The amoral politics of war and terror

Since the World Trade Center attack, a strain of thought has circulated around this country that the terrorists who committed this attack are evil and that their supporters, chiefly Osama bin Laden, are evil. This claim is wrong, however, for a simple reason: It removes acts of aggression and force from a political context and places them in a moral one.

The majority of our government leaders and many American citizens have branded the attacks as an affront to decent civilized society everywhere. Furthermore, they claim that terrorist action in general is immoral because it targets innocent civilians and its goal is to instill fear. However, such a position is untenable in the first place because no nation has ever considered killing innocent civilians wrong except when it had no need to kill them. Savagery has always been permitted to one degree or another depending upon the political circumstances. Those that have the luxury of not needing to resort to savagery, either because they are powerful enough or because they are at peace, will call savagery immoral.

Yet, those who feel that their very existence is threatened will quickly resort to savagery and call it moral. The United States, for example, has signed treaties forbidding the killing of prisoners of war. The justification for such a treaty is that the United States has never had a need to kill its prisoners of war and hopes that such a treaty would dissuade other nations from killing U.S. prisoners. Furthermore, while the treaty might have had a moral impetus, there should be little doubt that should the need ever arise for the United States to kill prisoners of war, it would do so. In the Battle of Agincourt in 1416, the great Christian King, Henry V, was forced to kill all his prisoners because he did not have enough men to guard them and at the same time attack the opposing army.

In the same way, the United States condemns killing innocent civilians, yet after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. In all the wars we have fought where we had the ability to kill innocent civilians, we did, as has every other nation in war. What is more, the two Japanese cities had no strategic value, yet we bombed them anyway. The reason is that the true target of the attacks were not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rather Tokyo. Our goal was to frighten Tokyo and thus Japan into surrendering. After all, we invented the concept of terror when General Sherman cut a 70-mile swath of destruction from Atlanta to the sea. His message: War is pain and if the South did not surrender it would encounter much more pain.

If morality is disregarded in war when immorality is required, then we are left with the axiom of Carl Von Clauswitz: "War is thus an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will," and furthermore, "war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means." This applies as well to Muslim extremists as it does to the United States and other countries around the world.

The World Trade Center attack was not killing for the sake of killing but rather killing in order to advance political interests. When it is necessary to resort to war and kill civilians to advance political interests, nations do so; so too do these terrorists. Thus the second reason their actions cannot be called evil is because it is nonsense to claim that our political interests, whether it be defeating the Germans and Japanese or supporting Israel, are any more morally pure than theirs. Dan Ostrow is a politics major from New York, NY. He can be reached at dtostrow@princeton.edu.