Letter to The Nation in response to Howard Zinn (Winter, 2002)
Howard Zinn does an admirable job in "The Others" (Feb. 11, 2002) of showing that the military campaign in Afghanistan has had a terrible impact on civilians caught in the fighting. He also contributes usefully to the argument that the U.S. media has generally downplayed the severity of this impact. (Though he occasionally overstates his case. It is one thing to say that details of deaths need to be gleaned from "scattered news reports" and entirely another to claim that Americans have "no access to alternative information"—especially when he has just finished quoting from the mainstream press.)
But Zinn also wants to make a larger point against the war, and his argument for this fails. Zinn believes that the war would lose popular support if civilian deaths were more widely publicized. As a factual claim this seems questionable, and Zinn offers no evidence to support it. His one attempt—an allusion to discontent with the war in Vietnam— collapses immediately on inspection. The war in Vietnam was premised on an obviously flawed assessment of American interests and waged on behalf of a corrupt military dictatorship. How can Zinn compare this with the attacks on September 11th, in which a large number of American civilians were brutally and deliberately attacked? Moreover, it is pointless in this context to invoke a crude symmetry in the deaths so far on either side. U.S. actions are based partly on the plausible assumption that bin Laden would have continued to target large numbers of Americans in the future.
Zinn clearly also means to suggest that the deaths are morally repugnant in addition to being tragic—not just that we would be moved to abandon the war by more exposure to civilian deaths, but that we should be. But this, too, is debatable.
First, it isn't clear whether or not Zinn believes that these deaths are an unavoidable consequence of any military action in Afghanistan, even if the greatest care is taken by military planners to avoid them. He insinuates, without providing much in the way of evidence, that the military is simply being careless. But if this is so—and it may be—it only establishes that we should lobby the military to be more careful, not that we should lobby against any war effort whatsoever.
But suppose a certain level of civilian deaths are unavoidable, however much care military planners take. Would the war be justifiable in this case? Zinn makes things easy for himself by avoiding this question. But it seems that in this case the moral status of the war would depend on whether or not it is ever permissible to pursue a course of action which will result in unintended but foreseeable deaths. (It depends, in other words, on the status of what moral philosophers call the "doctrine of double effect"). When Zinn attacks, and someone like Hitchens defends, the war the arguments usually get going by either implicitly accepting or rejecting this principle.
It is a particularly depressing feature of commentary on the war that this point goes largely unmentioned. It is more common, on both sides of the debate, for commentators to brood over a set of civilian deaths (ours or theirs) and then assume that policy recommendations follow uncontroversially from a full appreciation of their horror. Zinn is right that the war is truly horrible. But we need more than platitudes about a "universal morality" to arrive at an honest moral assessment of the war.
Chris Young
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