PEACE AND WAR IN OUR TIME

George Gale defends the Spectator

The continuing and desperate endeavour and the deliberate or blind misunderstandings which characterise those who think that the idea of the legitimacy of war and of martial conduct can be preserved through one soph- ism or another Convention, find expression

in Mr Fairlie's apologetics. He wants to keep war as a legitimate instrument of policy and to this end he is compelled to uphold the conceit that international law and the con- ventions of war are successfully normative. It is, to be sure, very comforting to think, along with Mr Telford Taylor, that 'War is not a licence at all, but an obligation to kill for reasons of state', so long as you do not ask yourself (and few do) 'What are "reasons of state"?' and (provided that you have found a satisfactory answer to this general query) 'What anyway are these particular reasons of state which oblige me on this par- ticular occasion to kill these particular people, or to kill no particular people but any bodies who happen to be around?' The problem is stated, not as Mr Taylor and Mr Fairlie suggest solved, by the us Army's 1863 regulations, in true ninteenth-century fash- ion 'Men who take up arms against one an- other in public war do not cease on this ac- count to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God'. Both Mr Fairlie and Mr Taylor seem to think that Francis Lieber, the author of those Regulations, wrote something helpful, or useful, or inter- esting, when all Mr Lieber's words mean, if they mean anything, is that men are moral beings, in which case they obviously cannot fail to be other than moral beings all the time.

The 'reduction of a complicated problem to a simple either/or choice' may usually be suspect in Mr Fairlie's view, or even dan- gerous; but what is altogether more suspect and dangerous, and popular, is the enlarge- ment of a simple problem into a complicated one. Every moral problem sooner or later becomes an either/or choice: Do I shoot this Vietnamese or do I not? Do I drop this bomb or do I not? Do I obey this particular order or do I not? It is generally the case that those who least enjoy taking moral decisions have most to gain from so complicating the issue that the decisions are muddled or avoid- ed; and Mr Fairlie hopelessly misunderstands Pope Pius xi] who apparently defended his silence during the Second World War by saying 'My duty is to simplify things, not to complicate them'—what that lamentable Pope was doing in saying that was exculpa- ting himself by complicating, not by simpli- fying, things. A simple Pope would have found no difficulty in condemning Hitler's Germany, and a simple Pope would not have bothered to say or to think, that his duty was to simplify rather than to complicate things. Either (my italics) Mr Fairlie is being de- liberately obtuse or he has misunderstood the SPECTATOR'S article. I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I am unsure whether he would prefer to be regarded as foolish on purpose, as it were, or as it so happens. A more charitable explanation is that the SPECTATOR itself failed in clarity. Mr Fairlie seems to interpret the general effect of the article as accepting the suspen- sion of the laws of war 'as inevitable' and in particular `to excuse Lieutenant Calley, ass- uming that he is found guilty of the charges which have been brought against him. 'Little Lt Calley . . . the baby-faced Lieutenant': 'these', argues Mr Fairlie, 'are sentimental and even offensive trivialisations of the issue'. And then Mr Fairlie goes on to say what neither 1 who have seen plenty such nor the SPECTATOR would ever deny, that other 'little' and 'baby-faced' lieutenants have certainly endeavoured to be guided by 'convention' and 'practical morality'. But is it not possible, is indeed it not certain, that such endeavour to be thus guided is by now become impos- sible, and has been since, say, Paschendsele, even if it be supposed to have been possible in some previous golden age of heroic war- fare?

Now there can be no doubt whatever that almost all politicians and generals, as almost all historians and commentators, wish to pre- serve in some way or another the notion that war may be a legitimate instrument of policy; and that to preserve the 'legitimacy' in the notion, it is desirable first to maintain the either/or distinction which Mr Fairlie utters, between the just and the unjust war, and second the either/or distinction between action capable of being guided by 'conven- tion' and 'practical morality' and action not

thus capable; and third the either/or distinc- tion between the victors and the defeated—

either might is right, or it is not. In all this there is. indeed, much room for what Mr Fairlie regards as 'a dangerous confusion of issue'; but the confusions are his, and the great majority of people who (naturally enough) prefer to think along with him.

For the alternative, to which at Fort Ben- ning there may indeed have been, as the SPECTATOR suggested, a two-handed groping,

and to which the sPLCTATOR, nothing like as dogmatic as Mr Fairlie, may also be groping,

is indeed to establish, if it be at all possible, as the SPECTATOR wrote, 'the personal respon- sibilities of the baby-faced Lieutenant who

liked it out in South Vietnam . . . and the

responsibility of the five-star generals, and beyond them, the Presidents of the United States themselves, whose decisions'—unargu- ably, Mr Fairlie, not allegedly—'have not only caused the war to continue but have caused it to possess its special nature'.

lf, at the end of such groping, what is grasped is the realisation that the terrible nettle of peace is the only legitimate object of international policy and that self-defence is the only just defence of war, then the firm- er that nettle is grasped the better. What is to

be grasped is the exact opposite of what Mr Fairlie falsely assumes the SPECTATOR to be

saying. 'One knows, of course' writes Mr

Fairlie 'the point to which the SPECTATOR is trying to take us. Wars are willed and waged by the state—by an abstraction, 1 think the editor of the SPECTATOR would say, in the name of other abstractions . . It is not that at all, Mr Fairlie. Certainly 'the state' is an abstraction, and certainly wars are waged in the name of the state and of other abstrac- tions: but wars are not waged and willed by abstractions at all. Wars are waged and willed by men, who use abstractions in their excuses or because they know no better. It is these abstractions which are, indeed, the 'much too convenient excuse' which apolo- gists like Mr Fairlie find 'for all kinds of rotten behaviour'.