Book reviews → Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement (Scott Ritter)

Scott Ritter is a former Marine who worked on the planning for what would become Operation Desert Storm and later as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. His skepticism about the Dubya Squad’s claims of Saddam’s weapons-of-mass-destruction arsenal and his opposition to the Iraq War whiplashed him from being a Fox News expert commentator to a big name on the anti-war lecture circuit.

In March, 2006, he wrote a tough-love criticism of the American anti-war movement that I approvingly linked to. It read, in part:

It is high time for the anti-war movement to take a collective look in the mirror, and be honest about what they see. A poorly organized, chaotic, and indeed often anarchic conglomeration of egos, pet projects and idealism that barely constitutes a “movement,” let alone a winning cause.… The anti-war movement lacks any notion of strategic thinking, operational planning, or sense of sound tactics.… The anti-war movement needs to study the philosophies of those who have mastered the art of conflict, from Caesar to Napoleon, from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz.

He now has a book out, Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement, that expands on this criticism and on his program for improvement.

The book, unfortunately, doesn’t add much to his original argument that needs hearing. It’s slim: fewer than 200 pages, and fully half of those pages are filler:

63 pages are devoted to reprinting the complete text of the U.S. Constitution (including the full list of signatories) and of the U.N. Charter — as though nobody knew how to look those up on-line
7 pages reprint the article I linked to above
10 pages are blank
20 pages are title / copyright / table-of-contents / index / throat-clearing
That leaves fewer than 100 pages of meat, even if you include the two diagrams and the sometimes lengthy quotes from other sources

It’s really a magazine article-sized argument that’s been puffed up to fit in a book.

And the argument, though it has moments of insight, for the most part seems silly and unrealistic. Ritter imagines the U.S. anti-war / progressive / peace & justice movements becoming effective by uniting under a national organization (perhaps, he suggests, the “National Concerned Citizens Activism Association”) that defines its operational terminology, organizes and trains much in the manner of FEMA, makes the defense of the U.S. Constitution its core value, and organizes in a hierarchy in which people obtain ranks such as Activist Ⅰ, Activist Ⅱ, and so forth according to their training and skills so that they can be assigned and deployed as their leaders see fit.

I somehow can’t see that happening. Furthermore, Ritter’s love for the Constitution strikes me as bizarre. He sees making the Constitution the anti-war movement’s core value as a way for the movement to reconnect with regular Joe America (he asks the reader to imagine how a message will play with, say, someone on your neighborhood volunteer fire department):

The Constitution, like the soul of America, lies discarded and trampled by those who would seek to hijack the promise of America for their own self-serving purposes… If progressives are truly interested in waging peace, and fighting to win then they will pick up the banner of the Constitution and claim it as their own, and make their rallying cry, one that is derived from the very essence of that which defines this great nation.… [This] would be extremely attractive to mainstream America, the battle for whose support the ideological struggle for the future of America hinges on.

But in the paragraph before this, Ritter laments that most Americans know nothing about the Constitution, and hardly any have “read, comprehended, and absorbed into one’s daily life the ideals and values set forth” therein. These ideals and values, Ritter says, “define who we are and what we are” and so “[i]f you haven’t read the Constitution (and it appears that most Americans have not), then you’re not a functioning American.”

How is the anti-war movement supposed to make any ground with middle America by appealing to them about a document they only know of by legend? And what is going to keep the pro-war establishment from appealing to it just as effectively? Like that other great literary rallying point, the Bible, it doesn’t seem to matter too much what’s actually written down in it — there’s sure to be a plausible interpretation that suits any propaganda needs. Indeed, don’t all of the politicians who gave us the Iraq war and all of the troops who carried it out swear to defend the Constitution as their core value?

Considering how rhapsodically Ritter waxes over the Constitution, I have to wonder whether he’s read it. In truth, it’s not a very inspiring document. It’s a boring org chart in paragraphs for the most part. You have to have a lot of imagination to be inspired by it or to think that it could “define who we are and what we are.”

The anti-war movement could certainly stand to take itself and its goals more seriously. Scott Ritter’s insights in this regard, if condensed and collected onto both sides of a single sheet of paper, would still be legible and valuable.

“[M]odern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.”
―William James

I’ve been slowly working my way through a collection of essays by William James, and today I want to do something that I’ve been putting off for a long time, which is to wrestle a bit with his essay on The Moral Equivalent of War.

If you haven’t read this, go ahead and follow the link and give it a shot. It’s a pretty quick read and it’s got the clarity and wit that’s typical of James’s writing, and suffers only a little bit from its age (it is from around 1908, I believe).

But if you’re impatient, or if it’s been a while, I’ll give you a two-sentence, paraphrased summary:

I agree with the “pacificists” that war must be abolished, but I think we are going about it the wrong way. It is important for us to recognize the positive virtues of war and of the military — both so that we may understand the mindset that supports them and, more crucially, so that we may invent an alternative institution that might support those virtues in the absence of war and the threat of war.

By the positive virtues of war, James doesn’t mean the potential gains of military victory: vanquishing a threatening enemy, claiming the spoils, striking fear into other rivals, that sort of thing. He means the way war strengthens attributes of the individual characters of the people (that is to say: men) who take part in it — fortitude, endurance, courage, heartiness, and other such things — and of the civic character of the nations that go to war — pride, selfless collective effort, patriotic obedience, that sort of stuff.

Non-pacifists, James posits, are dismissive of the pacifist position because they imagine that in the absence of war and the inevitable subsequent atrophying of the military institution, the nation would dissolve into a porridge of decadent, feminine milquetoasts with no sense of noble sacrifice or ideals worth struggling for.

I understand that James is trying to exercise the maximum of sympathy for the warrior perspective as a rhetorical technique — “to enter more deeply into [their] aesthetical and ethical point of view [so as to] move the point” — but his romanticization of war and the military is so over-the-top as to almost seem like parody, at least today. Maybe before World War Ⅰ, one could have such views without embarrassment, but they strike me as the sort of things people who haven’t had much contact with war or with soldiers outside of parades and memorial services and popular novels like to daydream about.

Take the bit from the first paragraph where he asks whether people would, if they could choose, vote to undo the whole of the American Civil War and replace it with a history in which the same effects were accomplished peacefully. No, he insists, they would not, for the Civil War is “the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out.” Well, to the people whose blood didn’t pour, maybe! Let the dead vote too and then make the tally!

The whole thing is revoltingly state-worshipping too. “All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs him.” “We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly.” Shoo, fly, don’t bother me, for I belong to somebody!

So I wasn’t able to take James very seriously. His solution, such as it is, is for us to invent a sort of mimic of the military institution and use it to conscript the youth (or the boys, at least) of the nation to do battle not against each other but against nature in ways that are equally vigorous and daunting and subject to authoritarian discipline, but don’t involve the repulsive evils of war.

This all reminded me much of Scott Ritter’s Waging Peace which I panned here a few years ago. He too thought the peace movement ought to organize itself along military lines and get down to brass tacks.

Not only do I think even less of Scott Ritter’s book now that I see it as partially-derived from James’s (better) essay, but I’ve also lost some of my respect for A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic which I had been much more enthusiastic about. A lot of what I thought were the innovative and bold underpinnings of Ayer’s assault on philosophy turned out to have been explicitly laid out in William James’s works on pragmatism much earlier.