Unjust War (or, How I Never Learned to Love the Bomb)

On the bomb, the Gaza, and moral dilemmas

With a heavy heart, I regret to report that Tucker Carlson has made a good point.

I used to like Tucker, casually. For me, the charm wore off around when he began asking why anyone cared about this little war in “a nation called Ukraine.” I mean, had Putin ever called you a racist? Had he shipped off your job? Was he trying to snuff out Christianity? The answer is yes, by the way, at least for Christian denominations Putin doesn’t like, but Tucker can be fuzzy on details. Though, to be fair, Tucker has taken a sudden intense interest in the Christians of the Gaza Strip, particularly the sort willing to come on his show and spew anti-Israel propaganda.

Nevertheless, as an objective journalist, I’m obliged to acknowledge when even Tucker has made a good point, even in a long podcast surrounded by bizarre points, which sums up his recent podcast with Joe Rogan. That good point came in the context of a discussion about artificial intelligence—what it is, exactly, whether it will get away from us, whether we should take action now to ensure that never happens. If people are that convinced that AI is going to lead somewhere Really Bad, if it’s going to become an existential threat to humanity or what-not, then Tucker wonders what they’re all waiting for. Why treat AI like the COVID virus, something inexorably spreading that everyone everywhere is bound to catch? Why not “strangle it in its crib,” right now?

Here Rogan suggests that you could have asked these same questions about the atomic bomb. Tucker heartily agrees, and here begins the clip that’s been going viral:

I love, by the way, that people on my side—I’ll just say, I’ll just admit it—on the right, have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. Like, are you joking? That’s just, like, prima facie evil. If you can’t… “Well, if we hadn’t done that, and this, that and the other, and this was actually a great savings…” Like, no, it’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people. And if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. Like it’s not a tough one, right? It’s not a hard call, it’s not a hard call for me. So, with that in mind, why would you want nuclear weapons? It’s just a mindless, childish sort of intellectual exercise to justify, like “Oh no, it’s really good, because someone else…” How about no? How about, like, spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening?

Unsurprisingly, this has not gone over well. Admittedly, Carlson didn’t help himself by using the rest of the podcast as a soapbox for everything-and-the-kitchen-sink anti-establishment conspiracism, up to and including “9/11 was an inside job.” It’s not clear at this point in time whether Carlson himself is seriously flirting with that hypothesis or just doing a very extended troll. Not that I think all his establishment narrative-questioning is equally ridiculous in essence, whether it’s a bit or not. It’s easy to sweep things like 9/11 trutherism, QAnon-ism, COVID vaccine skepticism, and evolution skepticism all into one neat dustpan of “tinfoil-hattery,” tip it in the garbage, and brush your hands thanking goodness that you’re a normal conservative who writes for sensible places like The Bulwark—too easy.

It was, likewise, too easy for Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing to tweet that “People who deny the moon landing or suggest America is evil for its use of atomic weapons against Imperial Japan or who say that George Bush was behind 9/11 actually hate this country.” A friend noted, provocatively, that this is really not dissimilar from what the left does when it says, “You must support Black Lives Matter, or else you hate black people.”

I don’t think we should have used the bomb. Readers who’ve followed me for a while will have picked this up from my review of Oppenheimer. But it can still come as a surprise to people who might glance over my profile, quickly note the Israel flag and the bylines in outlets like National Review or The Spectator, and assume at a glance that I get my own politics off a certain shelf. (An aggressively unhinged leftist tried to do this the other day, much to my amusement.) Not that I think all conservatives who disagree with me on this are evil, as Tucker says. Some of my best friends, etc. They would say Tucker is going after a strawman when he talks about people saying the bomb was good, when no one thinks the bomb was good, even if they think it was a necessary evil.

Ben Shapiro’s reaction video runs through that classic stock conservative response: Yes, many lives were lost, but the only other choice was invasion or more firebombing, where we’ve calculated more lives would have been lost. Yes, the bomb killed innocents, but the Japanese empire was a death cult that would have brainwashed even women and children to put up armed resistance. Shapiro reads a few shocking quotes from the Japanese leadership after the second bomb was dropped, one higher-up hoping the entire island might burst into “a beautiful flower” of flame and smoke. Needless to say, the Israel-Hamas war makes such quotes especially unsettling to listen to right now. (More on the parallels and dissimilarities here in a moment.)

Before I explain why I think the stock conservative response is wrong, I do want to register agreement with Shapiro about nuclear deterrence. This might seem paradoxical. How can I believe we should never use the bomb while still believing it would be a bad idea to destroy the bombs we have? The obvious answer is that bad guys aren’t going to destroy their bombs just because we do. Here, Carlson is wrong and Shapiro is right that in a post-Oppenheimer world, the only way to sustain peace is by preserving symmetry. Some might push back that it’s still wrong to threaten something intrinsically immoral. On a small scale, it would be wrong to coerce a criminal into doing something by threatening (even as a bluff) to kidnap his family. The argument goes that this is no less true on the scale of atomic weaponry. I still don’t think I’m compelled by it, certainly not all the way to the conclusion that we actively need to destroy our arsenal.

But when it comes to using the bomb, none of the “pro” arguments will wash in my view, which eschews all utilitarian reasoning to focus, deontologically, on the intrinsic wrongness of the act. Arguments from how many more lives might have been lost otherwise simply don’t carry the necessary moral force. Justice cannot be reduced to a head count, nor can it be quantified by the amount of total suffering averted. The path of greater justice may well be—indeed, often is—the path of greater total suffering. And the argument specifically from how many more American lives would have been saved prompts the question of why we need rules of engagement at all. If nuclear annihilation was on the table, what’s off the table?

It must also be emphasized that even if your philosophy of just war carves out some ethical space for civilian killing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not “collateral damage.” We were not regretfully killing innocents on our way to the target we actually wanted to hit. The innocents were the target. Their deaths were the point. The cruelty was the point.

Elizabeth Anscombe nails this in her short 1956 essay “Mr. Truman’s Decree”—a tart, tight argument against Oxford University’s decision to give Harry Truman an honorary degree. [After-note: It's been pointed out to me that Anscombe wrote from ignorance of the extent to which Truman was personally aware of each step in the process, which has come out in the release of his diaries. Though replacing Truman with whoever *did* have that knowledge doesn't make her argument collapse on substance.] The atomic bomb was the calculated choice to kill the innocent as a means to our ends, which, she argues, is a sufficient condition for murder.

However, she doesn’t think it’s a necessary condition, citing a letter from a Dutch correspondent about the inundation of Walcheren in World War 2. The population of the Dutch island province had nowhere to go when the British Air Force began bombing the dikes. The immediate objective was of course to defeat the entrenched German army, but as you can read, this wasn’t even achieved efficiently thereby, and meanwhile many civilians drowned. Anscombe categorizes this as murder too, and no doubt she would do the same for the Dresden firebombings, etc:

It may be impossible to take the thing (or people) you want to destroy as your target; it may be possible to attack it only by taking as the object of your attack what includes large numbers of innocent people. Then you cannot very well say they died by accident. Here your action is murder.

I’d either forgotten or never read about the Walcheren tragedy. It was yet another reminder of how harsh the Allies’ calculations could be, even when it came to the deaths of an allied country’s civilians.

There is, I think, a legitimate and an illegitimate way to bring up our history in the current discourse around the Gaza war. The illegitimate way is the lazy stock conservative way, which presupposes all the Allies’ actions were just and good, up to and including Dresden or the bomb, and therefore…fill in the blank. The legitimate way is to highlight the double standard being applied to Israel’s rules of engagement, in light of that history. There’s something predictable—and faintly contemptible—in the eagerness with which we always seem ready to vault onto a moral high horse and micromanage those rules from across an ocean. Many would argue that American and British leaders simply have no leg on which to stand and deliver a sanctimonious nation-to-nation scolding here. They have a point.

But in the meantime, what judgment can I render on how Israel has conducted this war, from my secure perch of moral consistency? What judgment would Elizabeth Anscombe render, if we could consult her?

There might be a clue in how Anscombe tries to argue (wrongly) that even individual self-defense with a lethal goal is murder. Israel’s current action in the Gaza strip is, of course, being framed as self-defense at scale—reasonably so. This means that all attempts to map their war onto our wars will inevitably break down. Yes, Pearl Harbor was a great loss. Yes, 9/11 was a great loss. But we will never understand what it is to wage war with an enemy on our doorstep, threatening to commit mass slaughter over and over again on a scale that—proportionally speaking—leaves Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in the dust. In such a context, inaction carries a moral weight as heavy as action. In deliberating over the form our action should take (which has become increasingly unclear as we have waged war with increasingly unconventional armies) we were at no point facing anything that even began to approach an existential crisis.

This is a challenge for me, as a good deontologist. I’ve always banged the drum about the active-passive distinction when posed with various supposed ethical dilemmas. I fully intend to go on banging that drum. I’ve always contended that there are no true ethical dilemmas, no situations where there literally is no “right” choice, and so you are forced to make the less wrong choice. But Israel’s dilemma comes about as close as I think you can get, for the terrible reason that, as Coleman Hughes was putting it on Rogan not long ago, Israel will rarely if ever get a “clean shot.” Even if one makes the harsh calculation that only a few of the mentally capable men, women, or battle-ready minors in the region are in the final analysis “innocent,” no analysis however harsh can ever count out young children or the mentally handicapped.

Here someone might say, “Well, thank goodness you weird deontologists don’t run the war cabinets, otherwise no nation (let alone Israel) could ever wage urban war with terrorists. Heck, you couldn’t even have waged full war with the Nazis.” They might be right. The essence of any war where military targets lie among innocents may be such that one will simply never be able to win the war without knowingly killing innocents, even if one’s choices could be simplified by a severely narrow definition of the word “innocent.” (It’s not my intention to have that debate here, though I don’t think it’s illegitimate to at least ask how the word should be defined in a society so symbiotically wedded to a terror group like Hamas. People have, of course, attempted something similar in discussions of the society of Japan, but I still think the cumulative moral argument against the bomb remains overwhelming.)

Yet writers like Phil Klay will still argue that Israel is being careless, that it could greatly reduce civilian casualties while still carrying out its military objectives. Earlier this month, the IDF was accused of using AI to generate targets quickly, which led to the deaths of many families in their homes in assassination attempts on minor Hamas operatives. People can read that report, then read the IDF’s official response and judge for themselves.

However, Klay makes it clear upfront that he still thinks urban war can be “necessary,” even when it’s imperfect. He approves of our rules of engagement during the Battle of Mosul, where we controlled casualties far better (he judges) than Israel. Among other things, he mentions that strikes anticipated to kill 10 or more civilians “required sign-off from the commanding general of General Command.” Maybe he would say all this is enough to give America back the moral high ground it lost by dropping the bomb, even if we’ve never come out in so many words and announced we should never have dropped the bomb, and we never intend to do it again.

I’m not a military expert. Perhaps there’s some truth to this analysis (though Klay also tips his political hand by calling the Gaza War a “war of revenge” and insisting that Israel must work towards a “two-state solution” in order for him to regard the war as just). Yet, in the end, perhaps it’s precisely because I’m a deontologist that once war with known innocent casualties has been deemed legitimate at all, the head-counting analyses begin to lose moral urgency for me—not because I don’t value innocent human life, but because I think each innocent human life is infinitely valuable, which makes comparing ten lives to a hundred lives like comparing orders of infinity. I find it hard to grasp a scale of morality on which Israel is morally monstrous, but we’re more or less on the up and up because we had a longer think about the “battlefield advantage” before deciding to go ahead and kill kids. Pragmatically speaking, perhaps we were more efficient, perhaps we achieved our battlefield goals better. But that’s a pragmatic assessment, not a moral one.

On that note, when it comes to the spotty success of Israel’s PR campaign, there is harsh truth to something a friend said to me recently, which is that the public has a fairly high tolerance for brutality in war, so long as it doesn’t keep hanging around on their screens—or, in the days of World War II, their radios. When we dropped the bomb on Japan, we were making, among other things, a PR calculation. We knew the public would have a low tolerance for a long, drawn-out end to an already long, drawn-out war. That would be something they could compute in a way they simply would never compute Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People would hear about Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio, they would blink, then they would go about their day.

In that sense, one could say that Israel has fallen between stools in the worst possible way: By fighting the war in a way that’s simultaneously very damaging, yet very long and messy, a way that keeps hanging around on people’s screens. This is the truth that will always fall on deaf ears. If Israel really was engaging in “genocide,” if it really did not care about civilian lives in Gaza, then there would be no Gaza War Discourse in April 2024, or if there was, it would be day-after discourse. You could attempt to argue this is solely because of their concern not to harm hostages, but I wouldn’t be convinced. As I write, I’m hearing about the beginning stages of the plan to invade Rafah, which has been delayed so long, people are wondering if there’s still much point in doing it. The projected evacuation process is expected to take weeks. If this is a genocide, it’s the clumsiest genocide I’ve ever seen.

Keep it simple. Keep it quick. Keep it so that nobody will have to keep thinking about it for too long. If all you care about is winning, this is the way.

Just ask Mr. Truman.