nuclear weapons

Why are all our Presidents war criminals?

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JDN 2457443

Today I take on a topic that we really don’t like to talk about. It creates grave cognitive dissonance in our minds, forcing us to deeply question the moral character of our entire nation.

Yet it is undeniably a fact:

Most US Presidents are war criminals.

There is a long tradition of war crimes by US Presidents which includes Obama, Bush, Nixon, and above all Johnson and Truman.

Barack Obama has ordered so-called “double-tap” drone strikes, which kill medics and first responders, in express violation of the Geneva Convention.

George W. Bush orchestrated a global program of torture and indefinite detention.

Bill Clinton ordered “extraordinary renditions” in which suspects were detained without trial and transferred to other countries for interrogation, where we knew they would most likely be tortured.

I actually had trouble finding any credible accusations of war crimes by George H.W. Bush (there are definitely accusations, but none of them are credible—seriously, people are listening to Manuel Noriega?), even as Director of the CIA. He might not be a war criminal.

Ronald Reagan supported a government in Guatemala that was engaged in genocide. He knew this was happening and did not seem to care. This was only one of many tyrannical, murderous regimes supported by Reagan’s administration. In fact, Ronald Reagan was successfully convicted of war crimes by the International Court of Justice. Chomsky isn’t wrong about this one. Ronald Reagan was a convicted war criminal.

Jimmy Carter is a major exception to the rule; not only are there no credible accusations of war crimes against him, he has actively fought to pursue war crimes investigations against Israel and even publicly discussed the war crimes of George W. Bush.

I also wasn’t able to find any credible accusations of war crimes by Gerald Ford, so he might be clean.

But then we get to Richard Nixon, who deployed chemical weapons against civilians in Vietnam. (Calling Agent Orange “herbicide” probably shouldn’t matter morally—but it might legally, as tactical “herbicides” are not always war crimes.) But Nixon does deserve some credit for banning biological weapons.

Indeed, most of the responsibility for war crimes in Vietnam falls upon Johnson. The US deployed something very close to a “total war” strategy involving carpet bombing—more bombs were dropped by the US in Vietnam than by all countries in WW2—as well as napalm and of course chemical weapons; basically it was everything short of nuclear weapons. Kennedy and Johnson also substantially expanded the US biological weapons program.

Speaking of weapons of mass destruction, I’m not sure if it was actually illegal to expand the US nuclear arsenal as dramatically as Kennedy did, but it definitely should have been. Kennedy brought our nuclear arsenal up to its greatest peak, a horrifying 30,000 deployable warheads—more than enough to wipe out human civilization, and possibly enough to destroy the entire human race.

While Eisenhower was accused of the gravest war crime on this list, namely the genocide of over 1 million people in Germany, most historians do not consider this accusation credible. Rather, his war crimes were committed as Supreme Allied Commander, in the form of carpet bombing, especially of Tokyo, which killed as many as 200,000 people, and of Dresden, which had no apparent military significance and even held a number of Allied POWs.

But then we get to Truman, the coup de grace, the only man in history to order the use of nuclear weapons in warfare. Truman gave the order to deploy nuclear weapons against civilians. He was the only person in the history of the world to ever give such an order. It wasn’t Hitler; it wasn’t Stalin. It was Harry S. Truman.

Then of course there’s Roosevelt’s internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans. It really pales in comparison to Truman’s order to vaporize an equal number of Japanese civilians in the blink of an eye.

I think it will suffice to end the list here, though I could definitely go on. I think Truman is a really good one to focus on, for two reasons that pull quite strongly in opposite directions.

1. The use of nuclear weapons against civilians is among the gravest possible crimes. It may be second to genocide, but then again it may not, as genocide does not risk the destruction of the entire human race. If we only had the option of outlawing one thing in war, and had to allow everything else, we would have no choice but to ban the use of nuclear weapons against civilians.

2. Truman’s decision may have been justified. To this day is still hotly debated whether the atomic bombings were justifiable; mainstream historians have taken both sides. On Debate.org, the vote is almost exactly divided—51% yes, 49% no. Many historians believe that had Truman not deployed nuclear weapons, there would have been an additional 5 million deaths as a result of the continuation of the war.

Perhaps now you can see why this matter makes me so ambivalent.

There is a part of me that wants to take an absolute hard line against war crimes, and say that they must never be tolerated, that even otherwise good Presidents like Clinton and Obama deserve to be tried at the Hague for what they have done. (Truman and Eisenhower are dead, so it’s too late for them.)

But another part of me wonders what would happen if we did this. What if the world really is so dangerous that we have no choice but to allow our leaders to commit horrible atrocities in order to defend us?

There are easy cases—Bush’s torture program didn’t even result in very much useful intelligence, so it was simply a pointless degradation of our national character. The same amount of effort invested in more humane intelligence gathering would very likely have provided more reliable information. And in any case, terrorism is such a minor threat in the scheme of things that the effort would be better spent on improving environmental regulations or auto safety.

Similarly, there’s no reason to engage in “extraordinary rendition” to a country that tortures people when you could simply conduct a legitimate trial in absentia and then arrest the convicted terrorist with special forces and imprison him in a US maximum-security prison until his execution. (Or even carry out the execution directly by the special forces; as long as the trial is legitimate, I see no problem with that.) At that point, the atrocities are being committed simply to avoid inconvenience.

But especially when we come to the WW2 examples, where the United States—nay, the world—was facing a genuine threat of being conquered by genocidal tyrants, I do begin to wonder if “victory by any means necessary” is a legitimate choice.

There is a way to cut the Gordian knot here, and say that yes, these are crimes, and should be punished; but yes, they were morally justified. Then, the moral calculus any President must undergo when contemplating such an atrocity is that he himself will be tried and executed if he goes through with it. If your situation is truly so dire that you are willing to kill 100,000 civilians, perhaps you should be willing to go down with the ship. (Roger Fisher made a similar argument when he suggested implanting the nuclear launch codes inside the body of a US military officer. If you’re not willing to tear one man apart with a knife, why are you willing to vaporize an entire city?)

But if your actions really were morally justified… what sense does it make to punish you for them? And if we hold up this threat of punishment, could it cause a President to flinch when we really need him to take such drastic action?

Another possibility to consider is that perhaps our standards for war crimes really are too strict, and some—not all, but some—of the actions I just listed are in fact morally justifiable and should be made legal under international law. Perhaps the US government is right to fight the UN convention against cluster munitions; maybe we need cluster bombs to successfully defend national security. Perhaps it should not be illegal to kill the combat medics who directly serve under the command of enemy military forces—as opposed to civilian first-responders or Medecins Sans Frontieres. Perhaps our tolerance for civilian casualties is unrealistically low, and it is impossible to fight a war in the real world without killing a large number of civilians.

Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps we are too willing to engage in war in the first place, too accustomed to deploying military force as our primary response to international conflict. Perhaps the prospect of facing a war crimes tribunal in a couple of years should be an extra layer of deterrent against any President ordering yet another war—by some estimates we have been at war 93% of the time since our founding as a nation, and it is a well-documented fact that we have by far the highest military spending in the world. Why is it that so many Americans see diplomacy as foolish, see compromise as weakness?

Perhaps the most terrifying thing is not that so many US Presidents are war criminals; it is that so many Americans don’t seem to have any problem with that.

To truly honor veterans, end war

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JDN 2457339 EST 20:00 (Nov 11, 2015)

Today is Veterans’ Day, on which we are asked to celebrate the service of military veterans, particularly those who have died as a result of war. We tend to focus on those who die in combat, but actually these have always been relatively uncommon; throughout history, most soldiers have died later of their wounds or of infections. More recently as a result of advances in body armor and medicine, actually relatively few soldiers die even of war wounds or infections—instead, they are permanently maimed and psychologically damaged, and the most common way that war kills soldiers now is by making them commit suicide.

Even adjusting for the fact that soldiers are mostly young men (the group of people most likely to commit suicide), military veterans still have about 50 excess suicides per million people per year, for a total of about 300 suicides per million per year. Using the total number, that’s over 8000 veteran suicides per year, or 22 per day. Using only the excess compared to men of the same ages, it’s still an additional 1300 suicides per year.

While the 14-years-and-counting Afghanistan War has killed 2,271 American soldiers and the 11-year Iraq War has killed 4,491 American soldiers directly (or as a result of wounds), during that same time period from 2001 to 2015 there have been about 18,000 excess suicides as a result of the military—excess in the sense that they would not have occurred if those men had been civilians. Altogether that means there would be nearly 25,000 additional American soldiers alive today were it not for these two wars.

War does not only kill soldiers while they are on the battlefield—indeed, most of the veterans it kills die here at home.

There is a reason Woodrow Wilson chose November 11 as the date for Veterans’ Day: It was on this day in 1918 that World War 1, up to that point the war that had caused the most deaths in human history, was officially ended. Sadly, it did not remain the deadliest war, but was surpassed by World War 2 a generation later. Fortunately, no other war has ever exceeded World War 2—at least, not yet.

We tend to celebrate holidays like this with a lot of ritual and pageantry (or even in the most inane and American way possible, with free restaurant meals and discounts on various consumer products), and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Nor is there anything wrong with taking a moment to salute the flag or say “Thank you for your service.” But that is not how I believe veterans should be honored. If I were a veteran, that is not how I would want to be honored.

We are getting much closer to how I think they should be honored when the White House announces reforms at Veterans’ Affairs hospitals and guaranteed in-state tuition at public universities for families of veterans—things that really do in a concrete and measurable way improve the lives of veterans and may even save some of them from that cruel fate of suicide.

But ultimately there is only one way that I believe we can truly honor veterans and the spirit of the holiday as Wilson intended it, and that is to end war once and for all.

Is this an ambitious goal? Absolutely. But is it an impossible dream? I do not believe so.

In just the last half century, we have already made most of the progress that needed to be made. In this brilliant video animation, you can see two things: First, the mind-numbingly horrific scale of World War 2, the worst war in human history; but second, the incredible progress we have made since then toward world peace. It was as if the world needed that one time to be so unbearably horrible in order to finally realize just what war is and why we need a better way of solving conflicts.

This is part of a very long-term trend in declining violence, for a variety of reasons that are still not thoroughly understood. In simplest terms, human beings just seem to be getting better at not killing each other.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that this is just a statistical illusion, because technologies like nuclear weapons create the possibility of violence on a previously unimaginable scale, and it simply hasn’t happened yet. For nuclear weapons in particular, I think he may be right—the consequences of nuclear war are simply so catastrophic that even a small risk of it is worth paying almost any price to avoid.

Fortunately, nuclear weapons are not necessary to prevent war: South Africa has no designs on attacking Japan anytime soon, but neither has nuclear weapons. Germany and Poland lack nuclear arsenals and were the first countries to fight in World War 2, but now that both are part of the European Union, war between them today seems almost unthinkable. When American commentators fret about China today it is always about wage competition and Treasury bonds, not aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles. Conversely, North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons has by no means stabilized the region against future conflicts, and the fact that India and Pakistan have nuclear missiles pointed at one another has hardly prevented them from killing each other over Kashmir. We do not need nuclear weapons as a constant threat of annihilation in order to learn to live together; political and economic ties achieve that goal far more reliably.

And I think Taleb is wrong about the trend in general. He argues that the only reason violence is declining is that concentration of power has made violence rarer but more catastrophic when it occurs. Yet we know that many forms of violence which used to occur no longer do, not because of the overwhelming force of a Leviathan to prevent them, but because people simply choose not to do them anymore. There are no more gladiator fights, no more cat-burnings, no more public lynchings—not because of the expansion in government power, but because our society seems to have grown out of that phase.

Indeed, what horrifies us about ISIS and Boko Haram would have been considered quite normal, even civilized, in the Middle Ages. (If you’ve ever heard someone say we should “bring back chivalry”, you should explain to them that the system of knight chivalry in the 12th century had basically the same moral code as ISIS today—one of the commandments Gautier’s La Chevalerie attributes as part of the chivalric code is literally “Thou shalt make war against the infidel without cessation and without mercy.”) It is not so much that they are uniquely evil by historical standards, as that we grew out of that sort of barbaric violence awhile ago but they don’t seem to have gotten the memo.

In fact, one thing people don’t seem to understand about Steven Pinker’s argument about this “Long Peace” is that it still works if you include the world wars. The reason World War 2 killed so many people was not that it was uniquely brutal, nor even simply because its weapons were more technologically advanced. It also had to do with the scale of integration—we called it a single war even though it involved dozens of countries because those countries were all united into one of two sides, whereas in centuries past that many countries could be constantly fighting each other in various combinations but it would never be called the same war. But the primary reason World War 2 killed the largest raw number of people was simply because the world population was so much larger. Controlling for world population, World War 2 was not even among the top 5 worst wars—it barely makes the top 10. The worst war in history by proportion of the population killed was almost certainly the An Lushan Rebellion in 8th century China, which many of you may not even have heard of until today.

Though it may not seem so as ISIS kidnaps Christians and drone strikes continue, shrouded in secrecy, we really are on track to end war. Not today, not tomorrow, maybe not in any of our lifetimes—but someday, we may finally be able to celebrate Veterans’ Day as it was truly intended: To honor our soldiers by making it no longer necessary for them to die.