with the piece by Wendy McElroy that my co-blogger linked below is this: it's rational, cogently argued, and demands that we accept its conclusions unless we deny its premises, which would be most unpalatable. It is all these things, and it is tantamount to a libertarian suicide note.

Ms. McElroy's logic might work in a world governed by pure reason, a sort of Kantian paradise of separate rational beings. But as the song says, you and me baby, we ain't nothing but mammals. And we're particularly savage ones at that. War is not going to disappear in a puff of logic, and the ugly thing about war is that the most violent warrior usually wins.

We get this lesson from history, but we also get it from Homer. In the Iliad, the climactic scene sees a confrontation between the soldier and the savage, between Hector, fighting for his home, his wife, and his children, and Achilles, fighting simply because he loves to fight, because he exults in killing. If you've seen the movie Troy you know how the fight turned out, but what the movie didn't portray- probably because Eric Bana's agent blanched at the prospect- is that in the original, Hector doesn't just lose. He flees.

Hector is a skilled warrior and throughout the Iliad his prowess is displayed again and again, but he fights because that is the role best suited to him in the civilized society he inhabits. In libertarian terms, his comparative advantage is in the provision of security, and since Troy is that Hoppean wet dream of a privately owned state, security is exactly what he provides. He is not ranging the Mediterranean world, seeking enemies to conquer- he is defending his home, his wife, his father, his son and his people against a foreign onslaught unleashed on a flimsy pretext. He kills only when attacked, and he kills only those who attack him. If there is a libertarian warrior in literature, it is Hector.

And if there is an embodiment of pure force in literature, it is Achilles. Interestingly for our purposes, Achilles doesn't fight for reasons of state, for conquest or for loot. In fact, for the bulk of the poem Achilles doesn't fight at all, but sulks in his tent in defiance of the expedition's commander over a petty point of honor. Achilles is not a government drone, a brainwashed stormtrooper feeding on taxes and killing on command. He's the Howard Roark of killing, a brilliant and supremely gifted individual wholly devoted to achieving his own goals, unconcerned with the demands of others. Achilles turns up for the Trojan War for the same reason Roark built a housing project: not to serve the state but as a way to express his vision, to make his own individual mark on the world. Roark blows up the building when he feels his vision is being compromised, and similarly Achilles sulks in his tent when Agamemnon tries to bring him to heel.

And when the libertarian warrior meets this incarnation of unrestrained violence, he doesn't just die- he knows he is going to die, and he runs away. Three times he runs the circuit of Troy's walls, his abject terror at facing the living embodiment of war propelling him to move even faster than "swift-footed Achilles." He only stops through a trick of Athena, and the ensuing fight is hardly a climactic Hollywood battle scene. The confrontation between the finest soldier of civilization and the savage from across the sea isn't even close. Achilles kills Hector as easily as he kills everyone else he encounters. They trade spear throws and then Achilles stabs Hector in the neck, and the libertarian warrior falls in the dust.

What does this ancient poem have to do with Ms. McElroy's rationalistic account of how unjust war is and how a just war is so hard to find? In war, self-restraint gets you killed. The wanton slaughter of civilians isn't needed and indeed is usually counterproductive, but carelessness about civilian casualties lets you use more powerful weapons, and as Voltaire said, God is usually on the side with the big battalions. A highly skilled libertarian army of snipers and light infantry, concerned with carefully picking out and killing only their enemies, will get massacred by the first gaggle of draftees willing to use artillery and aerial bombardment they come across.

The trouble with war is that it takes an Achilles to win it; war requires us to unleash our basest instincts and act in the most primitive fashion. The side that can employ the most violence usually wins. Try as I might, I cannot think of a war in which two sides were approximately equally matched and one side acted with significantly greater moral restraint in its prosecution of the war than the other. There's a reason for that- people generally don't want to die. They want to win the wars they fight, and so both sides descend to a sort of equilibrium of savagery. Moral restraints on tactics are exploded by the desire to win, and wars that start with one side condemning the other's savagery end with the former side turning the latter's cities into smoking holes in the ground.

This equilibrium of savagery, this ascendancy of Achilles, is why we have to fight against war. It's what creates the strongest possible presumption against war. A full understanding and awareness of what war really is and what war truly demands of those who fight compels us to demand that war truly be the absolute last resort.

But starry-eyed rationalism daydreaming about a species we will never be is not a replacement for this understanding. War is horrible- believe me, I know- and war is unjust, but we live in a world where sometimes the Greeks turn up at the walls of Troy, where the Nazis sometimes are on the march. I don't have a hard and fast rule, a fully articulated rational argument that will let us divine when to fight and when not to fight. The decision of when to fight is a purely human one, which is to say it is instinctual, intuitional, and only partly rational. I've written before about the ugliness of war and the perilous nature of warfare. I believe we must approach questions of war and peace with the strongest possible presumption in favor of peace, but not with an absolute prohibition on war or, even worse, some deluded idea that a just war is possible. We should always remember Achilles and Hector, and know well what we unleash when we fight.