Dec 18, 2006 
James Carroll writes in today’s Boston Globe:
Was the first act of war followed by the first act of denial? The story of Cain (“a tiller of the ground”) and Abel (“a keeper of sheep”) is a parable of primordial conflict between settled farmers and nomadic herders, and the lessons are timeless. Each warring group claims to have justice on its side, and believes that the way to peace is through conquest. War is always fought in the name of justice-and-peace. But peace achieved through war inevitably leads not to justice, but to conditions that cause the next war. History is the record of that succession. Victory through violence is the way to further violence.
I don’t think it’s been true throughout human history that war is always fought in the name of justice-and-peace, but I’m not aware of any war of the past century or so in which the justice-and-peace rationale wasn’t waved about by somebody. That’s not to say that justice-and-peace was the aggressors’ motivation behind all modern wars. In fact, I doubt that justice-and-peace is ever the true motivation behind initiating a war, just the excuse. But most of the time the people making that excuse don’t see that it’s just an excuse. They’ve talked themselves into believing their own excuse.
We might call these people “fools.” We might also call them “neocons.”
I agree with Carroll when he writes, “But peace achieved through war inevitably leads not to justice, but to conditions that cause the next war. History is the record of that succession.” If you step back and look at all of human history, time and time again the seeds of war were sown by a previous war. This is not to say that there aren’t other factors, but nearly always those “other factors” were issues that might have been resolved by other means.
Many who read the sentence “Victory through violence is the way to further violence” will bring up World War II. The victory over Japan, for example, was achieved after terrible violence that included two nuclear bombs. Yet that violence did not result in eternal enmity between the U.S. and Japan. Doesn’t that prove Carroll is wrong? No; it proves that this is one of the greatest anomalies of world history. A great many factors had to come together very precisely to create this anomaly. These factors, IMO, the manner of the U.S. occupation and the Buddhist-Confucian foundations of Japanese ethics. Needless to say, this happy confluence is not present in Iraq.
The lesson to be taken from Japan is not that a violent victory can have a happy result. The lesson is that, after a war, with hard work and a lot of luck the factors that might lead to another war can be substantially reduced. This is a critical distinction.
Our own Civil War was another such anomaly. Long and dear friendships existed across warring lines; officers on both sides knew and actually liked each other even as they tried to kill each other. At Appomattox Ulysses S. Grant ordered his troops not to celebrate the surrender of Robert E. Lee so as not to hurt the Confederates’ feelings. The rebel leaders were not punished for treason but were released on parole. (The only exceptions I’m aware of were the executions of the Lincoln assassination conspirators and the commanding officer of Andersonville Prison.) Compared to the aftermath of any other civil war on this planet, this behavior was downright peculiar. Even so, even though we haven’t had another civil war, there was another kind of violence — the defeated white southerners took their rage out on African Americans, beginning a reign of racial terrorism that has still not completely dissipated.
The truth that countless generations of fools can’t get into their heads is that military victory doesn’t create peace. Sometimes what victors choose to do with the victory can help establish peace, but that’s rare.
Carroll concludes,
The Bush administration embraced the cult of war when it did not have to. Bush re-legitimized that cult, and sponsored it anew. In this, he was supported by the American people, its press and its political establishment. In the beginning, the nation itself re affirmed war as the way to justice-and-peace. We did this. The first fallacy lived. By now, even Washington’s one self-proclaimed “victory” has led to further defeat. The “good” war in Afghanistan put in place structures of oppression that promised an inevitable resumption of savagery, which has begun. …
… Because of the destructiveness of modern weapons, there will be no distant future unless humans, having seen through the congenital illusion of justice-and-peace through violence, come to the rejection of war. That must begin now. Democrats, take heed: Bush must not be allowed to further the chaos. Having led the world into this moral wilderness, America has a grave responsibility to lead the way out. We have to cease killing other people’s children, which is the way to stop them from killing ours. Stop the war by stopping.
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