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August
24, 1999
RANDOM THOUGHTS,
MOSTLY ON BOMBING
BOMBING:
IS THERE ANY AMERICAN CONSCIENCE AT ALL?
Every year in August, someone is moved
by the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to say this or that
about the morality of the first – and only – use, by anyone,
of the Americans’ very own patent medicine of mass destruction.
First, a well-meaning liberal of some kind says, “Gee, ain’t
it awful what happened in August 1945?” Sometimes he or she
will say that use of the Bomb against Japan is just more evidence
of deep and ineradicable American “racism” because we
would never have used it against the Germans. Such writers seem
rather unaware of what happened to Dresden and other German cities,
which suggests to some of us that the U.S. would have been quite
happy to use the new bomb in Europe – except that the damned
thing wasn’t ready yet. (Anyway, it was a liberal war –
and liberals love bombing European Christians.)
The well-meaning liberal, or whatever, then meets with tirades from
Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and other respectable conservatives,
and sometimes with remonstrances from liberal foreign-policy “realists.”
Irritable veterans write letters to the editor about how some terrible
commie pinko was allowed to question the inevitability and morality
of our bomb and our use of it. And, then, the topic goes away for
a year.
I was reminded of this when I went to look at Mr.
Bill Kaufmann’s piece on the A-bombs. The link brought
up, with the essay, the angry responses of about twenty outraged
“patriots,” who, judging from their spelling, syntax,
and commitment to loud name-calling, must be recent victims of American
public “education.” One might as well have been at a Young
Americans for Freedom (YAF) meeting in 1968 or so, where those tasteless
nuke buttons and slogans – “Drop It” – kept
company with pretended scholarship – “Don’t Immanentize
the Eschaton.” This last, properly understood, is probably
good advice, but I doubt that the bomb-addled YAFers of 1968 had
any idea what it meant, or if they did, had actually read Eric Voegelin,
from whose work the phrase came.
Now, I don’t really care if the anti-Kaufmann yelpers are xenophobes.
A nation of xenophobes who left the world alone might well be “narrow,”
but on the other hand, they would be leaving the world alone, and
who could complain about that? Probably not the world. A nation
of xenophobes who want to mess with the world, however, has no room
to complain if the world messes back. Since Kaufmann’s piece
had appeared in the Calgary Sun, the patriots concluded that
Kaufmann is that terrible thing – much worse than an ordinary
commie pinko or bleeding heart liberal – a Canadian! I mean,
look at them. They just sit up there in all that tundra, making
fun of Uncle’s domestic woes, pointing out that their police
can conduct a siege without reducing everything to smoking rubble
and corpses, that they can live with a permanent constitutional
crisis and still remain fairly civil. Pretty smug, eh? Pretty arrogant,
eh? And they claim to make better beer, eh? (Largely true, eh?)
Of course, I would be the first to agree that the Canadian critique
of American life is off track in many ways. Canada suffers from
a sort of left-wing nationalism in which all the ills of the world
are caused by markets, free trade, capitalism, and the United States,
which “stands for” all those evils. Even where they are
correct about being better off, they don’t seem to know why
that might be. Lower population? The fact that they were missing
in action during the Vietnam War, with the result that their police
haven’t militarized themselves as much? Less power and resources,
so that they – necessarily – can eschew the temptations
of Empire? Anyway, if Mr. Kaufmann is a Canadian, I expect it is
a surprise to him and to the many readers of his very interesting
book, America First, a manifesto for peaceful American, i.e,
U.S. “xenophobia.”
The bombing issue came up recently in the Atlantic Monthly
(March 1999). Near the end of a long piece
on the naval aspects of World War II, historian David M. Kennedy
remarked that use of the A-bomb was not a break with American practice
because the “moral threshold” had already been crossed
by deliberate Allied bombing of German and Japanese civilians well
before August 1945. By the June issue, readers were complaining
that the Germans and Japanese “did it first” – so
to speak – reasoning, apparently, that if one power crosses
the moral threshold, then another power has no choice whatsoever
about doing the same. Kennedy conceded the point a bit too quickly.
Actually, the moral threshold was crossed in the 1920s in the colonial
empires. British aerial bombardments in their informal colony of
"Mesopotamia" (now mostly Iraq) in the twenties may be the first
example of the new art form. Mr L.S. Amery, Secretary of State for
the Colonies, remarked that "[i]f the writ of King Feisal [the British
puppet] runs effectively throughout his kingdom, it is entirely
due to British aeroplanes. If the aeroplanes were removed tomorrow,
the whole structure would inevitably fall to pieces."1
Italian forces were fairly liberal with bombs in Ethiopia, as were
the Japanese in China, both in the early 1930s. Hitler's Blitzkriegs
rested on the coordinated use of airpower, tanks, and infantry;
the role of airpower was a tactical one. As sloppy and unconcerned
about civilians as they might have been, the point – for them
– was to use airpower to defeat the enemy's armed forces.
Goering’s grandstanding about how the Luftwaffe could win the
war with Britain and Hitler’s frustration that England refused
to deal with him when he wished their Empire no harm as such (which
was true enough, since he wanted to dominate and abuse the Continent),
led to German bombing of London and other cities with bombers that
were not designed for the task. The result was losses so heavy that
the Luftwaffe retired in disarray. Britain, on the other, had designed
and built bombers of the type necessary for strategic or carpet
bombing, and the Americans followed suit, once they were in the
war. For every British civilian killed by German bombing, the Allies
killed ten Germans. So, in effect, the Allies crossed that particular
moral threshold ten times as often.
AMERICA
TO WOG RATIO
This brings me in a roundabout way
to an important question which discussions of this sort always imply:
is there to be no moral distinction between combatants and civilians
and, if not, precisely how many foreign civilians is it permissible
to kill off to save the proverbial “one American life”?
Judging by some of the commentary in the last two wars – Iraq
and Serbia – the ratio approaches infinity. I remember how,
at the outset of the Gulf War, excitable patriots wrote into our
local newspaper (local, if anything owned by Gannett can properly
be said to be “local”) that we must “nuke” Baghdad
at once. I’m afraid I never understood that. Perhaps these
fellows were victims of unscrupulous rug merchants but couldn’t
tell one foreign wog from another. I seriously doubt that swarthy
Middle Eastern types had ever laid siege to their condos or blown
up their dog.
That same week, a local radio station carried Joe Sobran’s
scathing commentary on U.S. obliteration of an Iraqi bomb shelter
with about 500 deaths (disguised as a “military target,”
no doubt). Scores of outraged citizens called in to complain – about
Sobran, not the bombing – and the poor fellow taking the calls was
obviously surprised when I said I hoped he’d replay Sobran’s
remarks because I thought they were true. (Right on target?)
Perhaps a trained statistician could get at the trend for us based
on analysis of the foreign civilian/U.S. combatant ratio found in
recent wars. Based on the Serbo-American War, the ratio would be
about 2000+/0, but more numbers may yet come in. Unfortunately,
this ratio does approach infinity.
ENDLESS
ENEMIES AND A NOTE ON LIBERTY AND SAFETY
Well, fellow patriots, try this on:
If it is unthinkable that any American combatant should ever be
killed in war, then the best thing we can do is to give up running
the world. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about such things.
That, or we can take the present moral theory to its logical conclusion.
To save that “one American life” we must wipe out the
entire population of the enemy-country-of-the-week before they even
know (much less “suspect”) that they are at war with us.
That would certainly clarify the wog-ratio situation, but perhaps
at the risk of making new, added, further, additional, supplementary
enemies for ourselves.
As for running the world, we’re not very good at it, we’re
not especially qualified for it, and nobody asked us to (leaving
aside heroic allies on our payroll, lo! these many years). We have
a couple of high-minded public documents – the Declaration of Independence
and the actual Constitution – and we acquired a lot of contiguous
real estate from sea to shining sea without being entirely scrupulous
about our methods. That ought to have been enough. We are good at
making stuff. We had a huge and largely free internal market which
allowed for plenty of growth, even if special interests hobbled
that market as soon as possible with protective tariffs. We had,
have, two oceans – count them, one, two – making life difficult
and supply-lines long for any would-be invaders other than the Mexicans
and those devious Canadians. (They have already infiltrated our
cultural apparatus with their actors and comedians, and as for Neil
Young, “Southern man don’t need him around, any how.”)
I will be told that I have overlooked the foreign airplanes and
missiles. Well and good. If we can’t actually defend the place,
why do we spend so much money on “defense”? Perhaps those
who built the “force structure” around considerations
of imperial “reach,” should be fired, possibly to be replaced
by those who could devise a strategy of genuine defense. Just a
thought.
If we really minded our own business, why would anyone want to send
bombers and missiles against us? Sheer envy? Hatred of our sitcoms?
Dislike of our so-called culture? But, alas, our current policies
make us a lot of enemies. In what may be a sign of the times, Richard
K. Betts – described as a real member of the real Council on
Foreign Relations – looked into the problem in Foreign Affairs
(January-February 1998: “The New Threat of Mass Destruction”).
There is no conspiracy here, just good ole CFR doing what it does
under cover of openness. Now this is evidently not the same Richard
Betts who played lead guitar for the Allman Brothers Band after
Duane Allman’s motorcycle wreck. You could defend that Richard
Betts, after all, particularly when he took the band in a country
direction, a trend he took to its height in his solo album, “Highway
Call.” (In Florida, we take the Allman Brothers very seriously.)
No, this Betts worries about disgruntled foreign wogs and governments
which, having come up against Uncle’s terrible swift sword
once too often, are angry and unhappy and want to lash out at Uncle’s
friends, relations, mistresses, and creditors, or at least the American
people, right here in our homeland. With the new, cheaper chemical
and biological weapons now available, this becomes a nightmare scenario,
and Betts spares us nothing by putting “homegrown militias
or cults” on his Disgruntled List. This may just reflect the
self-centeredness of the elites in that they expect all their enemies
and critics to ape Uncle’s methods and go in for “mass
destruction,” just because Uncle crossed that moral bridge
a while back. (Some observers date Uncle’s commitment to the
doctrine of Total War from the 1860s, although, admittedly, Atlanta
and Columbia were flammable cities, vulnerable, one imagines, to
the first Yankee who didn’t take Smokey’s advice and put
his cigarette out properly.) On the other hand, having made so many
enemies, Uncle may be right to think that some of them can and will
follow his moral example. He trained a lot of them, remember?
What to do, then? Betts observes that having fewer interventions
might reduce the problem, but quickly recovers from this lapse towards
“isolationism.” No, no, we might be a bit more prudent,
of course, but in general we must forge ahead, waist-deep in the
Global Big Muddy because an Uncle’s gotta do, what an Uncle’s
gotta do. Any how, if we stopped now, it wouldn’t solve the
problem, because we’ve already made so many enemies that they
will target our homeland no matter what we do now, so we might as
well do some of what we’re doing anyway, even if, perhaps,
we don’t do quite so much of it. Ergopostpropter, my dear Watson.
So who made this legion of enemies and who gets to suffer from their
existence? Not the same folks, I’m afraid. The overgrown Beltway
Boy Scouts, striped-pants Northeastern twits, corporate advance-men,
and military technicians, who have made these enemies (and imagine
even more), expect the American people to fall into formation and
march to the tune of a thoroughgoing new system of “civil defense.”
Betts says that salvation from the consequences of our leaders’
folly may involve letting these same leaders “[stretch] limits
on domestic surveillance.” These leaders just can’t lose
and we just can’t win. This resembles the history of 20th-century
American “liberalism” generally. Everything they do fails
but they always get to demand more money and power to do it over
again, and if they fail again – well, I wouldn’t put even
paper Weimar Reichsmarks on their ’fessin’ up and resigning
their various sinecures and posts.
As I say here from time to time, the Old Right warned us against
a foreign policy of endless intervention. One reason they gave –
leaving aside blood and treasure lost to wars – was precisely
the domestic spill-over, including curtailment of republican liberty.
You bet. And watch our for those aeroplanes.
[1]
Quoted in L.S. Stavrianos, Global
Rift (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1981), p. 535.
Joseph
R. Stromberg has been writing for libertarian publications since
1973, including The Individualist, Reason,
the Journal
of Libertarian Studies, Libertarian Review, and the
Agorist Quarterly,
and is completing a set of essays on America's wars. He is a part-time
lecturer in History at the college level. You can read his recent
essay, "The
Cold War," on the Ludwig
von Mises Institute Website. His column, "The Old Cause,"
appears each Tuesday on Antiwar.com.
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