Ethical Militarism

Earlier this week, British Defense Secretary John Reid gave a speech to students of the War Studies Department at King's College London. No questions were permitted after the speech, but the minister did deign to mingle with a pre-screened audience of Masters students afterwards. Putting to one side the hyperbole comparing Al Qaeda to the Nazis, the speech proved an interesting snapshot of contemporary British strategic thinking.

The speech comes in the aftermath of the publication of a videotape, recorded by a British soldier serving in Basra a few years ago, showing British troops beating unarmed Iraqi teenagers. Attempting to stem the outrage in the British media, Reid used his speech to call upon the public to show more understanding and less instantaneous condemnation of the 'deeply ethical professional body' that is the British Army. 'Ethical foreign policy', one of the ideological pillars of Tony Blair's first administration (similarly with President Clinton), now seems to have been consolidated in the ethical waging of war under Reid's stewardship of Britain's armed forces. This shift, from legitimizing military power in terms of national interests, to justifying military power by reference to its ethical ends such as human rights, is striking - far more striking than all the technological changes on the battlefield that Reid invokes in his speech.

While the language of 'ethics' jars with the brutality and illegitimacy of the US and British presence in Iraq, there is something more deeply troubling here than mere hypocrisy. For justifying the exercise of power through ethics is asking us to judge power not on the outcome of policy, but on the purity of the motives behind it. Reid's call for media self-restraint makes sense from the viewpoint of ethics: for who can doubt that Tony Blair has anything but the best of intentions? Nor is this unique to the UK. Bush has similarly rejected criticism on such issues as Abu Ghraib, absence of weapons of mass destruction, and the chaos in Iraq, on the grounds that his intentions were pure. Political critique is here rendered redundant or transformed into a question of personal character, in which opponents are forced to guess at the inner motives of politicians.

This ethical politics is extremely narcissistic. From the viewpoint of the ethical diplomat, be it Tony Blair, John Reid, or George W. Bush, human suffering exists only in so far as it can be exploited, not in the instrumental service of a higher good, but to demonstrate the 'beautiful soul' of the statesman himself. This means, perversely, that this ethically-motivated politics is ultimately indifferent to human suffering. The use of ethics as the justification for militarism exposes the political meaninglessness of the Iraq War: British and American leaders are fighting in Iraq in search of ethical redemption for themselves, rather than out of any real concern for the Iraqi people.