War in the United States is fought in an oddly paradoxical manner. As we leave Afghanistan, it will likely remain big, if not unending. Drone and missile strikes can span longitudes, while U.S. naval and air formations control massive areas of the planet.
Lawyers, who are now essential to military operations and in particular targeting, make it more humanitarian as well.
“Absolutely and comparatively, fewer captives are abused and fewer people die—by far—than in the past,” Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn says.
From direct U.S. military strikes or collateral damage, millions perished in Vietnam, whereas just 200,000 died in Iraq, and most of those deaths were due to civil conflict and instability, not American military activity. Moyn isn’t a fan of these kinds of numbers.
However, in “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War,” the author takes the reader on an excruciating journey through the modern history of making war more legal and thereby cleansing it so that it can continue indefinitely.
“Humanitarianism could entrench war,” Leo Tolstoy feared, according to Moyn. The Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz said something along these lines: “We must take war more seriously since the bloodshed is a dreadful spectacle.
” It has always been the goal of those who believe in nonviolence to seek “peace between states, not humanity within their battles,” according to Moyn. On fact, they saw the white surrender flag as morally better than the Red Cross banner displayed in the wounded’s wards. The pacifism that grew out of the bloodshed of World War I, however, was a collaborator in Hitler’s appeasement.
To understand the conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries, Moyn’s story relies heavily on the conflict between humanitarianism and the realities of politics, which he records in great detail, from the Ethiopian fight against Italy to the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa.
Particular focus is placed on American military involvement in Vietnam, as well as efforts by individuals such as former Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor to paint a picture of criminality and racial motivations in connection with the conflict.
Everything that goes wrong in a war stems from the hubris of its inception, as was the case with Iraq. Afghanistan and Iraq were midsize wars, not tiny policing activities like Grenada and Panama or all-out cataclysms like the two world wars, although Moyn does not label them as such.
They permitted a warring army and a shopping mall nation to exist side by side. As a result, the United States performed poorly in these conflicts because they were extremely brutal yet did not immediately influence the public.
