JUST WAR
15th October 2002
The next issue, Number 77, will appear on 15th November 2002.
Short of absolute pacifism there must be some notion of Just War.
The classic JW principles - negotiate, avoid hopeless war, use minimum force to achieve victory, magnanimity towards the defeated - are all moral precepts and they have the features common to moral precepts generally.
Consider 'tell the truth' - a typical moral precept. There are four main things to be said of this :
1) Everybody says that it is in principle right to tell the truth.
2) Nobody would proclaim that it is in principle right to tell lies.
3) No reasonable person would proclaim that the truth or otherwise of a statement is. in principle, of no ethical interest whatever.
4) Life is more complex than 1) seems to suggest. Most people would agree that there is such a thing as a 'white lie' both by omission and by commission. In any case, there is the prior epistemological difficulty of establishing what really is 'the truth' in any given case. If 1) holds then what is it that we should tell? Telling a poorly founded 'truth', or a misleading half truth, is no big deal.
The Just War criteria are rather like this example - nobody would say that negotiation is simply wrong: nobody would say that war should be embarked upon without hope of victory of some sort: nobody would say that the use of excessive force is right and nobody would say that magnanimity is wrong. Moreover nobody except psychopaths would say that the four criteria are simply without ethical importance one way or the other.
In the real world (is there any other?) things are more complicated and judgments (aka guesses) have to be made but the classic JW criteria are still a good starting point
There clearly can be people with whom negotiation is, or has become, a wasted effort. Saddam may very well be such a man - in which case nothing but credible force - credible to him - is likely to deflect him.
But while victory over Iraq - in the immediate military sense - would be assured, I claim that the suffering, chaos and destabilisation likely to be caused by it make it a poor option. We need to have a regime in Baghdad that is trusted both internationally and by the Iraq people. A new regime that is perceived to be imposed by foreign powers would have a credibility handicap to overcome. Such a regime might have to be horribly autocratic to function at all. Moreover, I think military action, that goes beyond threats, may be quite unnecessary.
Tyrants have, historically, been confronted by several possible reactions and there are at least three models that lie beyond the scope of classic JW criteria - the appeasement model, the counter attack model and the threat/deterrence/attrition model.
The appeasement model was discredited in 1938/9 - our sacrificing the Czechs for peace simply failed.
The counter attack model worked in the Gulf War of a decade or so ago. Iraq invaded Kuwait and was soon thrown out again.
The threat/deterrence/attrition model has served us well - if the official view of things is to be credited.
During forty years or so, ending in the late 1980's, there was a perceived threat of Soviet aggression on a major scale - possible attacks upon Europe and America particularly. These major attacks never took place probably because of the policy of deterrence. There are of course other ways of looking at the matter but most governments believed in the threat/deterrence/attrition scenario. Nobody but maniacs ever advocated a pre-emptive attack on the USSR as a means of 'making sure'. Attrition finally finished off the USSR and its associates.
It puzzles me that people who once believed in deterrence and attrition when faced with a large and powerful threat (from the USSR) do not now believe in the sufficiency of deterrence in face of an obviously lesser threat (from Iraq). I claim that nobody but maniacs now advocate a pre-emptive attack on Iraq as a means of 'making sure'.
Again there are serious problems with 'minimum force'. It seems probable that the Hiroshima bomb was a more truly minimal way of knocking Japan out of the war than landing soldiers on Japan would ever have been.
But it could be asserted that the Nagasaki bomb was in excess of reasonable minimum requirements and was indeed a case of want of magnanimity. Considering Japanese atrocities ....... (I lost neighbours in the Japanese war including at least one who surely died painfully on the Burma Railway project) ......... vindictive attitudes towards the Japanese were very understandable at the time but perhaps a bit more magnanimity, post-Hiroshima, might have paid long term.
There are some practical certainties. It is wrong for one country to attack another; 'first strike' is simply wrong. Self defence is morally acceptable and can well take the form of counter attack. It is morally acceptable for the victim of attack to ask for help from allies and for those allies to give help.
These practical certainties apply to, for example, a possible 'first strike' against Iraq and they hold whether or not the UN consents to such a strike. The UN is not an ultimate moral authority. UN decisions may embody morality but they do not define it.
E.S.
HOME PAGE