Book Preview: Reasons to Kill

In Reasons to Kill, I study the arguments and images used by U.S. public officials and other pro- war advocates to persuade ordinary citizens to support America’s foreign wars. These methods of persuasion need to be powerful, since they ask people to pay the human costs as well as the financial costs of war. The basic question I ask is: What convinces ordinarily skeptical Americans to send their sons, daughters, sweethearts, neighbors, and coun trymen to kill other people and risk their own bodies and minds in battle?

The overall answer, I found, is that Americans are persuaded to fight by appeals to widely shared and deeply held moral and spiritual values – values associated with what some call our civil religion. The most common themes are these:
• Self-defense. We have a moral right and duty to defend our nation against unjustified attacks. (The problem is that the “self ” we are now defending is not just America’s soil and people but U.S. troops, civilians, allies, and imperial interests around the globe.)
• Evil enemies. We have a moral duty to destroy diabolical leaders who commit atrocities against their own people, threaten their neighbors, and seek world domination. (The problem is that we often label adversaries absolutely evil when they are not really satanic and can be dealt with in ways short of total war.)
• Humanitarian interventions and moral crusades.
We have a special mission to secure the values of democracy, human rights, civil order, and moral decency around the world, by military means if necessary. (The problem is that the U.S. is a superpower with its own interests and cultural biases, not a disinterested liberator of the oppressed. More often than not, we end up acting like the tyrants and aggressors we oppose.)
• Patriotic duty. We earned our freedom by fighting for it. When Uncle Sam asks us to fight, even die, for our nation, we should be prepared to do so. (The problem is that love of one’s country has never meant killing and dying on command. Generations of American patriots have demanded that the government justify war making by showing that there is a real threat to the nation and that violence is needed to counter it.)
• National honor. If we don’t demonstrate that we are willing to fight, we will lose face and credibility and become a humiliated, second- rate nation. (The problem is that this is not a moral doctrine; it is an insecure cowboy machismo posing as morality. Most American wars since the end of World War have ended in something short of victory, and most should
not have been fought at all.)
• No peaceful alternative. Either negotiations to avert war have failed or they would be fruitless, since the enemy cannot be trusted to keep its word. (The problems are that Americans refuse to negotiate in good faith as much as any other nation, and that, in any case, negotiation usually falls far short of conflict resolution. Without serious attempts at conflict resolution – that is, ending violence by eliminating its underlying causes – war is never a last resort.)

The book reviews these themes as they appear over the course of American history from colonial times up to the current “war on terrorism.” It takes issue with both neo-conservative bellicosity and the liberal acceptance of allegedly just wars represented by President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. It concludes with a chapter outlining “Five Ways to Think More Clearly About War.”