Stumble it!War as Altruism
posted in War by themaiden |I’ve been thinking a lot about war. And I’ve been think a lot about a particular justification for the war in Iraq. More precisely, I suppose, it is a justification for staying in Iraq. That justification takes several forms grouped in two primary classes.
- If we leave, it will get worse.
- We broke it, we bought it, we fix it.
Here is the question: Does it really make sense to justify war as a kind of altruism?
Both (closely related) positions are closely related to a concept of war as a kind of altruism, to the idea that war can be, and in the case of Iraq is being, fought for the good of the people whose country has been invaded.
The more I think about it, the less the idea makes sense. The machinery of war is the machinery of destruction. Soldiers are a body of individuals trained for destruction. The concept is one of violence. War is meant force one group of people to bend to another group’s will. It seems difficult to justify the use of such a tool as ‘altruistic’.
I am not one to argue that war can be avoided utterly. I wish it could. I really do, but that would require a global willingness that doesn’t exist. It would require a rationality and an integrity on the part of the world’s people and the world’s leaders that simply doesn’t exist in any abundance. It would require that humanity as a whole stop thinking in terms of ‘getting all I can get for me and mine and to hell with the rest of you’ and start asking the question, “How can we all best live together?” I have no faith that such will happen in the near future. I’m not sure it ever will. But I do question justifying war as a kind of altruism.
Wars entered in self-defense are obviously not altruistic. Likewise with wars of aggression. A war entered to defend some need resource also doesn’t qualify. A war entered for political gain doesn’t qualify. What about Iraq?
In Iraq, we– used loosely– forced our will upon Hussein. We were told it was self-defense and/or retaliation– Hussein sponsored the terrorists who attacked us (never mind that the claim was false). This clearly is not altruistic. We were also told that the war was for the Iraqi people. It was to free them from oppression. This is the appeal to altruism– “we did it for them”. This claim, if true, might qualify as altruistic. i wonder, though, can you ever really justify running tanks through cities by saying that it “is for the people”, that it is for the people whose homes get bombed and whose children get killed and maimed.
And that leads into what we are doing now.
We are now attempting to force our will on the Iraqi people. More accurately, we are trying to force our will upon several different groups of Iraqi people. That isn’t altruism. It is violence. Even if you happen to think that the war in Iraq is necessary, it isn’t being fought for the (perceived) good of anyone but ourselves. That, really, is a problem with altruism in general. The ‘good’ boils down to what I think is good. The Iraqis, for example, seem to think that several Iraqi states would be the way to go. The people with the guns disagree, so we keep fighting. They keep fighting. Big mess. Not altruistic. Not, in other words, a “selfless concern for the welfare of others.”
Even intervention in something like the Rwandan Genocide could possibly have been described as ‘altruistic’. The intervention would have been from concern, at least, for those being massacred. But we didn’t go in, possibly because leaders themselves don’t really accept the ‘war as altruism’ argument.
But I’m not sure. Intervening in Rwanda would have been the forcing of an outside opinion onto Rwanda. That isn’t altruism. We wouldn’t have been acting out of “selfless concern for the welfare of others.” We’d have been taking sides. We may happen to think that genocide is bad, but obviously those committing it do not.
Before someone suggests otherwise, I am not opposed to taking sides. I wish we’d taken sides in Rwanda. I’m glad we took sides in WWII against Germany, but had we not taken sides when we did we’d have likely been forced to take sides later out of pure selfish self-defense. I do think, though that we need good and clear justifications for taking sides and I question whether Iraq is actually being fought for the Iraqis as we are sometimes told– as we are told when we are not told something else entirely and I question whether we can ever justify countrysides and cities as being out of “selfless concern for the welfare of others“. Maybe… maybe we can, under some rare circumstance.
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