Untimely Reflections

Abstract

Untimely Reflections Arno Mayer (bio) This is a time to reject the temptation or superstition of fixing on a single cause for the loss of America’s splendid invulnerability and exceptionalism on September 11, 2001. The infamous terrorist attack, presumably masterminded by Osama bin Laden, a Muslim zealot, is no more the causa causans of the crisis in this early dawn of the twenty-first century than the assassination by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian zealot, of Francis Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria-Hungary was the causa causans of the crepuscular crisis of the long nineteenth century in July-August 1914. As Washington chooses to treat this horrific crime as an act of war, it is well to remember that it takes at least two (states) to fight a war. And any war raises the question of the relative responsibility of each side and its allies for the underlying and precipitant causes of conflict. Of course, in 1914 the leaders of the opposing but equiponderant Triple Entente and Triple Alliance knew who the prospective enemy was even if they could not foresee the consequences of their diplomatic decisions and military actions, which spiraled into catastrophe. Today, quite apart from the nebulosity of the “enemy other” there is not even the semblance of a balance of military power and even without allies America, the self-appointed world sheriff, has the military capability to “make the law,” which is not to say that the consequences, both immediate and long-term, will be any less fraught with imponderables. But the temptation of war in 2001, not unlike in 1914, calls in question Montaigne’s axiom, grounded in Aeschylus and Aristotle, that foreign war is “a milder evil than civil war” and that to resort to external war to avoid internal war is “a bad means for a good purpose.” Presently this prescriptive formula is being revised to say that the violence of international war is also less wicked than the violence of terror. Indeed, we are witnessing the incipient collaboration between, in Arnold Toynbee’s words, an “external and internal proletariat” against an overweening imperial ascendancy. This battle will take the place of yesteryear’s international civil war. Chateaubriand challenged the millennial wisdom that foreign war is “morally superior” to civil war. In fact, he posited that a civil war might actually be “less unjust and revolting,” as well as more “natural” than an external conflict. In any case, Chateaubriand invited reflection on the degree to which foreign and (un)civil war may, in fact, be two sides of the same coin of violence. Except in America, the Second World War radically narrowed the dividing line between heroic fighting men and blameless civilians. This ideologically and technologically conditioned transformation of the realm of war removes one of the main reasons for preferring military over civil conflict in the moral economy of Kant — perpetual violence and war. The growing place, since 1945, of women in the armed services, in the strategic elites, and in key economic sectors further reduces the boundaries between civil and military society in times of foreign and civil war as well as in moments of terrorist violence. This blurring of the line between the battlefield and the homefront is rendered all the more lethal by the absence of strategies and laws governing irregular and indirect warfare. Tellingly, there is no treatise on civil war to equal Clausewitz’s On War. To date, civil war has been essentially blind and wild, in part for being impregnated with vengeance and re-vengeance. The same is true, in spades, for terrorist violence. Nor is there anything comparable to the “laws of war” for civil and terrorist warfare, except the embryonic laws and courts to punish genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. And they are likely to be no more effective than the Geneva conventions during the Thirty Years’ War of the Twentieth Century. Incidentally, taking the long view, the waning of cross-border wars between and among states in favor of ethnically, religiously, and culturally fueled civil conflicts is a return to the historical norm — to before the emergence of the sovereign state and the attendant international state system. Until now, in modern...