Humane

How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

By: Samuel Moyn

Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne

Length: 15 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humane.

In the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. It hardly matters who’s president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. The United States exercises dominion everywhere.

In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical - to ban torture and limit civilian casualties - have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force, from the 19th-century struggle to make war less lethal to the eventual shift from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences.

The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated, but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the “forever” war.

Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.

©2021 Samuel Moyn (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

Intelligent take on past and future war

Moyn has recognized what any aware citizen of the US can easily see: that war -- even endless war -- has become an ongoing bipartisan project. His perspicacious argument is that part of the reason for so many wars is that war has become less costly in terms of American body counts, and all participants have been, increasingly, treated according to the international law of humane warfare. Unfortunately, the the focus on shielding Americans from the grisly effects of war, and on making war more humane, has lessened our motivation to stop war in itself. Moyn outlines the last couple of centuries of warfare, and the concomitant attempts of reformers to make it more humane. His book lays a rational foundation for the next step for those many Americans who are sick of all these wars.

Great History, Weak Arguments

This book presents an extended historical argument for not making war more humane. If that sounds jarring, then it should. Moyn argues that ever since the First Geneva Convention in the late-nineteenth century, humanizing war has commonly come at the expense of justifying it.

Of course, as a human rights advocate, he recognizes that minimizing civilian casualties and crimes against humanity are a good thing. He even admits that we can have both more humane war and less of it. But he never sheds the sneaking suspicion that the American military’s embrace of humane rules of engagement around the mid-2000s, and especially under Obama, has not been a major contributing factor to the forever wars.

It sometimes seems that he is even arguing that if we had just allowed the war on terror to be more brutal, it would have ended long ago. But if that is what he is arguing, he fails to make the case, because he does not actually make an argument against each mission. In short, he does not weigh the consequences of leaving Afghanistan or not taking on Isis, but that is precisely what he would need to do to make this case. And if that is not the case he is making, it is difficult to discern the cash value of his argument, so to speak.

Moyn is a great historical writer who knows how to make his sources speak, but he does not do nearly so good of a job making his argument in the present. It sometimes seemed like he planned to write this book when Obama was president and failed to adjust his views to the far more dangerous Trump presidency. He often hints that the book is really an argument against drone warfare, but he fails to mention the dramatic turn in American warfare made under Trump, who oversaw the obliteration of two major cities, Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq while taking us to the brink of two massive wars with North Korea and Iran. Moyn has made the rounds downplaying the dangers of Trump, and his lack of concern with restraining the powers of a man who on several occasions spoke of the need to use nuclear weapons are on full display.

Moyn’s grasp of humanitarian history may be masterful, but he also fails to engage the dramatic transformation of the world order over the course of the last decade. It is once again another suggestion that this book was really about Obama and that he has failed to grapple with the legacy of Trump. All in all, it is a very well written book, but the argument is too marginal and his case too poorly made to grant it more than 3.5-4 stars. As Russia builds up troops on the Ukrainian border, one can only wonder how this book would be looked upon if a fully unrestrained war were to break out with millions dead as in the case of so many twentieth century wars.

~ Theo Horesh, author of The Fascism This Time: And the Global Future of Democracy

HUMANE WAR

Sameul Moyn's "Humane" shows America is one of many passengers on a train bound for Armageddon. The idea of a humane war is oxymoronic. War cannot, by definition be humane. There is no denying America's war against Indians, Filipinos, Japanese, and Germans, with a history of mass violence against Blacks and other American minorities, is inhumane. The reasons for war's violence range from defense of country to racism, to self-interest, to greed, i.e., the ingredients of human nature. From the crusades of Catholics against Muslims to persecution of Jews through the ages, to today's Palistinian/Israli mayhem, inhumanity seems an integral part of the human condition.

Government leaders may represent a nation or a faction of people, but unless one believes in “the arc of the moral universe” as originated by Theodore Parker in the 19th century (made modern by Martin Luther King in the 20th century), the world will continue to have wars; all of which become inhumane.