Reasons for Peace

About 20 years ago, when I was more involved than I am today with the problems of Central America, I put together a short list of 10 reasons to oppose U.S. intervention there. Recently I tried to reconstruct that effort and come up with a general list of arguments generally against armed conflict. Of course, the weight given to each argument can vary vastly with the particulars of a given situation. There are certainly occasions where armed struggle is a justifiable response to an oppressive regime, and for every unjustified aggressor there is a defender who can find justification in his defensive posture. That said, even the good guys in a war tend to underestimate at the outset the degree to which they are choosing a dark path for others who are innocent or neutral. Here's a revised version of the list, subject to further revision.

Presumption
1. It is war, not opposition to war, that requires justification. In public opinion, political science, anthropology, religion, and law, peace is assumed superior and normal and not requiring of justification, whereas war, by definition entailing organized campaigns of mutual destruction, is always undesirable of itself. (This argument holds most strongly against aggressive war, preemptive or preventive war, or any escalation in hostilities among parties at war; it holds least against the defenders who use force merely to survive or rescue, repel invasion, or liberate themselves from forceful captivity.)

Multiplier Effects
2. The party to a war who decides to initiate or escalate the conflict may anticipate that its action will be met tit for tat if its enemy has the power to do so, and a powerful enemy may respond tenfold or hundredfold. Because the enemy's response is a predictable consequence of the other side's decision, that side bears some degree of responsibility for it. (This is a difficult moral issue -- if a cause is righteous, one should not necessarily be held hostage by the fact that an opponent is prepared to resort to atrocities; nevertheless, what is said here is correct -- the initiator must bear some responsibility for even a disproportionate reaction, if it was foreseeable.)

3. Furthermore, this response may not be merely mutual, but may involve embroiling multiple parties on multiple sides in an expanding conflict.

4. At very least, the eruption of a conflict in one place makes leaders everywhere wary of the prospect of being attacked, leading them to focus on security and defense. (The exception to the rule is when a bully who is already feared gets bogged down fighting a challenger; then the whole world feels they have a period of relative security while the aggressor is preoccupied.)

5. At the end of a successful war the victor may garner a reward. When this happens it teaches the universal lesson that war pays.

6. Because wars are won by the strong, rather than the just, the outcomes tend to favor the strong, but be unjust. While victory by the strong tends to engender some stability, perpetuated injustice also creates a constant pressure to revive the conflict. The issues that led to the war may go unresolved. In many cases, the victor demands unfair reparations and humiliates the defeated, which especially tends toward revival of the conflict. The classic example is World War II.

7. The duration and expense of war is almost always underestimated by the aggressor; in cases where there have been historical exceptions to this, successful aggressors have frequently grown overconfident, been contained and rolled back.

8. A common outcome that extends the effects of war beyond original predictions is extended occupation.

9. The move to war generally elevates the status of the military. Military technology advances rapidly as new weapons are field tested, and needs are identified. Conversely, diplomatic skills and abilities atrophy. War is accompanied more often than we like to acknowledge by unshared sacrifice and profiteering, the ultimate result of which is the relative strengthening of those parts of society most willing to invest in the suffering of others.


Death and Injury
10. War kills. Loss of life is not only a loss to the individual, but to all who are bound to him or her by social connections, family, or affinity of varying degrees of intimacy. To the extent that war kills those of working age, it depletes the social investiment in rearing and training productive members of society. To the extent the victims have special gifts, there is the additional loss of their anticipated future creative production. Losses of life due to war are usually underestimated or undervalued and often deliberately concealed. In recent wars we've seen loss of civilian life on the opposing side minimized, loss of life by opposing forces either exaggerated or ignored, and, most strikingly, loss of friendly forces downplayed or concealed. Lowballing KIA tallies of U.S. forces has been noted in Vietnam, Panama, and the first Gulf War. In situations approaching genocide, birth rates also typically plummet, meaning further loss of potential life.

11. Alongside death run injury and sickness. It has been noted that in recent decades medical advances have sharply upset the ratio of dead to wounded, yielding many more maimed and dismembered survivors. Exposure to foreign climate and pathogens, shortages or contamination of rations, airborne smoke, and toxic munitions such as depleted uranium shells, the side effects of preventive measures, and chemical agents used for defoliation and illmnination have led to post-war syndromes affecting large numbers of veterans. Chemical agents, along with mines and unexploded ordinance, also pose a long-lasting problem for local populations.

12. Mental illness, including PTSS, affects a substantial portion of veterans. There is also the problem of secondary victimization: unlike natural forces of destruction, organized violence takes a psychological and spiritual toll on the aggressor, which alienates him from nonmilitary companions and family. Maladaption of veterans is one reason war is associated with increased rates of divorce and violent crime. The effect on soldiers is increased when they are placed in an environment where war crimes are being committed. The secondary effects there are profound -- many mothers would rather their children die or suffer torture than become torturers themselves.

Economic, environmental, and cultural losses.
13. Property destruction is of course vast. The scale of economic loss is enourmous and seldom appropriately measured. A billion dollar reconstruction contract is treated as an economic plus while infact its necessity is always a greater negative.

14. Environmental destruction, sometimes severe and long term. Oil fires set in the first Gulf War produced pollution and climate changes in China.

15. Loss of artifacts of historical, cultural and artistic significance, not including great artists who are killed. (A small recoupment of this loss comes from the inspirational effect of destruction -- without tragedy and atrocity we would not have Picasso's Guernica.)

16. Other economic costs, including production, maintenance and testing of weapons stockpiles between wars, pay to soldiers, fuel costs, research and development costs, opportunity cost, and the multiplier effect of lost yield on investment. (Although it's common to point to serendipitous discoveries emerging from military R&D, such research generally does not require war; war is seen perversely as a necessary goad to investment for those unwilling to support research for its peaceful benefits.)

17. There has been a long-demonstrated pattern of association between military presence and sexual ills -- harassment and domestic violence, forced prostitution, rape, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS. This is not referring to the use of rape as a criminal tool of war, which is another matter of concern, but simply noting that with the male dominance of the military and its culture of fetishized violence, sexual abuses tend to accompany the military, whether it is AIDS in Honduras and the Philippines epicentered on US bases there, or the abuses at Tailhook.


Political degradation.
18. War is often conducted illegally. The U.S. has a long and terrible record of war crimes, and as a general matter of policy uses controversial weapons and standards of engagement. Troops perform "body checks" -- killing the wounded rather than taking them prisoner, classify journalists, broadcast centers, civilians, emergency medical vehicles, and other targets as legitimate, engage in torture and assassination campaigns, and massacres. Its current doctrine of engaging in unprovoked wars of aggression is clearly unlawful. War itself is always unlawful ab initio for one side (though in a domestic insurrection, the original crime may be only municipal). The occupation of Iraq is illegal, the imposition of Iraqi leaders and laws and the sponsorship of Constitutional referenda were all illegal.

19. War is accompanied by, and used to justify, domestic oppression.

20. War is accompanied by propaganda. Its first casualty is truth.

21. War is accompanied by campaigns of dehumanization and organized promotion of hatred of the "enemy."

22. It usually operates on either forced conscription, economic draft, or lies.

23. There is a substantial pattern of nations or groups at war tolerating or encouraging the cultivation of illegal narcotics in order to help fund clandestineor overt operations, or as a quid pro quo for the military support of local druglords.

24. Because anything goes in a state of war, allies are made who are as bad or worse than the enemies.


Unjust ends.
25. Because they are politically so useful, wars may seek to wag the dog, i.e., raise the standing of strongmen, dictators and commanders in chief, at the expense of democratic government.

26. By nature, wars seek to impose one will over another’s sovereignty. What is desired by that will is almost always in the "national interest" (really the interest of the segment of society controlling the state) of the aggressor nation, and not in the interest of the land attacked. Positive purposes are used as pretexts, but the conduct of the war generally undermines these pretexts. The most common goals of US wars are to maintain effective control of foreign resources and to punish independent development that might be emulated by neighboring states.