Foreign Wars: The Ultimate Divider At Home

Those who oppose foreign wars find themselves at an impasse with those who support them.

A good friend here in Dallas who was highly supportive of my dissident work during the COVID-19 pandemic disagrees with my criticism of President Trump for starting and continuing the war on Iran.

I am not troubled that we disagree about this subject, and I am confident that our friendship will be just fine. However, our disagreement prompted me to ponder the impasse between those who oppose foreign wars and those who support them.

War—that is, the business of killing people and destroying their property and exposing one’s own people and property to the risk of being killed and destroyed—has long been a divisive subject among the philosophically inclined.

I say for the philosophically inclined, because it seems that most people are easily swayed by war propaganda to support war. Because only 0.4% of the American population serves in the active duty military, most Americans perceive themselves to be very far (and safe) from the business of waging war. Their minds therefore have free rein to imagine this business however they wish to imagine it.

I am confident that most people would instantly reevaluate their advocacy of foreign wars if they and their children were obliged to participate in fighting them. As General William Tecumseh Sherman put it:

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.

The burning of Atlanta, Nov. 1864

I regard friends, associates, and readers as being entirely free to support America’s foreign wars. However, by the same token, I declare my individual freedom of conscience—enshrined by the First Amendment and recognized by the Supreme Court as a core principle of the Free Speech Clause—to criticize these wars.

I did not arrive at my posture of staunchly opposing foreign wars lightly. My position is the result of decades of studying military history and analyzing the costs and results of America’s foreign wars since 1945.

I also believe that the burden of proof for justifying foreign wars is not on those who oppose them, but on those who advocate them.

War propaganda grossly oversimplifies the causes of conflict and reduces the adversary to a comic book bad guy, dehumanizing him and totally disregarding the historical events and circumstances that produced his feelings of enmity.

I often receive scolding emails from people who know nothing about Iran, its people, or its history apart from things they have heard from American and Israeli propagandists. Many of these people call themselves “conservatives” and have frequently expressed disgust at the decadence and immorality of popular American culture and the dishonesty of the US government, especially during the COVID-19.

On the other hand, people like me who oppose the US government’s foreign wars can draw on a long moral and legal tradition on which the US Republic was founded. This tradition regards war as an extreme measure—one to be undertaken only after every reasonable avenue of peaceful conflict resolution has been exhausted.

History has shown the war rarely results in desirable outcomes, but usually begets more war. As Jefferson put it, “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”

This view is rooted in the Western just war tradition, adapted and institutionalized by the American Founders in both the nation’s founding documents and its constitutional design.

The just war tradition, going back to Augustine and Aquinas, holds that resorting to arms is morally permissible only under strict conditions. Among the most exacting of these is the criterion of last resort: force may be used solely when all other means of resolving conflict—diplomacy, negotiation, arbitration, economic pressure, or legal appeal—have been attempted in good faith.

This moral framework shaped colonial and early republican thought. Puritan writers claimed that the justice of any war must be “notoriously evident,” and Revolutionary leaders framed their cause in just-war terms. The Declaration of Independence follows the logic of last resort: it catalogs a “long train of abuses,” records repeated petitions for redress, and only then concludes that the colonists were compelled “to dissolve the political bands” and take up arms in defense of their rights.

I’ve yet to see a single coherent argument—drawing on our moral and legal traditions—that justifies the US against Iran, which began when the nuclear-armed forces of Israel and the US attacked Iran on the grounds that Iran was seeking to develop a nuclear weapon.