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Good Wars And Total Wars

Responding to my earlier post on revolutionaries, Ross writes: There’s a reason that Lincoln has an enormous memorial and, say, James K. Polk does not; there’s a reason that the Washington Mall has a Museum of the American Indian rather than a monument to Philip Sheridan’s Plains campaigns; there’s a reason that the Spanish-American War […]

Responding to my earlier post on revolutionaries, Ross writes:

There’s a reason that Lincoln has an enormous memorial and, say, James K. Polk does not; there’s a reason that the Washington Mall has a Museum of the American Indian rather than a monument to Philip Sheridan’s Plains campaigns; there’s a reason that the Spanish-American War and the First World War don’t enjoy the kind of “good war” reputations that accrue to the Civil War and World War II; there’s a reason that the Korean War is remembered as a more heroic affair than Vietnam, and that our Filipino counterinsurgency isn’t remembered at all. The American reckoning with the moral questions that surround our wars is incomplete at best, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist – or that the attempt to distinguish good wars from bad ones on the basis of the ends that we sought isn’t a legitimate way to go about making moral judgments.

This seems to mix up the moral question of whether the ends justify the means (I don’t think they ever can) and the political-historical question of why certain wars loom larger in our national consciousness and nationalist historiography. The reasons why we build monuments to certain Presidents rather than others are tied up in how the nation (or at least some parts of the nation) was taught to understand itself and how these leading figures fit in the unfolding of a progressive nationalist history. There are two significant reasons why Polk, who was probably the most successful President in U.S. history when judged on the basis of achieving what he set out to achieve, has no national monuments and is barely remembered except by American historians and inhabitants of Tennessee and the Southwestern U.S. First, the grim reason: his war was not bloody, destructive and total enough to require the sort of dedicated effort to justify and sanctify it as an expression of righteousness, and the enemy–an independent Latin American republic–could not be very easily be turned into villains whose total defeat would raise few moral qualms. In other words, it was too mundane and too limited of a war; there was a post-war settlement that involved the transfer of territory and money, which is too obviously crass to be transformed into a straightforward crusade for liberty. The other reason is more simply political: Polk’s war was perceived as a war for Southern interests primarily, and in the wake of Lincoln’s war Polk and his war, which Lincoln and most of the North opposed, were bound to suffer eclipse and be largely forgotten.

The first is the most important reason, and it is the same reason why most of our wars aside from the two largest wars are not given enormous space in our national memory and the Presidents responsible for the other wars are largely forgotten or are relegated to second-tier status. Large-scale, total war requires full mobilization of the population and the utter demonization of the enemy, and the costs of such a war are usually so great that extensive ideological rationalization is required during and especially after the war. Military campaigns in the West against Indian tribes are not very well remembered, much less valorized, more because they were on a fairly small scale and did not involve the mobilization of the nation in the same way as the ‘Good Wars’. Obviously, the ruin visited upon the Indians also embarrasses and disgusts most people today, so no one is inclined to put a positive spin on these things. While it is more fashionable today to regret our 19th century expansionist wars, this is tied directly to the treatments of the ‘Good Wars’ that were, we are supposed to believe, not ultimately exercises in power projection and national consolidation but were instead fought for higher ideals against ideologically intolerable enemies.

There were obviously attempts to wrap some of the other wars, such as the Spanish war and WWI, in the mantle of liberation and defense of democracy respectively. However, even as great as the loss of life in WWI was and as extensive as the propaganda efforts during these wars were, neither war was enough of a total war and neither had an enemy that could reasonably be viewed in retrospect as an enemy that had to be defeated. The Spanish war stemmed from a dubious provocation that turned out to be an accident, and ultimately saddled the U.S. with colonial possessions that proved to be far more trouble than they were worth. WWI was a bloody, pointless fiasco all around, and we had the bad fortune of entering it when its futility and carnage were already clear to everyone. Wars that end in armistices and negotiated settlements, even as humiliating to the defeated as Versailles and the other treaties were, do not fit into a nationalist vision of total victory over enemies. The official propaganda justifications for the Allied cause in WWI–the rights of small nations, keeping the world safe for democracy, etc.–were all revealed to be either a sham or they led to disastrous results in the years that followed, which confirmed the American public in their earlier view that we should never have entered the war and that the war had all been for nothing.

The imperatives of the two ‘Good Wars’ were rather different. First, the idea of secession offends against a nationalist vision of a consolidated U.S., and abolition offers an attractive justification in retrospect (one might say that were it not for the prevalence of consequentialism the reputation of this war would have suffered greatly over the years). The particularly monstrous nature of the Nazi regime, which we therefore conclude today had to be defeated (whether or not it posed a real threat to U.S. interests then or later), has subsequently invested earlier machinations to enter the war with a degree of virtue they did not obviously possess at the time, and the taint of that regime has then been applied to all of its allies to make the entire conflict into a much more clear morality play than any war ever is.

The total nature of these wars involved wreaking a level of devastation and inflicting a degree of suffering on the civilian population that made it all the more important to emphasize the ends and either ignore or, in some cases, applaud the means used to get there. There is no real moral justification for mass bombing of civilian centers, which is and ought to be considered a war crime in any conflict because of its indiscriminate nature, but we are regularly treated to arguments that insist that these means were not only necessary to win (debatable) but were even positively life-saving in the end (laughable). The reason that most do not let this trouble them, if they think about it at all, is that they have been conditioned to think that the ends justify the means in the ‘Good Wars,’ which were in any case being fought against enemies so ignoble that they, including their civilians, deserve what was coming to them. (That this is also the result of the mass democratic nature of both enemy polities should give theorists of the so-called “democratic peace” pause.)

In other words, the treatment of the ‘Good Wars’ as struggles between fundamentally good and evil causes, rather than more basically as contests for political power (as we are forced to treat most of our other wars), invests victory in those wars with moral significance that we then use to cover over morally dubious means used to achieve victory. What this means is that the same arguments used to rationalize any crimes committed in the ‘Good Wars’ would have been used for Vietnam had we waged the sort of total war, up to and including invasion and occupation of North Vietnam, that had been waged in the others. We did not, because this was a geopolitical impossibility given the constraints of the Cold War, but ultimately what separates Vietnam and the ‘Good Wars’ in national memory was the inability then to engage in the same kind of total war aimed at the destruction of the enemy regime that somehow makes all of the unjust means used to reach that goal fade into the background. It is not how the war was fought, nor even the goal of the war, that puts Vietnam in a different category, but that it did not fit the story in which our side is always supposed to prevail.

P.S. Arguably, one of the main causes of so-called Vietnam Syndrome is this conditioning of our thinking about the ‘Good Wars’ as total struggles between good and evil that must end with the defeat of the latter. The inability to imitate the model of the ‘Good Wars’ causes enormous frustration, but most wars do not end in that way. The experience of total victory is the exception in human history, whereas we have made it into the standard by which and the lens through which we judge all other conflicts.

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