GEORGE BUSH, to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention last week
In origin and inspiration, just-war-reasoning is essentially religious, usually Christian. Its main concepts were formulated in the fourth century by Saint Augustine, who sought to reconcile the Christian commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” with the soldier’s duty to kill. Augustine’s theories were given greater precision by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, when chivalry still governed the waging of battles, and refined by 17th-century Spanish theologians, who aimed to limit rather than justify the war-making powers of the emerging nation-states. After World War I with its introduction of air raids on civilian targets, many just-war principles were woven into international law. “It’s a complicated theory,” says Stanley Hoffmann, an expert on international relations at Harvard University, “but the old theologians knew what they were talking about.”
In its classic form, just-war thinking focuses on both the purpose and the conduct of war. For a war to be just, it must be declared by a legitimate authority. The cause must be just. It must be fought with the right intentions, in a proper manner and only as a last resort. Wars of aggression are always immoral. But along with defensive wars, modern just-war-theories allow wars on behalf of helpless third parties and those designed to combat grave threats to the international order.
Does the war in the gulf satisfy these criteria? For Father J. Brian Hehir, professor of ethics and international politics at Georgetown University, some of the original justifications for fighting Iraq–notably maintaining the West’s access to cheap oil–would not pass inspection. But Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and subsequent violations of human rights there, Hebir says, satisfy the just-cause criterion. More problematic is the category of last resort. Hehir argues that the economic sanctions against Iraq should have been given a longer chance to work. But Walzer believes that the United States did all it reasonably could to avoid war through sanctions and negotiations. In any case, he finds the notion of “last resort” intellectually unhelpful: “You never really reach the point of last resort, because you can always call another conference.” Once the United States backed up negotiations with a plausible threat to fight, he believes, the president had little choice but to go ahead when the deadline was reached.
Now that the war is on, just-war theory dictates that citizens monitor and make ethical judgments on the conduct of the combat. A war for a just cause still may be fought by unjust means–and often has been. A classic case in point is the indiscriminate Allied firebombing of Dresden during World War II, which made no effort to distinguish military from civilian targets. By contrast, Walzer observes, the allied air forces in Kuwait have been instructed to return with their bomb loads if they have been unable to attack their designated targets. Walzer suggests that this evident–and militarily risky–effort to avoid civilian casualties is a decided moral improvement over tactics used in Vietnam–and demonstrates, he thinks, the value of ethics courses taught at the nation’s military academies.
Just-war theory also sets limits on warfare. The means must be proportional to the ends. It may be hard for allied conduct in the gulf’ to satisfy this demand. Once started, wars tend to escalate. By what calculus, Walzer asks, can anyone fix a “just” proportion between the number of people killed in battle and the value of liberating Kuwait? How many lives may be taken in pursuit of" the principle of collective security or a stable international order? And what if the war widens to the whole Middle East? The number of casualties would increase well beyond the original scope of freeing Kuwait and destroying Saddam’s war-making capabilities. At what point would a just war then become unjust?
The purely pragmatic mind shrinks from questions like these. Perhaps they indicate the folly of trying to think morally about war, especially against an aggressor who is not bothered by just-war principles. But the alternative is to leave war to the generals–or never to wage war at all.
