Max Weber and the War in Iraq

       Max Weber had a problem. If God was as omnipotent and kind as his followers suggested, how did God manage to “create such an irrational world of undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice, and hopeless stupidity.” It’s an ancient question that Weber tries to resolve in an essay –“Politics as a Vocation”- that offers chilling advice about any politician’s use of violence.

    Weber makes a distinction between an “ethic of ultimate ends” and “ethic of responsibility”. They are not mutually exclusive but those drawn to ultimate ends have a much easier time sanctioning the use of force. As George Packer stresses in The Assassins Gate, many Bush advisers “summoned America to benevolent global hegemony”. The United States had a moral obligation to “take a hand in shaping mankind’s destiny” or, as Weber wrote, those who embrace ultimate ends champion “the flame of pure intentions”. Blessed by God or an extra dose of hubris, they know the future and that makes it much easier to justify the use of violence or even war to achieve their providential ends.

   In a rare display of anger, Weber stressed the “ethical irrationality of the world”. No religion or moral code offered a way to justify the means by the ends. In heaven all was peace, justice and social order. On earth anything could and often did happen. As in Iraq in 2008, the ultimate end might be as elusive as ever; meanwhile, on earth, the flaming efforts of the Bush Administration produced many thousands of deaths, nearly four million refugees, the horror of Abu Ghraib, and a terrible irony: the war in Iraq is now Al Qaeda’s greatest recruiting tool.

      Before defining an ethic of responsibility, Weber talked about evil. The world is “governed by demons” and anyone who decides to use force “contracts with diabolical powers”. To the most deluded “good can follow only from good and evil from evil.” In real life the opposite was often true so, “anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant”. Think, for example, of President Bush landing on the aircraft carrier that displayed the “mission accomplished” banner. It’s puerile and could have been avoided if the President and his advisors embraced an ethic of responsibility.

       That ethic understands an unalterable fact: “The leader and his success are completely dependent upon the functioning of his (war) machine and hence not on his own motives.” Suppose, as in Iraq, your machine creates an institutionalized conflict of interest. Your soldiers want to want to win an insurgency but the 40,000 plus private security guards have a higher responsibility: They want to protect their principals. So, they roar through the streets whenever and however they please. The result is great political damage to the American effort. As Thomas Ricks noted in Fiasco, “If there are one hundred PSD’s (Private Security Details) a day in Iraq (there are) and they each anger one hundred people a day (they do), that is ten thousand Iraqis a day getting extremely agitated at us over the last year.” Multiply 365 days by five years and the President’s motives seem trivial beside the seething resentment of those literally driven off the streets.

        Or, suppose that your war machine is going to pay former Iraqi soldiers. The machine’s representatives ask the soldiers to line up alphabetically but, oblivious to Iraqi culture, they do not realize that Iraqis line up by their first rather than their last name. Confusion led to fights, fights led, in some cases, to rioting, and bad followed from good rather than the opposite.

      In advocating an ethic of responsibility Weber never forecloses the use of force. But he does stress the utmost caution. It is a true conservative’s best advice because “everything that is striven for through political action operating with violent means and following an ethic of responsibility endangers the salvation of the soul.” As in the arming of seventy thousand Iraq tribesmen in the so called Awakening Council Movement, I may be giving guns and money to people, who, just last month, terrorized my soldiers and anyone else who got in their way. Next month or next year they may use those guns to once again kill Americans. It’s a roll of the dice that should frighten any of our Presidential candidates.

      From the grave, Weber has great advice for those candidates. It is never a question of age or experience. Don’t make reference “to a date registered on a birth certificate” or, as with Senator McCann you may a find a man who says that Iran is training Al Qaeda. “Age is not decisive; what is decisive is the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly”

    For Weber the key is to grasp that however bad it looks, it can always get worse. In 2008, the alleged reasons for the war have nothing to do with today’s alternatives. A trained relentlessness would stress that, thanks to the Bush Administration, we have no good options. For example, in Dying to Win, Robert Pape convincingly argues that the occupation –not religion- is the biggest cause of the insurgency. Stay in Iraq and you nurture, not only Al Qaeda but Iraqi suicide terrorists who will seek to kill Americans wherever they are. Meanwhile, Juan Cole notes “that the United States has destabilized the cockpit of the world economy.” Make the wrong move and you threaten lives and the supply of oil that is vital to this nation’s well being.

         A trained relentlessness would honestly assess all the terrible alternatives. It would avoid banalities like “staying the course” or “victory is on the horizon” and it would keep the bar of success very low because we did contract with diabolical powers and, following Weber, we need to accept that the devil wins many more battles and wars than god.

   It’s a nasty assessment but it is still “immensely moving when a mature man (or woman) –no matter whether old or young in years- is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of their conduct and really feels such a responsibility with heart and soul. He or she then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere reaches the point where they say: Here I stand. I can do no other.”