7.18.2006
Honor: a series (part one)
[Posted 4:09 PM by James Bowman]
Editor’s note: special to Armavirumque, this column marks the first in a series of blog entries by James Bowman, columnist for The New Criterion and author of Honor: A History.
“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” said Winston Churchill about negotiations to end the Korean War. Yet he knew better than anyone not only that war is sometimes unavoidable but also that, in some cases, it can be fatal to go on avoiding it until it does become unavoidable. That was the mistake of the pre-war Chamberlain government which he had fought to correct in the 1930s. Should we see Israel’s de facto declaration of war on Lebanon over Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers as falling into the same category? What about the terrorist provocation to India of bombing commuter trains in Bombay? Is there a reasonable option for a non-warlike response in either case?
There is no easy answer, but one guide that once was essential and now has been more or less abandoned is Honor, the subject of my recent book of the same name.
A deliberate provocation by one country — or even by private individuals under the sanction or protection of that country — to the honor of another used to be thought unanswerable except by violence. Thus when Spanish coast guards in Cuba boarded the English ship Rebecca, bound from Jamaica to London, and cut off the ear of the captain, Robert Jenkins, telling him to take it to King George as a token of what they intended for him, England was forced to go to war with Spain in 1739 in what became known as “the War of Jenkins’s Ear.” It wasn’t a very big war, consisting mainly of border skirmishes between English Georgia and Spanish Florida. But honor was satisfied.
Similar calculations based on national honor produced the First World War out of the relatively trivial provocation of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand. Not trivial to the Archduke, of course, but trivial in comparison with the millions of lives lost in the war that followed. That disproportion between the cause and its horrific consequences helped to cause a widespread revulsion in Europe and America against the very idea of honor. Partly inspired by other kinds of utopian thinking popular at the time — the Russian Revolution was another one of the war’s consequences — many people began to think that peace could be had simply by refusing to respond to provocation. That belief seemed for a while to have been discredited by the Second World War, but it cropped up again with the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era. Ever since that time, it has been a recurrent temptation for liberals and Democrats in America, and even some conservatives and Republicans.
During his presidency, said Bill Clinton recently, “I always thought of Senator Fulbright and the terrible quagmire in Vietnam and how many times we sent more soldiers and found ourselves in a hole and kept digging because we didn’t want to look like we were weak. So anytime somebody said in my presidency, ‘If you don’t do this people will think you’re weak,’ I always asked the same question for eight years: ‘Can we kill ’em tomorrow?’ If we can kill ’em tomorrow, then we’re not weak, and we might be wise enough to try to find an alternative way.” Apparently, no one ever had the wit to say, “No, we can’t kill them tomorrow” — as his administration’s ineffectual pursuit of Osama bin Laden showed. We now know that, whether or not President Clinton thought America was weak for retreating from Somalia or failing to retaliate for the embassy bombings in Africa or the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, bin Laden did. And his belief in that weakness helped to inspire the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001.
Churchill might have pointed out that honor’s rule of thumb, learned from every playground bully, should be that when an enemy’s provocation betokens his determination to fight, it is better to have the war at once rather than wait for further provocations. That at any rate seems to have been the calculation of Prime Minister Olmert in Israel. For months the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been saying that he intends war against Israel. It is impossible to suppose that his clients in Hezbollah would have acted without his sanction. In India, by contrast, the connection between the terrorists and their most likely sponsors, Pakistan, is much less clear. In any case, it is surely unwarranted to suppose that Pakistan is determined on war with India. Those two countries’ situation is much more like that of the European powers before the First World War. Let us hope that they learn from that war’s tragic example that their respective national honors need not always be engaged by an act of terrorism.