“War Is Horrible, but . . .”

Dead German civilians in Dresden

Right on. The enemy states that the South started the War with the firing on Ft. Sumter which is incorrect since the blockade of Southern ports preceded this which is an act of war, period.

2. “War is terrible, war is horrible, but war is also at times necessary and the only means of stopping evil.”
"I do not endorse state-enforced—that is, violent or potentially violent—embargoes and blockades."

4. “War is horrible, but slavery is worse.” (Winston Churchill as quoted in Dear and Foote 1995, xv)
Some may object that the War Between the States was fought to prevent the ongoing slavery of the blacks then held in thrall. But however deeply this view may be embedded in American mythology, it is contrary to fact. As Abraham Lincoln made crystal clear in his letter of August 22, 1862, to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, he had not mobilized the armed forces to free the slaves, but only to prevent the seceding states from leaving the union: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”[1] When Lincoln brought forth the Emancipation Proclamation— a document carefully drawn so that at the time of its promulgation it freed not a single slave—he issued it only because at that time it seemed to be a useful means for the attainment of his “paramount object,” preserving the union. The slaves, including those in states that had not seceded, were ultimately freed for good by ratification (at gunpoint in the former Confederate states) of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which is to say as a ramification of the war, which itself had not been undertaken in 1861 in pursuit of this then-unforeseen outcome.

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Anyone who has done even a little reading about the theory and practice of war— whether in political theory, international relations, theology, history, or common journalistic commentary—has encountered a sentence of the form “War is horrible, but . . . .” In this construction, the phrase that follows the conjunction explains why a certain war was (or now is or someday will be) an action that ought to have been (or still ought to be) undertaken, notwithstanding its admitted horrors. The frequent, virtually formulaic use of this expression attests that nobody cares to argue, say, that war is a beautiful, humane, uplifting, or altogether splendid course of action and therefore the more often people fight, the better.

Some time ago—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for example— one might have encountered a writer such as Theodore Roosevelt who forthrightly affirmed that war is manly and invigorating for the nation and the soldiers who engage in it: war keeps a nation from “getting soft” (Morris 1979). Although this opinion is no longer expressed openly with great frequency, something akin to it may yet survive, as Chris Hedges has argued in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002). Nowadays, however, even those who find meaning for their lives by involvement in war, perhaps even only marginal or symbolic involvement, do not often extol war as such.

They are likely instead to justify a nation’s engagement in war by calling attention to alternative and even more horrible outcomes that, retrospectively, would have occurred if the nation had not gone to war or, prospectively, will occur if it does not go to war. This seemingly reasonable “balancing” form of argument often sounds stronger than it really is, especially when it is made more or less in passing. People may easily be swayed by a weak argument, however, if they fail to appreciate the defects of the typically expressed “horrible, but” apology for war.

Rather than plow through various sources on my bookshelves to compile examples, I have availed myself of modern technology. A Google search for the exact phrase “war is horrible but” on May 21, 2012, identified 58,100 instances of it. Rest assured that this number is smaller than the entire universe of such usage—some instances most likely have yet to be captured electronically. Among the examples I drew from the World Wide Web are the following fourteen statements. I identify the person who made the statement only when he is well known.

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