The Just War Tradition After
9/11
The
above serves as an overview of Just War criteria, but with the advent
of the War on Terror there arose a need to focus on and revise some
of the ten criteria that Reimer lays out. For instance, how can we
prosecute a war against anonymous terrorists while maintaining
discrimination between combatants and noncombatants? Who would the
legitimate authority be for prosecuting the War on Terror? While the
Just War tradition lays out criteria for a preventative war, does it
justify a preemptive war?
The
answers to these questions are not only important for Christians
involved in moral discernment, but for all who are interested in a
justifiable use of force and the upholding of international law
(often largely based on this tradition). The question of
discrimination in the War on Terror is perhaps the most difficult to
answer. In a situation where the line between a terrorist enemy and a
civilian bystander is amorphous, differentiating between who is a
justifiable target and who is not becomes extremely difficult. Often
the resulting solution becomes an attack on infrastructure as a means
of compelling the noncombatant public to take steps to either turn
over the enemy or to restrict its ability to use civilians as
camouflage. This, however, leads to its own perilous effects. Citing
George Lopez's findings, Kenneth Himes points to the targeting of
infrastructure as a large cause of civilian death. In the first Gulf
War, the casualties suffered among Iraqis due to disrupted water,
sewer, and electrical services was greater than 100,000 (Himes 153).
The criteria used by the United States in target discrimination is
based on the “war sustaining” nature of the target (Himes 154).
This proves grossly vague and results in the targeting of
infrastructure that is nominally war sustaining but predominantly
life sustaining. Europeans, on the other hand, “[restrict] targets
to those that 'have an immediate effect on the enemy with whom one is
engaged'” (Himes 154). This second criteria proves much more just
than the United States' overly broad criteria yet still allows troops
to prosecute a war effectively.
The case of
legitimate authority in the War on Terror is obvious on the one hand
– Al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. therefore the U.S. is the legitimate
authority – and complex on the other – Iraq had not attacked a
nation therefore the legitimate authority for an attack on Iraq is
more difficult to discern. The details involved in this discussion
are discussed below.
The question
of prevention vis a vis preemption is possibly the central
issue of Iraq War justifications. The Just War tradition has long
held that a nation has the right to defend itself against a known
attack before it happens. This falls under prevention and comes from
the age when invasions required the amassment of large numbers of
troops and materiel on borders days or even weeks before an actual
invasion. As the technology of war allowed for more rapid deployment
of troops as well as the ability to inflict death from afar, the
rules of prevention have grown more complex.
Being scared
of an enemy is not enough to justify a preventive strike. As Himes
puts it, “suspicion or fear about another's intentions is not
adequate” for justifying war (145). But at what point does that
fear become justified? Walzer addresses this at length and uses
various historical illustrations to further his concept for
preventive attacks in the landscape of modern war. He boils the
decision to attack before being attacked down to the idea of a
“supreme emergency” (Walzer 251-268). For Walzer, the risk of
attack needs to be time sensitive. A risk that could develop over the
course of years does not justify a preventive attack. This
constitutes the “emergency” half. The risk must also be of an
overwhelming magnitude in order to justify the preventive use of
force. This makes up the “supreme” half. Walzer uses the concept
of supreme emergency to examine the civilian bombing campaign of
England in WWII as well as the Israeli Six Days War. In both cases,
Walzer believes that the initial decision to attack was justified by
a supreme emergency.1
The threat of Nazism to overrun European civilization as they knew it
was both “in the now” as well as of a grand magnitude (Walzer
255-263). For Israel, the writing was on the wall of an imminent
attack which threatened its mere existence (Walzer 82-85). If we
accept the theory of supreme emergency then the United States would
be justified in a first strike against Iraq if that nation posed a
risk of supreme emergency. This theory, as we shall see, will also
play a part in the Bush administration's argument for going to war.
Having
covered many of the theoretical bases necessary for examining the
Iraq War, it is now possible to turn to the practical side of its
justification. How was the war in Iraq “pitched” to the American
people? What attempts were made beforehand to justify the invasion?
Were the ends consistent before, during, and after the war or did the
arguments change midstream? Lastly, and perhaps most importantly,
were the arguments for going to war accurate or misinformed?
Just War Critiques of the Iraq
War
Both
leading up to the Iraq War and in its aftermath, many politicians,
ethicists, theologians, and citizens have offered justifications for
and against the United States' actions. Here I will focus mainly on
those from the Christian tradition of Just War. Many of them contain
common arguments that will help to identify mistakes made and lessons
learned. Some offer unique highlights that witness to the creative
side of the Just War tradition. All of them, however, make note of
the change in circumstances between the lead up to the invasion and
the years following the invasion.
Arguments
of American imperialism aside, no one can deny that on September
11th,
2001 the United States was attacked without provocation. And outside
of false flag conspiracy theories, the attackers were acknowledged to
be terrorists mainly of Middle Eastern background – predominantly
from Saudi Arabia. The situation gets a bit more complex when into
this description is added their years presumably spent training in
Al-Qaeda camps located in Afghanistan. America was, therefore, placed
in a defensive position, but identifying the aggressor was a bit more
problematic. Faced with the realization that Al-Qaeda was operating
out of Afghanistan without hindrance and possibly with the support of
the Taliban government, the aggressor was nominally Afghanistan. The
first criteria of the Just War tradition, that of a legitimate
authority, was answered in the affirmative for the war in Afghanistan
– the United States was the aggressed and Al-Qaeda and the Taliban
by proxy were the aggressors. Due to the amorphous nature of
terrorism, and the deft use of rhetoric by the Bush administration,
the War on Terror, however, was more than just a battle against
Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
For
a conflict against Iraq as opposed to Afghanistan, there would be
additional dots that would need to be connected in order to establish
the United States as a legitimate authority to prosecute an invasion.
Before examining the two main arguments for an invasion of Iraq, it
is important to address two other arguments that were sometimes used
for the same purpose. These two were often used as secondary excuses
for the war in cases where the primary two, which will be addressed
shortly, were contested. It is important to note that Just War
tradition requires only one justifiable cause for going to war, not
four almost-good-enough causes. These two secondary arguments were:
(1) Saddam Hussein's government was corrupt and oppresive to its own
citizens to the point where a humanitarian intervention was
necessary; (2) Hussein's violation of U.N. sanctions was egregious
enough to merit punishment.
The
first of these arguments proved unjustifiable because of the lack of
recent evidence of Hussein's treachery. Even if a bad government were
assumed, the historical precedent of humanitarian intervention set
the bar much higher than the situation in Iraq merited. When
considering how many corrupt and oppressive governments were not the
target of humanitarian interventions, a decision to invade Iraq based
on humanitarian reasons would therefore belie a self-interested cause
which is anathema to the Just War tradition. The argument regarding
U.N. sanctions holds no water because the legitimate authority to
enforce the violation of U.N. sanctions would be the U.N., not a U.S.
led coalition. The authority for the use of force by the U.N. is
contained in Chapter VII of its charter where it states “[s]hould
the Security Council consider that measures provided for in Article
41 would be inadequate or have proved to be inadequate, it may take
such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to
maintain or restore international peace and security.”
The two
primary arguments used for a war in Iraq needed to address the fact
that Iraq had not attacked the United States. As has been shown,
there need not be an attack in order to justify a response. Walzer's
supreme emergency establishes the criteria for preventive war. So in
order for the United States to be considered a legitimate authority
for invading Iraq, it would have to be shown that Iraq presented a
risk to the United States that was both in the “now” temporally
and in the “catastrophic” in magnitude. In order to meet this
criteria, there were two main arguments that were used to justify an
invasion of Iraq: (1) the presence of considerable stores of weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) along with the ability to continue
producing and using them, (2) there were ties linking the government
of Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda.
The
ad bellum justification,
then, for the Iraq War rests on these two arguments. Brian Stiltner
addresses both arguments in a piece entitled “Just War: Second
Thoughts on Iraq.” Stiltner highlights the change in circumstances
mentioned above with his choice of “second thoughts” in his
title. When addressing arguments before the invasion, he states that
“war seemed justifiable because of the intelligence reports
concerning Iraq's weapons programs and because Saddam Hussein . . .
was likely to be highly dangerous if he acquired weapons of mass
destruction” (Stiltner 34). Stiltner echoes the thoughts of many of
the other authors surveyed – the WMD argument and the Al-Qaeda
argument together met the criteria for a just war. He goes on to hint
at an argument for supreme emergency when he states that these
arguments “persuaded many people that Iraq posed an imminent
threat” (Stiltner 34). The emergency criteria is covered by the
threat's being imminent and the supreme criteria is met by the
magnitude of damage a biological or chemical attack could do. Yet
these arguments faded slowly al niente
as Stiltner addresses when he states that “the just cause of
addressing weapons of mass destruction collapsed after investigations
by the press and by governmental and independent commissions revealed
deep flaws in the intelligence” (34).
Knowing
then what we know now about claims of WMD, that argument would not
have been justifiable in the use of force against Iraq. A connection
between Al-Qaeda and Iraq could still be used, however. While
diminishing the “supreme” nature of supreme emergency, Al-Qaeda
could still inflict mass casualties against the United States even
without WMD if they could count Saddam Hussein as an ally. In his
critique, Andrew Calabrese notes that in early 2003, “Secretary of
State Colin Powell appeared before the U.N. Security Council and
presented what he characterized as compelling evidence of the
existence of WMDs in Iraq and of links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein's government” (155). Through the provenance of this
statement, it was later discovered that this assertion was attributed
to an MI6 report, but that MI6 had not made this statement. MI6 went
so far as to “[leak] its own report on the same date as Powell's
speech, denying that there had been any evidence linking Iraq and
Al-Qaeda” (Calabrese 156). Calabrese also goes on to point out that
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also “discredits
claims made by the Bush administration that there was valid evidence
of an Iraq-Al-Qaeda connection” (157). It is important to note that
Calabrese believes that the evidence for both the WMD and the terror
connection claims were shoddy from the beginning. He attempts to
prove that this is not a case of hindsight being 20/20: “during
this period [the lead up to the war], such claims were disputed, and
the evidence used to support them was discredited before, during, and
since the U.S. invasion of Iraq” (Calabrese 156). If the two
arguments used to justify the invasion of Iraq proved to be false,
then it can only be stated that the Iraq War does not meet the
criteria for a just war.2
The
arguments I have made so far concerning the war in Iraq have all been
of the ad bellum
variety. An obvious example of an in bello atrocity
would be the Abu Ghraib scandal. There is simply no argument to be
made for what occurred there. I will address a possible cause for
similar atrocities below. Other in bello arguments
concern the ability of the U.S. Armed Forces to inflict damage from
afar with weapons such as cruise missiles, “smart bombs,” and
drone aircraft. Many of these arguments will have to be developed
further based on case studies from Iraq and Afghanistan. I believe
that at the heart of these new techniques is the importance of aim.
Accurate aim means a combatant is more likely to be hit and a
noncombatant less likely to be hit. Aim also has target assignment as
a prerequisite. Assigning proper targets also address the issue of
noncombatant immunity. I will address these topics later when dealing
with military training.
It is not
the goal of this paper to assign blame for the evidence used to
justify an invasion that ended up being proved false. The arguments
have been made that the Bush administration knowingly and willfully
misled the public. It has also been argued that the intelligence
given to the administration was simply flawed and no malintent was
present. Regardless of which argument proves true, there can still be
lessons learned from the Iraq War and its relation to the Just War
tradition.
It is my
belief that it was not the criteria of the Just War tradition that
caused us to enter into an unjust conflict in Iraq, but rather
institutional and systemic issues that prevented the country and its
government from arriving at the proper decision. I will focus on
three sine quibus non which contribute to the decision making
process as well as the prosecution of a just war. First among these
is the importance of training in the military – both technical and
ethical. This first prerequisite is not Iraq specific; military
ethics training is important for the Just War tradition in general,
but has gotten short shrift in many military training programs As
mentioned previously, aim is of the utmost importance and should not
be overlooked, but neither should the training of all troops in
military and combat ethics. Second among these prerequisites is the
need for a high quality press whose product is accurate. Since the
press is the main non-governmental source of data that goes into the
decision making process, a low-quality press could result in a poor
decision. Garbage in, garbage out. And lastly, the need for honest
public conversation about war must take place before the decision is
made to initiate one. This is especially true for a democracy such as
the U.S.
1Walzer
believes the contiued bombing of civilian populations, however,
ceased to be just at some point.
2The
majority of Christian critiques of the Iraq War are remarkably
consistent on this point. See Burghardt, Casey, Colson, Gorringe,
Himes, Lull, Revering, and Stiltner for similar non-justified
arguments. Strehle is the sole author arguing for a justified
intervention in Iraq.
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