Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

It's been a long time since I've read a book that made me feel so defensive.

Even now, having completed Samuel Moyn's "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War," I can't decide if the problem is me or Moyn. Moyn's central idea here is that the United States has made its wars more palatable for public consumption -- particularly with an emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties, but also by focusing ever more on the international laws of war -- and in so doing has made it easier for the country to find endless wars with little or no public restraint. "American concern with war has become focused on ensuring it is humane -- not whether it drags on and on, or even should be fought in the first place," he writes.

I agree with part of Moyn's assertion. We're a country that goes to war pretty easily. Sometimes there's a debate, as when the United States invaded Iraq. Mostly, there's not: America fights or facilitates violence in places like Syria and Yemen with barely a peep of interest from the public and only the scantest attention from major media organs. And I also believe that America's increasing use of drone strikes has helped make our wars more invisible to that public, letting us spread death to alleged terrorists around the world in a fashion which invites blowback, but which is easy to ignore because U.S. soldiers are safely immune from the immediate threat of reciprocal violence. How can somebody in the Middle East take revenge against a pilot based in Las Vegas?

And yet, I really struggle with Moyn's notion that the people who try to keep war within certain bounds after it has been declared -- lawyers mostly, those who have developed the laws of war and then applied them vigorously -- have somehow enabled war. Moyn argues that as the focus on fighting wars "legally" ascended, the power of antiwar forces in American life receded. "Compared with the antiwar forces of the past, humanitarians were a far preferable foe, occypying more common terrain," he writes. Observers were right to ask if the military's "self-humanizations since My Lai entrench violence more than they regulated it." Is the choice really between arguing against war and arguing against using torture at war? It seems like I ought to be able to do both, right? Can't I be a pacifist, yet also argue against targeting civilians while the war is underway? Am I really assenting to war by criticizing its conduct? Maybe there's room for "both-and," but it's difficult to argue against Moyn's contention that it hasn't worked out that way. In his telling, the lawyers who represent Gitmo defendants might be honorable, but they're also patsies. I find that hard to swallow.

Another source of frustration: Moyn seems to wish that opponents of U.S. wars would focus more on legal arguments that those wars have often violated the United Nations' ban on wars of aggression. I find that idea naive (particularly since Moyn points out repeatedly how the laws of war have often been bent and broken with little repercussion) as is the idea that war can be stamped out. As I've written elsewhere, I've long lived at the edges of pacifism -- but I also believe there will always be wars and rumors of war. Am I betraying my own stated principles to believe in "don't kill civilians, don't torture detainees" the best second-best I might get? Am I a hypocrite? Or is Moyn being impossibly utopian? That's what I suspect is true, but again: Maybe I'm just being defensive.

If I find "Humane" to be frustrating, I also find it useful -- unexpectedly as a quick primer on Leo Tolstoy and his pacifist activism, but also the rise and development of international humanitarian law. He also provides a useful thread of how major powers have tended to observe the laws of war loosely, and usually not at all when fighting non-white peoples. American forces, for example, have often found easy justification for brutality against Native Americans, Filipinos, Vietnamese an "War on Terror" combatants. The rules are supposedly for civilized people only.

Still, it was perhaps unwise of me to read Moyn while tensions are on the rise -- the weeks I spent with this book coincided with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm angry and scared about matters of war and peace right now, anyway. Today, I watched a video of a Russian tank running over a Ukrainian civilians' car with the driver still inside. If war has become humane, it is difficult to see the evidence this week.