40 The New York ReviewThe Forgotten Crime of War Itself
Jackson Lears
Humane: How the United States
Abandoned Peace and
Reinvented War
by Samuel Moyn.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
400 pp., $30.00For weeks after the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, Vice Presi-
dent Dick Cheney remained closeted
away in various undisclosed locations
while Bush administration officials
announced the start of a global war
on terror. Cheney, the chief architect
of that war, finally resurfaced in his
office in the West Wing of the White
House, where Bob Woodward of The
Washington Post asked him how long
the war might last. Cheney was forth-
right: “It may never end. At least, not
in our lifetime.” It was the closest any
public figure has come to predicting
endless war— the dream of every mil-
itarist from Clausewitz and Moltke to
Cheney and his fellow Vulcans in the
Bush White House.
C h e n ey ’s c o n fi d e nt ex p e c t at io n s h ave
been borne out by events. Despite the
recent pullout from Afghanistan, the
war on terror has only spread in new
technological and political forms. At-
tempts at regime change in Iraq, Libya,
and Syria (as well as Afghanistan) have
leveled ancient cities, destroyed hun-
dreds of thousands of innocent lives,
provoked resistance from multiplying
jihadist organizations, and unleashed
conflict across the Middle East and
into South Asia and Africa. The infla-
tion of a diffuse but permanent threat
has created a vast new revenue stream
for vendors of military hardware and a
new industry of “counterterrorism con-
sultants” whose offices line the highway
from Washington to Dulles Airport.
Ostensibly constrained by rules that
ensure humane conduct, the war on
terror is unrelenting and everywhere,thanks in part to the embrace of drone
warfare by Barack Obama, the consti-
tutional lawyer who some of us thought
was going to deliver us from the Bush
administration’s violation of the Eighth
Amendment along with other assaults
on the Constitution. Instead, Obama
became the assassin in chief while
his lawyers made the war look a little
cleaner. They also expanded the con-
cept of self- defense to justify violating
the sovereignty of any nation whenever
it could be alleged to harbor terror-
ists. After September 11 no politician
asked whether the proper response
to a terrorist attack should be a US
war or an international police action.
Alternatives to war have remained
unarticulated.
The war on terror seduced some of
its critics, including Donald Trump,
who like Obama had posed as an anti-
war candidate. Trump, too, found the
role of chief assassin impossible to re-
sist. Yet even that clownish bungler
so traumatized the national security
establishment by hinting at a less ag-
gressive posture that neoconservative
Republicans and neoliberal Democrats
came together to reassert their com-
mon interventionist commitments. De-
spite small dissensions, these abide in
the current Congress.
Our public discourse, where not
hopelessly fractured, has been focused
on urgent and immediate issues of do-
mestic politics and climate change.
Intelligent discussion of foreign policy
is increasingly unlikely, especially the
issue of when and why the US should
go to war.The roots of this failure are entwined
with Americans’ sense of themselves
and their relations with the world, as
Samuel Moyn shows in Humane, his
brilliant new book. Moyn concentrateson the campaigns in Europe and the
United States to make war more hu-
mane, from the creation of an inter-
national brigade (later known as the
Red Cross) to care for the wounded
in the Franco- Austrian War in 1859,
to the legal constraints gradually im-
posed on the war on terror in our own
time, when, as he writes, “swords have
not been beaten into plowshares. They
have been melted down for drones.”
Moyn’s central insight is that the
quest for humane war, whether by de-
ploying smarter weaponry or making
new rules, has obscured the more basic
task of opposing war itself: “Increas-
ingly we live without antiwar law. We
fight war crimes but have forgotten the
crime of war.” In tracing the efforts to
humanize war, Moyn casts new light
on much of the surrounding historical
landscape— not only peace movements
and the divisions within them but also
the assumptions of the warmakers
themselves.
Humane provides a powerful intel-
lectual history of the American way
of war. It is a bold departure from de-
cades of historiography dominated by
interventionist bromides. A vainglori-
ous narrative of modern US diplomatic
and military history is embedded in
our conventional wisdom: a struggle
between prescient “internationalists”
and ostrichlike “isolationists,” until the
shock of Pearl Harbor awakens the re-
luctant giant to the responsibilities of
global leadership, first in World War
II, then in the cold war. (The Soviet
Union’s crucial role in defeating Hit-
ler is omitted.) US ascendancy is com-
plete, in this view, with the collapse of
Soviet communism and the rise of a
unipolar world order in the 1990s. But
there the upbeat story ends: even the
most committed triumphalist finds it
difficult to assimilate the troubling de-
nouement of the September 11 attacksand the permanent state of emergency
that followed.
Moyn probes the legal and ethical is-
sues surrounding the war on terror, but
he also assays the century and a half of
US history that preceded it. The notion
of humane war would have been alien
and baffling to most Americans for
much of that per iod. “A mer ica’s default
way of war— honed in the imperial en-
counter with native peoples and lasting
into the twentieth century across the
globe— recognized no limits,” Moyn
writes. He records the consequences
in sobering detail, ranging from the ex-
termination of Native American tribes
to the torching of Vietnamese villages.
During the Pax Americana following
World War II the whole world, in effect,
became “Indian country” (as many GIs
referred to Vietnam).
But his most original and incisive
contribution to historical understand-
ing is taking seriously the possibility
of peace— or at least the avoidance
of war— as a primary goal of foreign
policy. This leads him to dispute, for
instance, the frequent dismissal of iso-
lationists as shortsighted or xenophobic
rather than people of good faith with
an attachment to traditional Ameri-
can ideas of neutrality and a principled
aversion to war. Moyn is neither a pac-
ifist nor an isolationist, but he believes
war must always be the genuine last re-
sort, not merely the rhetorical one.
That perspective has been absent
from foreign policy debates in recent
decades. In Moyn’s view the reason is
straightforward. Debating torture or
other abuses, while indisputably valu-
able, has diverted Americans from
“deliberating on the deeper choice they
were making to ignore constraints on
starting war in the first place.” Prohibit-
ing torture and preventing war are both
moral necessities, but war itself causes
far more suffering than violations of its
rules. It is a fatal mistake, says Moyn,
to give up on the possibility of stopping
wars before or even after they start.The case is forceful, but Moyn some-
times suggests that we must choose
between making war more humane
and opposing it altogether. Though he
denies that stark duality, he does not
repudiate it consistently or explicitly
enough. He occasionally implies that
certain individuals made the wrong
choice— people like Michael Ratner of
the Center for Constitutional Rights,
for example, who eventually shifted
his attention from opposing the war on
terror to reforming its abuses. There
is a misplaced precision in Moyn’s
critique that may be unfair to Rat-
ner and other people in public life by
exaggerating the choices available to
them.
Moyn convincingly documents how
the disappearance of peace as a topic
for public debate correlates with the
rise of arguments for humane war.
But he doesn’t show specifically how
one development relates to the other.
We indeed need to talk more about
whether we should go to war as well as
how to stop it, but the shift toward hu-
man i zing is not the on ly reason we have
failed to have that discussion.US military pilots operating Predator drones from the ground control station at Balad Air Base, Iraq, May 2008Jerome Sessini/Magnum PhotosLears 40 42 .indd 40 3 / 23 / 22 3 : 58 PM