The desire to mitigate the horrors of war is understandable and laudable but, Moyn (Yale Univ.) argues, a serious misdirection of efforts better aimed at its abolition. A diachronic analysis of the goals of European and American peace movements and their impact on (primarily American) state policy supports this contention. Pre--WW II peace associations focused on abolishing war, not just ameliorating its atrocities--the latter attempted through international conventions--although legal restraints on harming civilians and prisoners did not apply to racially tinged colonial wars. Even the Nuremberg Trials, one can argue, were primarily based on indicting illegal German aggression, not Nazi atrocities. In Korea, MacArthur's crossing the 38th parallel dashed any hope of founding the Pax Americana on an international legal basis. The publicized horrors of Vietnam pivoted antiwar opposition toward condemning violations rather than challenging the US's dubiously legal entrance into that conflict. Post-Vietnam, a conjoined effort by peace groups and the government to reduce civilian casualties, e.g., employing targeted killing, led Americans to demand humane war while accepting internationally illegal and interminable military commitments. An analysis of Randolph Bourne's essay "Twilight of Idols" (1917) would have buttressed the arguments presented here. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Robert T. Ingoglia, St.Thomas Aquinas College

A searching look at the rise of the "endless war" the U.S. is now waging. "There is no single arc to the moral universe that guarantees that progress comes without regress on other fronts," writes Yale Law School professor Moyn. The way in which contemporary war is fought, at least by American standards, has become increasingly "humane," discounting the devastation it wreaks on identified enemies. Today, civilian populations suffer fewer casualties as targets are isolated and then hit with drones or Special Forces operations. The author contrasts this new approach to war with the conflicts in the last century, in which untold millions of civilians died, with cases in point being Vietnam and especially Korea, which, with good reason, Moyn considers "the most brutal war of the twentieth century, measured by the intensity of violence and per capita civilian death." The author locates some of origins of the comparatively sanitized wars of the present in abolitionist and pacifist movements of the 19th century, although more interesting are the seeming contradictions he identifies in writers such as Carl von Clausewitz, who held that "the point of engagement is annihilation"--which would, oddly enough, then usher in peace. The contradictions remain: Making war a business of killer machines and a handful of highly trained soldiers does not necessarily make it any more just. However, Moyn notes, some of the present insistence on a more humane approach to fighting comes from our revulsion in the face of such horrors as Abu Ghraib and My Lai. Never mind that, as Moyn adds, humane war is also the product of what he calls "lawyerliness" on the part of the Obama administration, which sold the public on the idea that "his policies of endless and humane war, though not exactly what they had signed up for, were morally wholesome." "Humane war" may seem an oxymoron, but Moyn's book will be of interest to war fighters and peacemakers alike. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The effort to make warfare more "civilized" has sapped energy from the peace movement and led to America's "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to this provocative history from Yale law professor Moyn (Not Enough). Highlighting Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy's belief that "making war more humane only allowed it to break out more often or drag on endlessly," Moyn points out that many of the international laws established in the 19th century failed because they "didn't apply or were ignored when it came to counterinsurgent and colonial war." After WWII, the threat of U.S. air power helped to maintain peace in Europe, even as America went to war in Asia. The revelation of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam "added fuel to the fire of America's last major peace movement," while public outrage over the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq only "diverted from deliberating on the deeper choice they were making to ignore constraints on starting war in the first place." Moyn also sheds light on the rise of drone warfare and "targeted killings" during the Obama administration. Unfortunately, he doesn't fully wrestle with the differences between wars of aggression and those of self-defense, which somewhat undermines his case. The result is a stimulating yet inconclusive rethink of what it means to regulate war. (Sept.)