COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS – Equating war with individual evil has become ubiquitous – if not universal – in contemporary international politics. Wars are fights against evil tyrants and the illegitimate governments they control. Such rhetoric makes wars easier to justify, easier to wage, and easier to support, especially for elected leaders who must respond directly to swings in public opinion. Such language works equally well for any society in today’s media-obsessed age.
Little wonder, then, that political leaders consistently personalize international conflicts. Alas, such commonplace language also makes wars harder to avoid, harder to end, and arguably more deadly.
The rhetoric of personified evil is easily seen through American examples, but is hardly a uniquely American phenomenon. Chinese leaders blame Taiwanese leaders for cross-straits tensions, and blame the Dalai Lama for all that ails Tibet. So, too, have protestors around the world made George W Bush resemble Hitler, and mullahs throughout the Islamic world ritualistically harangue US presidents as earthly Satans, simultaneously noting their basic affection for the American people.
Recent American leaders, for their part, find it nearly impossible to deploy military force without first employing such rhetoric as both mantra and crutch. The most famous example came in 1917. Woodrow Wilson, asking for a declaration of war against Germany, said, “We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their Government acted in entering this war.” Only the Kaiser and his evil henchmen were to blame.
In 1990, George HW Bush made the same plea: “We have no quarrel with the Iraqi people.” His son said the same thing in 2003, adding, “they are the daily victims of Saddam Hussein’s oppression.” George W. Bush had earlier noted that Americans “had no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan,” only with al Qaeda and their Taliban supporters. He even employed this phrase in his final State of the Union address in 2008, saying, “Our message to the people of Iran is clear: We have no quarrel with you… Our message to the leaders of Iran is also clear: Verifiably suspend your nuclear enrichment, so negotiations can begin.”
Every American president since Wilson has, at least once while in office, uttered the phrase “have no quarrel with” a foreign enemy. Such statements are typically made only days, sometimes hours, before the first American bombs fall. Bill Clinton promised on the eve of the bombing of Serbia that “I cannot emphasize too strongly that the United States has no quarrel with the Serbian people.” Barack Obama promised from the campaign trail that “We have no quarrel with the Iranian people. They know that President Ahmadinejad is reckless, irresponsible, and inattentive to their day-to-day needs.”
Presidents employ such language for good reason. They know their public, a self-styled melting pot of peoples, would rather fight dictators than brothers and cousins abroad. Indeed, Wilson’s initial formulation grew from a demographic and political quandary. More than one-third of Americans in 1917 could trace their heritage back to Germany and its allies. Wilson could not implore his people to “kill the Krauts,” as British or French leaders frequently did, because so many of Wilson’s soldiers were, by ethnicity at least, ‘Krauts’ themselves. He instead rhetorically transformed American soldiers from fratricidal killers into liberators of their ancient fatherland.
Only when foreign enemies looked different from what Americans conceived themselves to be could presidents wage war against a people as a whole. Thus, Franklin Roosevelt could simultaneously urge Americans to keep the world from being “dominated by Hitler and Mussolini,” even as he told them that “we are now in the midst of a war against Japan .” The war in Europe was a war to liberate oppressed peoples from tyrants. The war in the Pacific was a race war.
Such politically expedient language has a strategic downside. First, once you pin blame for a conflict on a single individual, a Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il, it is difficult to see a solution to international conflict that does not result from the tyrant’s downfall. Imagine Bush parlaying with Saddam Hussein in 2005 or 2006, if war had never come again to Iraq, after having called him this generation’s Hitler.
More troubling is the identification of conflict with a single human source, which obscures the more systemic and insidious nature of international conflict. Again, imagine if recent history had gone differently, and Saddam had in fact taken the Bush administration’s eleventh-hour offer of exile rather than war. Or if the initial attempt made on Saddam’s life in the war’s first hours had been successful.
If Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction, as Bush believed, Hussein’s departure would have left such weapons in the hands of… whom exactly? Equating war with a solitary tyrant thus imposes strategic limitations for policymakers. It also leads, paradoxically, to a greater number of civilian deaths. Bombs aimed at foreign dictators or their security apparatus almost invariably kill individuals far from the corridors of power. Their deaths are easier to stomach, and to justify, so long as airmen and soldiers, and the public watching at home, believe the violence was at least directed against evil incarnate.
Such rhetoric clearly works. It is global in nature. But it also helps make the world a more dangerous place by obscuring the real reasons for war, and by allowing peoples around the world to justify violence and conflict not as a means to an end, but rather as a holy mission of liberation, freedom, and the eradication of tyranny. Until political leaders reject the rhetoric of evil as a justification for war, war itself is unlikely to disappear.
