Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Ethics of War

I was interested in how ordinary soldiers very often commit terrible atrocities during wars and if the military command condones these events and performs a standard shrugging insincere handwringing exercise if they’re discovered but fundamentally doesn’t care. It was difficult to find a book discussing what soldiers actually do during actual battles (got any recommendations?) and the nearest thing, or so I thought. was this mighty tome. But of course I got something different to what I wanted.

This is a very highfalutin very intricate discussion about the whole smorgasbord of ethical conundrums warfare throws up. Well, I probably should have read the blurb, it didn’t lie : will appeal to both an academic and professional readership meaning that us “general” readers are considered too lowly to get an invite. Hmph, what an insult. I ploughed on regardless. And there is a lot of very interesting stuff here, delivered in a style that makes your eyes bounce off the sentences.

FOREVER WARS

When Joe Biden said of Afghanistan “I was not going to extend this forever war” he got a deluge of harsh disagreement as the Taliban immediately took over. This is a neat example of the issue A J Coates raises on page one : utopians versus realists.

Utopianism has grossly inflated expectations about the world of international politics. Wedded to an abstract image of a just and perfect order, it concludes that the world at large must find its ideal constructs irresistible.

Utopians know their ends are good and disregard their means. Joe wanted to terminate the hopeless conflict in Afghanistan and so withdrew immediately. Realists were saying that this was naïve, that however nasty American involvement was it had to continue. Joe was optimistic, the realists were pessimistic. Joe’s optimism must have lasted for about five minutes. Was it the right decision? I can sure see why he did it.

This book is explicitly against “utopians” :

The utopian claims the moral high ground, accusing the realist of moral duplicity and even of rank immorality, while the realist regards the utopian or moralist at best as a dangerous if well-intentioned fool, at worst as a self-indulgent hypocrite, more concerned with the preservation of a spurious moral purity than with the avoidance of conflict or the alleviation of human distress.

Well, that’s fightin’ talk!

This does not, of course, mean that the realists think war is an ethics-free zone, even if they appear by their conduct to believe that. The lumbering but smooth machinery of the rest of these chapters discusses the intricacies of the ethics of many horrible realities, - one example from many is : what is a non-combatant anyway? It seems obvious, but not so fast.

Most people would think that the military should be targeting the enemy army, and that it’s illegal to target civilians. Which is true, but – is it okay to target the factories that are building your enemies’ planes and tanks? If so, is it okay to target the oil refineries providing fuel to the enemy army? Where do you draw the line?

Most of the questions discussed in The Ethics of War are very interesting (even though he hardly glances at the conduct of soldiers in battle) BUT it may be the blurb is doing us a great favour by warning off the non-academic reader because this is the kind of obstacle-course sentence you will have to clamber over to get to the raw meat :

In considering the morality of area bombing with the aid of the principle of double effect a distinction needs to be drawn first of all between a strategy of “selective” area bombing, that is, of area bombing that has as its sole objective the destruction of an important military target (or targets) and is resorted to out of military necessity alone (that is, because of the involuntary absence of an alternative, more discriminate and therefore more acceptable means of attack) and a strategy of “general” area bombing that involves deliberate targeting of non-combatants and non-military installations or structures (either solely or as an accompaniment of military targeting) as a way of undermining the capacity and will of the enemy to fight.

My head, my head!