I believe two moral judgments can be made about the present «
war »:
The September 11 attack constitutes a crime against humanity and
cannot be justified, and the bombing of Afghanistan is also a crime,
which cannot be justified.
And yet, voices across the political spectrum, including many on the
left, have described this as a « just war. » One longtime
advocate of
peace, Richard Falk, wrote in The Nation that this is « the first
truly just war since World War II. » Robert Kuttner, another
consistent supporter of social justice, declared in The American
Prospect that only people on the extreme left could believe this is
not a just war.
I have puzzled over this. How can a war be truly just when it
involves the daily killing of civilians, when it causes hundreds of
thousands of men, women, and children to leave their homes to escape
the bombs, when it may not find those who planned the September 11
attacks, and when it will multiply the ranks of people who are angry
enough at this country to become terrorists themselves?
This war amounts to a gross violation of human rights, and it will
produce the exact opposite of what is wanted: It will not end
terrorism; it will proliferate terrorism.
I believe that the progressive supporters of the war have confused a
»just cause » with a « just war. »
There are unjust causes, such as the attempt of the United States to
establish its power in Vietnam, or to dominate Panama or Grenada, or
to subvert the government of Nicaragua. And a cause may be
just—getting North Korea to withdraw from South Korea, getting
Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, or ending terrorism—but it
does not follow that going to war on behalf of that cause, with the
inevitable mayhem that follows, is just.
The stories of the effects of our bombing are beginning to come
through, in bits and pieces. Just eighteen days into the bombing,
The New York Times reported: « American forces have mistakenly
hit a
residential area in Kabul. » Twice, U.S. planes bombed Red Cross
warehouses, and a Red Cross spokesman said: « Now we’ve got 55,000
people without that food or blankets, with nothing at all. »
An Afghan elementary school-teacher told a Washington Post reporter
at the Pakistan border: « When the bombs fell near my house and
my
babies started crying, I had no choice but to run away. »
A New York Times report: « The Pentagon acknowledged that a Navy
F/A-18 dropped a 1,000-pound bomb on Sunday near what officials
called a center for the elderly. . . . The United Nations said the
building was a military hospital. . . . Several hours later, a Navy
F-14 dropped two 500-pound bombs on a residential area northwest of
Kabul. » A U.N. official told a New York Times reporter that
an
American bombing raid on the city of Herat had used cluster bombs,
which spread deadly « bomblets » over an area of twenty
football
fields. This, the Times reporter wrote, »was the latest of a
growing
number of accounts of American bombs going astray and causing
civilian casualties. »
An A.P. reporter was brought to Karam, a small mountain village hit
by American bombs, and saw houses reduced to rubble. « In the
hospital in Jalalabad, twenty-five miles to the east, doctors
treated what they said were twenty-three victims of bombing at
Karam, one a child barely two months old, swathed in bloody
bandages, » according to the account. « Another child,
neighbors said,
was in the hospital because the bombing raid had killed her entire
family. At least eighteen fresh graves were scattered around the
village. »
The city of Kandahar, attacked for seventeen straight days, was
reported to be a ghost town, with more than half of its 500,000
people fleeing the bombs. The city’s electrical grid had been
knocked out. The city was deprived of water, since the electrical
pumps could not operate. A sixty-year-old farmer told the A.P.
reporter, « We left in fear of our lives. Every day and every
night,
we hear the roaring and roaring of planes, we see the smoke, the
fire. . . . I curse them both—the Taliban and America. »
A New York Times report from Pakistan two weeks into the bombing
campaign told of wounded civilians coming across the border. «
Every
half-hour or so throughout the day, someone was brought across on a
stretcher. . . . Most were bomb victims, missing limbs or punctured
by shrapnel. . . . A young boy, his head and one leg wrapped in
bloodied bandages, clung to his father’s back as the old man trudged
back to Afghanistan. »
That was only a few weeks into the bombing, and the result had
already been to frighten hundreds of thousands of Afghans into
abandoning their homes and taking to the dangerous, mine-strewn
roads. The « war against terrorism » has become a war against
innocent
men, women, and children, who are in no way responsible for the
terrorist attack on New York.
And yet there are those who say this is a « just war. »
Terrorism and war have something in common. They both involve the
killing of innocent people to achieve what the killers believe is a
good end. I can see an immediate objection to this equation: They
(the terrorists) deliberately kill innocent people; we (the war
makers) aim at « military targets, » and civilians are
killed by
accident, as « collateral damage. »
Is it really an accident when civilians die under our bombs? Even if
you grant that the intention is not to kill civilians, if they
nevertheless become victims, again and again and again, can that be
called an accident? If the deaths of civilians are inevitable in
bombing, it may not be deliberate, but it is not an accident, and
the bombers cannot be considered innocent. They are committing
murder as surely as are the terrorists.
The absurdity of claiming innocence in such cases becomes apparent
when the death tolls from « collateral damage » reach figures
far
greater than the lists of the dead from even the most awful act of
terrorism. Thus, the « collateral damage » in the Gulf
War caused more
people to die—hundreds of thousands, if you include the victims of
our sanctions policy—than the very deliberate terrorist attack of
September 11. The total of those who have died in Israel from
Palestinian terrorist bombs is somewhere under 1,000. The number of
dead from « collateral damage » in the bombing of Beirut
during
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was roughly 6,000.
We must not match the death lists—it is an ugly exercise—as if one
atrocity is worse than another. No killing of innocents, whether
deliberate or « accidental, » can be justified. My argument
is that
when children die at the hands of terrorists, or—whether intended
or not—as a result of bombs dropped from airplanes, terrorism and
war become equally unpardonable.
Let’s talk about « military targets. » The phrase is so
loose that
President Truman, after the nuclear bomb obliterated the population
of Hiroshima, could say: « The world will note that the first
atomic
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we
wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the
killing of civilians. »
What we are hearing now from our political leaders is, « We are
targeting military objectives. We are trying to avoid killing
civilians. But that will happen, and we regret it. » Shall the
American people take moral comfort from the thought that we are
bombing only « military targets »?
The reality is that the term « military » covers all sorts
of targets
that include civilian populations. When our bombers deliberately
destroy, as they did in the war against Iraq, the electrical
infrastructure, thus making water purification and sewage treatment
plants inoperable and leading to epidemic waterborne diseases, the
deaths of children and other civilians cannot be called accidental.
Recall that in the midst of the Gulf War, the U.S. military bombed
an air raid shelter, killing 400 to 500 men, women, and children who
were huddled to escape bombs. The claim was that it was a military
target, housing a communications center, but reporters going through
the ruins immediately afterward said there was no sign of anything
like that.
I suggest that the history of bombing—and no one has bombed more
than this nation—is a history of endless atrocities, all calmly
explained by deceptive and deadly language like « accident, »
»military targets, » and « collateral damage.
»
Indeed, in both World War II and in Vietnam, the historical record
shows that there was a deliberate decision to target civilians in
order to destroy the morale of the enemy—hence the firebombing of
Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, the B-52s over Hanoi, the jet bombers over
peaceful villages in the Vietnam countryside. When some argue that
we can engage in « limited military action » without «
an excessive use
of force, » they are ignoring the history of bombing. The momentum
of
war rides roughshod over limits.
The moral equation in Afghanistan is clear. Civilian casualties are
certain. The outcome is uncertain. No one knows what this bombing
will accomplish—whether it will lead to the capture of Osama Bin
Laden (perhaps), or the end of the Taliban (possibly), or a
democratic Afghanistan (very unlikely), or an end to terrorism
(almost certainly not).
And meanwhile, we are terrorizing the population (not the
terrorists, they are not easily terrorized). Hundreds of thousands
are packing their belongings and their children onto carts and
leaving their homes to make dangerous journeys to places they think
might be more safe.
Not one human life should be expended in this reckless violence
called a « war against terrorism. »
We might examine the idea of pacifism in the light of what is going
on right now. I have never used the word « pacifist » to
describe
myself, because it suggests something absolute, and I am suspicious
of absolutes. I want to leave openings for unpredictable
possibilities. There might be situations (and even such strong
pacifists as Gandhi and Martin Luther King believed this) when a
small, focused act of violence against a monstrous, immediate evil
would be justified.
In war, however, the proportion of means to ends is very, very
different. War, by its nature, is unfocused, indiscriminate, and
especially in our time when the technology is so murderous,
inevitably involves the deaths of large numbers of people and the
suffering of even more. Even in the « small wars » (Iran
vs. Iraq, the
Nigerian war, the Afghan war), a million people die. Even in a
»tiny » war like the one we waged in Panama, a thousand
or more die.
Scott Simon of NPR wrote a commentary in The Wall Street Journal on
October 11 entitled, « Even Pacifists Must Support This War.
» He
tried to use the pacifist acceptance of self-defense, which approves
a focused resistance to an immediate attacker, to justify this war,
which he claims is « self-defense. » But the term «
self-defense » does
not apply when you drop bombs all over a country and kill lots of
people other than your attacker. And it doesn’t apply when there is
no likelihood that it will achieve its desired end.
Pacifism, which I define as a rejection of war, rests on a very
powerful logic. In war, the means—indiscriminate killing—are
immediate and certain; the ends, however desirable, are distant and
uncertain.
Pacifism does not mean « appeasement. » That word is often
hurled at
those who condemn the present war on Afghanistan, and it is
accompanied by references to Churchill, Chamberlain, Munich. World
War II analogies are conveniently summoned forth when there is a
need to justify a war, however irrelevant to a particular situation.
At the suggestion that we withdraw from Vietnam, or not make war on
Iraq, the word « appeasement » was bandied about. The glow
of the
»good war » has repeatedly been used to obscure the
nature of all the
bad wars we have fought since 1945.
Let’s examine that analogy. Czechoslovakia was handed to the
voracious Hitler to « appease » him. Germany was an aggressive
nation
expanding its power, and to help it in its expansion was not wise.
But today we do not face an expansionist power that demands to be
appeased. We ourselves are the expansionist power—troops in Saudi
Arabia, bombings of Iraq, military bases all over the world, naval
vessels on every sea—and that, along with Israel’s expansion into
the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has aroused anger.
It was wrong to give up Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler. It is not
wrong to withdraw our military from the Middle East, or for Israel
to withdraw from the occupied territories, because there is no right
to be there. That is not appeasement. That is justice.
Opposing the bombing of Afghanistan does not constitute « giving
in
to terrorism » or « appeasement. » It asks that other
means be found
than war to solve the problems that confront us. King and Gandhi
both believed in action—nonviolent direct action, which is more
powerful and certainly more morally defensible than war.
To reject war is not to « turn the other cheek, » as pacifism
has been
caricatured. It is, in the present instance, to act in ways that do
not imitate the terrorists.
The United States could have treated the September 11 attack as a
horrific criminal act that calls for apprehending the culprits,
using every device of intelligence and investigation possible. It
could have gone to the United Nations to enlist the aid of other
countries in the pursuit and apprehension of the terrorists.
There was also the avenue of negotiations. (And let’s not hear:
»What? Negotiate with those monsters? » The United
States negotiated
with—indeed, brought into power and kept in power—some of the most
monstrous governments in the world.) Before Bush ordered in the
bombers, the Taliban offered to put bin Laden on trial. This was
ignored. After ten days of air attacks, when the Taliban called for
a halt to the bombing and said they would be willing to talk about
handing bin Laden to a third country for trial, the headline the
next day in The New York Times read: « President Rejects Offer
by
Taliban for Negotiations, » and Bush was quoted as saying: «
When I
said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations. »
That is the behavior of someone hellbent on war. There were similar
rejections of negotiating possibilities at the start of the Korean
War, the war in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the bombing of
Yugoslavia. The result was an immense loss of life and incalculable
human suffering.
International police work and negotiations were—still
are—alternatives to war. But let’s not deceive ourselves; even if
we succeeded in apprehending bin Laden or, as is unlikely,
destroying the entire Al Qaeda network, that would not end the
threat of terrorism, which has potential recruits far beyond Al
Qaeda.
To get at the roots of terrorism is complicated. Dropping bombs is
simple. It is an old response to what everyone acknowledges is a
very new situation. At the core of unspeakable and unjustifiable
acts of terrorism are justified grievances felt by millions of
people who would not themselves engage in terrorism but from whose
ranks terrorists spring.
Those grievances are of two kinds: the existence of profound
misery—hunger, illness—in much of the world, contrasted to the
wealth and luxury of the West, especially the United States; and the
presence of American military power everywhere in the world,
propping up oppressive regimes and repeatedly intervening with force
to maintain U.S. hegemony.
This suggests actions that not only deal with the long-term problem
of terrorism but are in themselves just.
Instead of using two planes a day to drop food on Afghanistan and
100 planes to drop bombs (which have been making it difficult for
the trucks of the international agencies to bring in food), use 102
planes to bring food.
Take the money allocated for our huge military machine and use it to
combat starvation and disease around the world. One-third of our
military budget would annually provide clean water and sanitation
facilities for the billion people in the world who have none.
Withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia, because their presence near the
holy shrines of Mecca and Medina angers not just bin Laden (we need
not care about angering him) but huge numbers of Arabs who are not
terrorists.
Stop the cruel sanctions on Iraq, which are killing more than a
thousand children every week without doing anything to weaken Saddam
Hussein’s tyrannical hold over the country.
Insist that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories, something
that many Israelis also think is right, and which will make Israel
more secure than it is now.
In short, let us pull back from being a military superpower, and
become a humanitarian superpower.
Let us be a more modest nation. We will then be more secure. The
modest nations of the world don’t face the threat of terrorism.
Such a fundamental change in foreign policy is hardly to be
expected. It would threaten too many interests: the power of
political leaders, the ambitions of the military, the corporations
that profit from the nation’s enormous military commitments.
Change will come, as at other times in our history, only when
American citizens—becoming better informed, having second thoughts
after the first instinctive support for official policy—demand it.
That change in citizen opinion, especially if it coincides with a
pragmatic decision by the government that its violence isn’t
working, could bring about a retreat from the military solution.
It might also be a first step in the rethinking of our nation’s role
in the world. Such a rethinking contains the promise, for Americans,
of genuine security, and for people elsewhere, the beginning of hope.
-Howard Zinn is a columnist for The Progressive.