The end of war

David Green interviews John Horgan, the author of The End of War ‏(McSweeney’s; 222 pages, $24‏), for Haaretz Daily. Horgan posits that it is possible to erase war from the human condition:

At various times in my life, I’ve called myself a pacifist. But the more I talked to real pacifists and read classic pacifist literature, the more I realized I’m not. Because there are times when some kind of force is not only justified, but actually morally required. You need to use force to stop a greater kind of violence. I would use force to defend myself, or defend my family. I’ve read some Gandhi, where he’s talking about “peace armies” of people who sacrificed themselves before invading armies, who allow themselves to be butchered, and it makes me really queasy. That seems to make the principle of non-violence so absolute that it leads to moral absurdities.

But I don’t think the U.S. and NATO should have intervened in Libya, for example, because in that case, the benefits of trying to stop Gadhafi from slaughtering his own people were outweighed by the larger symbolic significance of the U.S. and Europe using force, which I think legitimizes the use of force in general, for future situations. We should come up with non-violent solutions to quell the violence in all cases.