Leithart on just war
Recently Peter Leithart has been posting on the significance of the just war criteria. A few notable quotes:
Pakistan has been one of the staunchest American allies in the region, so staunch that it’s regularly denounced in the region as a US puppet. Now we’re bombing Taliban who have fled across the Afghan border into Pakistan. Islamabad charges that we and our allies have killed several hundred civilians, and has asked us to stop. Islamabad sees our missions as a violation of their national sovereignty. Islamabad has nukes. But we keep sending in the drones. We’re risking that testy alliance, and also running the risk of throwing Pakistan into a domestic crisis that might topple the friends that remain.
Plus, the bombings often fail to meet the requirements of the classic standards of jus in bello, justice in the conduct of war. Daniel M. Bell has recently noted that “it is not enough that just warriors do not intend the death of noncombatants,” he writes, “they have a responsibility to exercise due care in avoiding noncombatant deaths and protecting them from harm.” …
I believe in just war, but I feel the sting of John Howard Yoder’s complaint that in practice just war theory is toothless, incapable of doing anything but endorse whatever “military necessity” demands. If the church is going to be a credible witness, both in the US and to the Muslim peoples of the Middle East, that charge must be put to rest.
And also:
In the previous post, Jim Rogers asked what can morally be done about enemies who use innocents are human shields? That’s a difficult question, but I’ve found Daniel Bell’s discussion helpful (Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the State). …
…the response should be ”to be more discriminate. Instead of using air power, one might have to send in ground forces. Instead of using a tank or artillery, one might have to use infantry. Instead of using an M-16 or hand grenade, one might have to use a sniper.” He admits that this rigorous standard might mean that a military target will have to be left intact for the time being, until it’s possible to mount a discriminate attack, and he would also admit that, despite all precautions, innocents get killed. But Bell takes the standards of jus in bello as rigorous demands that cannot be simply dispensed with when they get difficult to apply.
The fact is, much of modern warfare is unjust by just war standards. One does not have to be a pacifist to see that. Yoder was right to point out the implication of just war theory is that it is at least possible that the only just thing to do in some situations is surrender.
War is hell. It cannot be sanitized. Surrender is not an option. Innocents always die. The charge of the death of innocents is upon those who provoke war, not upon those who fight to bring peace. Finally, the way to make sure that innocents die is to surrender to evil people. The consequences of surrender to tyrants thus are unthinkable and ultimately unworkable as an option. Yeah. Surrender to the United States. But I’d refuse to surrender to any other country, and certainly not to Islamofacists or Marxists.
I think the Swedes would you treat you pretty well. Canada, we used to be okay with prisoners, when we didn’t turn them over to the
Karzai dictatorship, err, totally democratic and free government of Afghanistan to be tortured.PW Dunn:
“Surrender is not an option.”
This is Machievellian. It is not justice (for example) to vaporize an entire city of women and children (as in the case of Hiroshima) because of what a tyrant might do. Ultimately Christian (or, truly righteous) magistrates believe in God, and go to him for vengeance when no just avenue remains for them to take vengeance.
Innocents may always die, but that does not mean “we” have to be the ones to kill them. Ultimately, there is a real moral difference between killing and not doing absolutely everything possible, morality be damned, to stop someone from killing someone else. In one case we are killing, in the other we are not.
It has been argued that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved innocent lives. The Japanese, it has been argued, would have stood against all manner of conventional bombing which would cumulatively exceeded the death toll from the two atomic bombs–not to mention also those who would have died of starvation and pestilence during an extended siege of the island state. One only need look at the conventional bombing of Dresden, for example. Andrew, what you are asking is that soldiers be jeopardized to save the innocent lives of the enemy. The role of a commander however is to win the war while not placing those who are under his charge in more risk than what is necessary to win. In practice ultimately, such scruples lead to losing the war and whatever innocent lives which could have been saved by victory will perish too–consider the killing fields in Cambodia and the slaughter of a million Vietnamese after the US retreat. The goal of war is victory. If you don’t have victory as your goal then you should never enter it in the first place. This means that hard choices will be made. As for your example from Japan, given that the US was effective in war but magnanimous in victory, don’t you think that the Japanese as a nation are better off than had the war dragged on indefinitely? Not too many decades after that terrible defeat, they rose up to become one of the most prosperous nations in history.
“Andrew, what you are asking is that soldiers be jeopardized to save the innocent lives of the enemy.”
No, what I’m asking is that they not be asked to kill innocent people in the first place.
“The goal of war is victory. If you don’t have victory as your goal then you should never enter it in the first place.”
Having victory as your goal does not mean you have it at all costs. The just war tradition, for over a millennia, has not thought so anyway.
“As for your example from Japan, given that the US was effective in war but magnanimous in victory, don’t you think that the Japanese as a nation are better off than had the war dragged on indefinitely?”
I don’t know, I’m not sure I’d be persuaded of the magnanimity of the US army if I watched my non-combatant, innocent, child relatives be vaporized before my eyes.
“In practice ultimately, such scruples lead to losing the war and whatever innocent lives which could have been saved by victory will perish too”
What exactly makes us better than the evil Islamofascists and Marxists other than scruples?
“No, what I’m asking is that they not be asked to kill innocent people in the first place.”
The quote above stated, “Instead of using air power, one might have to send in ground forces. Instead of using a tank or artillery, one might have to use infantry. Instead of using an M-16 or hand grenade, one might have to use a sniper.” Putting the soldier on the ground and using less effective means of killing places the soldier in greater danger than using effective distance weapons. So choose who you are going to kill, your own soldiers or your enemies innocents?
“I don’t know, I’m not sure I’d be persuaded of the magnanimity of the US army if I watched my non-combatant, innocent, child relatives be vaporized before my eyes.” The magnanimity of the US after the defeat of Japan is established history. Don’t forget that Japan attacked the United States unprovoked with a brutal sucker punch. Millions died in the Pacific Theater of World War II, all attributable to the Japanese. My family left Korea in 1905 to escape Japanese tyranny which had led to widespread poverty and eventually to the complete annexation of the Korea in 1910. My mother was nine and lived in Oahu on the day of the attack, and my aunt (11) was nearly killed. There was a lot of anger. People at the end of World War II undoubtedly wanted to make the Japanese pay for what they had done, but instead, the US helped them rebuild and get back on the right foot. After having lost 90,000 soldiers to the Japanese, that is magnanimity. As a result, Japan remains at peace with the US to this day.
A couple points worth mentioning about the end of WWII in the Pacific theatre:
Hiroshima can be debated in terms of necessity or not, but after the bomb had been dropped it was clear that the Japanese had to surrender and the government embarked on an attempt to do so while saving face. The only thing that they were really after was a guarantee that the emperor would retain his title – something the Americans allowed to happen anyway. Was it stupid for them not to rush to accept Potsdam right then and there? Probably. Was it necessary in terms of strategic goals to bomb Nagasaki though? No. That was a little piece of performance art for Joe Stalin, the message being “we have a lot of these.”
As far as helping Japan the history here has to be read closely, the Americans were content to leave Japan as a third-world backwater up until about 1949 at which point there is a decided shift in American policy. Why? The lynchpin of American post-war geo-political strategy in the Pacific involved the Nationalists controlling China. They failed, and so the Americans had to shift to a sort of plan B: making Japan into a model of democracy and economic success. Rebuilding Japan and implementing the Marshall Plan in Europe were two prongs of an anti-Communist strategy more than they were anything altruistic.
The commencement of the Cold War in the immediate wake of WWII makes WWII almost entirely unworkable as any kind of model for evaluating post-war scenarios in other conflicts (despite the fact that it is frequently used that way).
“Putting the soldier on the ground and using less effective means of killing places the soldier in greater danger than using effective distance weapons. So choose who you are going to kill, your own soldiers or your enemies innocents?”
How about not putting the soldiers in that impossible situation in the first place, if those are necessarily the only two options?
And frankly, yes, sometimes justice might require dying rather than killing.
Well, yeah that’s what I’m saying. If the idea is that you must only fight a just war, then if your enemy constantly hides behind the skirts of women, then you just don’t go and fight them. You just let them come and kill you whenever they want. Good one. But at some point, people become so angry that they won’t care who they hide behind.
Yes, it is good to lay one’s life down for a friend. But it is not right for a commander to lay down the lives of his soldiers. That is usually considered evil and history frowns upon it.
Dan:
Nagasaki was so that the Japanese would surrender unconditionally because they thought we had lots of them.
The magnanimous response of the Americans towards the defeated enemy at the end of World War II was intended to be correct the mistakes of the Treaty of Versailles which many viewed as having laid the groundwork for renewed hostilities. The Cold War by all means played a role in policy, but your narrative unnecessarily demeans the policy makers who were largely successful in creating friends out of enemies. You make it seem also that it was a bad thing that America created these friends to protect against Soviet and Chinese aggression. I visited East Germany right after the fall of the Berlin wall. The Soviets had kept the Germans in Third World conditions for the entire duration of their occupation, not just for the first four years while resources were thin and everyone, allies and enemies alike, were suffering from severe deprivation. Thus, history shows that the US was far more magnanimous than the USSR, by contrast. Viet Nam and North Korea are also very poor. I visited South Korea in 1994, and it had a booming economy. I saw these things with my own eyes.
In 1982 I bought a little pick-up truck. My Dad, who was 9 years old when Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, said to me, “You know Mitsubishi made tanks and airplanes that killed Americans.” We Americans largely forgave our enemies by buying their Volkswagens, BMWs, Hondas, Toyotas, and every other sort of manufactured goods from their factories. Their workers travel around the world and have wonderful vacations while many American workers can’t even afford to travel. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve traveled places where the German and Japanese tourists outnumber the Americans. If that is not magnanimity, I don’t know what is.
“Well, yeah that’s what I’m saying. If the idea is that you must only fight a just war, then if your enemy constantly hides behind the skirts of women, then you just don’t go and fight them. You just let them come and kill you whenever they want. Good one. But at some point, people become so angry that they won’t care who they hide behind.”
So the moral alternative is to fight an unjust war? Or is war the one activity in the universe to which moral standards, and the Lordship of Christ, do not apply?
No I am saying that if you must hold to such a just war theory, then it is better not to go to war. So no Viet Nam, no Korea, no Iraq, no Germany. Because at some point, if you pick up arms it’s going to get ugly. It involves a compromised situation probably more than anything else, where in order to survive you have to kill other people and perhaps even some innocent people and some people on your own side by accident or negligence. It is bad. It can’t be sanitized. And you can’t go to war with the rules that you are suggesting and win. So better just not to go. But that means that your enemy can bully you; and go to your house and beat you up and kill you like Maj. Hasan did
My idea of a just war is that you go when there is a good reason, and you fight to win. You do your best to protect the innocent, but sometimes the mission to win and the enemy make it impossible to do that consistently. The war on terrorism is a good example because the enemy wears no uniform (except when they are wearing ours) and often uses human shields, exploiting our desire not to kill the innocent. We can’t win that war with your rules so it is better not to go at all.
The other day our housekeeper broke a knife (an expensive Henkels) cooking our supper. She was carelessly using it to break off some pieces of frozen meat. So she said that she would pay for the knife. But we won’t let her do that because if she hadn’t been cooking our dinner she wouldn’t have broken the knife.
OK. Well I don’t agree that the just war criteria necessarily entail never going to war. I’m willing to live with the fact that they might entail not fighting in most contemporary wars (especially everything under the banner of the War on Terror).
PW:
I want to avoid getting into a sarcastic rhetorical duel. I apologize for contributing to this tone. However, I would like to continue to the discussion.
Let me ask something else: would you be willing to apply this ends-justify-the-means logic to police force, too?
I hope you haven’t found my tone disrespectful; though I’ve tried to use irony for rhetorical purposes.
I am not sure that I am asking for an ends-justify-the-means logic. It’s just realism that I’m arguing for. For the police it depends on how extreme the case is. Obviously lethal force is often necessary, but their main job, unlike the soldier, is to protect the community not to kill the enemy.
I was thinking about my own tone, not yours.
I don’t think any moral distinction can be made between the police and the army. Both the police and the army exist to punish evildoers and thereby to protect society.
The fact that police will routinely choose the life of innocent hostages over punishing captors proves that my logic is not that unrealistic, I think.