In Defence of War: What Is It All About?

The clue is in the title. What I have written is, in the first place, a critical response to certain points of view that seem to me to be popular in the time and places in which I live. As a rule I think it best for authors to be self-conscious and explicit about why they bother to write what they write, and about why they presume to bother the reader with it. So in my book I have sought to make clear what it is in my environment that I am reacting against, and why. One or two commentators have described the book as a “polemic.” I accept that, insofar as there are matters about which I care deeply and therefore viewpoints and ideas against which I react strongly. Sometimes very strongly. But I am loath to accept that what I have written is “polemical” in the sense that it is intemperate, unmeasured, and unfair. I do not think that it is. It might be wrong, but it does not rant.

Whether or not In Defence of War is polemical, it is rhetorical. That is to say, it understands itself to be located in a particular intellectual and cultural context, taking a particular set of positions and trying to persuade a variety of kinds of reader. If the time and place, and its predominant intellectual currents, were different, I would have written a different book. Under a different fate, I can imagine myself writing In Defence of Peace.

So the book is perhaps polemical and certainly rhetorical. In the first place, it is also defensive. However, notwithstanding its deliberately provocative—indeed unqualified and polemical—title, it does not defend war in general. It does not argue, as one reader of the incomplete manuscript reported, that “war is wonderful.” I am confident that no one who reads the opening pages of the introduction with her eyes open could fairly conclude that. No, of course, In Defence of War is actually in defense of just war. More on that shortly. Right now, let me explain what the book is mainly defending against.

Three or so years ago I gave a talk in which I flew the intellectual kite that the 2003 invasion of Iraq could be morally justified. (This kite has since grown up into the sizeable airplane that is now chapter 7). Afterward, a clerical member of the audience came up to me and said, “But there must have been a better way.” To this I responded, “Well, there might in fact have been a better way; but why did there have to be one?” So the first target in my sights is “the virus of wishful thinking.” That is a phrase that I have lifted from a passage in Michael Burn’s extraordinary autobiography, where he reflects on why it was that he was so enchanted by Adolf Hitler, whom he met in the 1930s (Burn 2003, 70, 69–78, 148). I use it to refer mainly to the view attributed by Andrew Roberts to Lord Halifax during that same period, namely, “the Whiggish view that there [is] a rational solution to all problems and all that [is] needed [is] to find a modus vivendi comfortable to all parties” and that these parties “[are] rational . . . [and] sincerely [want] to reach solutions” (Roberts 1992, 115). My opposition to this is based, not simply on Christian dogma about the anthropological fact of sin, but also on corroboration by historical experience. As I argue in chapter 4, the decisive causes of World War I were not cultural forces common to all parties, or the nature of international structures, but the moral attitudes and choices of individuals: the slaughter in the trenches is primarily attributable to the thinking and decisions of the military and civil leaders of Wilhelmine Germany and Austro-Hungary. And as I argue in chapter 6, one reason why it was right for NATO to go to war against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999 was that Slobodan Milosevič saw negotiations only as a way of pursuing his aggressive policies, not as an occasion to...