Unfinished Business: War 4 (continued)

Cause Conjugated

Causes with respect to war, casus belli, are further complicated by their timing. Causes are regarded differently in their past, present and future settings. They are further treated differently depending on the mood in which they are used. I am not concerned with the 'would haves, could haves' of causes - so-called "virtual history" - as determining probable cause is already difficult enough. Nonetheless, proposing a future cause, a hypothetical, must rely on thinking similar to virtual history.

The retrospective hunt for causes is the historians' bailiwick. In seeking ancient causes, we are trying to identify a chain of events, a pattern, similar to natural (or physical) causation. Looking at cause historically is about as far from "intentional causes" as one can get. That's because the intentions are not immediately visible, but must be inferred from evidence. Moreover, what's done is done; it doesn't help to cry over spilt milk. In the historical study, whatever was intentional becomes a fact or event documented in the record. We do not "see" the intentions per se, but only their trail. Even then, we do not see most historical events and intentions; they are mostly water under the bridge, leaving no trail whatsoever.

In an historical study, it doesn't matter whether we judge intentions to have been good, bad or indifferent; they were what they were. Moral acclaim and outrage fade with the passing of time and living memory. Still, our judgement matters when history is taught and forms the basis of moral examples. It is the application of historical findings to present and future decisions that is of ethical interest. History provides us with examples and connections, from which we can generalize to moral notions. 'You ought to do this, because X, Y and Z said you should do it, and history shows they were right' (they had a desirable outcomes). The moral lesson arises from past intentions, not from some inference about the events. (That is, 'ought' is not implicit in a fact or event apart from intention. We can infer what the 'ought' might have been, using the facts or events as a setting, knowing what we do about intentional players.) It takes an intelligent player to have intentions, to create an 'ought'.

There are a few bones left from the Age of Dinosaurs, which is one way we know there was such an Age. Some of those bones were once living predators, and some of them gorged themselves on our early ancestors. The chilling thought of being eaten, say 100 million years ago, doesn't arouse much ire today, except for those being chased by velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Without Jurassic Park, it is easy to write off dinosaurian eating habits as the Darwinian fitness of their time. It's also hard to have a lot of outrage about the thousands of French and Russians who died unknown in the winter of 1812. We do know something wasn't right in 1812, and various lessons have been learned from that winter. Even though immediacy is lacking in both cases, we can draw moral lessons from the war of 1812, but probably not from repasts of 100 million BC. This suggests the possibility that whatever morality we thought applied in 1812 might return to the earth with the bodies of the slain.

The foregoing suggests that events we believe have a moral "content" have a weight. The farther in the past they were, the less they weigh. Let's call this "moral evaporation," or "m-evaporation." The fewer the number of victims, the less they weigh. Let's call this "moral intensity," or "m-intensity." Then, there is our judgement concerning the "gravity" of the moral rule (in some hierarchy of morality), or "m-gravity." The moral severity, or m-severity, of some event or act is then the product of these weightings. In principle, we could rank moral behavior using these factors, even if it would be a sliding scale because there are different evaluations of the components.

In fact, our Courts make this calculation every day using the factors mentioned. (M-evaporation is simply the 'statute of limitations.') The calculation is analogous to PV = nRT, the gas equation of state, which can be evaluated to a single parameter, the temperature "T". In this sort of equation, it is impossible to tell which is the more fundamental variable; we only know their relationship. In most discussions, it is usual to talk about the morality of a given act, event or situation as a single value, like the gas temperature. This is perfectly acceptable, but it disguises certain other features of the moral "content" which I have just pointed out.

We can think about morality as having dimensions. Different observers place the moral content somewhere in morality space (or m-space), either using the single parameter or a separate evaluation of multiple parameters. This results in a m-space curve. Where the curve is most dense (has the most points per unit vector), there are points of agreement. That is, the common moral understanding or judgement about something is represented in those "dense" areas of the curve. We give those areas names, such as "Ten Commandments." This does not deny the existence of other areas of the curve, and other clusters of judgement. There is no a priori reason any one value cluster (dense area) is more or less important than any other. A cluster, the m-temperature, does not necessarily represent similar judgements on all its dimensions; rather, it represents the convergence of judgements within a certain area, of different dimensional values.

Example: In the formula r = (∑^m(X_mⁿ))^(1/n) , any given value of r could be represented by an infinity of X_m; there is no need for the X_m to be the same. In the same way, each individual can make different assessments of the components of a moral judgement, and still arrive at a similar composite result as others. Nonetheless, in common discourse, we speak of agreeing on our moral values; i.e., the r's in the equation. [This also explains why discussions about moral values often get bogged down in arguments over cases: the cases expose the discordant approaches to a seemingly agreed result. 'The devil is in the details.']

Now remembering our historian, it is perhaps a little clearer why historical causes, especially of wars, seem value-free. After sufficient m-evaporation, moral judgements tend to zero. This makes the story easier to tell as who did what to whom on a day and hour somewhere. The "why" of that story is not a complex argument about ethics and morals, but only of obvious motives; e.g., the Greeks took revenge against the Trojans. Our very much present day view that dragging the body of Hector around the walls of Troy is immoral and probably a violation of the Geneva conventions is for naught. We can be shocked by that brutal act and still shrug it off; whereas, for Americans, the outrages in Mogadishu, Somalia and now in Iraq still burn.

If the reader doubts this notion of moral evaporation - of moral distance, consider the recent devastating railroad explosion in North Korea near the Chinese border just weeks before this writing. Hundreds of people were killed and injured, but the story faded from the headlines in just 2-3 days. I think most Americans and Europeans were unimpressed with this disaster, even though it was a numerically greater loss than the American casualties in Iraq in April-May, 2004. It was, in proportion to population, a far greater loss than September 11, 2001. Most people are just not aroused about terrible things that happened long ago and far away.

This is not to say that the Holocaust or the Rape of Nanjing were meaningless or unimportant. (I have known Holocaust survivors, some of whom were not-so-distant relatives.) There are moral lessons to be drawn from those horrors. But, they were not the only holocausts in history. Until modern times, genocide, ruining civilizations, and laying waste to cities was a common practice. While we hear some outrage about what the White Man did to the Lakota people (in revenge for Custer), what of all the other Indian tribes? The Incas? The Aztecs?

So, our moral feelings, persuasions and judgements are personal and local. Long ago and far way is easily dismissed. Should we look for the moral evaluation of casus belli in such events? My tendency is to say 'no,' because we have no immediate reports, no discussion. We cannot fairly examine something of little moral interest. We can, however, study such cases as evidence in arguments about the Kantian 'similar circumstances,' known in legal circles as "precedents." While precedents and ancient events may not evoke much moral sentiment, they do evoke some. The moral content of "evaporated" situations may be small, but it is still there. Thus, when we evaluate "similar circumstances" and "precedents," we cannot do so in a wholly value-free way. Because their is some residual intentional value in historical events, we do not derive an 'ought' from an 'is' or 'was.'

Where this line of argument leads is this: moral choices (intentions) exist mostly in the present. Future choices, or "virtual" choices, are applications of ethical principles and guidelines (methods of reasoning) to hypothetical activities. It is useful to consider such virtual choices in determining what we might do in the future. Such considerations might even be formative in our activities; i.e., may lead us to place where such a choice is appropriate. But, until we actually come to the decision point, no one knows how we will arrive there. It is only in the relatively short time before making a decision that past and future collapse into factors that must be considered. Almost everything of ethical interest is about the present, where we think of "present" as a period of time, a slice not an instant.

In the intentional present, the future becomes evident:

If I do A, then X will result. If I do B, I get Y. If I do C, the result is Z. And so on.

All of those hypothetical arguments are based on knowledge of the past. Somehow we learned that A yields X, etc, so now we expect that result. This argument assumes that no one knows the future, but that decision makers make predictions about it and act accordingly. If the future is (in principle) known, it becomes like the past, an object of study. Moreover, there is no moral dimension in decisions made when the future is known. How can there be a "decision" when the future is foretold; i.e., we know what the decision will be?

Those who believe the Universe is a clockwork, for whatever reason, have a great difficulty in explaining moral behavior. It matters not whether the Universe is a Newtonian clockwork or determined in the mind of some god. In such cases, all of the players merely act out their parts: for them, "Que sera, sera." The only morality applies to original decision maker which runs the whole show.

Some religions, such as Catholicism, try to get around this problem by introducing the notion of "predestination." This word is supposed to mean that decision makers are apparently free to choose, but things will actually work out as planned by the supernatural god. The "freedom" is in the actor's lack of knowledge of god's plan. That freedom is only in the mind of the actor, however, because the actor will actually do what is determined.

I think talk about "predestination" is very confused and convoluted. The problem to be solved is the apparent "free will" of agents. This problem arises precisely because we do not know the future. For those who posit that the future is determined, possibly even knowable, it makes no sense at all to talk about "free will." What can be appreciated is the complex of "mental states" that lead a player to do something. In other words, for determinists, decision making can be studied as the material implementation of god's will, clockwork design, or whatever it is that is determinate. It simply doesn't make any sense to call decision making "free" in the usual sense of the word, no matter which variety of determinism you subscribe to.

An important point here is that, if there is no "free will," then there is no moral choice, hence no responsibility. This gives an interesting meaning to the fundamentalist Christian saying that "'Christians are always forgiven:" believers can do whatever they want, because they will be forgiven. This follows from their lack of responsibility for the condition of the world: only their god is responsible. If such a view of our existence is correct, then there is no morality or ethics whatsoever; there is just god's will.

My reaction to all of that sort of argument (about clockwork, determinism & c) is applying Occam's Razor: why do we need it? The simple facts are almost everyone observes people making decisions about all sorts of things everyday. Lots of folks say they know the future (including myself from time to time), but that knowledge is a guesswork based on study of past trends and events. Predictions do come true, showing that historical patterns do repeat themselves. But, does any one know the future completely? I think not. So, we are back to the problem of explaining what people do, what is their morality.

The determinists add nothing whatsoever to the discussion, because in the end they must deny moral decision making. The pre-determinists only confuse the discussion, by making distinctions without a difference. Those who hold such metaphysical beliefs are not in a position to help us determine what are "just wars." For determinists, war, like everything else, just happens. The religious faithful who suffer the effects of wars must resign themselves: this, too, shall pass. (This may explain the fatalism and passivity of people in many religious countries where horrendous atrocities are being committed.)

Again, activity subject to moral judgement - moral actions - is necessarily not determined or subject to a deterministic framework. This is true, even if later on when could say 'he was compelled to do it because of ...' At the time of the decision, the action cannot be compelled or known in the sense the next stroke of an engine is known. Moral actions are not machine-like.

Even if there are historical guides - "do this and not that' - the agent must have the sense of making a choice. There needs to be the possibility of doing that instead of this, even if it is not recommended, even if it is unwise.

Moral actions occur in the present, not in the future or past, for the agents of my concern. At least in this discussion, there are no permanent, invariable 'forces' or 'laws' guiding or compelling behavior. 'Intentional' means what the agent intends, or is about, to do. While that intention can be demonstrated in many ways prior to the actual doing (e.g., MRI or PET scans show brain activity), the most anyone can say about the eventual act is that it is less than 100% probable.

Casus Belli

A Casus Belli is some fact, event or reason, or combination of them, which propose to justify a war. It is a motivating factor to go to war. It is not value free; casus belli implicitly represent a value (moral) judgement about the actions undertaken.

Historians may write about and analyze causes of war (as discussed above), but those causes may or may not be casus belli. The difference is what is recognized and acted upon at the time, regardless of what is eventually discovered. For example, the underlying cause of many European wars may have been surplus population and barbarism, but the proponents of those wars did not say so. Christians and Muslims fought over the Holy Lands in several Crusades, supposedly for their gods and religion. The fact that Crusaders and Jihadists may have had other, more urgent and pecuniary motives, such as plunder, fame, and Empire, is important in assessing causes, but not casus belli.

This view of casus belli is similar to the foregoing discussion about the timeliness of moral judgements. Casus belli are what the immediate participants and observers of their time believe they are; their choice of motivations is what we are concerned about. This is because it is possible there would be no war, if the decision makers had no casus belli.

Of course, the parties could go to war without any casus belli. They could just feel like it, or do the acts without justification. This is a distinct possibility that makes moral evaluation of their acts difficult. In cases like that, I would think the warriors mad (psychotic). They could be professional soldiers who lust for a fight. But, it would be unusual. Almost all of the time, in wars large and small, the parties announce their grievances and willingness to submit to trial by the sword. Almost always, war makers feel a need to put themselves before their fellow men, to show their greatness and seriousness of purpose, and to gain approval from as many others as possible. (Is it just a glorified display of alpha-maleness?)

The exception which does come to mind is North Korea, which invaded the south in June, 1950 without warning, notice or stated ambition. In retrospect, it is clear the North Korean Communists believed the Marxist line that they were the wave of the future. They also had the backing of their Maoist and Stalinist allies, who thought South Korea would be an easy conquest. The unification of Korea from the North almost happened, except for the quick and very determined resistance of the Americans in Pusan. Once the United States was fully in that war, the invasion was beat back and the war quickly became a stalemate.

Since the Korean War, we hear very little from the North which amounts to a family fiefdom or monarchy, currently run by Kim Jong Il. Nonetheless, North Korea is a major supplier of proscribed weapons, such as missiles, and nuclear materials. The North Koreans keep an extreme secrecy. This represents one of the rare cases in which a war-like government or people does not advertise its motives or intentions. What we do know is the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, believes he is reinstating the past glory of Koreans and will eventually rule over all of Korea. The Chinese know him best, and report little or nothing of what they know.

Of course, Korea has long been a focus of the struggle between Great Powers, China and Japan, for Asian dominance. It could be Kim's views represent, or are the result of, the Korean version of "ducking for cover." It's what subordinates have to do to keep their fiefdoms.

In any event, I admit North Korea is a puzzle and an exception. I will leave it and others like it as an exception. The rule is casus belli are announced, public intentions and justifications of those who make war. They are social in nature, because war is social in nature. [Perhaps that is one clue to Kim Jong Il and any others like him: his tyranny is entirely personal and idiosyncratic. He uses his North Korean subjects for his purposes. There is just one persona in North Korea; there is no society.]

There are many famous casus belli, most of which do not evaluate to a full justification of the war.

► Adolph Hitler claimed the Czechs were oppressing Germans in the Sudetenland, and that those Germans were clamoring for reunification with the Fatherland. The casus belli, oppression of supposed German subjects, actually was an excuse or pretext for conquest, since Hitler had staged the "demands" for reunification and the "oppression" as well. Nonetheless, PM Chamberlain famously won "Peace in Our Time" at Munich in 1938 by allowing German occupation of the Sudetenland. Casus belli can be a ploy to win a war by other means.

 

► Adolph Hitler claimed the Poles were harassing Germany's border guards, and preparing to attack Germany. It appears Hitler staged a border incident to illustrate his casus belli, and then proceeded in September, 1939 to invade and conquer Poland. Most people agree that Hitler's casus belli was a pretext for war, not a justification.

 

► The United States had been involved in Vietnam since the 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The United States was involved in supporting South Vietnam's repression of the Communist Viet Cong insurgency. The United States arranged for Ngo Dinh Diem's assassination and the installation of American approved puppet governments. This led to a full scale civil war in Vietnam, a guerilla war by the Viet Cong against the Saigon government. While the Viet Cong were supported by Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese were not directly involved in South Vietnam until after 1968. Unable to defeat the Viet Cong, the United States wanted to make the North Vietnamese (and their Communist backers, the USSR and China) responsible for the Viet Cong. That view was based on the "domino theory" which circulated in Washington, DC circles since the middle 1950s. Thus, an incident was concocted which led to the 1965 Gulf Of Tonkin resolution, a declaration of war on North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. The casus belli was the supposed, unprovoked attack by a North Vietnamese PT boat on a US destroyer. [No damage was ever reported, and no one was injured or killed in the "attack." It is not clear whether any North Vietnamese boats were even in the area. There may have been someone's boat near the destroyer, but it was not logged as a warship at the time.] The point of this lengthy story is that casus belli are sometimes elaborately contrived cover stories that mask the real intentions of the warring parties.

 

► The United States invoked a similar process before its recent Conquest of Iraq. The US government went to great lengths to develop a stories about Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), Hussein's planned attack on the United States, and the connections between Al Qaeda and Baghdad. All of this illustrates casus belli designed as propaganda.

 

► The United States declared war on Japan after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, December, 1941. Because Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy promptly declared war on the US in support of their Axis ally, the US declared war on them as well. In all of these cases, the casus belli was 'you hit me first.' Of course, the secondary declarations of war resulted from Treaties and Agreements among the various Powers, but the bottom of it was that everyone claimed self-defense. The Japanese claim of self-defense arose from the Embargo of scrap iron and oil placed by the United States on Japan. Had the Embargo proceeded without interference, the Japanese economy would have been reduced to Depression in less than a year. The Japanese viewed the Embargo as an attempt to destroy their Empire by non-military means. Of course, the United States was trying to destroy a Japanese Empire engaged in aggression against China and Western colonies in Asia, but the US denied that motive. The United States claimed obscure treaty violations, among other reasons, for starting the embargo. Admiral Yamamoto calculated the Japanese had just 6 months after Pearl Harbor to stake all their claims in Asia, and to force the United States out of the war. After that, the United States would be a sleeping giant awakened, as the Admiral said. The Japanese did create the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in under 6 months, stretching from near the Aleutians to Indonesia. But, 6 months later, the giant struck a blow at Midway, just as the Admiral predicted, and went on to crush Japan.

 

► The Soviet Union claimed it was only helping a friendly (puppet) regime in Kabul, when it invaded Afghanistan. The casus belli was the intolerable attacks of the Afghan guerillas against the "legitimate" Afghan government and Russian military stationed in Afghanistan. The Soviets said they acted in self-defense, or honorably in defense of a neighbor as requested by that State. The Russians say the same thing about Chechnya.

 

► Of course, what the Russians were, and are, facing is the rebellion of Islamic revolutionaries against foreign powers. Those are the same warriors the United States supported in the Afghan war as the "Muhadjin" (freedom fighters), who are now fighting the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. The casus belli in this case was, variously, the United States support of people seeking liberation from oppression or foreign domination. That has been the ex post facto casus belli for the Conquest of Iraq since the other casus belli were found to be baseless, false, deceptions or outright lies.

 

► Brutus and the other conspirators struck their blows on Caesar in defense of Rome. It was Octavian who punished them in a long, bloody civil war for the deed, because crime needs punishment (the casus belli), in defense of Rome. Octavian's casus belli against Marc Anthony and Cleopatra was their traitorous secession from Rome to create an independent Egypt. Egypt had been subjugated only a few years before by Julius Caesar. For Cleopatra, who inspired Romans to treason, the casus belli was the legitimacy of her patrimony left by her Greek ancestors who had subjugated Egypt.

These are only some examples in the long, sorry history of casus belli. Most of the time, the State making war claims the high ground, even if that ground has to be manufactured out of thin air, or is just hot air. In most cases, "casus belli" evaluate to excuses and pretexts for doing something the warriors want to do anyway. Warriors have their own, internal goals such as glory, plunder, fame, etc. Because other people and societies are not likely to submit easily to such grandiose plans, the warrior must strategize. Strategy has many levels, including indirection, confusion and subversion. Casus belli plays a role in all those strategies in reducing resistance, and even in gathering like-minded allies.

The implication is that war is never a good thing, and is always forced on the warrior. Warriors always have a justification that makes war appear the lesser of two evils. 'Our back is up against the wall.' 'They made us do it.' 'They struck first.' 'We were only defending ourselves.' And so on. God is always on "our" side.

About War

I note that wars seem to happen because one group wants something that another group also wants, and neither side is willing to make any compromise short of dead bodies. In the distant past, war usually stopped when the pain was sufficiently great, or the warriors were exhausted. Starting in the 20^th Century, no pain has been too great - a remarkable innovation - leading to strategies such as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

In our time, it has become more important to win, or at least not lose, than to gain anything. Thus, Hitler committed suicide rather than surrender. Two A-bombs were dropped on Japan before surrender was thinkable, and even then surrender was resisted. The horrors of World War II made Americans and Russians even more ghoulish than before. In the end, and to this day, the mere symbol of Victory has conquered the fear of total annihilation and, with it, resistance to war. War has become a way of life.

What possible casus belli justifies total war? A war in which no one survives, except possibly some alien who judges victory and defeat from a planet light years away in the far distant future.