Enough Said

He handles great subjects in rhythmical language, and becomes quickly enslaved by his own phrases. He deceives himself into the belief that he takes broad views, when his mind is fixed upon one comparatively small aspect of the question.

War is the greatest test of the rhetor. Convincing a country to go to war or rallying a people’s courage and optimism during the course of that war depends on your ability to persuade those who are listening to you to risk sacrificing themselves and their children for some wider public purpose. It is words against life and limb.

The need for length and detail as you explain the justification of the war; the simultaneous need for brevity and emotional impact; authenticity, rationality, authority; the search for a persuasiveness that does not—cannot—sound anything like marketing given the blood and treasure that are at stake; everything we have discussed so far in this book comes together when we consider the rhetoric of war. The scale of the challenge is the reason why so many of history’s famous speeches, from Pericles’ oration for the Athenian dead to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to Churchill’s speeches and radio addresses during Britain’s struggle for national survival in 1940–1941, are concerned with war—its necessity, its nobility, its terrible cost. So too many of the best-known passages of rhetoric in fiction, from Henry V at Agincourt to Aragorn in front of the Black Gate in The Lord of the Rings.

The wars we have fought in recent years may not compare in scale to the cataclysms of the first half of the twentieth century, but they have presented political and rhetorical challenges nonetheless. The justification for war has characteristically been more disputed and the wars themselves less decisive, early gains giving way to stalemate, recriminations at home, and uncertain outcomes. Even relatively low-risk, initially popular interventions—no troops on the ground, aerial bombardment only—have had a habit of turning sour. Hospitals get bombed. The local good guys turn out to be not quite so good. And after all the time and money and heartache: success of a kind in a handful of cases; in others, anarchy and the metastasis of the very threat we went to war to eliminate.

Then there are the shadow wars, the wars and actions we didn’t fight but that some claim we should have: to halt the slaughter of innocents in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Syria; to stop Iran getting the bomb; to help the Ukrainians fight off the Russians. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t—the damnation sometimes coming from the same critics.

Protesters against a given military intervention often claim that their country’s leaders have embarked on it for personal political advantage or vainglory—a charge that has been enthusiastically echoed in novels and movies at least since War and Peace. We all have our own views about the leaders and wars of our lifetime. What we do know is that, with the exceptions of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands, and George H. W. Bush, John Major, and the other leaders of the coalition that successfully fought the Gulf War in 1990–91, any Western leader of the last thirty years who hoped that military action would improve his or her reputation has been sadly disappointed. In recent decades, war has been more likely to shred a leader’s reputation than to rescue it.

So what role does our troubled public language play in this most fraught area of public policy? Let’s begin with a benchmark:

You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.1

It’s May 13, 1940. Winston Churchill has been prime minister of the United Kingdom for three days. This is his first speech to the House of Commons as the nation’s leader. It is also day four of the German invasion of northern France. As Churchill speaks, the French defense is breaking at Sedan. Dunkirk is less than two weeks away.

This passage of Churchill’s speech has the structural clarity of a sonnet, or a prayer. There are two parts—stanzas, I want to call them—the first asking and answering the question “What is our policy?,” the second the question “What is our aim?” The first is controlled by the repeated word “war,” the second by the repeated “victory,” though perhaps the single most important word in the entire passage is the one everything else builds up to, the last one: “survival.” The extract is rich in technical rhetorical effect: anacoenosis (rhetorical question); alliteration (wage war, that God can give us); enumeratio (listing first the ways the war must be fought, then the challenges that must be faced before victory can be secured); tricolon crescens (those three victory clauses that progressively grow in both length and emphasis). Yet it never feels studied or contrived, but immediate, unforced, fluid; the repetition, alliteration, and the short, spare clauses driving both the speaker and listeners forward.

There’s one phrase—the “monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime”—that reminds us of the orotundity that even Churchill’s contemporaries found old-fashioned and pompous. In this context it is reassuring, Churchill the autodidact weighing the present threat in the scales of the past and assuring us that on this occasion, at least, the moral stakes are as clear as day.

And that’s what strikes us most about this passage, and about the “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech as a whole. It is not, first and foremost, a moral call to arms. Churchill is rallying the Commons and the nation in the face of a real-world emergency. The enemy is racing across France toward the Channel. Invasion and national destruction are not distant rhetorical threats, but in imminent prospect. Yet the moral imperative is so congruent with the contingent emergency, the enemy so clearly in the wrong, that the language of should and must, of ethical and practical necessity, are one. It is a moment in time—Churchill, as we shall see, was no angel when it came to rhetoric—but it is magnificent.

What a long shadow that clarity casts. How difficult for any subsequent prime minister to stand at the Despatch Box to make a case for war that combines national self-interest and moral necessity so seamlessly.

Let’s listen to one trying. The location is again the House of Commons, the date is March 18, 2003, and Tony Blair is opening the debate into whether Britain should join the United States and other allies in invading Iraq:

At the outset, I say that it is right that the House debate this issue and pass judgment. That is the democracy that is our right, but that others struggle for in vain. Again, I say that I do not disrespect the views in opposition to mine. This is a tough choice indeed, but it is also a stark one: to stand British troops down now and turn back, or to hold firm to the course that we have set. I believe passionately that we must hold firm to that course.2

There is a gracious tone to this, and indeed to the whole of the speech: an acknowledgment that, as Blair states a few sentences later, “people who agree on everything else, disagree on this,” while “those who never agree on anything” find “common cause.” In these opening words we hear moral argument at once: whereas in the United Kingdom people have the right to question and debate everything the government proposes, the citizens of Iraq are not so lucky. Next, there is the recognition that this is a “tough choice,” not in the Churchillian sense of a decision which, although straightforward in itself, will require sacrifices in its execution, but a choice which is difficult to make. It is also a “stark” choice: either to “stand British troops down now and turn back” or to “hold firm to the course that we have set.”

But who are we? Well, this we, the we who have set the course so far, is clearly Tony Blair himself and his government. But then he goes on to say: “I believe passionately that we must hold firm.” The second we includes not just his government but also his listeners—everyone who will be voting in the Commons and, by extension, the nation. It’s easy to miss the distinction and to hear the following meaning: We-everyone must hold firm to the course that we-everyone have already set. One way of persuading a reluctant audience to make a painful decision is to convince them that they have essentially already made it, and that to refuse it now would involve an illogical and dangerous climbdown. The blurring of we-government and we-people helps Tony Blair establish this implicit context.

The simplicity and power of “I believe passionately that we must hold firm” stands out, though. There’s no hint of machismo: indeed, the words “hold firm” imply defense—of Britain and the world’s security—rather than attack. The “I believe” is important too. This is a statement by the leader of a government, but it is also explicitly a personal endorsement. Knowing how divided his party and the country are, Tony Blair lays his political judgment and reputation on the line. Like Churchill, Blair has practical policies and aims to lay out, but he makes it clear that this is also a question of personal resolve or the lack of it, and a question of principle.

But the case he has to set out is far more complex and nuanced than Winston Churchill’s. It’s a tale not of a direct attack on British allies and forces and—who knows?—soon the British homeland, but an interminable saga of UN resolutions and weapons inspectors and diplomatic maneuverings. The questions it seeks to answer are not as simple as What is our policy? or What is our aim? but Have we exhausted all diplomatic ways of ensuring that Saddam Hussein complies with Resolution 1441? and Are the consequences of his noncompliance so serious that they justify the use of force against him? Tony Blair, of course, will answer a firm yes to both of these abstruse questions.

Nonetheless, in the midst of this painstaking exposition, the ghost of Churchill makes an appearance. Is Saddam Hussein another Adolf Hitler? Are those who oppose the war in 2003 like the appeasers of the 1930s? Tony Blair’s answer is a subtle one. He protects himself by dismissing what he calls “glib and foolish comparisons with the 1930s” and states explicitly that “no one here is an appeaser,” but then immediately goes on to talk about 1930s appeasement at some length. He claims that those arguing against military intervention today are different from their predecessors in an important respect: whereas the appeasers may not have realized how dangerous Hitler was, their modern equivalents have no such excuse, given Saddam Hussein’s undisputed record of aggression and WMD development. Then he adds this Churchillian thought: “The world has to learn all over again that weakness in the face of a threat from a tyrant, is the surest way not to peace but—unfortunately—to conflict.”

The reference to the 1930s is unmissable. But the present situation was quite different. The West had already fought one war against Saddam and imposed stringent conditions and sanctions on him after it. There had certainly been a lively debate about those sanctions—with some arguing that they were too harsh and others that they were unlikely to be effective no matter how hard they were—but there had been no equivalent of the Western inaction that greeted Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, annexation of Austria, and invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the case of Saddam, it was impossible to argue that the forces of appeasement had had the upper hand in Western policy. In any event, it’s absurd to suggest that the “surest way” to war is not to fight one. The surest way to war is simply to go to war, which is exactly what Tony Blair is now proposing.

Eighty years on, hindsight, revisionism, and modern skepticism have done little to blunt or tarnish the impact of Winston Churchill’s rhetoric. Around a decade and a half after he delivered it, it is impossible to read Tony Blair’s speech in the way it was intended to be heard at the time. His argument rests centrally—indeed, almost exclusively—on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and the manifold dangers they pose: direct danger to his neighbors and the Middle East and, if the terrorists with whom he colludes get their hands on them, to us; and indirect danger, because if we don’t take on Saddam and neutralize his weapons, other bad regimes will keep or acquire weapons of their own. The term “weapons of mass destruction” appears fourteen times in the speech, and individual WMD—VX, anthrax, mustard gas, sarin, botulinum toxin, radiological bombs—many more times.

None of them were ever found. We all know that now. And that knowledge eviscerates the speech. To us now, it is a speech without a foundation, a speech almost literally about nothing—but a speech that nonetheless led to a war. This is not to reach a verdict about whether or not the speech was delivered in good faith—in other words, whether Tony Blair himself believed at the time that Saddam had WMD. It is simply to say that what we might call the objective moral justification set out for going to war has disintegrated utterly.

In his passage about the 1930s, Tony Blair suggested that we shouldn’t blame the appeasers because it was only later that the scale of the menace of Hitler became clear. But now we have to confront the opposite revelation. In this case, it was only later that it became apparent how much smaller the threat of Saddam was than Tony Blair had claimed at the time. Once it became clear that the WMD didn’t exist, other reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein would be adduced—that he was a tyrant and a mass murderer, that he destabilized the region, that a democratic Iraq could be a force for good in the Middle East—but they do not form a significant part of the prime minister’s case for going to war at the point when the decision had to be made. We may or may not believe that Tony Blair presented a knowingly false prospectus. But there is no question that his argument rested on a false premise.

The most memorable peroration of that week was the resignation speech given the day before by Tony Blair’s Labour colleague Robin Cook, who had decided to leave the cabinet over the issue of Iraq. Cook laid out his argument drily enough, but the sadness in his voice and the foreboding in his face gave his exposition a tragic weight. This is how he ended:

It has been a favourite theme for commentators that this House no longer occupies a central role in British politics. Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for this House to stop the commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support. I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.3

At ten o’clock the following evening, the House of Commons voted 412 to 149 to go to war. The invasion began two days later.

Despite the quality of the debate, the “commentators” whom Robin Cook had been so keen to prove wrong had a point. To all intents and purposes, the question of Iraq had been decided long before the motion was laid before the House, and the principal rhetorical instruments that Tony Blair’s government had used to make its case, and to satisfy itself that it had sufficient political and public support to proceed, were not parliamentary speeches but summaries of the intelligence in the government’s possession about Saddam’s alleged secret weapons. In the media, these summaries were called dossiers, a word that, at least in a British tabloid newsroom, conjured up a lost world of spies and stolen papers, Tintin, and The Riddle of the Sands.

One of these had been published around six weeks before the parliamentary debate. This so-called “February Dossier” was immediately discredited—part of it turned out to have been plagiarized from a PhD thesis that was itself more than a decade old. Commissioned by Tony Blair’s communications director Alastair Campbell, it did the government’s campaign to win support for the invasion no good at all.

But there had been an earlier dossier—the “September Dossier” or, more soberly, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government—which had been published the previous autumn and was regarded at the time of the Commons vote as altogether more authoritative. MPs who voted in favor of the motion, and members of the public who supported the government’s position, did so to a significant degree because they found this first dossier persuasive. Within a couple of months, though, they would be asking themselves if it was as suspect as the other, and if they themselves had been victims of a confidence trick.

On May 22, 2003, some nine weeks into the invasion, two men met for an abstemious drink (one Coke and one Appletiser) at the Charing Cross Hotel in central London. They were Dr. David Kelly, a WMD expert working within Britain’s Ministry of Defence, and Andrew Gilligan, a journalist from the BBC’s Today program. They’d met several times before; Kelly was the key source in an investigation Gilligan was carrying out into the British government’s public claims about Iraqi WMD. Gilligan made some notes on the meeting in his electronic organizer:

the classic was the 45 mins. mst thngs inndossier wre dbl sc but that was single-source. one source said it took 4 minutes to set up a missile assembly, that was misinterpreted . .

most people in intel werent happy with it, because it didnt refect the considere view they were putting forward

Most of Gilligan’s digital shorthand is easy to translate. Dr. Kelly told the journalist that the draft of the first dossier on WMD had been “transformed” during the week before it was published to make it “sexier,” meaning more impactful and frightening, and therefore more persuasive. As we’ve seen, Aristotle’s rather less steamy term for the same rhetorical impulse is amplification. An example is the suggestion that Saddam’s chemical weapons could be deployed at only forty-five minutes’ notice and, because he also possessed medium-range missiles, could be used to attack British military bases in Cyprus in that time frame: this improbable claim had given some newspapers their headlines when the dossier was published. The claim hadn’t been in the original draft, Gilligan recorded Kelly as saying, because it was based on a single intelligence source and the experts were doubtful about it, but Alastair Campbell had thought that earlier draft was “dull” and had asked if anything could be added to beef it up. During the subsequent inquiry into the affair conducted by Lord Hutton, Andrew Gilligan himself explained the densest passage: “Campbell … real info but unr, incl against ur wishes” means “Campbell: real information but unreliable, included against our wishes.”5

Andrew Gilligan used this and other conversations with David Kelly as the basis for an interview and subsequent reports on the Today program on May 29, in which he made a number of specific allegations about the government and the dossier. He said that he had learned that the dossier had been changed “at the behest of Downing Street.” As for that forty-five-minute claim, “What we’ve been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier was that actually the Government probably, erm, knew that that forty-five minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in.” The “erm” that follows “probably”—itself an attempt to take the edge off the accusation—is one of the most fateful hesitations in the history of journalism.

Crazily, given the gravity of the charges that he was making, Andrew Gilligan was speaking in a live, unscripted radio interview with an anchor and was deciding how to express his story as he went along. He didn’t have to allege that the government knew that the forty-five-minute claim was wrong and seemed a little uncertain about whether he should do so, but ended up doing it anyway. Put together with his “at the behest of Downing Street,” the meaning was inescapable: Tony Blair and/or those immediately around him had knowingly distorted the September dossier to strengthen their public case.

The government reacted with fury to Gilligan’s charge. Their response was couched in mangled English but it had a lawyer’s vulpine precision: “Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies.” Although this sounds like a comprehensive denial, it in fact fails to answer the Kelly-Gilligan charge: Downing Street could have cajoled and bullied the authors of the dossier into radically altering the text, adding intelligence they thought was unreliable and insisting that caveats be removed, without adding a single phrase or new idea of their own.

The war of words had begun. David Kelly informed his bosses at the Ministry of Defence that he had met Andrew Gilligan but said he did not believe he was the journalist’s main source. They leaked enough information for the press to be able to identify him anyway. He was then subjected to an ugly televised interrogation by a Select Committee of MPs. He told them he had not said the things Andrew Gilligan had reported, and they accepted his word. Nonetheless, he appeared extremely anxious. Shortly afterward, he took his own life.

Now the prime minister’s own reputation—and quite possibly his job—was on the line, and the Kelly-Gilligan affair became the biggest running story in the UK, bigger even than the invasion of Iraq itself for many months.

To observers at the time, Kelly-Gilligan was a battle about politics and journalism. We can also see it as a battle about rhetoric. Andrew Gilligan’s charge was that the first dossier was a piece of deliberately reckless rhetoric—the government had been so eager to persuade the public that they had exaggerated what they knew, removing qualifications and presenting snippets of quite possibly erroneous intelligence as if they were facts. In other words, that they were guilty of doing to the first dossier many of the things I have claimed that contemporary politicians do to other expressions of public language.

The government’s counterattack also turned on a claim about rhetoric. They effectively charged that Andrew Gilligan had himself been guilty of amplification, by adding an unsubstantiated accusation that they had knowingly falsified the dossier to make his story more impactful. Yes, it might be true that David Kelly and some of the other weapons experts in the MoD had had their doubts about the dossier, but establishing that did not prove the more heroic allegation that the distorting had been done on purpose. Like canny plaintiffs in a defamation action, they hoped to win the broader reputational fight by picking away at what they took to be the weakest point in Gilligan’s story.

The government chose Brian Hutton, a senior judge who had made his reputation hearing terrorist cases in Northern Ireland, to hold an inquiry into the Kelly-Gilligan affair. Lord Hutton’s inquiry soon zeroed in on the electronic record of that consequential meeting at the Charing Cross Hotel. Here is some of Andrew Gilligan’s testimony:

Q: Then there is the entry which is just a single word, “Campbell.” Was there any question that gave rise to that entry?

A: Well I was surprised and I said: What, you know, Campbell made it up? They made it up? And he said: No, it was real information but it was unreliable and it was in the dossier against our wishes.

LORD HUTTON: May I just ask you, Mr Gilligan, looking at the first paragraph, you put the question: Was it to make it sexier? And Dr Kelly replied: Yes, to make it sexier?

LORD HUTTON: Now are you clear in your recollection that you asked how was it transformed, and that the name Campbell was first spoken by Dr Kelly?

A: No, it was him. He raised the subject of the 45 minutes and he raised the subject of Campbell.6

So it was Gilligan rather than Kelly who had first used the word “sexier,” although Gilligan claimed that Kelly had accepted it (“Yes, to make it sexier”). On the other hand, Andrew Gilligan stubbornly maintained that it had been David Kelly, rather than he, who had first mentioned Alastair Campbell’s name. Although Andrew Gilligan had not referred to Tony Blair’s right-hand man in his broadcast reports, the fact that it was David Kelly who had first introduced Campbell’s name was crucial to his assertion in those reports that his source, that “senior official,” had confirmed that the government had deliberately changed the dossier.

But here too there was a question about journalistic sourcing. David Kelly had not witnessed Alastair Campbell asking for the dossier to be doctored; in fact, he had never met Alastair Campbell. Nor had he been in the room for any of the discussions between senior officials about its composition, nor seen any documentary evidence about it. David Kelly was an authoritative source about attitudes to the September dossier among WMD experts within the MoD. When it came to how the government might or might not have changed the dossier, he was just speculating. And of course—just like the government’s unreliable claim about the forty-five-minute warning—Gilligan’s story was “single source.”

Andrew Gilligan’s allegation of deliberate distortion was in effect a claim that he had found proof that the government had lied to the British public and gained support for a war on the basis of that lie. The implication of the allegation was lost on no one, and it explains why the government reacted to it with such anger. But on this point his source, so credible on other issues, wasn’t really a source at all.

The BBC told Lord Hutton’s inquiry that it acknowledged significant shortcomings in its journalism. The government acknowledged nothing at all. In his findings, Hutton came down entirely in favor of the government, but many, perhaps most, observers took and still take a different view. Even though Andrew Gilligan’s journalism was flawed, the broad thrust of his story—that the political imperative to present a compelling case had been allowed to influence the final version of the dossier—has become received wisdom. In the matter of reputation, the government won the battle but lost the war.

In an era when people distrust politicians’ words, the idea of presenting them with dispassionate bundles of facts—intelligence findings, satellite images, maps, and diagrams—has a practical appeal. If they are likely to doubt your rhetoric, why not let the evidence speak for itself? But once you make that supposedly dispassionate bundle your principal means of persuasion, all the techniques and temptations of rhetoric at once suggest themselves to you. We may never know for sure whether the intelligence community technocrats were cajoled or directed into sexing up the dossier, or whether the political purpose of the thing was so obvious that they didn’t need to be told. What we do know is that having made a show of taking rhetoric out of the picture, somebody somewhere decided to put it right back in again.

But rhetoric played a crucial role on the journalistic side of this story as well. Andrew Gilligan had an excellent and original story—one of the government’s own WMD experts rubbishing the content of the crucial dossier—but it wasn’t enough. There was a bigger prize: the possibility of delivering a full ad hominem blow by asserting that Tony Blair or someone very close to him had deliberately deceived the public by ordering that the evidence be distorted. Andrew Gilligan would later accept that his allegation, that the government probably knew that the forty-five-minute claim was wrong, was itself “insufficiently supported,” and that he hadn’t used “exactly the right language.” He excused himself by pointing out that he had been speaking in a live broadcast. But it is hard not to suspect that whether consciously or not, he too was tempted to do just what he was accusing the government of having done with the dossier, namely, to go with the stronger, clearer rhetorical line despite the gaps in the evidence.

I watched the Kelly-Gilligan drama unfold from the relative safety of Channel 4, but heard throughout from many of those involved on the BBC side, including the director-general, Greg Dyke. It was a brutal and depressing episode to watch even as a witness, marked by a gulf of culpable incomprehension and, on the government side, a vindictive unwillingness to find a way out even at the end. At its heart was the wholly unnecessary tragedy of David Kelly—a decent man who followed his conscience and was rewarded for his pains by being ground to destruction between the mills of the British establishment.

A pretext is a false explanation or justification one gives for some course of action because the real reason for the action is illegal or embarrassing, or is judged to be insufficiently persuasive in some other way. It is an illegitimate rhetorical tactic in which the speaker replaces the truth with a “better” argument.

To state the obvious, a pretext is a pretext only if the speaker is aware that the justification he is giving is false or seriously deficient. George W. Bush and Tony Blair would no doubt argue that their claims about Saddam’s WMD were not a pretext because they and their governments genuinely believed them at the time. Their critics might reply with a variant of Mandy Rice-Davies’s famous dictum: Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? This is why controversies about pretexts usually drag on for years. A politician wrongly accused of using a pretext will naturally deny it. But a politician who is justly accused of using one will also deny it. Unless you can get inside a given politician’s head, or find some documentary evidence that confirms whether she knew at the time that what she was saying was false or misleading, you’ll be hard-pressed to prove guilt or innocence.

If we step back, though, there’s a wider question: Why does the discussion of pretexts, real or alleged, turn up so regularly in the modern rhetoric of war? This is not a new phenomenon. Medieval magnates usually found some territorial, dynastic, or religious excuse, no matter how far-fetched, to justify a land grab or an attempt on the crown. Adolf Hitler routinely ordered “false flag” attacks against German targets—for instance, against the German radio station in Gleiwitz in August 1939 on the eve of his assault on Poland—so that he could claim that the subsequent onslaught was defensive rather than aggressive.

Today an angry debate about pretexts is the norm. It is telling that even such a flagrant act of unprovoked aggression as the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and other targets on 9/11 should now be the subject of multiple conspiracy theories that reinterpret the event as an act of mass murder that the US government, or the Israeli or Saudi government, or other shadowy forces allowed or caused to take place (LIHOP, let it happen on purpose, and MIHOP, make it happen on purpose, are the acronyms used for the two main schools of thought) as a pretext to justify the subsequent wars. Some theorists make similar claims about the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

If people can claim, and some credulous readers believe, that the attack on the US Navy in Hawaii, which involved thousands of Japanese sailors and airmen, hundreds of planes, and multiple aircraft carriers, was in fact a put-up job by the American government, it’s hardly surprising that less clear-cut modern wars—wars that are not a reaction to a direct attack but a response to aggression against an ally or an attempt to interdict a claimed future security threat—are endlessly parsed for pretexts.

But deep suspicion and the hunt for hidden motives is only one of the challenges the modern war orator faces. TV and the Internet have brought the horror of war home to any Western citizen with the stomach to watch. This is all the more true of today’s “asymmetric” wars, in which high-tech weaponry of immense destructive power is deployed against developing world enemies that operate in the midst of civilian populations. The inevitable direct and indirect human cost, not to mention casualties on our own side, seems acceptable only if the highest moral bar can be met. As a result, there is a tremendous temptation to focus on the strongest possible elements in the case for war. National security and self-defense are the aces. Noble ideals—peace, democracy, the protection of human rights—can also be high-value cards, though in practice they are liable to be scrutinized closely for signs of double standards or cant. Other factors, including economic self-interest, geopolitics, obligations to allies, and other diplomatic considerations, are downright dangerous. As a result, they tend to be underplayed or omitted entirely.

Once Western leaders could discuss national self-interest openly. Here, for instance, is President William McKinley in 1898, presenting his justification for asking Congress to authorize American intervention to free Cuba from Spanish rule, an action that triggered a wider Spanish-American War:

The right to intervene may be justified by the very serious injury to the commerce, trade, and business of our people and by the wanton destruction of property and devastation of the island … With such a conflict waged for years in an island so near us and with which our people have such trade and business relations; when the lives and liberty of our citizens are in constant danger and their property destroyed and themselves ruined; where our trading vessels are liable to seizure and are seized at our very door by warships of a foreign nation … 7

During the Suez crisis in 1956, it was still possible for Prime Minister Anthony Eden to cite economic interests as a justification for military action against Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, though by now the protection of these interests has come to be described as a form of national defense:

I will now speak to you about the situation in respect of the Suez Canal dispute. Before we examine the political implications of this event I must record in plainest terms the economic impact upon our life in this country of any hostile interference in the free passage of the Canal. It is no exaggeration to say that this is a matter of survival for us as a trading nation. It concerns the employment, the standard of living and the pay packet of every man and woman in the land.8

In recent decades, however, any Western leader who relied on economic factors or any other national self-interest when trying to justify the need for war would have risked being branded an imperialist or war criminal.

National self-interest has not disappeared, of course. It continues to play a central role in every foreign policy decision, including those about military action. But because it can sound instrumental and inhuman, it is seldom discussed as openly and honestly as it once was. That can in turn breed exaggerated suspicions that the real reason for a given war is hidden—that Western military intervention in the Middle East, say, is always really about oil. Public distrust encourages rhetorical circumspection, which only serves to stimulate more public distrust.

Late on the evening of August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson went on television to address the American people. According to the president, earlier that day the American destroyer the USS Maddox had been attacked in international waters by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. It was the second such attack in the past three days, he said:

The performance of commanders and crews in this engagement is in the highest tradition of the United States Navy. But repeated acts of violence against the Armed Forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense, but with positive reply. That reply is being given as I speak to you tonight. Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Viet-Nam.

An act of open and unprovoked aggression and targeted military action to neutralize the attackers: self-defense, in other words, as sanctioned by the UN Charter and international law. But then, like a fencer’s foil, the president’s rhetoric starts darting. Forward and backward, feint and parry. America’s response will be “limited and fitting”; “We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risk of spreading conflict.” Lingering doubts? “We still seek no wider war,” Lyndon Johnson assures us. At that, a skeptical citizen might be tempted to relax a little, but that rhetorical sword is still flashing. Now the thrust:

Finally, I have today met with the leaders of both parties in the Congress of the United States and I have informed them that I shall immediately request the Congress to pass a resolution making it clear that our Government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in southeast Asia.9

And suddenly everything—the map, the implications on the ground, above all the president’s policy goals—widens. Now President Johnson is declaring that America must commit not just to a “limited” immediate response but at the same time agree “to take all necessary measures.” The protection of the Maddox and the US Navy’s right to sail the high seas has swollen to include support for “freedom” in Southeast Asia—freedom in this Cold War context meaning freedom from communism. And what began as the brave captain and crew of the Maddox exercising their right to self-defense has become the “defense of peace.” How do we defend peace? The president doesn’t spell it out, but as we’ve already discovered in the case of Tony Blair and Iraq, political leaders can find themselves arguing that we defend peace best by going to war. It’s an irony that is seldom lost on those on the other side of the conflict. As Tacitus has the Caledonian leader Calgacus ironically remark of the Romans: “They turn a country into a wasteland and call it peace.”10

Three days later, the US Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing the president to use military force without the need for further approval if any ally in the region asked for help against the Communist threat. In the months and years that followed, America’s involvement in the Vietnam War grew, and although the Congress continued to debate and vote support for the war, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution came to be seen as a key trigger for the escalation, and the president’s use of the incident to bend Congress to his will as an example of ruthless overreach by the executive branch.

But there was more. Almost from the start, questions were asked about the Tonkin incident, and the more that was revealed, the more suspicious it appeared. At the time of the attack on the Maddox, the United States was itself engaged in multiple covert operations against North Vietnam. The Maddox had indeed been in international waters, but it had been conducting a signals intelligence operation against the North. But most troubling of all was evidence—confirmed in recent years—that the critical August 4 attack on the destroyer, which was the stated reason for President Johnson’s broadcast and the justification for his appeal to Congress, hadn’t been a real attack at all but a case of panicky sailors misreading radar images and seeing imaginary enemy craft. Worse, senior members of the government, almost certainly including the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, and perhaps even the president himself, had known at the time that the report of that second attack might well be false. Here, in Naval History Magazine, Lieutenant Commander Pat Paterson, at the time of writing a serving officer in the US Navy, puts it all together:

Questions about the Gulf of Tonkin incidents have persisted for more than 40 years. But once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.11

For this reason, Lyndon Johnson and the Tonkin incident has become a classic subject for academic studies of political rhetoric. The key word, which is almost invariably used in these studies, is pretext.

In 1978, Richard A. Cherwitz, who was then a doctoral student and is now a distinguished professor of rhetoric, wrote a paper called “Lyndon Johnson and the ‘Crisis’ of Tonkin Gulf: A President’s Justification of War.” In the section titled “The Rhetorical Situation: Tonkin Gulf as a Pretext,” Cherwitz methodically deconstructs Johnson’s language and finds many of the rhetorical tactics I have drawn attention to in this book: the use of limited and “dubious” facts; “vivid and descriptive language” including “powerful adjectives” to help dramatize and exaggerate the events; the building up of the authority of his office and his personal character (ethos); compression, as in the three short sentences Johnson used in his address at Syracuse University the day after the TV address:

The attacks were deliberate.

The attacks were unprovoked.

The attacks have been answered.12

A further rhetorical device is the “magnification” of what Cherwitz calls “local events” to a global context: “Although the Tonkin incident transpired thousands of miles from the United States mainland, the President was able to highlight the severity of the events, giving them a sense of international importance, by associating them with a broader doctrine striking closer to home.”13

But Professor Cherwitz’s seminal paper needs a little rhetorical deconstruction of its own. His immediate verdict—that the Johnson administration had used one minor incident and a second nonexistent one to secure congressional and public support for US military involvement in the war—is no doubt valid. But what was the political context—and the political motives which explain their actions? Cherwitz’s answer to this question is not based on dispassionate rhetorical analysis but relies on his own, quintessentially political verdict on American foreign policy at the time:

United States Foreign Affairs in the 1960’s were characterized by the expansion of presidential power used to support a policy of unilateral military interventions into third world nations. The President, acting as Commander-in-Chief, on numerous occasions in the 1960’s, embroiled the US in conflicts with other nations.14

Cherwitz’s language—“expansion of presidential power,” “unilateral military interventions” against “third world nations,” “on numerous occasions,” above all the verb “embroiled”—leaves us in little doubt about his own ideological position on American foreign policy. But whether or not we agree with him, he reached his verdict with the benefit of hindsight rather than the political context as it appeared to Lyndon Johnson at the time. That is the relevant context if we want to understand why he said what he did. It is also the only context in which we can consider intentionality and therefore reach a conclusion about whether Tonkin really was a pretext and, if so, what kind of pretext it was.

By way of contrast, let’s first consider the political context for that other alleged pretext, the UK government’s claims about WMD in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was this: Britain had a free choice about whether or not to join in the American-led military intervention. Other Western allies stayed out. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that the US was prepared to proceed with the invasion of Iraq with or without the UK, noting that there were “workarounds” in the event of British nonparticipation.15 Nor was the invasion itself the culmination of some inexorable long-range strategic logic. After Saddam’s attack on Kuwait in 1990, George H. W. Bush had had both the justification and the troops in theater to press on to Baghdad, but he had decided not to do so.

This is why the question of the specific evidence offered to justify the invasion is so crucial. Had Tony Blair’s government not produced its “evidence” about Saddam’s WMD, the UK would not have taken part in the war. It’s as simple as that. And, although it is less certain, there is a good chance that there would have been no Iraq War at all had the Bush administration not presented its own equivalent of the dodgy dossiers.

Tonkin was different. There was a war going on already, the Cold War, a global struggle against the USSR and its allies, which Professor Cherwitz does not mention once in his paper. Cherwitz introduces the global context for the Tonkin incident as another “rhetorical device,” as if giving the security situation in Vietnam “a sense of international importance” was nothing more than a deceitful trope. But connecting local flashpoints to the tense global standoff between the superpowers was what everyone on both sides of the Cold War did. Specifically, the United States, the USSR, and China all believed that Vietnam was a geopolitically important theater in that wider struggle. Lyndon Johnson’s main focus was domestic reform, but by the summer of 1964, his officials had concluded that the troops of the South Vietnamese government were losing their fight with the Vietcong, and that without rapid and substantial American military involvement, the South would collapse.

Unlike Iraq in 2003, the proposal to intervene in Vietnam in 1964 fitted coherently into a political worldview that enjoyed extensive bipartisan and popular support. The Johnson administration believed it was dealing with a crisis in a frontline state that was critical to its overall aim to contain global communism. In this context, it may well have been looking for a triggering event, some high-profile example of Vietcong “aggression” that could be used to fire up Congress and the American people and pave the way for escalation. Potential triggers were not hard to find. That first engagement with North Vietnamese torpedo boats on August 2 was probably genuine, and given the number of American military in the zone of conflict and the rate at which the situation was deteriorating, it’s likely that another suitable incident would have presented itself soon enough.

It has often been asserted that had it not been for Tonkin, the Vietnam War might never have happened. Having just rehearsed the Kelly-Gilligan story, we are familiar with the rhetorical temptation to go for the gravest possible charge: that Johnson lied that night, and tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Southeast Asians died as a result. A less emotive but more plausible verdict is that America’s war was coming one way or another, not because of a piece of false rhetoric but because of the internal logic of US Cold War foreign policy; that Tonkin was not a material pretext but a convenient trigger in a period that was likely to offer other such triggers.

Tonkin may have been handy for the president, but in many ways it suited Congress and the American public too. Public as well as private doubts about the incident were expressed quickly, but the president’s policy gained widespread acceptance anyway. Many Democrats shared the party leadership’s hawkishness on Cold War issues, and most Republicans took an even tougher line. The theory of an imperial presidency, which Cherwitz refers to several times in his paper, is a construct that has the advantage of making it possible to narrow the blame for Vietnam to a small elite, but the idea that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution disarmed Congress and amounted to a constitutional coup is fanciful. In reality, the legislative branch continued to hold the purse strings and voted repeatedly to fund the war over the years that followed. The less conspiratorial but no less unsettling truth is that America went to war in Vietnam as a functioning democracy. Large majorities in both houses supported the policy, not because they were the naïve victims of a lie but because they agreed with the administration’s broad policy stance on the Cold War and, despite the question marks over Tonkin, were prepared to give the president the benefit of the doubt. Political and popular support for the war began to wane in earnest only when it became clear that it was going badly.

And that’s the rub. Congress and people acquiesced in the escalation, but the manner in which it happened—and the highly abbreviated justification Lyndon Johnson offered in making the case for it—gave both plenty of ammunition for opposition later on. Had the escalation in 1964 led to rapid and decisive success, most would probably have thought of themselves as full partners in the enterprise. When casualties mounted and failure loomed, it became Lyndon Johnson’s war. Within a few years it had broken him.

This is the problem with partial explanations and pretexts, even ones that play an incidental rather than a decisive part on the road to conflict. When it comes to war, we tend to want to have it both ways. Our assent is always qualified, and while we may overlook a shortcut or even a deception if we find the overall case convincing, we also reserve the right to use it as a pretext ourselves later on, to distance ourselves from the decision when things start heading south.

The Old Lie

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus says that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. War, and war rhetoric, are like that. No matter how persuasive the case for military intervention, many people still find dark questions pressing in on them. The speaker may sound reasonable, but what if it turns out that he is wicked or mad? How can we be sure that this supposedly limited affair won’t become a quagmire? Aren’t all wars fundamentally futile? Are we on the brink of sending young men and women off not to victory and honor but to slaughter—of themselves, the enemy, and who knows how many innocent civilians?

This nightmare has a name. It is our received understanding of the First World War. More than the terrible but—for the Western Allies—altogether more intelligible conflagration that followed it, more than any other earlier conflict in history, the Great War has infected our understanding of war and looms like a dark question over each new call for military action. How can we be sure that this set of leaders won’t turn out to be as murderous and irresponsible as the foolish and bloodthirsty old men who wrecked Europe in 1914?

The Great War master narrative is necessarily concerned with rhetoric. Those wicked leaders didn’t fight the war themselves; they persuaded millions of ordinary people to do it for them. How they used public language to convince the “doomed youth” of Europe to take to the trenches, and how we can ensure they never do it again, is central to both the story and its message. Let’s examine the end of the most famous poem by the most celebrated poet of the war, Wilfred Owen:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and fitting to die for your country) is a motto from the Roman poet Horace that was often used in Victorian and Edwardian England to memorialize young men killed in war. As recently as 1913, it had been chosen to adorn a memorial in the chapel at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

Juxtaposed with the effects of a poison gas attack—and by extension with the rest of the mindless, murderous experience of the trenches—this conventional piety is revealed as a lie. Owen doesn’t tell us anything about the “friend” who has been spreading the lie, but we take it that he means everyone—the military establishment, jingoistic newspapers, political, religious, and educational leaders—who contributed to the culture that made the war possible. You told us that war was heroic and noble. Now we know what it really is.

“Dulce et Decorum Est” is a warning about rhetoric, but it is also rhetoric itself, indeed, one of the most compelling pieces of antiwar rhetoric ever written. Its message is apparently timeless—the lie is not just any lie, it’s “the old Lie”—but Wilfred Owen’s poem is in fact a reaction to a specific war and its horrors. Its immediate subject, chemical warfare, was new, but so too was its utterly modern disenchantment and moral disgust. “Dulce et Decorum Est” is a response to the coming of modern industrial war.

* * *

By the end of the American Civil War half a century earlier, it had become clear that industrialization was changing the character of warfare. Vast machine-age armies armed with modern weapons were impossible to beat in a single battle and had instead to be worn down through multiple attritional engagements. Victory in this new kind of war would depend less on inventive generalship than on social and economic factors—population size, manufacturing capacity, transport infrastructure, scientific and engineering capability—which, at the end of the long and bloody process of attrition, would leave the better resourced side still standing after its opponent had collapsed.

But this new reality of war as a mechanical grinder into which two adversaries would feed their young until one side ran out of fresh meat was, and remains, too terrible to contemplate. We can think of the original Victorian use of the dulce et decorum tag as a rhetorical coping strategy, an attempt to focus not on the unspeakable actuality of industrial warfare but instead on the motives and character of the combatants who could, in principle, be every bit as chivalrous and pure as those in previous conflicts. Thus World War I pilots in their newly invented flying machines became knights of the air. It is this rhetorical gambit that Owen dismisses as being impossible to sustain in the face of the actual experience of the trenches.

The battle between these two contrary reactions—the effort to render the war meaningful by associating it with romantic/religious transcendence, and the angry denial of that effort—raged on in the years after the Armistice. In the hymn “O Valiant Hearts” (1919), the fallen follow “the martyred Son of God,” and having “drunk His cup of sacrifice,” are expected to rise with him victorious in the end. Similarly, in “I Vow to Thee, My Country,” written in 1918 and still sung today, the dead soldier’s love of his country is compared to Christ’s love “that lays upon the altar the dearest and the best,”

The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,

The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

But even then a rival rhetoric—a rhetoric of futility—was taking shape. Self-sacrifice was still central, but the altar on which that sacrifice took place was no longer an innocent quasi-religious one but an altar of arrogance and ineptitude. The war poets, and especially Owen and Siegfried Sassoon,16 were important contributors to this new rhetoric. So too was Robert Graves, whose mordant and absurdist memoir Good-Bye to All That (1929) struck many readers as a confirmation of the version of the war painted by the poets.

So who was to blame? The generals and the politicians were the obvious targets. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the British commander in chief Douglas Haig and the other generals were fêted. Haig was made an earl, and his former troops elected him president of the Royal British Legion, which was set up in 1921 to help veterans of the war. Soon, though, a revisionist mood set in, driven not just by literary expressions of the bloody horror of the Western Front but also by the age-old instinct of politicians to protect their own reputations by shifting the responsibility elsewhere.

I began this chapter with a warning about Winston Churchill, delivered by Lord Esher to Douglas Haig, at a point when the war was deadlocked and the politicians at home were growing restive. Esher’s 1917 warning was prompted by recent events—a few months earlier Churchill had circulated to the cabinet a highly critical note about Haig’s Somme offensive—but it also presaged the future reputational assault the generals would face from the politicians.

In 1917, Churchill’s own standing as a military strategist was at an all-time low after the ignominious end of the Gallipoli campaign that he had inspired and promoted. Characteristically, that did not stop his sharing his bitter criticism of the performance of the British commanders, and his own suggestions about what they should do instead, with anyone who would listen. The doctrine of attrition offended everything he believed about war and leadership, which is why, in Esher’s words, he had taken to using “rhythmical language” to tell himself an alternative story about the stalement in the trenches, one based on his own strategic instincts.

The plain truth was that the new advantage that machine guns and more accurate artillery gave the defenders had baffled the most brilliant military minds on all sides in the early years of the war. It would take a long period of innovation and trial and error before they developed the tactics and weapons that would enable the decisive battles of 1918. But in Winston Churchill’s simplified narrative, the answer had been obvious all along; it was only the dolts commanding the British Army who had been unable to see it.

After the war, he returned to the attack. In The World Crisis 1911–1918, he described the campaign on the Somme as “from beginning to end a welter of slaughter.” He declined to take Haig on directly, but the malice was not far from the surface: “The military profession reposed in him a confidence which the various fortunes, disappointments and miscalculations attendant upon three years of war on the greatest scale left absolutely unshaken. The esteem of his military colleagues found a healthy counterpart in his own self-confidence.”17

Douglas Haig had the misfortune to fall foul of not one, but two of the most eloquent politicians of the century. David Lloyd George, who had been in the cabinet that had taken the country to war and was prime minister for the latter years of the conflict, was as keen as anyone else to deflect criticism about the conduct of the war toward the generals, and he was equally cutting. Haig, he claimed in retrospect, lacked the “necessary breadth of imagination and vision to plan a campaign against some of the ablest generals of the war.” Indeed, he had never met a man in high position “so utterly devoid of imagination.”18 A more visionary and less smug British commander, he implied, could have achieved victory far sooner and at much lower cost. That self-serving and tendentious judgment soon became the received wisdom. But if the generals were so incompetent, why hadn’t the politicians replaced them? And wasn’t it the politicians, rather than the generals, who had started the thing in the first place? Despite their best efforts, Britain’s wartime political leaders soon joined the generals in the dock.

The grip of this narrative, of lions led by donkeys, of a country betrayed by its political and military elites, only grew with time. It receded in the years before, during, and immediately after World War II, a cataclysm that as we have seen was different enough from the earlier war to produce narratives of its own. But it soon returned, and by the last third of the twentieth century had become normative. It is the gravamen of the groundbreaking BBC documentary series The Great War (1964), as well as the exuberant stage and screen musical Oh! What a Lovely War (1963 and 1969, respectively)—the knowing irony of the title revealing just how deeply the narrative had taken hold. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962), about the beginning of the war, won a Pulitzer. Two decades later, in The March of Folly, she would generalize the World War I narrative of stupidity and betrayal to explain wars through Western civilization, from the siege of Troy to the abandonment of the US embassy in Saigon.

The first centenary of the start of the war has now passed with much new scholarship and fresh debate but little change to popular conceptions about the conflict. It is not too strong to say that if dulce et decorum est represents the old lie, the simplistic narrative of betrayal and incompetence weaves a new lie that serves the same essential purpose as the first—to provide a comforting alternative to what would otherwise be an unbearable reflection on what our industrial inventiveness has wrought, and indeed on what we are capable of as human beings. This new lie makes much of dishonest rhetoric but in important ways is a piece of dishonest rhetoric itself. Yet it is so widely accepted that whether or not we are conscious of it, it influences the discussion of almost every war, not just in Britain but also across the West.

* * *

In April 2006, the British defence secretary John Reid spoke at a press conference in Kabul about the British Army’s deployment into Helmand province. He hoped, he said, that this deployment—which was intended to focus on reconstruction, security, and the building of strong local institutions—would be different from earlier phases of the war that America and its allies had begun in Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11: “We’re in the south to help and protect the Afghan people to reconstruct their economy and democracy. We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years time without firing one shot.”19

That last phrase, “without firing one shot,” would be quoted again and again over the next eight years as the British Army fought a long, bloody, and fruitless campaign in Helmand against the Taliban. It’s obvious what the phrase means in context—We’re here to build and we’re not looking for a fight—but if you take away that context, you can easily make it sound like the ludicrous home-before-Christmas optimism that is said to have marked the first months of the Great War. Here’s Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian some eighteen months after the press conference: “John Reid, the then defence secretary, even talked of completing the Helmand deployment ‘without a shot being fired.’ … The whole Helmand expedition has from the start been a suicide mission.”20

Note the inversion. “Without a shot being fired” means something quite different from “happy to leave without firing a shot”: Instead of an assurance that the British Army didn’t intend to fire first, now we have a prediction that there will be no fighting whatsoever. To my ear, even the word order seems to conjure up a plummy World War I general. Simon Jenkins can then contrast this mad prediction with the reality, which is that the deployment has turned out to be a “suicide mission.” But the prediction is an artifact of his own misquotation.

For years now, Dr. Reid has energetically tried to convince the world that “I never at any stage expressed the hope, expectation, promise or pledge that we would leave Afghanistan without firing a shot.”21 He once phoned me at home when he heard someone on the BBC suggesting that he had, and I acted on the call. But once this kind of narrative takes hold, it is almost impossible to dislodge. At the start of this book, we discussed the way that compressed phrases can take over a debate. Dr. Reid’s problem was rather one of meanings: instead of his own original meaning, a new meaning had been imposed on his words—a meaning whose connection to national memory (or myth) was so powerful that it took on a life of its own.

In March 2012, the Lancashire Telegraph reported the death in action in Afghanistan of Sergeant Nigel Coupe from the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment. Here are some of the comments that were posted on the paper’s Web site under that story:

This now brings the total killed to 400. When he was Defence Secretary John Reid boasted that we would be in and out of Afghanistan without a shot being fired. I wonder how he can sleep at night.

The military have done a fantastic job over there at great sacrifice. More than can be said for the politicians. The sad thing is there have never been any casualties amongst the Westminster regiment.

I wear my poppy with pride every year and pray for those that don’t come back … RIP good lads; I for one will not forget.22

We’re very close to the First World War here. Dr. Reid’s comment has become a “boast,” and now it refers not only to the Helmand deployment but to the whole Afghan war. The phrase is now fixed in its inverted form. And there’s that jibe, which could have come from any decade in the past century, about “the Westminster regiment.” Here we have the paradigm of betrayal, which applies not just to one generation of politicians but to every generation, to politicians as a class.

Sophisticated writers can even claim that the fact that John Reid never said what is attributed to him is irrelevant, because the invented quotation reflects a broader reality. Writing in the Guardian, again in 2012, Julian Borger acknowledged that Dr. Reid had been completely misquoted, but then went on: “The myth does nonetheless encapsulate a deeper truth about the blithe optimism with which the Blair government sent the first deployment of 3,000 soldiers into Helmand in early 2006.”23

Thus a sentiment that began as an attempt by a British minister to assure the Afghan people that his government’s intentions in Helmand were to do as little fighting and as much reconstructing as possible had morphed into a proof-text of incompetence and callousness. And the fact that he didn’t say it means nothing—even to those who know he didn’t say it. That is the deeper truth.

The Afghan campaign, meanwhile, would eventually remind the world of another disagreeable fact of life, which is that “justified” wars can end just as unhappily as the “unjustified” ones.

* * *

The arrival of industrial warfare had a second profound impact on the way we think about both the morality and the rhetoric of war. By the later years of World War II, the Allies had a decisive advantage over the Axis powers in all areas of matériel and notably in aircraft. As a result, they were able to achieve air superiority and bomb the industrial heartland of both Germany and Japan against diminishing resistance. Hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese men, women, and children died in these raids, even before the dropping of the two atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

How should we think about such mass killing? The question is relevant not just because the bombing raids cast a question mark over the twentieth century’s most “moral” war, but also because the West still enjoys the same air supremacy and astonishing preponderance of weaponry over the nations it fights today.

In February 2015, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, gave an address at the Frauenkirche in Dresden as part of a service to mark the seventieth anniversary of the British bombing of the city, which killed some twenty-five thousand people:

Walking together as friends requires talking together in truth. As Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf challenges us: “To remember wrongdoing untruthfully is to act unjustly.”

Much debate surrounds this most controversial raid of the allied bombing campaign. Whatever the arguments, events here seventy years ago left a deep wound and diminished all our humanity. So as a follower of Jesus I stand here among you with a profound feeling of regret and deep sorrow.24

But this “talking together in truth” was too much for some British politicians and newspapers, and Lambeth Palace quickly denied that the archbishop’s remarks were an “apology” or that they touched on the “question of blame”: he had simply been bearing witness to the “tragedy of war.”25 But while the regret the archbishop expressed in his address may not have added up to an “apology,” his use of the quotation from Miroslav Volf does indeed appear to imply that he thought the British bombing raid was an example of “wrongdoing.” The suggestion is controversial because Britain—so quick to accuse other nations of being in moral denial about their actions during the war—has never got to the bottom of the debate about its bombing of the German civilian population during the war. Was it necessary and justified, indeed requiring a heroic sacrifice by the tens of thousands of killed and injured aircrews? Or was it a war crime?

Such a topic is too complex, too loaded with ethical abstractions and religious undertones, for it to be remotely comfortable territory for today’s political leaders. As a consequence, the morality of contemporary military practice is insufficiently publicly debated: the use of drones and special forces death squads to assassinate suspected enemy commanders with frequent mistakes and inevitable collateral casualties; the effect on civilians of the aerial destruction of a nation’s infrastructure; military alliances by the West with groups and nations whose own conduct on and off the battlefield is known to fall short of the barest legal and human rights standards, and so on. The West’s adversaries may be guilty of far worse abuses, but as even the most gung-ho defense minister must reluctantly acknowledge, that is hardly an adequate excuse. Better to say as little as possible and leave it to people like the archbishop to wander into that minefield.

The past weighs heavily on us. The great conflicts of the twentieth century have left us with a hunger for the moral high ground but a bitter residue of cynicism and distrust. When we debate going to war, some of the real motives are unspoken, while the question of how our soldiers, sailors, and aircrew should behave when fighting has been rendered so complex, and so disturbing, by the reality of modern warfare that we are liable to turn away for fear of seeing too much. We want our nations to be strong and safe. Yet we also want to be able to think of ourselves as good. As a result, our leaders end up contorting themselves like Cinderella’s unfortunate sisters, struggling to fit the ungainly and hideous reality of modern war into the crystal slipper of moral simplicity.

Not in My Name

Of course, political leaders—and citizens—always have another choice. Some three years after Tonkin, Martin Luther King Jr. visited Riverside Church in New York City to “break silence” on the war in Vietnam. He praised the faith leaders who had invited him and said he had found himself “in full accord” with the statement they had recently released that said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Then he launched into a carefully argued but fiery critique of the war. Here he is close to the apogee, the point just before he turned from his condemnation of America’s war to the “five concrete things” he proposed to bring the conflict to an end:

Surely this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.26

In many ways we have returned to the power and simplicity we heard in Winston Churchill’s voice back in 1940. The five I speaks take us through the religious, moral, and political reasons for ending the war. King begins with an instinct (“Surely this madness must cease”) and ends with a specific political call (“the initiative to stop it must be ours”), in an arc that starts and finishes with short, declarative statements but builds in the middle to more complex sentences. If Churchill’s master word was victory, King’s central concept here is destruction: physical destruction (“laid waste,” “destroyed,” “death”) and the destruction of aspirations and values (a culture “subverted,” “smashed hopes,” “corruption”). He speaks more in sorrow than anger, but the rebuke is no less sharp edged for that—and, although Dr. King uses the plural when he appeals to the “leaders of our own nation,” President Lyndon Johnson is clearly the main object of that rebuke. What Johnson is being rebuked for is Tonkin and everything that flowed from it.

By the late 1960s, the idea that war—and particularly modern industrial war—is “madness,” to use Dr. King’s word, was no longer an iconoclastic revelation but an unquestionable fact for many across the West. There was a brief period after the Cold War when it seemed that the era of wars involving the West—and thus the need for antiwar protests and songs and movies—might be over. But then the wars began again, and so did the protests.

Today’s antiwar movement was inspired by opposition to recent Western interventions in the Middle East, but its sense of itself and its language are heavily influenced by previous responses to war: ethical pacifism, particularly associated with Quakerism but also embraced by some other Christians and believers in other faiths, as well as by some humanists; the liberal internationalism that flourished in the aftermath of World War I and that sought, unsuccessfully, to make another such bloodbath unthinkable; the mass protests against atomic and hydrogen weapons from the 1950s through to the 1980s; and the opposition to the Vietnam War that radicalized so many previously unpolitical Americans and introduced strong antiwar themes into popular culture. Important too is the coming together of two schools of ideological thought; the first a general theory about Western capitalist countries and their taste for imperialism, the second a specific belief about a Western tendency to fear Muslim peoples and culture (Islamophobia) and a consequent desire to attack and oppress Muslim countries.

One of the beliefs that binds antiwar protesters together is the certainty that their rhetoric (though they would of course dislike the word) is quite different from that of the political leaders whom they oppose. When they speak, they do so like Martin Luther King Jr., as “citizens of the world,” aghast at the path their countries have taken or are about to take. Who can possibly be in favor of bombing children? Who can seriously argue for war rather than peace?

We can acknowledge the good faith of the majority of those who campaign against war, without accepting that things are really quite as politically or rhetorically straightforward as that.

The largest grouping within the antiwar movement in the UK is the Stop the War Coalition (STWC). Founded ten days after 9/11, with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Muslim Council of Great Britain, it organized what is often said to have been the biggest public protest in British history: the February 2003 demonstration in London against the invasion of Iraq. As its name makes clear, the STWC was intended to be an alliance that could rise above the ideological differences of its constituent members. Indeed, this coalescing of members of different political tribes is what gives any antiwar movement much of its moral force: it is much easier for the establishment to dismiss an ideologically homogeneous pressure group than something that looks like a cross-section of society as a whole.

Despite the packaging, however, and like almost all Western antiwar groupings, the STWC is overwhelmingly a political formation of the Left. Indeed, to a greater extent than many realize, it is a creation of the hard Left and of people who have no love for either “bourgeois democracy” or free speech. Several of the founders of the STWC were members of the (Trotskyist) Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party, and many of its current activists are members of these and other extreme Left parties. The SWP in particular is famous for its energy and organizational skills, and it is given much of the credit, by friends and foes alike, for the impact of the STWC in its early years. Some years later, it helped launch another consumer-friendly brand—the Coalition of Resistance, created to campaign against “austerity” and government cuts—and it’s hard not to conclude that the SWP, whose core ideology is regarded as beyond the pale by almost all voters, has developed these coalition brands as a political marketing tactic, hoping to build support and advance elements of its agenda under these more acceptable umbrellas.

Jeremy Corbyn, whom most of the British media describe as an extreme left-winger, but who in this company looks like a centrist, was chairman of the Stop the War Coalition from 2009 to 2015. His successor, Andrew Murray, is a former Communist who has defended both Josef Stalin and North Korea. Another senior official is the chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In its “Ban the Bomb” heyday, CND was a relatively broad political church, but today it too has drifted well to the Left and its chair is another former Communist.

On November 14, 2015, the STWC Web site published an article with the headline “Paris Reaps Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence in Middle East.” According to the article, the real cause of the attacks (which killed 130 people and injured hundreds more) was “Washington’s decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism”: “Without decades of intervention by the US and its allies there would have been no ‘war on terror’ and no terrorist attacks on Paris.”27

The article was promptly deleted, but not promptly enough to prevent an outcry. This and other statements after Paris convinced many in the Labour Party that their leader could not remain the chair of such an organization, and Jeremy Corbyn stood aside shortly thereafter. The Green Party’s Caroline Lucas also resigned as one of the vice chairs.

Then a group of human rights activists wrote a letter to the Guardian a few weeks after the Paris attacks about a separate issue, namely what they saw as the STWC’s bias toward the Syrian regime and lack of concern about its victims. The letter also alleged that the coalition routinely misrepresented Syrian anti-Assad groups and stopped them from speaking at rallies:

As well as systematically ignoring war crimes committed by the Assad regime, STWC often misrepresents the opposition to Assad as being largely composed of jihadi extremists and agents of imperialism; marginalising the non-violent, secular, democratic, local community and non-aligned opposition to his tyranny. It also misrepresents the call by Syrian civil society organisations for civilian safe havens and humanitarian corridors; claiming they are calls for western bombing, when they are actually bids to stop Assad’s bombs and save lives. We urge STWC to take on board these constructive criticisms and change its stance to support the Syrian people’s struggle against the war being inflicted on them by both Isis and Assad.28

The charge is that influential voices within the coalition want to impose the following narrow doctrinaire view on the public position which the STWC as a whole takes on the Syrian conflict. The conflict is the fault of Western imperialism. Bashar Assad should be defended because he is standing up to this imperialism. Those rebelling against him are Western stooges, and if they are persecuted or killed, they have only themselves to blame. Even the Islamic State is the fault of the Western imperialists, because it was the West that fueled religious extremism for years.

People are entitled to believe whatever they want to about Barack Obama, François Hollande, and David Cameron, and to organize protests against them. My point is not to criticize a particular analysis of the Syrian civil war, or to deny a link between the Islamic State attack in Paris and Western military and diplomatic actions in the Middle East. It is rather that, whatever one’s views on the substance of the arguments, these two recent controversies suggest that there is a lot more going on ideologically in the Stop the War Coalition than its headline rhetoric would suggest, and that some of its key members have a political agenda that goes far beyond, and in some respects flies in the face of, its simple antiwar message.

The STWC may be an extreme case, but all antiwar movements face similar pressures: the risk of entryism and exploitation, and the endless splintering with which most radical organizations seem to be afflicted; the inevitable arrival of difficult real-world choices and compromises.

Antiwar activists like to contrast their truth telling with the bogus rhetoric of the warmongers. Indeed, puncturing the false rhetoric of the other side is one of their main objectives. As we have seen, there can be moments—“Dulce et Decorum Est” and Dr. King at Riverside Church are two of them—when such a thing is possible, for an eloquent individual at a given point in time. For the most part, however, and certainly in its familiar form in Western countries today, antiwar rhetoric suffers from most of the same faults it criticizes in the rhetoric of its targets: a tendency to omit awkward arguments or to downplay unresolved issues, to pretend that difficult choices are easy, to talk straight past the other side in the debate, to oversimplify everything. Just like conventional political rhetoric, it has its fair share of hypocrisy and hidden agendas. Judge the argument against a given war as you would seek to judge any other policy question—on the merits of its case, not on some imagined superiority in the way it lays out its rhetorical stall.

One of the most resonant of the many antiwar slogans is the cry of one of the groups that campaigned against the Iraq War, Not in My Name. The idea is a simple one: governments are capable of some decisions that are so heinous that it is the moral duty of citizens to disown them. But of course the whole point of democracy is that the decisions reached by our representatives, even ones with which we disagree, are done in our name, indeed that democracy works only if those who lose a given debate agree to abide for the time being by the decision of the majority, even as they work to get it overturned in the future.

Martin Luther King Jr. sought to change the US government’s mind about Vietnam, not to challenge the democratic legitimacy of the decision to go to war or to leave the debating chamber altogether. At least rhetorically, Not in My Name threatens to do both of those things. Many antiwar protesters are good democrats but, as we’ve seen, some of those who guide the movement embrace ideologies that regard Western democracy as a capitalist snare and prefer the regimes of some of the world’s most vicious dictators, though they generally try not to say that out loud when the children are listening. And of course wars that do not offer an easy opportunity to attack Western leaders—like the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that has so far claimed perhaps six million lives—are of little or no interest to them because they are less politically promising.

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Many people hope that one day war will be abolished. But wishing for something does not make it so. When I became a journalist, it looked as if there was only one future war in which the UK was likely to be involved—a theoretical global conflict that few in their hearts believed would ever happen. In the event, during my time as producer and editor, British forces took part in four major wars, as well as numerous smaller military interventions.

The leaders we vote into power still often make and sometimes win the case for war. But our public language has yet to find a way of dealing adequately with the reality of what modern war means. Perhaps it is indigestible, indeed should be indigestible, because it is too monstrous to be put into words. As a result, we are likely to say too little or, like Winston Churchill in 1917, to comfort ourselves with “rhythmical language” that suits our own finer feelings, whether we are a hawkish armchair general, a humanitarian interventionist, or a selective pacifist.

Our inability to debate war honestly and in the round is a terrible weakness. Our governments grow evasive and reckless with the truth, the media by turns credulous and paranoid, the public ever more distrustful. Bitter, disunited, too confirmed in our prejudices even to bother to discuss them with those who disagree with us—woe betide us and our public language if we are ever truly tested.