Norms and the Use of Force

Moral concepts have frequently been invoked to justify the present war. Failing to identify significant stocks of weapons of mass destruction, the administration shifted its claims for war from the threat posed by WMD—a reason that fits comfortably within mainstream analysis of international security—to an inherently moral cause, the illegitimacy of the Ba'ath Party regime. Despite some recent scholarship, ethics and international relations remain somewhat marginalized in political science, particularly in the study of war making. Having internalized the critiques of moral claims in IR advanced by Hans J. Morgenthau and E. H. Carr, I would have expected normative concepts to be incapable of explaining much about the war.²

At the tactical level, the normative dimension of war is seldom far away; the infantryman's ideal world is divided into us and them, bad guys and good guys. War is intensely personal, and soldiers need to believe that their enterprise is “right.” For example, the fedayeen use improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and suicide bombers for perfectly sensible reasons. In terms of the military balance, their comparative advantage lies in irregular tactics. Yet the troops consider such tactics out-of-bounds. Even as his Union armies were burning the South, William Tecumseh Sherman famously condemned the Confederate practice of using hidden mines against his troops as being “not war, but murder.”

Professional soldiers react in two ways—first, as scientists who must devise techniques to overcome the enemy's tactics; and second, as amateur ethicists who condemn fedayeen practices as morally flawed. With no small degree of disdain, we dismiss these “terrorist” tools as weapons of the weak—evidence of the enemy's tactical failures and his fundamental lack of moral conviction.⁵

One can reasonably argue that because war itself is so intensely personal, it is necessary to abstract the personal to get closer to social science. However, the fact that most military professionals make conscious efforts to be moral in the midst of combat—and the fact that the administration often invokes moral sanction for the war—suggests to me that theorists who wish to make a full accounting of how states act at war must find a better way of accounting for the normative dimension in war. Did Germany refrain from using chemical weapons in World War II for strategic or normative reasons? Or both? The question merits analysis and a full answer.

Norms certainly play a role in tactical planning and tactical decisions; plans are revised and amended if they run afoul of the ethical rules of the game. We make conscious efforts to spare historical, cultural, and religious sites. And we try very hard—sometimes to our disadvantage—to play fair. It would, for example, be infinitely easier to destroy villages in order to save them, but such rational and cost-effective action would run afoul both of national policy and—more importantly—of the normative injunction for waging the war in the first place. As several scholars have shown, following the rules provides valuable sanction for war making. This sanction is vital given the 24-hour news cycle. Even the functionally illiterate Iraqi laborers I employed were completely attuned to Aljazeera. They were often better informed about current events than I. By paying closer attention to the role norms play both in the conduct of war and in the decision to make war, we see that while states may well have the power to “go it alone,” increasingly they seem to value going it together even more.⁶

War as a Costly Lottery

Despite the administration's search for normative sanction, the United States went it alone in Iraq. From my traditionally realist perspective, this was not surprising. The United States was responding to a threat, and politicians invoked morals to appease the electorate. Yet it was difficult for me to square that dismissal of norms with my own sense that there appeared to have been a rush to judgment in going to war; I and other officers were uncomfortable playing the role of aggressor. I was reminded more than once of Robert F. Kennedy's argument against a preemptive strike in Cuba—we would have been morally equivalent to the Tojo regime in Japan.⁷

A vast and persuasive literature argues that states treat war like a costly lottery and tend to be risk-averse because of the uncertainty and potential costs of conflict. I will be more skeptical of such arguments in the future. During the rhetorical build-up to war in 2002, and after mobilization in early 2003, I saw little evidence of risk-averse behavior by the United States. On the battlefield we talk about “preparatory fires”—artillery laid down on a target prior to an infantry assault. In 2002 the administration began its rhetorical preparatory fire against the Saddam Hussein regime. I was then, and remain, ambivalent about the strengths of our claims to legitimately engage Iraq in warfare. My ambivalence was due less to partisanship than to my academic training; I could not square what appeared to be a rush to war with my comfortably held assumptions about the nature of threat, cost-benefit analysis, and states' risk-aversion to war. I did not think then that diplomacy had been exhausted or that Iraq posed a strategic or even regional threat. I could not explain why, especially with significant mopping-up to be done in Afghanistan, the United States would focus on a new target—particularly one that posed no immediate threat. I believe that the real explanatory variables lay both in the monopoly control the executive branch has over the war powers and in the belief systems of key decision makers. As a student of foreign policy, I have been challenged to do a better job of taking into account the disproportionate advantage the president has in deciding to go to war.

If we take seriously the findings of the democratic peace literature that democracies make war differently from other types of regimes, then perhaps we need to pay closer attention to the specific politics of a democracy. When dealing with the United States, for example, we should acknowledge that the war powers are not held democratically. That is, the executive branch has, by law and by custom, acquired an almost exclusive writ of authority for deploying military force. This concentration of authority is not a defining trait of democratic regimes. We need not treat democracy as a dichotomous variable; rather, we should code democracies along a continuum that takes account of the distribution of war-making power between legislative and executive branches.

Partisanship and Politics in the Army

Challenged to reassess my thinking about how and why states go to war, I began also to rethink the institutional dimension of war making. Specifically, I began to reevaluate my understanding of civil-military relations and their connection to the more general issue of war making. As an American citizen, a scholar, and an officer, I take for granted the subordination of military power to civilian control. However, it seems to me that the army as an institution is drifting away from civil society. On average, today's soldier is conservative, religious, and Republican; he or she has an almost innate distaste for anything that smacks of “liberalism.” In a survey by the Military Times Company, which publishes the Air Force Times, Army Times, Marine Times, and Navy Times, only 13 percent of respondents self-identified as Democrats and only 7 percent described themselves as liberal. Nearly 65 percent of active-duty officers self-identified with the GOP.⁸

The army's predominant Republican partisanship is troubling because research suggests that officers' political biases can affect the quality of information they provide to decision makers—witness General LeMay and President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.⁹

Many soldiers distrust the media and Congress. As living conditions in Iraq improved in the fall and winter of 2003, more units were able to procure satellite television systems from the Armed Forces Network (AFN). AFN rebroadcasts network programming from the States. For news, the military's network of choice is Fox News Channel. Reporters on CNN (the “Communist News Network”) are almost universally derided as “biased,” while those broadcasting on Fox are generally applauded for their honesty and objectivity. Very few personnel I encountered recognized that there is a substantive distinction between news reporting and conservative commentary. Even those who held that commentators were “always” biased tended to defer to conservative bias.

Many military personnel hold Congress in disdain. The army is very much an executive branch agency, by which I mean that soldiers seem to instinctively defer to the president—not only because he is commander in chief, but because they like his politics. Only half of the respondents in the Military Times poll felt that the civilian leadership has their best interests at heart. Yet I noticed no such deference to the executive branch among rank-and-file military personnel during Clinton's presidency. Beyond the expected institutional concerns for mission, funding, and authority that we would expect, there appears to be a distinctly partisan bias in the willing acceptance of civilian control.

I am not suggesting that the United States is susceptible to a military coup. Nevertheless, empirical research by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) shows that officers increasingly subscribe to the belief that they should have a voice—if not veto power—in security policy matters. Many observers remarked upon the reluctance of the services to perform peace-keeping or nation-building missions during the Clinton era; some have suggested that the military's intransigence on the issue encouraged resistance in our adversaries. The politics of the army is not a trivial matter in an era when it has become what retired General Wesley Clark calls the preeminent “action agency” for the United States abroad.¹⁰

As both the TISS and Military Times findings show, military personnel tend to view themselves as being more dedicated, more patriotic, and therefore more qualified to judge national security policies than civilians. Describing its sample of 933 active-duty respondents as “Right, Republican and principled,” the Army Times reported that 66 percent of respondents agreed that the military has higher moral values than civilians. There is a notion abroad in the armed forces that, given our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for the common defense, we deserve a more privileged place within the democracy. This attitude is by no means political; no one is suggesting the military not be subordinated to civilian control. It is, rather, cultural—a view that, as the guardians, our take on events should be privileged for we bear the brunt of battle. Instead of consulting or directing, civilians should be listening to us.

In general, the army views itself as separate from, and superior to, society at large. The army votes no on gay rights, gun control, abortion, affirmative action, and social welfare and yes on flag-burning amendments, the intact (cold war) Pledge of Allegiance, school prayer, home schooling, travel restrictions on foreigners, the war on drugs and the war on terror. Most important, the army does vote, offering a potential electoral boon to conservative candidates. At the forefront of American foreign policy, then, is an institution that is somewhat uncomfortable with the nation it is sworn to defend. It is an institution suspicious of “liberalism” that jealously guards, and seeks to expand, its prerogative to challenge not only decisions that affect the battlefield but also decisions that affect the policies that lead to the battlefield. Given that the war on terror has been defined as a problem requiring a military solution, the seeming disdain in which those in uniform hold civilians is troubling. The U.S. military will likely remain the principal agency of battle in the War on Terror. The use of force is as much a symbolic decision as a strategic one; institutionally, the armed forces must be representative of the nation. In Iraq, where we are simultaneously liberators and conquerors, sergeants and junior officers on countless street corners throughout the country make diplomacy. What those individuals do is taken by Iraqis to be a tangible—and representative—symbol of American policy.

The Power of Symbols

The United States has tried to define its mission in Iraq as liberation rather than conquest and occupation. As a prewar realist, I would have told students that the difference is moot. Iraq, posing a strategic threat to core U.S. interests, must be dealt with. Nothing I have seen in Iraq, however, suggests to me that there was a strategic threat, lending further credence to my belief that my models must incorporate the ideational aspect of foreign policy. Moreover, the fact that the United States invests such effort in defining our mission here as one thing rather than another shows that image is meaningful. In general, I consider myself more liberator than occupier. It has been my good fortune to have worked closely with several dozen Iraqi contract laborers.¹³

This evidence of the power of symbols accelerated the transformation of my materialist understanding of political science to one that includes ideational content. It became clear to me that my training had largely overlooked the power of symbols, norms, and ideas, and that as a result my own understanding had been impoverished. And here I saw vividly the divide between theory and practice, between political science and politics. The politics of liberation (or conquest) were less important to them then was the symbolic meaning of the terms themselves. These men do not claim to have been liberated. My guess (though I could not express this in my pidgin Arabic) is that there is simply too much symbolic content to the word “liberation.” Perhaps the word suggests that Iraqis were incapable of taking care of themselves or that in allowing themselves to be “captured” they failed in some way. We achieved a military victory. But by insisting that we are liberators, we begin to alienate the very people we hoped to free. Their cautionary note for me is that a military victory can still be a political defeat in the battle of ideas.

Here I must apologize for indulging in the kind of ad hoc orientalism that prevails in the army, but I am not yet sufficiently distant from events to clarify my thinking on this point. I have observed that many Arabs invest greater significance in the meaning of an act than in its content. I traveled frequently to Kuwait to do business for the army, and as a result number among my counterparts men from Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Each believes that the United States has failed to win the peace in Iraq on purely symbolic grounds. None deny the tactical victory of 2003. None deny the material and economic superiority of the United States over both the Saddam Hussein regime and the insurgent forces now arrayed against us. They argue that material considerations are beside the point, because the insurgents have more powerful symbols.

As an army, we explicitly recognize the importance of symbols. In combat we protect mosques even though it may make tactical sense to attack them. It takes little imagination to gauge the meaning that Muslim audiences would attach to footage on Aljazeera of GIs entering a mosque. The symbolic damage would far outweigh the tactical advantage. Likewise, speeches about our respect for Islam are rendered moot by images of male soldiers searching female Iraqis and by the images of sexual abuse of Muslim prisoners by American military intelligence and military police.¹⁴

I am not sanguine about the future of democracy in Iraq so long as we seek to mold Iraq's institutions. I do not believe that any institutions in this country will be considered legitimate unless Iraqis create them; anything else will smack of colonialism and occupation, rather than liberation. As a result, one question continues to occur to me: What kind of democracy are we willing to accept in Iraq? As a teacher, do I account Operation Iraqi Freedom a success or failure if we see a return to authoritarianism or movement toward what Tocqueville called “democratic despotism?”¹⁵

Power, Hard and Soft

Operation Iraqi Freedom began as an exercise in hard power, the “brute force coercion” that Thomas Schelling described in Arms and Influence.¹⁶

The conventional definition of soft power is considerably broader than the one I use here. It is usually defined as power that is “not hard.” To differentiate soft power conceptually, I operationalize it by using popular culture as a proxy, because pop culture is the most visible manifestation of American soft power. Indeed, popular culture is the form of soft power most threatening to (for example) Islamic traditionalists, who are offended by its seeming promotion of sexual and social liberty. Though the concept of soft power is intuitively appealing, particularly to Americans who have a comparative advantage in it, I question its analytic and practical utility.¹⁷

Soft power is undeniable in the Middle East, particularly in Kuwait. The Middle East version of MTV pays more than subtle homage to its North American progenitor; prior to deploying, I was unaware that there is such a thing as Arabic hip-hop. Given that MTV's target audience is also the prime demographic for military recruiters, one has ample opportunities to watch MTV's Mideast and subcontinent broadcasts on military installations. I have observed, however, that American styles—in clothing, in singing, in film and editing technique—are readily incorporated into local traditions. An Arab pop video is likely to include Britney Spears–like routines based upon traditional dance forms. Though electronic and synthesized, the musical forms themselves are Arab, not American. At the risk of conceptual overreach, it appears to me that soft power can be readily co-opted; al Qaeda is as much a virtual presence on the Web as is Amazon.com. To put it another way, “Bollywood” is not homage—it is competition. Consequently, I question the degree to which we should expect soft power to produce practical influence, that is, influence that produces visible political outcomes. Over the long term, soft power might make audiences more receptive to things American. In the near term (and as a form of national power), soft power seems ineffective in a world where guns still rule.