Just More War

Nathan made a long series of comments on my earlier post on terrorism and Just War theory. I’m going to try to reset a bit.

In that post I argued, I think correctly, that terrorism is not justified under Just War theory. But: is Just War theory applicable today? Do we believe that everybody should follow it?

The first question is whether war can have rules at all. There is a long history of rules of warfare, most recently the Geneva conventions. There is also a long history of people ignoring those rules. Obviously nobody in Iraq today is scrupulously following the Geneva conventions (though I hope that most of the U.S. military is trying to do so).

One way to see whether the rules mean anything at all is to look to see what happens when the war is over. Are people who violated the rules punished? A relatively recent development is international tribunals which attempt to punish people for violating the rules–not so much the Geneva convention, as extreme so-called crimes against humanity. These tribunals can be effective ways to punish the leaders in a war, though in general they can only punish the leaders of the side who lost.

Another way to see whether the rules mean anything is to see who follows them. Until the Iraq war, the U.S. was generally careful to follow the Geneva conventions, and other agreed upon laws of war. Will the decision by the Bush administration to ignore the conventions have lasting bad effects on the U.S.? I tend to think that it will, but it’s obviously difficult to prove. Russia, for example, ignored the Geneva conventions in their battles in Chechnya; no bad effects are evident to date.

If there are no rules, then does it make sense to speak of terrorism as violating the rules? In some cases we can say that there is no state of war, in which case the terrorist attack is simply a horrible crime. I would say that this is true of Timothy McVeigh’s attack in Oklahoma City. McVeigh claimed to be seeking revenge for Waco and Ruby Ridge, but there were other means of redress. It was correct for the U.S. government to charge him with a crime and convict him (though I am personally opposed to the death penalty which he received).

What about 9/11? I think Al Qaeda would say that there was a state of war between them and the U.S., although many in the U.S. were unaware of it. Al Qaeda believed that the U.S. had been attacking people in the Muslim world by putting armed forces in Saudi Arabia and by supporting Israel. It does not imply supporting 9/11 to observe that their argument is rational, nor does that imply that I actually agree with it. If Al Qaeda was at war with the U.S., and if there are no rules in war, then do we have any grounds for arguing that their attack was unethical?

I think there is an important observation to make here. Whether or not there are rules of war, the U.S. (and, for that matter, Israel) do generally try to avoid accidental deaths. The U.S. has made many mistakes in Iraq, causing many accidental deaths, but in general they were mistakes. In some cases, soldiers have been punished for them. In almost all cases, the deaths were considered to be regrettable. Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack was, of course, in no way a mistake.

Is that a key difference between terrorism and other forms of warfare? That terrorism intentionally kills people at random, while non-terrorism kills people by accident? It is a subtle distinction, but not, I think, an irrelevant one.

However, we must then also consider the ethics of creating a situation in which it is likely that people will be killed by accident. The unprovoked invasion of Iraq clearly created such a situation.

It is odd to observe that the Bush administration has on the one hand called for idealistic efforts to create worldwide democracy, while on the other hand it has adopted a very pragmatic and “ends justify the means” approach to actually (attempting to) create it.