U.S. Conducts Multiple Strikes on Iran Following Deaths of American Soldiers
Punishment Many Times Over, Prosperity Many Times Undone
A sovereign may rightly avenge fallen soldiers, yet a doctrine of endless reprisal near the world’s sea-lanes threatens to cost the living far more than it can ever reclaim for the dead.
Two young soldiers, scarcely entered upon adult life, are killed in a strike upon a base in Jordan; another dies in the dangerous work of disarming an enemy’s device in Iraq. Their names are read out by their own government, their ages recorded, their photographs doubtless circulated. In answer, that government has launched night after night of attacks within Iran, with explosions reported near a northern city and at several ports upon the Gulf and south-eastern coast. Over all this, a single principle is announced: that each time a soldier is killed, the foreign power deemed responsible shall pay many times over. It is a terrible arithmetic, and, like most bad accounts, it does not balance.
When I wrote of the duties of the sovereign in "The Wealth of Nations", I reckoned defence the first of them. A people that cannot protect its soldiers in the field soon loses the protection those soldiers afford. From the view of the impartial spectator, as I described him in "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", there is real justice in seeking the authors of such deaths and in preventing their repetition. Yet the same spectator, if he were wisely informed, would ask not only whether punishment is deserved, but by what means, upon whom it falls, and at what further risk. Retaliation may quiet the indignation of the moment; it may or may not secure future safety; it never restores the life already lost.
The place chosen for this lesson of many times over is singularly ill-suited to experiments in vengeance. The strikes are reported near ports and along coasts through which passes a great share of the world’s seaborne trade, particularly that fluid commodity whose carriage does so much to determine the price of heat, light, and motion in distant lands. The same coast looks upon the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage already described as constricted by conflict, while allies of Iran in Yemen threaten another narrow waterway leading to the Red Sea. In such straits, the division of labour is literally afloat; when great ships lie idle or sail in fear, it is not only admirals who should be alarmed, but weavers, carters, and cooks half a world away.
It is the unhappy property of such measures that their most visible effects are also their most politically convenient. A government may point to destroyed targets, to fiery images from ports whose names its citizens scarcely knew last week, and say that its honour is vindicated and its enemies chastised. The costs, by contrast, creep in upon soft feet. Insurance upon ships rises first, then the freight upon every cargo, then the price of every article into which that cargo enters, till at last the labouring poor, who never heard of Chabahar or Konarak, find their fuel dearer and their food a little smaller in the pot. They are told it is the work of distant villains; it is more exactly the work of a policy that spends their wages in the air above foreign harbours.
There is another cost, harder to reckon but no less real. Explosions near cities and ports do not distinguish with any delicacy between combatant and bystander. One person is already said to have been killed and several wounded near Tabriz; we are not told their occupations, their opinions, or their culpability. In war, as in commerce, incentives matter: if a rule is laid down that each hostile act will be repaid many times over, those who fire the first shot may count such suffering among their aims, hoping to profit from outrage and further disorder. Thus a maxim announced in the name of deterrence may in practice bid up the price of each affront, till both parties are found haggling in blood over a tariff of injuries that no prudent spectator would have posted at the outset.
The language of paying many times over also betrays the spirit of the man of system. He imagines that, by a steady application of force according to his declared formula, he can bend a complex scene of rival interests, trading routes, proud governments, and fearful merchants to his will, as a hand arranges the pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that each of those pieces has a motion of its own: a ship-owner who diverts his course, an insurance office that raises its premiums, a government in Tehran or Sana’a that reads every new strike not as the end of a sum but as the beginning of another. The more minutely such a statesman proclaims his plan, the more certainly events will conspire to expose him.
What, then, would a policy look like that passed the test of the impartial spectator and respected the natural progress of opulence? It would begin with justice to the dead and safety for the living, yet aim to confine the quarrel as a prudent merchant confines a fire to one warehouse rather than the whole street. It would treat each additional strike not as the fulfilment of an arithmetical vow, but as an occasion to ask whether the next blow truly lessens danger or merely shifts it onto humbler shoulders. Above all, it would remember that the wealth of any nation, however great its fleets and bases, ultimately consists in the annual produce of its land and labour as consumed by the whole people. A doctrine of punishment many times over, pursued along the narrow gates of the world’s commerce, risks leaving that people to pay many times over for a security they might have purchased more cheaply with restraint.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, justice, public works and institutions) and the measure of policy by the real consumption of the labouring poor.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action?