Four calls for Dresden: An investigation into just war theory (Warning: very long)

Wartime does strange things to people. Thucydides was no stranger to this phenomenon, and his analysis of the Corcyrean civil war rings frighteningly true now. Thucydides, like Plato, was interested in what happens when communally held conceptions of virtues and vices break down into chaotic rhetoric and dissonance. The manner in which the meanings of words change in Thucydides' account of Corcyra mirrors Plato's account in Republic 8 of Athenian democracy, where "freedom" becomes license for outrageousness, laziness, impiety. (We can say with assurance that Thucydides' picture is much more accurate than Plato's, although the sentiment is the same.) Orwell, of course, made a living out of the idea that with enough ideological conditioning, words can mean anything, even their extreme opposites.

But what happens the second time around, when ideologues use the same tactics while at the same time using Orwell's analysis to defend themselves? Perhaps Marx was right when he criticized Hegel, that the latter should have said that all world-historical events appear twice, but "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." For salient examples of farce in action, I direct you to Subjects A, B, C, and D: Charles Krauthammer, Cal Thomas, John Podhoretz, and Christopher Hitchens. All four writers have taken up the recent debate on "proportionality in war" and turned it on its head, often with the very sort of semantic sophistry I outlined above (i.e. defending themselves by appealing to the Orwellian idea of "common sense" as opposed to "doublespeak"). Krauthammer even explicitly talks of an "Orwellian moral universe." (For another article on doublespeak, but not with the same implications that I want to tease out of the four aforementioned writers, see Victor Davis Hanson.)

Rather than formally join the argument about "proportionality" in the Lebanon-Israel conflict, a move which would probably just bog us down and obscure my greater point, I'd like to draw attention to a move which all four writers make. I'll let them speak for themselves:

Krauthammer: "Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the Blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with 'proportionate' aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest air campaign and land invasion in history, which flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process."

Thomas: "Imagine if we had been concerned about a proportional response at the beginning of World War II. Instead, America nuked Japan and firebombed Germany. We weren't after a 'sustainable cease-fire,' nor did we speak in diplomatic niceties or worry about 'civilian casualties.' Our goal was the enemy's unconditional and complete surrender. There haven't been any dictators in Germany or Japan since."

Podhoretz: "Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Didn't the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and the back of their enemies? Didn't that singleness of purpose extend down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of Germans and Japanese?"

Hitchens: "Anything less than the apocalyptic seems inadequate. Eva Klemperer, a staunch and principled German Lutheran, told her husband that, after what she had experienced under Hitler, she could not find it in herself to truly regret the firestorm of Dresden. And what of the Slav and Balkan and Polish and Jewish slaves in Speer's underground hell holes, forced to dig out pits for the rocket-bombs that were being directed at London? Did they not cheer silently every time the very earth shook with revenge?"

Four defenses of scorched earth campaigns, three of them essentially saying the same thing. To Hitchens' credit, his argument is without a doubt the most complex and nuanced (how could it fail to be, when up against intellectual stillborns like Thomas and Podhoretz?), but he actually comes to a sneakier conclusion: rather than allow ourselves to get into situations where a Dresden is necessary, better to wage preemptive campaigns against all our enemies. Which tactic is the worse (or better)? You decide.

Now, to anyone not in a state of complete and unblinking military zeal equal to that of these commentators, the suggestion that we carry out another Dresden or another Hiroshima must be pure madness. "Never again" is not just a phrase we use to describe crimes perpetrated only by Nazis, although they will always be its main target; "never again," as it relates to the events of World War II, means that human beings will never again propel themselves into the sort of large scale destruction that inverts our moral calculus so viciously. Everyone knows it's best that the Allies won WWII; at the same time, everyone knows that Dresden and Hiroshima were atrocities, evidence of how close we had to come, asymptotically, to the Nazis in order to defeat them. We should recoil from that nearness. Almost everyone does. Not apparently, these four men, whose willingness to present the mass firebombing of civilian populations as not only justified, but necessary and desirable, reveals an element of character that defies definition. It's not merely fascist, because that word is limited to a very recent phenomenon; it's just evil. And that's just the a priori argument against it. Even the briefest glance at the empirical facts in the case of Lebanon shows us that there is not even the remotest chance that Hezbollah, given any sort of "victory" here, could duplicate what the Reich could. Summoning up "shades of Hitler," the "specter of Islamofascism," is laughable.

What, then, is the "moral compass," if you can even call it that, that is capable of calling genocide "singleness of purpose"? It is a curious version of the jus in bello, one that starts not with a conception of the rules that all parties must follow but of the parties themselves. The party that is "in the right," not with respect to the jus ad bellum or justification for war but with respect to itself, to where it stands in the spectrum of systems of thought, each more or less closer to the "truth," formulates its policy accordingly: "the rightness of our cause makes our actions righteous." One can see the transparent fallacy of this line of thinking, because no party would ever assert its "wrongness," so to speak, and so no one would ever accept any version of the rules. It is an invitation to terror and genocide. It's not surprising that this sort of thinking should dominate both sides of the fight. The one side, that is clearly the stronger, has nothing to lose, or more specifically has no real threat by which it might be checked in its assumptions of superiority (the "Might Makes Right" camp). The other side, limited in its resources but strong in willpower, has nothing to gain, or more specifically no other way to justify itself to itself than by exhibiting what little power it does possess in every haphazard and indiscriminate way possible (the "Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures" camp). Thucydides again provides a sterling example: the respective cynicism and desperation of the Athenians and the Melians in the so-called Melian Dialogue.

Krauthammer, Thomas, Podhoretz, and Hitchens fail to be true cynical Athenians, however, because they do not speak of naked power and aggression as the Athenians do. Perhaps behind closed doors they are honest with themselves, but in their commentary they hold fast to the language of justice and the truth, which the Athenians of Thucydides can only smirk at as naivete, mere rhetoric that conceals weakness. But before a popular audience it can be a powerful ideological tool. In the true rules of war, which take the form of Kantian categoricals, "good" and "evil" are determined by adherence or failure to the rules. In the minds of these men, conversely, "good" and "evil" are the premises by which we characterize ourselves, and the rules are whatever the "good" say they are. We cannot but be good, and burning to a cinder men, women, and children can only make us better.

We do not blanch at these opinions, in fact we find them part and parcel of our common currency, and there are historical reasons why. We have fought battles of "ideology" in the past, most notably with the Soviet Union. In that case there were certainly hawks who thought we should have nuked them indiscriminately, or at least destroyed Cuba in '62, but the Russians had nuclear deterrence, vast wealth, and centralized leadership. We could afford to be "civilized" and fight battles that were primarily economic in character. Since 9/11, we have been able to perpetuate the fight against those who "hate our freedom," who "want to destroy our values," who possess an "agenda of irrational hatred," but much to neoconservative delight we now have a decidedly weaker enemy, one with a thousand distinct, complex faces but an easy label: terrorism. Thus the "one percent doctrine" of regime change. The material and historical circumstances of the situation matter not at all; when we have identified an element of a state as "terrorist," it is our duty to wipe clean the slate. Negotiation is useless because our enemies have no "real" claims, only masks for their hatred. It must also be infinitely relieving to the war hawks that our enemy is now brown and of a different religion. The Russians were too unnervingly Like Us (they were godless, however--that helped). Now Cal Thomas can easily invoke the Arabs' "7th-century ways," their "miserable existence" full of "failings" and their inveterate jealousy towards Western success. He's waited a lifetime of Godly Christian righteousness and capitalist prosperity to be able to rub it in the big Other's face, and now he's getting it in spades.

That, then, is my psychologizing of the Four Proponents of Dresden. I confine it to them and other Americans like them, although there may be others in other countries. I should close by saying that it does not surprise me that they should talk this way. It comes as no shock that these people encourage the crudest, stupidest forms of foreign policy analysis, because those are the kinds most easily digested and repeated by their followers. What surprises me is that in their actions and language, in the arenas where they really count, they seem actually to believe what they tell us. To return to the example of Orwell, "genocide is resolve" has ceased to be a ruse; it is an article of faith.