Why war has rules
AS SOME OF THE guards at Abu Ghraib are now finding out -- too late and to their chagrin -- all is not fair in love and war. Or at least not in war. There are rules of war, passed down from soldier to soldier for centuries as codes of ethics, debated by philosophers and religious thinkers, and, more recently, spelled out in international treaties.
Nevertheless, many people still find it hard to understand how moral distinctions can hold up in hell, or why they should. Consider the response of John Derbyshire, a writer at National Review Online, to the news that Americans might be abusing Iraqi prisoners: "Good. Kick one for me."
Some people fall back on the notion that no one can, from the safety of the armchair, question the decisions warriors make under brutal duress. "Who knows what those boys were going through," one resident of Corriganville, Md., hometown for some of the reservists who allegedly ran amok at Abu Ghraib, told The Washington Post.
From the left, a more typical argument is that since everything is horrific in war, it is pointless to single out particular acts for criticism. In this view, the beheading of Nicholas Berg and a smart bomb that drifts off-course and kills a child are morally indistinguishable.
The political philosopher Michael Walzer, editor of Dissent magazine and a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, heard versions of all these arguments during the Vietnam War -- a war he protested -- and found them wrong-headed in ways he couldn't always pin down. When it was over, he sat down and wrote "Just and Unjust Wars" (1977), now a classic. The book helped drag just-war theory, a tradition of thought beginning with St. Augustine almost 2,000 years ago, out of theology departments and into the mainstream of political science -- and all the way to West Point, where the theory is now taught.
Now, some 30 years after that war, Walzer has a new book, a collection of essays forthcoming in August that fills in some of the gaps in his thinking and applies his brand of moral reasoning to cases from Kosovo to Iraq. Proponents of just-war theory, he writes in "Arguing About War" (Yale), are still fighting on two fronts: "against those who will not think realistically about the defense of the country they live in and also against those who will not recognize the humanity of their opponents."
The foundations of just-war theory are the concepts of jus ad bellum (justice in deciding when to fight) and jus in bello (justice during combat). Just-war theorists find wars of conquest always wrong, but those of self-defense or humanitarian intervention sometimes acceptable. In combat, some civilian deaths are inevitable, but they must never be intentional and must be minimized, even if that mean soldiers run greater risks.
It is folly to say that this is mere ivory tower second-guessing, Walzer argues in a phone interview. "It is precisely soldiers who are most likely to think about these questions," he says. "The memoirs of war are full of moral dilemmas and moral anxieties." And Abu Ghraib notwithstanding, he says, it's soldiers more than anyone else who recognize the reciprocal nature of morality: Don't hurt their prisoners, because then they'll hurt ours.
In contrast to some of his allies on the left, Walzer believes that both the first Gulf War and the attack on Afghanistan were justified. The first repulsed an aggressor; the second targeted people who had committed an act of war against the United States.
Yet Walzer came out strongly against the present Iraq war last March, in an essay in The New York Review of Books, reprinted in the new volume. He thinks that sanctions, coercive inspections, and no-fly zones were preferable alternatives to all-out war. The claims of imminent threat from Iraq were unpersuasive, and there was no humanitarian disaster to stop.
The new currency of just-war theory is both welcome and cause for renewed vigilance, Walzer thinks. On the one hand, he writes in the new book, "It is easier now than it ever was to imagine a general saying, `No, we can't do that; it would cause too many civilian deaths."' On the other, smooth talk from the Pentagon can mask grim realities.
The biggest change in Walzer's thinking since 1977 has to do with humanitarian intervention. Then, he thought the test of a just intervention was that the troops went in, stopped the killing, and got out. Now he sees that the broken societies that breed humanitarian disasters often need reconstruction -- preferably through international effort.
"I didn't think enough the first time around about what you might call jus post bellum -- justice after the war," Walzer says. Looking at Baghdad, it's clear he's not the only one.
Christopher Shea's column appears biweekly in Ideas. Email: critical.faculties@verizon.net.
