Opinion | Waging War Lawfully Is Crucial to Defending Civilization
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In David Lean’s classic 1957 movie, “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” Alec Guinness plays the punctiliously correct English Col. Nicholson leading his fellow prisoners of war in dutiful observance of a wartime code of honor. His determination that they do as ordered by their Japanese captors and build a bridge that completes a critical section of the Rangoon-to-Singapore railroad appalls his own men but is matched by his insistence that the Japanese also observe the laws of war on prisoner treatment.
The camp commandant, Col. Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), is as incredulous as he is furious and erupts when Nicholson lectures him about playing by the rules. “Do not speak to me of rules!” Saito explodes. “This is war! This is not a game of cricket!”
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Lean’s movie, based on the novel by Pierre Boulle, seems on its face a depiction of the classic asymmetric nature of war fighting between good guys (the Allies) and bad guys (the Japanese). Although fictional, it captures the lawless savagery of the imperial army, which tortured, starved, mutilated and murdered tens of thousands of British, Australian, American and other POWs in World War II, along with millions of civilians. Meanwhile, the stiff-upper-lipped avatar of the Western liberal order insists on doing everything by the book.
But it is a morally complex tale. In the end (spoiler alert, in case you haven’t seen one of the greatest war movies of all time), Nicholson belatedly realizes that his scrupulous adherence to rules, conventions and laws in the teeth of an existential global struggle is the short route to death and defeat. His just-in-time epiphany leads him to do the very thing he has spent his whole career eschewing: substitute a simple calculus of immediate military advantage for legalistic code. Trying at first to thwart an attempt to blow up the completed bridge by allied commandos, he suddenly realizes his higher duty and falls deliberately onto the detonator, blowing up the bridge as the first train crosses, plunging hundreds of Japanese soldiers and civilians to their deaths, and delivering a crucial tactical setback to the enemy with his dying act. Definitely not cricket.
Waging war according to legal principles seems designed to hobble us. We play by a code of conduct, that nebulous thing we have reified as “international law.” Our enemies murder civilians wantonly, fly passenger planes into buildings, kill captured prisoners, ship arms and poison to our shores that ruin innocent lives. Yet we somehow feel obliged to give them the due process and benefit of law they laugh at. It can seem, to echo a phrase used in another cinematic setting, as if we are constantly bringing a knife to a gunfight.
That is why I suspect most people aren’t too troubled by what the U.S. military has been doing in the Caribbean the past three months. They should be.
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We don’t know enough about the circumstances in which the men alleged to be commandeering a boat full of drugs died on Sept. 2. As though to affirm that old line about the first reports of battle always being wrong, the initial stories of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or his senior military commander ordering a deliberate “double tap” strike to “kill them all” and eliminate a couple of survivors of the first attack might have been misleading. It certainly isn’t for a newspaper columnist to second-guess the decisions of military personnel in the heat of battle. But we should hope that full investigations—congressional and presumably from the military itself—will get to the truth, though I suspect that the wide gray line between deliberate targeting of shipwrecked men and the exigency of removing a remaining threat from survivors will comfortably accommodate an official exoneration of both civilian and military leaders.
Of even more dubious legality is the casus belli for the deployment of our military in this action in the first place. The analogy the administration repeatedly cites—that the men on these boats are akin to terrorist cells armed with drugs designed to kill Americans—is laughable. Al Qaeda members don’t land on U.S. shores to sell products to Americans willing to buy them. We have domestic laws and interdictory capabilities to deal with the scourge of illegal drugs entering the country. We also have something called Article I of the Constitution that vests war powers in Congress.
The principal problem with the deliberate erosion of a lawful and moral basis for dealing with those who want to harm us isn’t what it does to them. It is what it does to us. Enemies, properly identified, deserve to be destroyed. If they’re lucky, they get to live, but we owe them nothing more than the minimum levels of protection.
The reason we live by laws and wage war by rules isn’t for their benefit. It is because it is the defining characteristic of our civilization. It is what makes us different from and, yes, superior to our enemies. Honor is its own virtue. If we abandon that, whatever we think we gain in tactical advantage, we lose a part of ourselves.
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