Why War Is A Bad Idea

Robert Wright:

If you had asked me a few days ago, before news broke that American soldiers have urinated on Taliban corpses, whether American soldiers have ever urinated on Taliban corpses, I would have said: Probably.
You send hordes of young people into combat, people whose job is to kill the enemy and who watch as their friends are killed and maimed by the enemy, and the chances are that signs of disrespect for the enemy will surface--and that every once in a while those signs will assume grotesque form.
War, presumably, has always been like that. But something has changed over the past couple of decades--two things, actually--and they amount to a powerful new argument against starting wars in the first place.
First, there's the new transparency of war. Infinitely more battlefield details get recorded, and everyone has the tools to broadcast these details. So it's just a matter of time before some outrageous image goes viral--pictures from Abu Ghraib, video from Afghanistan, whatever. These images will make you and your soldiers more hated by the enemy than ever--and hated by civilians who may identify with the enemy, whether because of national, ethnic, or religious kinship.
The second big change is that hatred is now a more dangerous thing. America faces no serious threat from any nation-state, but the more amorphous threat from radical Islam, if mishandled, could mushroom and, years from now, reach massively lethal proportions. And the lifeblood of radical Islam (like the lifeblood of many radical things) is hatred. The more Muslims there are who hate Americans, the easier life is for recruiters from al Qaeda or some other such terrorist group.

I have to admit, I wasn't surprised or, really, horrified at the news that there was a video of U.S. soldiers urinating on the body of a dead Afghani.  I hadn't really given the story much thought until last night.  After an exciting hour or so out on the town, I fell asleep at about 8:30 last night.  I woke up at about 12:30, and turned the channel on the TV to see what was on.  I came across the early part of Full Metal Jacket.  What struck me as odd was that while much of this movie is well represented in our culture (the only things from Texas are steers and queers, etc.), apparently, the basic perspective of the movie (link to scene with helicoptor gunner) as I see it, that war dehumanizes people, is lost to the culture.

I think some of this is that most of us don't want to be personally involved in war, so we overcompensate by glorifying those who do participate in the wars.  Part of that is to ignore the fact that some of these people will do horrible things in the course of the war, and the realization of the dehumanizing effect of war undermines our ability to self-justify support of war while not participating ourselves.  We don't have the courage to stand up against our nation participating in wars, either because we are afraid of our so-called enemies, or we don't want to be portrayed as unpatriotic or as cowards.  I guess in my case, while I didn't see the benefits of going to Afghanistan, and I was explicitly opposed to Iraq, I didn't want to stand out by being more public in my opposition to the war. 

It has always seemed obvious to me that war is dehumanizing.  A person is put in the situation of kill or be killed, he or she is a part of one team, and is fighting another team.  Friends will be killed by the enemy, and a soldier will obviously want to retaliate against the enemy.  War crimes will happen. 

Back in 2007, I got into a big disagreement with a coworker of my sister over this subject, much to her consternation.  He was a graduate of West Point, and had served as a junior officer in Iraq.  I made the mistake of assuming that he would agree with me that war brought to the fore horrible actions in some (not all) participants.  I argued that this fact was a reason why we should generally avoid warfare.  I pointed to the recent disclosure of killings of civilians at Haditha.  Instead, he argued that no U.S. soldier ever committed a war atrocity in Iraq, and that he, unlike I, knew that because he was there. He alluded to the idea that such atrocities were the result of conscription, and that the all-voluteer force led to better soldiers who were immune to commiting war crimes.  I suggested that in spite of my lack of personal experience, history showed that some soldiers in every war, regardless of the rightness or justness of their cause, committed terrible crimes.  I made the mistake of arguing this for too long, but I believe that while the number of incidents which occur in war may be relatively small, they do occur, and the fact that they occur is a legitimate argument against war.  I think this is the case Wright is making here.

Update:  I guess the case Wright is making is not that we shouldn't fight wars because wars bring out the worst actions in people, it is that in our linked world, such atrocities will be seen by people who will be persuaded to become our enemies, locking us in a cycle of atrocities and retaliations for those atrocities.  I'll stick to my position that the atrocities themselves are reason enough to avoid war.