The Pursuit of Peace

THE ATLANTIC

BY ERIC LARRABEE

PEACE should doubtless be a positive idea, but commonly we construe it in the negative — as the absence or cessation of armed hostilities. In practice the pursuit of peace is a matter of preventing international conflict, and while individual wars vary, the phenomenon remains the same. Wars follow one another with a regularity disconnected from the proximate causes of any one of them. “We are the kind of people,” as Dr. Brock Chisholm said twenty years ago, “who fight wars every fifteen or twenty years.”

Dr. Chisholm, who was at that time Deputy Minister of Health in Canada, disregarded both ideology and economics. He looked for the causes not of any particular war but of wars in general, calling primarily on psychiatrists to engage in mass preventive medicine to help eradicate those neurotic symptoms — prejudice, emotionalism, excessive desire, and excessive fear — which create a martial climate. “With luck we have perhaps fifteen or even twenty years, he said, “. . . twenty years in which to change the dearest certainties of enough of the human race . . . twenty years in which to remove the necessity for the perverse satisfactions to be found in warfare.”

For our future, when new aggressors appeared, Dr. Chisholm imagined only three possibilities: acquiescence and slavery, conversion to a garrison state, or a thorough remaking of the hearts and minds of men. Until the third could be brought about, he preferred the second. He did not foresee the cold war, but he foresaw something very similar to the balance of terror. “The people who definitely do not want to fight any more wars,” he said, “must promise annihilation to any nation which starts to fight and must be prepared immediately and ruthlessly to carry out that promise without parley or negotiation. This involves the continual upkeep of widely dispersed atomic rocket stations covering the whole world and a continual high pressure research program to discover ever more efficient methods of killing to keep ahead of any possible competition.”

Today these words have a curious ring, both for the boldness with which they accept the necessity to exercise power where power exists, and for their inapplicability to a world in which the power to annihilate is possessed by more than one of nations inimical to one another. Twenty years have passed, and there is no major war, yet there is no peace either; and it would be interesting to know whether Dr. Chisholm would have predicted that large populations — on the scale of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. — could have learned to restrain their natural aggressiveness while living in a state of indefinite tension. The hearts and minds of men have not been perceptibly remade, yet there has been some kind of change, rendering the hopes and fears of twenty years ago invalid and raising again the perennial question of what we mean by “war" and “peace.”The wars that continue to happen are comprehensible only in terms of some general notion of what war is.

War is many things, but one thing it most certainly is not: it is not “the continuation of politics by other means.” Far from continuing politics, war negates it. The political process for reconciling differences is one of war’s worst and earliest casualties, and one of the most difficult to restore in the aftermath. The Clausewitzian formula is not even meaningful as the employment of force to achieve pre-war purposes, for those purposes quickly become obscure — why die for Danzig, indeed? — as war imposes its own clarities and distortions. The recourse to war is an act which reverses the quality of experience, just as a picture is reversed by its photographic negative. Conventional virtues and vices exchange themselves; behavior forbidden in peacetime is now licensed and encouraged.

How and why this reversal takes place is, if anything, less evident than it used to be. One by one the traditional explanations of why wars start have lost their persuasiveness, or, rather, their capability to convince us that in the future they will still obtain. Where Dr. Chisholm grandly eliminated doctrine and material covetousness, we would today be tempted to brush aside his “neurotic symptoms.” It was a fancy of that far-off time in which he spoke to hope that nations which “understood” each other would therefore live in harmony, and that if all conducted themselves rationally, they would encounter no irreparable conflicts of self-interest. Now the nightmare is of a war which happens though no one wills it, the nightmare of which Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove are the dramatically exaggerated symbols. It is the nightmare of a war which comes simply because it has been built into the situation, on what may once have appeared to be rational and necessary grounds. The very enormity of atomic warfare has operated to fine down the process which leads to it, pruning away all purposes insufficient to a holocaust, eliminating all causes but one, the one which set the logic of reciprocal deterrence in motion in the first place. This, ironically, is that very belief in the effectiveness of total violence which Dr. Chisholm himself expressed, the belief that a threat of “annihilation to any nation which starts to fight” is an effective organizing principle in international affairs.

WHAT makes men willing to deal out annihilation to others we scarcely know, except enough to know that all men share this willingness to some degree and that no nation is wholly free of it. One might argue that certain types of nation have been more prone to start a war than others — those, for example, that seek to compensate for slender resources by a highly developed code of pseudo-masculinity and honor. Yet nations like our own, which pride themselves on fighting only when attacked, are no more hesitant in the use of violence once their blood lust has been aroused. Men of high purpose make the most resolute killers; in World War II, in retrospect, nothing was more implacable than the fury with which the peace-loving democracies immolated the wives and children of their enemies. It is almost as though some switch can be turned inside the psyche, converting a person to whom war is repugnant into one prepared, if led on by imperceptibly gradual stages, to commit personally its worst excesses. We ourselves achieved perfect horror — Hamburg, Dresden, the fire raids on Japan — quite without any help from the Bomb.

No means exist for measuring a society’s readiness for war. No existing technique of social science could have shown, on December 6, 1941, that the United States was anything but deeply divided by its strong strains of isolationist and pacifistic sentiment; nor could any have shown, on December 8, that the same country was anything but uncannily united in its determination to see a quixotic military venture through to the most bitter end. Until that moment the leaders were properly inhibited by the thought that in the event, they might not be followed. And while to be attacked no doubt releases the primitive in man, to say as much does not explain which of primitive man’s responses — combat, immobile panic, or headlong flight — the modern man in question will adopt. The circumstances which surround the essential moment, the moment at which the switch turns and a readiness for war is created, are almost wholly mysterious.

One reason for the mystery may be that too much is involved, too much of life and death, to bear thinking about. Another reason is that war mobilizes the best, as well as the worst, in the human personality. The civilian virtues of courage, trustworthiness, endurance — what are they, viewed in the appropriate light, but pale reflections of their military equivalents? “Militarism,”wrote William James, “is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible.” The most dangerous appeal of war comes, not from what Dr. Chisholm called the “perverse satisfactions,” but from the healthy ones. Few other experiences in modern life so effectively take people outside themselves, providing an entire society with a purpose larger and more commanding than its dreary daily routines. Extravagant effort can apparently be called forth only in pursuit of the rare, the arduous, or the irrational: fur for beaver hats, or climbing Everest, or military victory. Once expended, the effort exposes potentialities in both nations and individuals which they never knew they had; and not infrequently war leaves them, for all its gutting waste, stronger than they began.

For war is, in functional terms, a sacrament — that is, a ritual with acknowledged binding power. To enter on war is to invite the verdict of destiny, putting the event in the hand of God. “One wages war,” writes Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens, “to obtain a decision of holy validity.”War is best understood as what Huizinga called a noble game, a stylized contest in which the players are committed to accept the as yet unknown outcome. The object is not to destroy one’s opponent but to convince him that he is beaten; the target is not his material being but his will. The use of total force in war is therefore irrelevant. It would have no meaning, like tipping over the chessboard in a lit of temper; the outcome would have no binding power. This, rather than moral scruple, is surely why the truly total weapons of nerve gas or bacteriological warfare — though available, as at least the nerve gases were to the Nazis in their death agony — have never been employed.

IN THIS sense the war of nuclear exchange, of preemptive strikes and counterforce strategies and the like, is not really war at all. It is neither noble nor a game. It has little room in it for the hardy virtues James admired, for fortitude or élan, and it cannot be said to have an ending if one or more of the players are no longer there. In recent years we have managed to maintain the game quality only by shadowboxing: by deploying force without using it (as in the Cuban missile crisis), or by using less than total force (as in Vietnam) against a lesser enemy. There seems likely to be an indefinite number of such exercises, since they offer the only vital means for strength to parley with strength, but it hardly needs to be emphasized how risky and problematical they are.

What does need to be emphasized is that they should be; being risky and problematical is their purpose. By being risky they invite attention and commitment; by being problematical they compel thought. They have a gritty texture of reality which serves to purify them of the inconsequential, somewhat the way poker is purified by being played for real money. At all events, these periodic confrontations are preferable to the alternative, which is the effort to conduct a game between nations based on a threat of total annihilation.

Certainly it is true that our precarious accommodation with the Russians does depend on the thermonuclear standoff, and that in some quasiirreversible way both parties to it have tacitly consented not to commit double suicide. Major war is indeed obsolete in principle, and each year that passes free of major war makes the practice of eschewing it that much more secure. But how can destiny disclose itself in events which never occur? Nothing could be more real than major war, since it is the most awful thing that could happen, yet there is nothing you can do about it: you can only think about it. The conduct of hypothetical conflicts presents the baffling spectacle of intelligence at work in an arena from which some essential element of sanity has been removed; it is, quite literally, thinking about the unthinkable. The fate of nations is enshrouded in classified documents and in books which no one reads, and if all the classified documents were released tomorrow, it would probably turn out that they were unreadable too. Where fate is at issue, the public rightly prefers something it can get its teeth into.

The difficulty is that the public has no common language for coping with military affairs. In the absence of anything better, the political dialogue over strategy is still conducted in the Clausewitzian rhetoric, as though any aim which might be implemented by force can be doubly implemented by twice as much force. This is the logic of escalation; if I hit at you twice as hard, you are supposed to be twice as impressed, even if the blow fails to connect. It is the logic that leads the mightiest navy in the world into combat with obsolescent PT boats, and the mightiest air force in the world into bombing empty patches of rain forest. The theory seems to be that we show our judiciousness in the use of force by publicizing and rationalizing every tiny increment we apply; not only is each tactical shift or innovation announced but its motivation and anticipated results are announced along with it. The action itself may be restrained, but the logic is that of unrestrained force; the restraint for which we ask so much credit consists in not doing things which it would be ridiculous for us to do — and we wonder why we are ridiculed.

Mr. Justice Holmes once enunciated what he called the Hydrostatic Principle of Controversy: by engaging your opponent, you bring yourself to his level. In the simplest terms, the President of the United States does not name his critics; for Mr. Roosevelt they were always “some Republicans.”The equivalent of this in modern warfare is the Principle of Challenger’s Choice, by which the weaker antagonist can get to choose the weapons. He gets to choose the avenue by which his willpower can be reached. In the abstract it must seem absurd for guerrillas to take on the Strategic Air Command, but it does not seem so to them. Similarly, it seems absurd to some Republicans, like former Senator Goldwater, for us to fight “their" way instead of “our" way, which is presumably to bomb them out of existence; yet in this case the real absurdity is Air Force doctrine, or any doctrine based on the idea of absolute violence. Violence varies with its use. Every Viet Cong terrorist may well believe that a grenade thrown into a fashionable Saigon restaurant full of American officers is just as effective militarily as a multimillion-dollar B-52 raid all the way from Guam, and he may well be right: the blood is all the same color. Just so long as he thinks his weapon can wound us and that we are afraid to meet it, so long will he feel himself to be unbeatable.

The one thing the far-right conservatives and the left-liberal “peaceniks” agree on is that we shouldn’t have done the one thing, from both a military and a pacifist point of view, that we clearly should have done — that is, commit American ground troops on the Asiatic mainland. Of the far-right position I prefer not to speak, but for the peaceniks it should be said that their very enthusiasm and decency are what have cost them the power to discriminate. One might wish that there had been fewer teach-ins on American “policy” in Asia — which is to say, arguing over public relations — and a few more on American tactics, which can be discussed concretely and which often determine “policy.” The proper study of pacifists is the etiology of war. It is not necessarily true that all “warlike” measures are equally likely to detonate an all-out conflict, and the pacifist position is neutralized unless it can identify one course of action as peace-enhancing where another is not.

Whether we “ought” to be in Asia or anywhere else is beside the point as long as we behave responsibly — if possible, by refusing to be pushed around any more than absolutely necessary without losing our temper. Perhaps in some earlier episode of the unhappy narrative of Vietnam it would have been possible to repeat the counterguerrilla success stories of Greece and Malaysia and the Philippines, but (even assuming the effort was ever really made) that moment has long since passed. What should have exploded in the press after the Viet Cong raid on Pleiku was a debate not over our presence there but over the appropriateness of our response. To retaliate by bombing the north was more than likely morally and politically dubious, but it was certainly wrong militarily. It was sulky and impulsive, indicating that we were hurt and had panicked. It confirmed the Asian Communists in everything they believe and must have given them ten years’ lease on life. The strong do not behave this way, and the weak know it.

There is an old and wise army adage that you do not point a weapon at a man unless you are willing to kill him, and by the same token you do not threaten either men or nations with a blow you know, and they know you know, will not be delivered. We cannot “promise annihilation” to North Vietnam, any more than we could to North Korea. In the first place, in strategic bombing terms, there is nothing there to annihilate. In the second, we would lose (as we have already lost) incalculable advantages of initiative and maneuver in return for scarcely perceptible gains in the ground guerrilla battle. The only thing we can do, now we are stuck with it, is what we did in Korea: stand our ground and fight on the ground, until our opponent knows he is beaten (as the Chinese knew they were beaten in Korea) at his own game. The redundancy of that phrase is intentional: how could anyone really know he was beaten except at his own game?

In guerrilla warfare the superior opponent will be tempted to make hollow demonstrations of his superiority, marching and countermarching, or dropping bombs, merely to show that he can do it. The greater the disproportion between antagonists, the greater the danger for the stronger of the two, especially if he concludes that his parading of unopposed force seems as formidable to his enemy as it does to him. Such an impression may be ludicrously wide of the mark. In the American Revolution, Cornwallis and his professional soldiers possessed the technical preponderance to move through the Garolinas virtually as they pleased, but control of the countryside eluded them. One of his officers wrote afterward: “Our march through this country may be compared to the passage of a ship through the waves which give way on the least impulse, but immediately close when the body has passed.”

It is incredible that we have to learn this lesson so many times over; or, rather, it would seem incredible if public debate on these matters were not so meaninglessly muscular and so interspersed with eloquent silences. A language of controversy which can only define people as “hawks” or “doves” is not going to make much sense of what Mr. Khrushchev called “wars of national liberation,” for the divorce between belligerency and political skill is precisely what these wars are calculated to exploit. They seem likely, as long as major war remains suspended and William James’s “moral equivalent of war” has not been found, to be a permanent condition of American reality, and they cannot be wished away by changing the name of our incompetence to “counterinsurgency" and pretending that this constitutes recognition of our role in guerrilla wars. We still do not recognize that role as valid. No one defends it, least of all on the grounds that it offers the only military means for forcing a political settlement — in Southeast Asia or anywhere else we encounter the same phenomenon.

The breakdown of communication is so complete that Secretary McNamara has no terms of discourse at his disposal to explain why the presence of American infantry in a guerrilla-ravaged country is profoundly peace-enhancing in a way that the presence of air bases and naval task forces was not. I say this in the hope, rather than the certainty, that Mr. McNamara himself understands the distinction; he is a rational man of uncommon abilities, but war is less susceptible to rationality than are the problems of inner organization in the Department of Defense. If it were just a matter of avoiding risk, as Napoleon said, glory would be at the disposition of very mediocre talent.

Somehow there must be a working-out of human purposes, toe to the line and no nonsense; to meet them less than head on is no guarantee of safety. If we have to live dangerously, however, we also have to manage it without blowing ourselves up in the process. For the nations armed with nuclear weapons the noble game has ended, permanently. Avoiding thermonuclear war is the most compelling duty of this generation; to fail in that duty is to betray not only our own species but all living things, and in this sense, any man who is not a pacifist has taken leave of his humanity. The dilemma of the peace-loving person today is that he must be satisfied with a less than perfect pacifism, and still must study the kinds of war at least to the point of preferring one to another.

For the only “moral equivalent of war" is now a form of warfare itself. It is guerrilla war — ground war, old-fashioned war, in the dirt and weather, rifle to rifle, grenade for grenade. It is bloody, vicious, and hateful; it should never be fought except to halt an attacking enemy and bring him to the conference table. But twenty years under the brooding presence of the Bomb should have taught us to respect it, to recognize its prominence among the principal military instruments of the twentieth century. It is the only weapon we can wield with steadiness, justice, and self-respect. It is our only military means with any just proportion to its ends. It is the only innocent sacrament we have left.