The 33 Strategies of War (69 page)

Understand: you cannot win wars without public and political support, but people will balk at joining your side or cause unless it seems righteous and just. And as Luther realized, presenting your cause as just takes strategy and showmanship. First, it is wise to pick a fight with an enemy that you can portray as authoritarian, hypocritical, and power-hungry. Using all available media, you strike first with a moral offensive against the opponent's points of vulnerability. You make your language strong and appealing to the masses, and craft it, if you can, to give people the opportunity to express a hostility they already feel. You quote your enemies' own words back at them to make your attacks seem fair, almost disinterested. You create a moral taint that sticks to them like glue. Baiting them into a heavy-handed counterattack will win you even more public support. Instead of trumpeting your own goodness--which would make you seem smug and arrogant--you show it through the contrast between their unreasonable actions and your own crusading deeds. Aim at them the most withering charge of all--that they are after power, while you are motivated by something higher and selfless.

Do not worry about the manipulations you will have to resort to if you are to win this moral battle. Making a public show that your cause is more just than the enemy's will amply distract people from the means you employ.

There always are concrete human groupings which fight other concrete human groupings in the name of justice, humanity, order, or peace. When being reproached for immorality and cynicism, the spectator of political phenomena can always recognize in such reproaches a political weapon used in actual combat.

--Carl Schmitt (1888-1985)

KEYS TO WARFARE

In almost all cultures, morality--the definition of good and evil--originated as a way to differentiate one class of people from another. In ancient Greece, for example, the word for "good" was first associated with the nobility, the higher classes who served the state and proved their bravery on the battlefield; the bad--the base, self-centered, and cowardly--were generally the lower classes. Over time a system of ethics evolved that served a similar but more sophisticated function: to keep society orderly by separating the antisocial and "evil" from the social and "good." Societies use ideas about what is and is not moral to create values that serve them well. When these values fall behind the times or otherwise cease to fit, morality slowly shifts and evolves.

There are individuals and groups, however, who use morality for a much different purpose--not to maintain social order but to extract an advantage in a competitive situation, such as war, politics or business. In their hands morality becomes a weapon they wield to attract attention to their cause while distracting attention from the nastier, less noble actions inevitable in any power struggle. They tend to play on the ambivalence we all have about conflict and power, exploiting our feelings of guilt for their purposes. For instance, they may position themselves as victims of injustice, so that opposing them seems wicked or insensitive. Or they may make such a show of moral superiority that we feel ashamed to disagree with them. They are masters at occupying the high ground and translating it into some kind of power or advantage.

How should a regime pursue a counterguerrilla campaign?
[
Colonel John
]
Boyd laid out an array of tools: Undermine the guerrillas' cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve the needs of the people rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite. (If you cannot realize such a political program, Boyd noted, you might consider changing sides now to avoid the rush later!) Take political initiative to root out and visibly punish corruption. Select new leaders with recognized competence as well as popular appeal. Ensure that they deliver justice, eliminate major grievances, and connect the government with its grass roots.

T
HE
M
IND OF
W
AR
: J
OHN
B
OYD AND
A
MERICAN
S
ECURITY
,
G
RANT
T. H
AMMOND
, 2001

Let us call these strategists "moral warriors." There are generally two types: unconscious and conscious. Unconscious moral warriors tend to be motivated by feelings of weakness. They may not be so good at the straightforward game of power, so they function by making other people feel guilty and morally inferior--an unconscious, reflexive way of leveling the playing field. Despite their apparent fragility, they are dangerous on an individual level, because they seem so sincere and can have great power over people's emotions. Conscious moral warriors are those who use the strategy knowingly. They are most dangerous on a public level, where they can take the high ground by manipulating the media. Luther was a conscious moral warrior, but, being also a genuine believer in the morality he preached, he used the strategy only to help him in his struggle with the pope; slipperier moral warriors tend to use it indiscriminately, adapting it to whatever cause they decide to take on.

It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral.

R
ULES FOR
R
ADICALS
,
S
AUL
D. A
LINSKY
, 1909-1972

The way to combat moral warriors in general is indicated by certain strategies that have evolved in modern warfare itself. The French officer and writer Andre Beaufre has analyzed the use of morality as a military strategy in the contexts of the French-Algerian wars of the 1950s and of the Vietnam wars fought by first France and then the United States. Both the Algerians and the North Vietnamese worked hard to frame each of their respective conflicts as a war of liberation fought by a nation struggling for its freedom against an imperialist power. Once this view was diffused in the media and accepted by many in the French and American publics, the insurgents were able to court international support, which in turn served to isolate France and the United States in the world community. Appealing directly to groups within these countries that were latently or overtly sympathetic to or at least ambivalent about their cause, they were able to sap support for the war from within. At the same time, they cleverly disguised the many nasty maneuvers to which they themselves resorted to fight their guerrilla wars. As a result, in the eyes of the world, they dominated the moral battlefield, enormously inhibiting France's and America's freedom of action. Stepping gingerly through a political and moral minefield, these powers could not fight their wars in a winnable manner.

Beaufre calls the strategic use of morality an "exterior maneuver," for it lies outside the territory being fought over and outside battlefield strategy. It takes place in its own space--its own moral terrain. For Beaufre both France and the United States made the mistake of ceding the high ground to the enemy. Because both countries had rich democratic traditions and saw their wars as justified, they assumed that others would perceive these struggles the same way. They saw no need to fight for the moral terrain--and that was a fatal mistake. Nations today must play the public game, deflecting their enemies' attempts to portray them as evil. Without appearing to whine about what the other side is doing, they must also work to expose their enemies' hypocrisies, taking the war to the moral court themselves--fighting on apparently moral terms. Cede the moral terrain to the other side and you limit your freedom of action: now anything you might have to do that is manipulative yet necessary will feed the unjust image the enemy has publicized, and you will hesitate to take such action.

This has great relevance to all forms of conflict. When your enemies try to present themselves as more justified than you are, and therefore more moral, you must see this move for what it most often is: not a reflection of morality, of right and wrong, but a clever strategy, an exterior maneuver. You can recognize an exterior maneuver in a number of ways. First, the moral attack often comes out of left field, having nothing to do with what you imagine the conflict is about. Something you have done in a completely different arena is dredged up as a way to drain your support or inject you with guilt. Second, the attack is often ad hominem; rational argument is met with the emotional and personal. Your character, rather than the issue you are fighting over, becomes the ground of the debate. Your motives are questioned and given the darkest turn.

Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being--and hence there is no specific differentiation in that concept. That wars are waged in the name of humanity is not a contradiction of this simple truth; quite the contrary, it has an especially intensive political meaning. When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as one's own and to deny the same to the enemy. The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon's: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.

T
HE
C
ONCEPT OF THE
P
OLITICAL
,
C
ARL
S
CHMITT
, 1932

Once you realize you are under attack by a moral warrior using the exterior maneuver, it is vital to keep control of your emotions. If you complain or lash out angrily, you just look defensive, as if you had something to hide. The moral warrior is being strategic; the only effective response is to be strategic, too. Even if you know that your cause is just, you can never assume that the public sees it the same way. Appearances and reputation rule in today's world; letting the enemy frame these things to its liking is akin to letting it take the most favorable position on the battlefield. Once the fight for moral terrain has begun, you must fight to occupy the high ground in the same way you would in a shooting war.

Like any form of warfare, moral conflict has both offensive and defensive possibilities. When you are on the offense, you are actively working to destroy the enemy's reputation. Before and during the American Revolution, the great propagandist Samuel Adams took aim at England's reputation for being fair-minded, liberal, and civilized. He poked holes in this moral image by publicizing England's exploitation of the colonies' resources and simultaneous exclusion of their people from democratic processes. The colonists had had a high opinion of the English, but not after Adams's relentless campaign.

To succeed, Adams had to resort to exaggeration, picking out and emphasizing the cases in which the English were heavy-handed. His was not a balanced picture; he ignored the ways in which the English had treated the colonies rather well. His goal was not to be fair but to spark a war, and he knew that the colonists would not fight unless they saw the war as just and the British as evil. In working to spoil your enemy's moral reputation, do not be subtle. Make your language and distinctions of good and evil as strong as possible; speak in terms of black and white. It is hard to get people to fight for a gray area.

Revealing your opponent's hypocrisies is perhaps the most lethal offensive weapon in the moral arsenal: people naturally hate hypocrites. This will work, however, only if the hypocrisy runs deep; it has to show up in their values. Few will care about some innocuous self-contradictory comment made or vote taken long ago, but enemies who trumpet certain values as inherent to their side yet who do not always adhere to those values in reality make juicy targets. The Algerian and North Vietnamese propaganda campaigns were so destructive in part because of the discrepancy they were able to show between the values of freedom and liberty espoused by France and the United States and the actions those countries were taking to squash national independence movements. Both nations seemed hypocritical.

If a fight with your enemies is inevitable, always work to make them start it. In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln maneuvered carefully to make the South shoot first at Fort Sumter, initiating the Civil War. That put Lincoln on the moral high ground and won over many ambivalent Northerners to his side. Similarly, even if you are fighting a war of aggression, your goal to take from your enemy, find a way to present yourself not as a conqueror but as a liberator. You are fighting not for land or money but to free people suffering under an oppressive regime.

In general, in a conflict that is potentially nasty, in which you are certain the enemy will resort to almost anything, it is best that you go on the offensive with your moral campaign and not wait for their attacks. Poking holes in the other side's reputation is easier than defending your own. The more you stay on the offensive, the more you can distract the public from your own deficiencies and faults--and faults are inevitable in war. If you are physically and militarily weaker than your enemy, all the more reason to mount an exterior maneuver. Move the battle to the moral terrain, where you can hamstring and beat a stronger foe.