The Human Dimension of Wars

“But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent,…(it) has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed. Peace is no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as ’appeasement,’ if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war or an interlude between wars…” (C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. 1956)

In the justifications that are drawn up for wars by the media, it is seldom realized that no war can be described as a “just war” when it involves the daily killing of civilians, the continuous psychological terrorizing of entire populations of civilian cities, or when it forces people to leave their homes and become refugees, or when it destroys the civilian infrastructure and disrupts the provision of daily necessities to the common people. My purpose in this article is to try to bring facts in line with their human consequences, to restore reason and reflection that are so often robbed from us by those whose desires for continuous war are seldom affected by humanitarian concerns. Given the nature of weapons possessed by militaries around the world, the concept of the traditional “just war” has become completely outmoded. The use of these weapons in all cases, in spite of the claims of them being “smart”, involves the killing of unarmed, noncombatant civilians.

Given the mode of modern warfare, we must differentiate between the concept of war and that of self-defense. Self-defense, would, as the term implies, mean a limited engagement between combatants where one is the aggressor and the other the defender. Self-defense can be justified, overcoming aggression can be justified but no “shock and awe” preemptive bombings of civilian towns can ever be justified as “self defense”. Shocking the civilian population of entire cities is nothing new in war campaigns that the major powers have carried out in the last century. General McArthur’s military secretary and chief of psychological operations during the 2nd World War, Bonner Fellers, stated in an internal memorandum dated June 17th 1945, “The civilian bombings of Japanese cities was one of the most ruthless and barbaric killing of noncombatants in all history.”-(As quoted by John Dower in his book, Embracing Defeat). He was referring to the bombing other than the use of the Atomic Bomb, which surpassed the ruthlessness of any conventional weaponry, and which was used not once but twice.

Lethal weaponry that is specifically designed to destroy everything across a wide perimeter, like the MOAB bomb, reveals a predetermination of “mass destruction” on the part of those who design such weapons. Most of the weapons of mass destruction are designed in the United States. Similarly, any move of taking combat to non-aggressors or to civilian areas in my opinion makes any war an unjust war. What we see in the popular culture is confusion between the concept of just wars and that of just causes. We can very well have a “just cause” but using war as a means to attain it, is not justified. To attain a “just cause”, just means must be used.

In wars that are planned at the present time, the people leading us into war are certain of civilian causalities- they are certain before the event that civilians are going to get killed in large numbers- yet they proceed to carry on with the same war plans- this amounts to premeditated mass murder. There is no morality and no justice in such war planning. The people who do such planning are not national heroes or defenders, they are war criminals.

Even though the ends are uncertain in almost all wars, the means have been well calculated and assume civilian casualties and the destruction of the “life lines” of a civilian society. In World War 2 and in all the wars that the major powers have fought ever since, civilian areas have been deliberately targeted. The ones who suffer and the ones who do the fighting are the common folk, the masses, but the ones who initiate hostilities or provoke hostilities or decide upon using weapons of mass destruction are always the “well-protected” elite.

It is dishonest to talk about a “volunteer army” when it is disproportionately made up of people from the lower socioeconomic classes and racial minorities- people who are forced to volunteer because the institutional arrangement of society offers few if any alternatives to them. And this is another reason why no war of the elites can ever be justified, when the masses have to do the fighting and suffer casualties on their behalf.

Irving Horowitz writes in his 1964 book, The War Game:
“ A framework that holds the individual in little or no regard, or considers the person only as fodder for the requirements of the State, must hold the preservation of life as incidental..."
Humanity cannot afford to have its existence treated as incidental to the desires of the elite. If human life is held incidental, and in many cases less than incidental by our militarist civilian leaders, as history has shown time and again, then all the popular war propaganda slogans of democracy, of freedom, and liberation, become quite meaningless and hypocritical. It is the most basic human right, the right to life, without which all other rights are meaningless. No one has more right to live than another and no one should be given a blanket right to determine life and death decisions for others because they claim access to greater resources, resources that have offered them access to public office which is then sold to the masses as “democracy” by the establishment mass media.

Massive state intervention in a military based economic system, as there exists in the U.S. comes either through the provision of contracts or through heavy subsidies or sometimes through direct control and interference. It is often accompanied by threats and military interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is a major cause of wars. It is reckless, irresponsible and in almost all cases inhumane. Public support to maintain such a military dominated economic system is usually obtained by scaring the masses, or as Senator Vandenberg put it, “To scare the hell out of the American people.” Over 46 percent of all our taxes, (see http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm, based upon a line by line analysis of the US budget) in the U.S. go into maintaining the Military Industrial complex (includes past obligations that are currently being met). This figure reaches a much higher percentage according to some estimates, if we take out Social Security contributions from taxes the government receives (Vidal 2004:99). The fictitious "lack of security" is the number one marketing concern of the Military Industrial Complex, while deliberately provoking situations abroad, ensures their survival and profitability. Government scientific research is also heavily concentrated in the military order. C. Wright Mills stated:

“…an expensive arms race, under cover of the military metaphysic, and in a paranoid atmosphere of fright, is an economically attractive business. To many utopian capitalists, it has become the Business Way of American Life.” (C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III, 1960:68)

In any “just war theory” the concept of proportionality figures in as a major factor. The wars that have been fought in recent history have all been disproportional. Around 900 billion dollars are spent around the world on arms and armament, while people die of preventable diseases and starvation around the world. With the current increases in military spending, the United States will be spending almost the same on its military establishment as the combined total military spending of all the other countries of the world-, and this is being sold to us as being necessary to fight people who attack us with "box cutters".

There is no bravery involved in attacking a nation that has less than one percent of the firepower possessed by the United States and spent less than one half of one percent of what it spends on its military establishment. Lobbing hundreds of missiles from hundreds of miles away at civilian cities, cities whose defenses don’t stand a chance in a million to protect its civilian inhabitants does not constitute bravery by any definition. Those who believe their causes are righteous do not pick on weak targets.

The truth behind the excuse of liberation that was used for the suffering Iraqi masses becomes clear when we consider that over 1.5 million Iraqi people have died as a direct result of the sanctions regime imposed by the same people who in 2003 wanted to liberate the “suffering” people. According to the 1998 UNICEF report over 250 Iraqis, a disproportionate number of them children, died every day as a direct result of sanctions, representing a 345% increase from the pre Gulf War rate. The deaths in children less than five went up 16 fold (1600%) in Iraq after the first Gulf War. The sanctions that these liberators kept in place because of "invisible" weapons that were never found, and the same sanctions which they wanted removed (after the war) without even starting to look for those "invisible" weapons which they knew "existed", shows the shallow, inhumane nature of their " just causes". After destroying the infrastructure of urban Iraq in the name of "liberation", the so-called "liberators" showed complete indifference and disregard to the destruction of the cultural/historical heritage of Iraq and the security of the vast majority of the inhabitants of Baghdad. However, they wasted no time acting as policemen to secure the oil wells of Iraq at the very start of the conflict, even moving their war plans up because the security of the oil wells (and not the Iraqi people) was threatened.

Anyone who knows anything about basic economics will never conclude that the palace building of Saddam caused the preventable deaths in Iraq, despicable as such conspicuous consumption might be. Yet the media and Ari Fleischer, the President’s spokesperson, often presented them to be such in the days before the war. Iraq’s GNP fell by 75% after the first Gulf War due to sanctions. If you cut the GNP of the US by 75%, simple statistical projection can show that the rise in proportional deaths consequently, ceteris paribus (other things being equal), would be similar to what we see in Iraq, regardless of the real estate activity of the corporate elite. By 1994, according to the US department of Health and Human Service statistics, the mortality rate for black children ages 10 through 14 in the USA was nearly 65 percent higher than the rate for white children in that age group, 81 percent higher for children ages five though nine, and twice as high for children ages one through four. Are these numbers the result of the real estate activity of the elite in the U.S. or the de-facto institutional “sanctions” (based on race) built into our economic system?

When the U.S. military in its adventures abroad commits massacres, there is seldom any accountability. Rather, these acts are conveniently and tactfully removed from public consciousness and even though they are massive, systemic and repetitive, they are never labeled as the “uncivilized” actions of a “barbaric” nation, like the acts of opponents are. The routinization of such double standards by the U.S. media ensures that our fears and emotions are properly channeled, controlled and institutionalized in an almost robotic/push button fashion. Perhaps this one quote sums up modern warfare:

“Bad conscience has once and for all been transferred to “moral” machines… while man self-righteously washes his hands. Since all these machines can do is evaluate profits and losses, they implicitly make the loss finite, and hence justifiable, although it is precisely this evaluation that destroys us, the evaluated ones, even before we are actually destroyed. Because responsibility has been displaced on to an object, which is regarded as “objective”, it has become a mere response, the Ought is merely the correct chess move, and the Ought Not, the wrong chess move…. To mistrust the solutions provided by the machine, i.e., to question the responses that have taken the place of responsibility, would be to question the very principle of our mechanized existence. No one would venture to create such a precedent.” (Gunther Anders; Quoted by Eric & Mary Josephson, Ed. 1962:292-294)