Last week I traded e-mails with National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru; Ponnuru challenged in print the West's traditional justification for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wary of the acts' implications for this war.
Ponnuru's replies were brief, indicative of the author's distinguished clarity; and limited time and obligation to make generous conversation with me, one of many, many readers. But I reprint the conversation for what the article and our exchange of letters suggests about rightists: that while we are hardly uniphonous we are absolutist and concurrent enough to recognize the presence of truths to which men attempt to adhere in policy and conduct. On the right is discourse for the application, not the invention, of natural law; that discourse is a refuge for constructive disagreements.
My first letter criticized a single sentence in Ponnuru's article: "The war crimes of Japanese soldiers are not a good reason to kill a child in Nagasaki." Such a selection was narrow but not unfair, the sentence a perfectly succinct thesis statement. So I wrote:
Not directly, no, but no serious supporter of the atomic bombings argues that. What the Rising Sun's conquest, massacres and destruction warranted was a good reason not to refrain from measures intended to stop Japan — simply on account of potential civilian deaths. Imperial brutality towards Japanese citizens and those living in occupied territories was shockingly exponential to Japanese losses from Allied attacks. Prolonging the war a day by sparing that child in Nagasaki meant dead children elsewhere in the Empire. Where is the moral authority in choosing to spectate before mass murder?
He replied:
That's to embrace a purely utilitarian view — that it's okay to deliberately target civilians whenever you can assume that you're saving more lives. The traditional distinction between acts and omissions is abandoned. As I noted, that's not the way we usually reason about justice in war.
I wrote:
Consider, though, that it is just as utilitarian (and ultimately relativist) to leave intact other systems, circumstances and governments daily engaged in the killing of innocents because one does not want to be directly responsible for civilian death — even if it means those other killings continue indefinitely.In the decades following the end of the Second World War, particularly the last years of the Cold War, active concern for foreign indigents became a central variable in the West's moral calculus; the incredible and ever-increasing amount of Third World aid dispensed by a handful of wealthy nations today is sound testimony. Now, while that does not overrule traditional reasoning about justice in war, it does influence it; to the point where the culpability of omission is increasingly equated with the culpability of act, whether ethics departments are teaching it that way or not. Constructive conversations about Iraq between "left" and "right," like, say, Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson, are often dominated by reflection on what was gained and lost by omission between 1991 and 2003. We still smart, I think, over what omission brought to places like 1944 Warsaw and 1956 Budapest.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (even LeMay's firebombing) are, of course, potentially more troubling because of the certitude and magnitude of killing involved but the costs of inaction — given the capabilities, intentions and history of militarist Japan — still add up to something far greater.
He replied:
Omissions can be morally culpable, but not in the same way that acts are. We are not responsible for the crimes of Saddam's regime from 1990-2003 the way we would be had we committed them ourselves. Nor are we responsible in that way for the crimes of all the regimes we have not toppled.
I wrote:
True, we cannot be held responsible for the actions of others, and especially so since anti-nationalists and other relativists wrongly blame Western democratic powers for a given dictator's atrocities before turning round to blame Western democratic powers for the inevitably difficult situation following a military or political deposition of that dictator. But though the culpability may be different, the moral defeat of dereliction can easily approach that of transgression.Rwanda would be a fine example. As would — on a much smaller scale, and even though I supported the decision of American command — leaving Fallujah in the hands of terrorists for about six months last year. The omission, significantly motivated by apprehension over potentially high numbers of civilian deaths in the Jolan neighborhood, left residents to be kidnapped, violated and murdered in conspicuous numbers.
When one is thought damned if he does or doesn't, in the democratic waging of war it is most often that by doing he ends what he could not have by not doing — and by not doing he would indeed be damned, and probably forced to eventually do whatever he had not. Cue Churchill.
On National Review's Corner, Ponnuru informed colleagues of his desire to continue developing his argument. My position stands — but so does my respect and interest.