This is the latest version of the preface to the book I’m working on.
One semester, I was teaching Abrams v. US and Schenck v. US—two famous cases about criminalizing dissent in wartime—and I had a couple of students absolutely insistent that people should not be allowed to criticize a war “once boots hit the ground.” I pointed out that refusing to deliberate about a war we were in would mean we were guaranteed to have wars last longer than they needed, and therefore have troops die unnecessarily. They said it didn’t matter—what mattered that you could not criticize a war once people were risking their lives for it. To do so would be to dishonor them and their sacrifice.
My uncle was killed in the 1943 North Africa campaign. He successfully bombed a Nazi supply train, but his plane was downed in the resulting explosion–perhaps because he hadn’t been informed the train had munitions, perhaps because he was unable to pull the plane up fast enough since he’d been injured in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. He was a hero to me.
Since the speculation was that a contributing factor to his death was an injury he’d gotten during the Kasserine Pass battle, at some point, I looked into it. Anyone familiar with the action knows what I found: “America’s first major battle against the Germans in World War Two would end in shame, disgrace and defeat—and Major-General Lloyd R. Fredendall would bear a great deal of the responsibility for that defeat” (Whiting 114). Histories of the battle have little or nothing good to say about Fredendall. He was “an appallingly inept commander” (Carr 28), whose leadership was “a tangled skein of misunderstanding, duplication of effort, overlapping responsibility, and consequential muddle” (Dear, Oxford Companion 644). His communications were often “incomprehensible,” and he became angry if asked to clarify (Blumenson 85). He “was utterly out of touch with his command […] feuded constantly with his subordinate commanders, and generally broke every known principle of leadership in the employment of his corps” (D’Este 24). He was “ill-informed and far from the scene” (Rutherford 121). Whiting says, “Critical of his superiors, Fredendall was outspoken about the defects of his subordinates, ponderous in action, overbearing in attitude and with a tendency to jump to conclusions—probably more often than not, the wrong ones.” (113) Major General Ernest N. Harmon, tasked by Eisenhower with assessing what went wrong in the battle, reported that Fredendall was “a physical and moral coward” (qtd. Atkinson 400). The book I read particularly noted his poor handling of the Army Air Corps, putting them in considerable and unnecessary danger (including getting fired on by American troops, Blumenson 81-2).
I was enraged.
At the author.
Not because I knew enough about the event to think that what the author was saying was untrue, but because I felt it shouldn’t be said.
I was immediately puzzled by my own rage. It would make sense for me to be outraged that Fredendall might have been an over-promoted coward whose incompetence may have contributed to my uncle’s death. It would make sense for me to be outraged if I believed that the author was being inaccurate or unfair to Fredendall. But, to be honest, neither of those was my first (or even third) reaction. I was outraged because someone was suggesting that my uncle’s death was the consequence of someone’s incompetence. And I felt strongly that that was not something that should be said. It took me a while to understand why I was more angry at someone arguing (even correctly) that his death might have been the consequence of military incompetence than I was at the incompetent who might have caused his death. I was having the same reaction as the students. My almost visceral response was that criticizing how the action was conducted dishonored my uncle because it seemed to say that his death was unnecessary, and therefore meaningless.
What I learned from my rage about the criticism of the Kasserine Pass action is that it is tremendously difficult to consider seriously that someone we love and admire might have died unnecessarily, as a consequence of bad decisions, bad leadership, or even for bad reasons. Yet, as I said to the student, if we can’t admit the bad decisions, bad leadership, or bad reasons, more people will die unnecessarily.
Eventually, of course, I worked around to realizing that some people are incompetent, some decisions are unforced errors, some wars are the consequence of political figures bungling or blustering or trying to stabilize a wobbly base or just having painted themselves into a corner, an irresponsible media, an easily-mobilized or distracted public, a culture of demagoguery, or various other not especially noble factors. Even in a just war (and I do think American intervention in WWII was just) there are unjust actions, bad decisions, incompetence, and failures of leadership, and, if we are to make the conduct of war more just and competent, we have to acknowledge the errors. But that my uncle’s death might have been the consequence of incompetence still hurts.
What I learned from my own reaction is that deliberation about a war is constrained by considerations of honor. I want my uncle honored. And it was hard for me to understand that honoring him is compatible with being willing to be critical about the conditions under which he died. We want our ancestors honored. That we want them honored shouldn’t make us unwilling to think carefully and honestly about how, why, or what for they died. The more we refuse to consider past deliberations critically the more we poison our ability to deliberate about the present, and the more likely it is that others will die.
My uncle was a hero. Fredendall bungled the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, in ways that might have contributed to my uncle’s death. Both of those things can be true at the same time. We have to live in a world in which we honor the military dead without thinking we are prohibited from being critical of the cause for which they fought, the people who led them, or the political discourse that caused them to go to war. Learning from mistakes gives those mistakes meaning.
This isn’t a book about military strategy, or military history; it’s about rhetoric. More specifically, this book is about the vexed relationship of political disagreement, deliberation, demagoguery, and war. And I don’t think we can figure out the right relationship without being willing to admit we’ve sometimes gotten it wrong.
We’re primed to reason badly when it comes to questions about war because the prospect of fighting activates so many cognitive biases, especially binary thinking. Under those circumstances, deliberation can easily be framed as opting for cowardly flight instead of courageous fight, as unnecessary at best and treasonous at worst. It’s precisely because disagreements about war are so triggering, so to speak, that we need to be deliberately deliberative. To say that we should deliberate reasonably before going to war is banal in the abstract, but oddly fraught in the moment, and this book uses several cases to explore why it is that we often evade deliberation even (or especially?) when the stakes are so high.
Many people believe it is counter-productive to deliberate about war before it starts, since they think deliberation might cause us to delay in an urgent situation, will weaken our will, enable cowardice to sneak in the door. But, like my students, many people believe we shouldn’t deliberate about war once it’s started because we shouldn’t have sent people to risk their lives if we’re uncertain that the risk is necessary—we owe them our full commitment, since that’s what they’re giving. My own experience shows the deep aversion to deliberating about a war even long after it’s over, since a critical assessment suggests that lives were wasted. In other words, we are averse to deliberating about war, ever.
But, if war and deliberation are incompatible, then war and democracy are incompatible, because democracy thrives on deliberation. This isn’t to say that every decision about a conflict should be thoroughly deliberated—that would be impossible and unwise—but that deliberation doesn’t weaken the will for war if there is a strong case to be made for that war. If advocates of war can’t make their case through reasonable policy argumentation, then they probably have a bad case, and it’s likely an unnecessary war. War triggers cognitive biases, and so deliberation is necessary to counter the effects of those biases—contrary to popular belief, we can’t simply will ourselves not to rely on biases; deliberating with people who disagree can, however, do some work in reducing the power of the biases. But, not all rhetors want us to reduce the power of cognitive biases. Because we are averse to deliberating about or during war, rhetors engaged in normal political disagreements who are unable or unwilling to advocate a policy rationally are tempted to claim that this isn’t normal politics; it’s war. If they can persuade their base that this situation is war, then they won’t be expected to deliberate. The cognitive biases triggered by war will motivate the audience to believe beyond and without reason, and some political leaders and media pundits want exactly that.
Rhetoric and war have a counterintuitively complicated relationship; after all, we don’t go to war because of what the situation is, but because of what we believe the situation to be—that is, the rhetoric about our situation. Being at war (or even believing ourselves to be at war), as I’ll emphasize in this book, often causes us to think differently about things; it persuades us. It also constrains our rhetoric in ways, such as how much we can be critical of the war or its conduct once boots are on the ground. Invoking war or its prospect can change how we argue, and rhetoric can be treated as a kind of war.
In this book, I’ll argue that the way we argue for a war (that is, the rhetoric) implies the conditions under which we can end it, how it will be conducted, what kind of war it will be, what kind of sacrifices (lives, resources, rights) will be expected on the home front, who and what our enemy is. The rhetoric we use might alienate, neutralize, or mobilize potential allies, gain sympathy and assistance from third parties, generate sympathy and assistance for our antagonist(s), or persuade third parties to remain neutral. It might unify a nation, thereby increasing support and morale, or frame the question in partisan terms, thereby ensuring divided support; it can enable us to deliberate our options, including long-term plans. It might make the military action to be diversionary, an attempt to deflect attention from a regime’s scandals or failures, thereby rousing cynicism rather than enthusiasm.
And war affects rhetoric. As mentioned above, when we’re seriously considering war, it’s easier to persuade people to imagine our complicated situation in binaries—pro-/anti-war, patriotic/traitorous, brave/cowardly, action/talk, confident/defeatist. And we can, I will argue, get into a cycle. Believing we are in danger of being attacked (or are already being attacked) increases in-group loyalty and extremism (see, for instance, Hoag et al.), and so we are less open to hearing nuanced explanations of our situation, holding in- and out-groups to the same standards, realizing that the world does not consist of an in-group and an out-group, or even paying attention to non in-group sources of information. If we imagine there are only two positions (pro- or anti-war) then we are likely to hear any criticism of our war plan—or even calls for deliberation–as “anti-war.” Thus, in the process of talking ourselves into a war, we can talk ourselves out of deliberating about that war, and out of deliberation at all. And then we have more war, less deliberately.