How Democracies Should Wage War
A Podcast Piece by Phil Klay.
This is a polished excerpt from the transcript of our podcast with National Book Award-winning novelist and Iraq War veteran, Phil Klay. In that episode, Phil joined and Shadi Hamid to discuss his article, “U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible,” published in The Atlantic. You can listen to the episode here.
— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
Phil Klay: Let me give you the religious answer.
Damir: So give me the religious answer.
Phil: A democracy should not ask its soldiers to engage in war in a way that will destroy their souls.
Damir: Okay, good. Say more. That’s what I wanted to hear. Tell me more.
Phil: You know, as we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, war is already morally and, I would say, spiritually bruising. And of course we can talk about the psychological and physical effects as well. It is close exposure to evil. To the act of killing. And added to that dehumanization and brutality is that waging war in an unjust way is a sin.
So look, in war you send out young men, usually very young men, who tend to believe very much in what they’re told, right? If you gear up a bunch of young 20-year-olds to go out and just destroy, they will and they’ll be excited to do it. If you give them a mission with a greater moral underpinning, that will motivate them as well, and provide them a framework for what they’re supposed to accomplish, and whether the suffering they endure has any meaning.
In that sense, having a clear moral purpose can be asset, as long as it’s not a loose kind of feel-good morality disconnected from brutal reality. I remember in 2009, right as Obama’s ill-fated surge in Afghanistan was going on, I was talking to some young Lance corporal and I asked him, “How are you going to be successful in Afghanistan?” And he said to me, “Through cultural effectiveness.” And he really believed it, you know? And then he went to Helmand province, which was an incredibly violent place. And there’s something tragic there, in the disconnect between what he thought the mission would consist of, and what it was — months in an incredibly hostile and deadly place that reverted to Taliban control the second U.S. troops lost.
Nevertheless, I still think the Marine going over with a sense of the moral stakes of his mission is in a better place than one whose only thought is lethality, and who afterwards, if he has any shred of humanity, will have to come to terms with what it meant to kill people, and to see his friends killed. And the moral understanding soldiers have their sense of themselves and what they’re doing, that’s something the whole society will help form, not just their political and military leaders. And if you believe in the human soul in any kind of real way, then it’s not hard to see how acts of war that become unmoored from an ethical code and a moral purpose quickly become soul-killing.
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