However intense the passions leading to war may often be, each belligerent must view its enemy as resembling it in key respects if there is to be any possibility of restraint through reciprocity. This paradox explains why the argument against forbearance in war is always some version of the claim that the enemy is entirely different from us in ways that make it incapable of rationally playing tit-for-tat. We must therefore consider the rhetorical tool kit with which proponents of the argument against restraint come to formulate it and the recurrent role of humanitarian law in refuting it.

The public argument for going to war has almost never been couched in simple terms of efficiency or social utility. To justify war's predictable horrors – especially to democratic voters – demands a rhetorical mode altogether distinct from the utilitarian, with its sober and uninflected tone. The public is never simply told that the lesser pain of war, correctly calculated, is preferable to the greater prospective pain of not fighting, that this calculus provides sufficient grounds for entering the fight, even in self-defense.

Rather, “wars are born and sustained in rivers of language about what it means to serve the cause, to kill the enemy, and to die with dignity; and they are reintegrated into a collective historical self-understanding through a ritualistic overplus of the language of commemoration,” observes literary critic James Dawes.