A Thinking Reed

Category: War & Peace

  • Can we know if our wars are just?

    This post by Kelley Vlahos at The American Conservative looks at attempts to assess the number of civilians killed by U.S. “drones” in Pakistan and Yemen. She notes that the Obama administration has not exactly been forthcoming with estimates of the number of civilians killed–either because they aren’t tracking it or aren’t willing to make the assessments public. We’ve also been informed recently by the New York Times, that the administration may have a somewhat unorthodox method for deciding who counts as a “civilian.” (According to Vlahos, a watchdog group, the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, has estimated about 200 civilian casualties.)

    This official reticence isn’t new. Although our leaders frequently tout our military’s efforts to minimize “collateral damage,” the U.S. military has long refused to offer body counts of civilian casualties from its wars (see, e.g., this article on efforts to get the Pentagon to release an estimate of civilians killed in the Iraq war). But this raises anew a question I’ve had for a long time: if we don’t know how many civilians have been killed in a particular war, how can we know whether the war is just?

    To offer some context, most versions of what is usually referred to as “just war” theory (which is not really a single theory, but a family of theories) contain a principle of non-combatant immunity. This doesn’t mean that non-combatants* can never be killed, but that they may never be directly targeted. It’s only permissible, according to this principle, for non-combatants to be killed when this is an unavoidable side-effect of attacking a legitimate military target. Or, to put it another way, the principle forbids inflicting harm on non-combatants as an end in itself or as a means to another end.

    However, this principle is qualified by another principle: the principle of proportionality. The non-combatant immunity principle doesn’t provide a blank check for inflicting harm on non-combatants so long as you’re not intentionally targeting them. It’s constrained by the principle of proportionality, which says that the good effect one aims to achieve must outweigh, or be greater than, the damage to noncombatants that one foresees, but does not intend. Moreover, the principle requires that there not be another available option that would achieve the same benefit with less collateral damage.

    So, to summarize, collateral damage (i.e., harm or killing of non-combatants) can be permissible only if (1) it is an unintended (though possibly foreseen) side-effect of attacking a legitimate target and (2) the good to be achieved outweighs the evil of the collateral damage.

    What seems to follow from this, however, is that, in order to know whether these conditions have been met, one would have to know, at least with some degree of accuracy, what the extent of the “collateral damage” was. Otherwise, how can we assess whether the good achieved outweighed the bad of the harm to non-combatants? (This assumes that the first condition is met: that non-combatants were not directly targeted; if that isn’t the case, then no amount of proportionate good can “make up” for the violation of the immunity principle, at least according to most versions of JWT.**)

    And there’s the rub: if our government isn’t tracking the number of civilian deaths in a particular war, then they can’t know whether conditions (1) and (2) have been met. Or, alternatively, if they do know and they’re just not telling us, then we aren’t in a position to know whether they’ve been met. But without that knowledge, it’s hard to see how we can be assured that the war is being carried out according to widely recognized principles of just war.
    ——————————————————
    *There are legitimate debates about who exactly counts as a non-combatant (e.g., suppliers of weapons), but wherever we end up drawing the line, there are clearly some groups that fall on the “non-combatant” side (e.g., children).

    **The first principle acts a kind of deontological constraint on the conduct of war, while the second more closely resembles a consequentialist principle. So a pure consequentialist would likely reject (1) as absolutely binding (Michael Walzer, a noted theorist of just war, rejects (1) for cases of what he calls “supreme emergencies”).

  • Foreign policy and the Golden Rule

    Even though I argued in my previous post that liberals are under no particular obligation to support Ron Paul (e.g., vote for him), I do agree with those who say that he is raising important issues and has a perspective that needs to be heard, particularly with respect to foreign policy.

    In a recent post at his new Atlantic blog, Robert Wright does a good job of articulating this perspective. What Paul is doing, Wright argues, is expanding our “moral imagination” by inviting us to look at U.S. foreign policy through the eyes of those whom it affects:

    It’s certainly true that Paul’s hawkish critics are using his weirder ideas and checkered past to try and make non-interventionism synonymous with creepiness. But, whatever their success, Paul is making one contribution to the foreign policy debate that could have enduring value.

    It doesn’t lie in the substance of his foreign policy views (which I’m largely but not wholly in sympathy with) but in the way he explains them. Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans.

    Wright cites this impressive pro-Paul campaign ad that explicitly draws an analogy between our occupation of foreign countries and an imagined Chinese occupation of Texas:

    Wright comments:

    I’ve long thought that the biggest single problem in the world is the failure of “moral imagination”–the inability or unwillingness of people to see things from the perspective of people in circumstances different from their own. Especially incendiary is the failure to extend moral imagination across national, religious, or ethnic borders.

    If a lack of moral imagination is indeed the core problem with America’s foreign policy, and Ron Paul is unique among presidential candidates in trying to fight it, I think you have to say he’s doing something great, notwithstanding the many non-great and opposite-of-great things about him (and notwithstanding the fact that he has in the past failed to extend moral imagination across all possible borders).

    I think this is right, and I think this is why some liberal critics of Paul are wrong when they reduce his foreign-policy views to nothing more than a selfish, “leave-me-alone”-style libertarianism. One can disagree with Paul’s views on, say, foreign aid (not to mention much of his domestic agenda) and still appreciate the basic point that American foreign policy-makers (and the public) too often fail to exercise the moral imagination Wright is talking about.

    In fact, a similar argument has been made often by Noam Chomsky–someone whose political views otherwise have very little in common with Ron Paul’s. Chomsky has repeatedly pointed out that justifications of U.S. policy often appeal to a double standard which makes it okay for us to do things to others that we would never tolerate being done to us. Here’s a recent version of the argument where Chomsky points out how the interests and voices of parties who object to U.S. (and Western actions more broadly) on the international are routinely ignored, rendering them “unpeople.” The double standard is that some people’s voices count (usually power players in business and government), while others’ (e.g., those of the people without power–who often end up on the receiving end of our military actions) don’t. Chomsky’s “radicalism” often consists of nothing more than trying to apply the same principles to U.S. policy that we would apply to others.

    It’s arguable that what moral progress the human species has enjoyed has largely happened when the majority, or those with power, have been persuaded (or in many cases forced) to look at the world through the eyes of the minority, or of those who have been oppressed or victimized. In Robert Wright’s terms, this is expanding our moral imagination; in Christian terms, it’s learning to treat others as we would want to be treated. Especially when it comes to foreign policy, “American exceptionalism” all too often means refusing to see ourselves as others might see us. To the extent that Ron Paul makes people aware of this, he’s doing us a service.

  • What would it mean for progressives to “support” Ron Paul?

    There’s been a bit of back and forth recently in the left/progressive blogosphere about whether people who meet that particular description should “support” libertarian Texas Republican congressman Ron Paul’s candidacy for president. Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and others have expressed varying degrees of support for Paul’s candidacy, noting that his stances on civil liberties and foreign intervention and war-making are arguably to the “left” of President Obama’s.

    Others have countered that Paul is a social reactionary who lent his name to (and profited handsomely from) a series of newsletters in the 90s that trafficked in racist and other inflammatory language as part of a “redneck outreach” strategy among self-described “paleo” libertarians and conservatives. Paul is furthermore a libertarian of a peculiar sort: one who would devolve much of the power of the federal government to the states, a move whose likely effect on individual liberty is debatable at best.

    I’m neither a libertarian nor do I have much street cred as a “progressive.” But what I wonder is: what’s at stake in these arguments? What sort of “support” do Greenwald, et al. have in mind? Are they proposing that progressives, who one assumes are mostly registered Democrats, re-register en masse to vote in the Republican primary? Or that they should vote for Paul in the general election were he to get the GOP nomination?

    What I think needs to be kept in mind here is that Ron Paul is very, very unlikely to win the nomination and why this is the case. It’s because, among other things, his stances on issues where he is appealing to the likes of Sullivan and Greenwald, are precisely where he is most at variance with the modern Republican party and the conservative movement. The Republican Party and the conservative movement, recall, are largely a fusion of economic, social, and national-defense conservatives. And I agree with the longstanding thesis of Jim Henley that, contrary to popular belief, these factions are not really “in tension” with one another to any great degree. These three varieties of conservatives are, if not identical, largely in sympathy with one another. Among conservatives of whatever stripe, free-marketeerism, cultural conservatism, and military hawkishness are seen as mutually reinforcing. Paul’s eccentric blend of isolationism, decentralization, Austrian economics, and social conservatism are out of sync with what remains the overwhelming conservative consensus.

    So it remains unclear what sort of support a progressive or liberal is supposed to offer Paul’s candidacy. Is it that they (we?) should commend Paul for promoting certain perspectives (e.g., a critique of American interventionism) that fall largely outside of the bipartisan mainstream? Liberals can certainly do that without voting for him. But beyond this, what else is “supporting” Paul supposed to mean apart from wishing (and working?) for the success of his candidacy? Are liberals supposed to support (e.g., give money to or vote for) a candidate who opposes every facet of the regulatory and welfare state going back to the 19th century on the minuscule chance that he’ll win the presidency and dismantle the American empire? This seems like an odd allocation of resources for liberals to make. A better use of those resources would seem to be to try to move the Democratic Party–which after all already has a large progressive constituency–in a more progressive direction.

    UPDATE: Kevin Drum makes a similar argument, focusing more on what he calls Paul’s “crackpot” ideology:

    Bottom line: Ron Paul is not merely a “flawed messenger” for these views. He’s an absolutely toxic, far-right, crackpot messenger for these views. This is, granted, not Mussolini-made-the-trains-run-on-time levels of toxic, but still: if you truly support civil liberties at home and non-interventionism abroad, you should run, not walk, as fast as you can to keep your distance from Ron Paul. He’s not the first or only person opposed to pre-emptive wars, after all, and his occasional denouncements of interventionism are hardly making this a hot topic of conversation among the masses. In fact, to the extent that his foreign policy views aren’t simply being ignored, I’d guess that the only thing he’s accomplishing is to make non-interventionism even more of a fringe view in American politics than it already is. Crackpots don’t make good messengers.

    Now, if you literally think that Ron Paul’s views on drugs and national security are so important that they outweigh all of this — multiple decades of unmitigated crackpottery, cynical fear-mongering, and attitudes toward social welfare so retrograde they make Rick Perry look progressive — and if you’ve somehow convinced yourself that non-interventionism has no other significant voices except Ron Paul — well, if that’s the case, then maybe you should be happy to count Paul as an ally. But the truth is that you don’t need to. Ron Paul is not a major candidate for president. He’s never even been a significant presence as a congressman. In a couple of months he’ll disappear back into the obscurity he so richly deserves. So why get in bed with him? All you’ll do is wake up in March with a mountain of fleas. Find other allies. Make your arguments without bothering to mention him. And remember: Ron Paul has never once done any of his causes any good. There’s a good reason for that.

  • White House: dropping bombs on Libya isn’t “hostilities”

    The New York Times is reporting that President Obama has chosen to disregard, or at least overrule, the view of some of the top lawyers in his administration on the legality of the continuing war in Libya. The head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the General Counsel of the Defense Department have apparently both advised the president that the ongoing military action is not consistent with the War Powers Resolution. The act, which was passed in the wake of Vietnam, requires the president to seek congressional authorization for war 60 days after the onset of hostilities, except in cases where the United States is under attack. The war in Libya obviously doesn’t qualify, but other lawyers in the administration have argued that because the U.S. is now largely playing a supporting role in the NATO campaign, it doesn’t rise to the level of “hostilities.” The Times reporter, Charlie Savage, notes that it is “extraordinarily rare” for a president to override the conclusions of the OLC.

    I’m not qualified to judge the legal arguments, although it seems significant that even the top DOD lawyer thinks that the War Powers Act applies to this case. In any event, though, the president’s decision certainly seems to violate the spirit of the act, which was passed precisely to put a check on presidential war-making. For once I’m inclined to agree with (gulp!) John Boehner:

    The White House says there are no hostilities taking place. Yet we’ve got drone attacks under way. We’re spending $10 million a day. We’re part of an effort to drop bombs on Qaddafi’s compounds. It just doesn’t pass the straight-face test, in my view, that we’re not in the midst of hostilities.

    Of course, Congress is hardly blameless here as it has largely ceded its constitutional authority and responsibility for declaring war to the executive branch over the last several decades.

  • Friday Links

    –With the death of bin Laden, the U.S. has accomplished the aims that justified the war in Afghanistan. Time to leave.

    –An interview with “eco-economist” Herman Daly: Rethinking growth.

    –A primer on Christian nonviolence.

    –The collapse of the “progressive Christian” big tent?

    –The Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to allow non-celibate gay and lesbians to serve as clergy. Support for the change came from some surprising places. And see this article from theologian Eugene Robinson on how same-sex couples can image the faithfulness of God.

    –Catholic theologians and other teachers take Speaker of the House John Boehner to task on the GOP’s budget priorities. More here.

    –Theologian Roger Olson on how “inerrancy” became a litmus test for evangelicalism.

    –The Obama administration is trying to figure out how to continue the war in Libya without congressional authorization.

    –An interview with historian Adam Hoschchild on the World War I pacifist movement.

    –Lord Vader announces the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  • Justice, just war, and the killing of Osama bin Laden

    This story asks whether it’s wrong to celebrate bin Laden’s death. It quotes, among others, moral philosopher Christine Korsgaard who says:

    “Most people believe that the killing we do in war is justified as the only way to disable an enemy whose cause we believe to be unjust…. And although it is more controversial, many people believe, or at least feel, that those who kill deserve to die as retribution for their crimes.

    “But if we confuse the desire to defeat an enemy with the desire for retribution against a criminal, we risk forming attitudes that are unjustified and ugly — the attitude that our enemy’s death is not merely a means to disabling him, but is in itself a kind of a victory for us, or perhaps even the attitude that our enemy deserves death because he is our enemy.”

    This is an important point. Just war theory–at least in its modern incarnations–holds that the use of force is justified only up to the point of stopping an aggressor. It’s not about meting out justice in the sense of giving someone what they deserve. If it’s possible to stop an act of aggression without killing the aggressor, then just war theory requires we use only the minimum amount of force required to do that. Strictly speaking, any killing is supposed to be an unintended (albeit often forseeable) side-effect of using only the force necessary to disable the enemy.

    Of course, in practice it’s often very difficult to determine just where this line is between necessary and excessive force. But observing the distinction would certainly, I think, call into question many of the tactics of modern war. And whether the killing of bin Laden in particular was justified depends on whether it was possible to apprehend or otherwise disable him without killing him. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever know the truth of that for sure. Therefore, from this perspective, we’re not really in a position to say with 100 percent certainty that “justice was done” in the killing of bin Laden.

    UPDATE: Just to clarify, I’m not saying that bin Laden didn’t “deserve to die” in some moral sense. What I’m saying is that just war theory, as Christine Korsgaard points out, isn’t about punishment of the guilty so much as setting out the proper conditions for using force to protect the innocent and repel aggression. The question of justice in war is distinct from the question of justice as it relates to bin Laden’s personal guilt and what punishment might be appropriate.

  • bin Laden

    Clearly no American is going to shed any tears for Osama bin Laden, me included. And based on the president’s statement last night, it sounds like the operation that got him was of the right kind–targeted, based on sound intelligence, avoiding both American and civilian casualties. If we’re going to fight terrorism, this is vastly preferable to “shock and awe.”

    That said, it’s hard to be too giddy about this when you consider the road we’ve traveled over the last decade. Nearly ten years after the inauguration of the “war on terror” we find ourselves with two protracted wars we’ve been unable to bring to a decisive or satisfying conclusion; trillions of dollars spent, further contributing to a ballooning national debt; untold thousands of dead–both American troops and foreign civilians; and an engorged national security apparatus that has pushed, and sometimes broken through, the boundaries of values we profess to hold dear. The Obama Administration has taken some important steps back from the brink (ending torture, winding down operations in Iraq, e.g.) but hasn’t gone nearly far enough. If this is what winning looks like, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

  • Mission creep watch

    This is shaping up to be quite the splendid little war:

    European nations stepped up efforts Wednesday to aid Libyan rebels, with France pledging to intensify airstrikes against the forces of Moammar Gaddafi, and Italy joining the French and British in announcing plans to help train and organize the rebel fighters.

    […]

    The Obama administration has said it will not send ground forces into Libya, and senior U.S. military officials said they have received no instructions to plan such an effort. But the administration has not ruled out what State Department spokesman Mark Toner described Tuesday as stepped-up “non-lethal assistance.” Toner also said that the possibility of arming the rebels has “not been taken off the table.”

    Remember when this was nothing more than a no-fly zone established to prevent a massacre of civilians?

  • Friday Links

    I spent the day hanging out with my family, so these are coming a little late…

    –Why Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal is neither brave nor serious.

    –Free-range meat isn’t necessarily “natural.”

    –A case for universalism from the Scottish evangelical preacher and biblical scholar William Barclay.

    –A review of a recent book called What’s the Least I can Believe and Still Be a Christian?

    –The WaPo reviews a local prog-metal band called Iris Divine (here’s their MySpace page).

    –Do Americans love war?

    –Speaking of war, April 12 marks the 150th anniversary of the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter and the onset of the Civil War. I’m thinking of marking the anniversary by finally tackling James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom this spring.

    –As I write this, it looks like the two parties are getting close to a budget agreement that will avert a government shutdown. But I still wanted to note that a shutdown would have a major impact on the District itself, shutting down a number of basic city services. This is something that hasn’t gotten much attention.

    –The AV Club continues its feature “Loud”–a monthly review of the latest in punk, hardcore, metal, and noise.

  • Mission creep watch, the continuing series

    From today’s WaPo:

    An operation billed as a humanitarian intervention in Libya by President Obama was described in starkly more military terms Thursday by the administration’s top two defense officials.

    Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told lawmakers that continuing coalition attacks on Libyan government troops — even when they were not directly threatening civilians — would encourage senior government and military officials to break with Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and inspire more civilians to join opposition forces.

    “His military, at a certain point, is going to have to face the question of whether they are prepared over time to be destroyed by these air attacks or whether they decide it’s time for him to go,” Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

    The testimony came amid reports that another member of Gaddafi’s inner circle had defected, boosting the spirits of the beleaguered rebels. A top Libyan Foreign Ministry official, Ali Abdel Salam al-Treki, announced his defection in a statement sent to news agencies by his nephew. British Prime Minister David Cameron and White House spokesman Jay Carney on Thursday hailed the earlier defection of Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Kusa, saying it was a sign that Gaddafi’s power was eroding.

    In eastern Libya, rebels fought their way back into the key oil-refinery town of Brega but were soon forced to withdraw under heavy shelling from Gaddafi’s forces, which maintain a huge firepower advantage over the ragtag opposition army.

    In his testimony, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blamed the rebels’ losses in recent days on the heavy cloud cover in Libya, which has prevented U.S. and allied jets from attacking Gaddafi’s ground forces.

    Mullen said the sustained bombing campaign had destroyed as much as 25 percent of Gaddafi’s military arsenal and pledged that coalition forces would continue to hammer away at his ground forces.

    Some of the United States’ partners have acknowledged that the initial descriptions of the intervention in Libya no longer apply. “What is happening in Libya is not a no-fly zone,” a senior European diplomat told reporters, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity. “The no-fly zone was a diplomatic thing, to get the Arabs on board. What we have in Libya is more than that.”

    Anyone think this concept of a wider war could’ve been sold honestly to Congress and the war-weary American public?