Robert Kagan has an oped piece in the Washington Post today on the subject of the categorization of wars as "necessary" or of "choice." He is correct in thinking that this is rhetorical trivia. He is correct n writing that nearly all wars represent choice. After all, surrender is always a possibility.
In the course of his essay he writes -
"There have been few if any clear-cut wars of necessity in America's history. Not the Revolution, where both the colonists and the British had other and, in the British case, better choices. Not the Civil War, which some historians still believe was an unnecessary and catastrophic spilling of American blood. (Slavery, they wrongly argue, would eventually have died of natural causes.) And never mind the war with Mexico, the Spanish-American War, the many interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, or, in the view of many, World War I. "
Kagan's essential argument seems to be that the essential question is not whether or not wars were "necessary" but if they were a good idea.
"They wrongly argue?" Sorry, but I think the word "wrongly" in this sentence is merely the product of the "received wisdom" passed down to and among the physical and/or spiritual descendants of the winning side. The carnage of the Civil War and the devastated and impoverished lives of all the people of the American South necessitated a life there of diminished chances and opportunities that lasted a hundred years. The demographic and economic wreckage in the South and the human losses in the North were so bad that a compelling argument had to be made that the moral imperative of the evil of slavery in the South had made this awful war an "irrepressible conflict." The eternal and immutable nature of slavery as an institution in the south served that pupose well and still does. The fact that nearly all the Northern states had at one time or another had been "slave" states seems to mean nothing to that propaganda theme.
Just for the sake of argument imagine that the seceded states had decided in 1861 (the year the war began) to collectively abolish slavery. Would the North (the United States) have then allowed those states to depart from the union in peace? If the answer is no, then slavery in the South was not the primary cause of the war.
Nevertheless, Kagan chooses to characterize the cause of the war as slavery, and to imply that this moral evil could only have been expunged by mass violence. Is that true? Agribusiness in the South based on slave labor was quite profitable. Agribusiness in Brazil based on slavery was also quite profitable. Slavery in Brazil was abolished in the late nineteenth century on the basis of gradual compensated emancipation.
Slavery was an institution inconsistent with American political ideals and the developing collective consciousness of the Western world. Economic determinists will argue that profits in business would have "trumped" any argument from "higher values" for a gradual emancipation in the South. People who think that clearly believe that Southerners were simply evil, that they enjoyed the sadistic perquisites of domination of another people so much that the disapproval of all of Western civilization would not have moved them to free the blacks. Is that true? Try to imagine an alternative 1900 or 1950 in which millions of African-Americans would still have been held in conditions of chattel slavery. Can you do that? If you can't, then perhaps there is something wrongly argued in Kagan's statement.
This brings me to my point. If Kagan's argument in his oped hinges on the centrality of judgment and wisdom in deciding on war or peace, and he believes that the American Civil War was an inevitable, indeed a desirable thing, then why should we accept his judgment about the virtue of wars like Iraq and Afghanistan? pl
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