Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=10/05/2002

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01204

TITLE=IRAQ AND "JUST WAR"

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0037

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: Would a war against Iraq be just? Next, On the Line.

[music]

Host: President George W. Bush, in a speech to the United Nations, challenged the world organization to hold Iraq to account. Members of the U-N Security Council have been discussing how to confront Saddam Hussein's regime. Lawmakers in the United States are considering a resolution that would authorize President Bush to take immediate action against Iraq. Among those making their voices heard in the debates over Iraq are theologians and ethicists. Would a war against Iraq be just? Joining me to talk about that question are Reverend John Langan, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University; Shaun Casey, assistant professor of Christian Ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary, and Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute. Welcome, thanks for joining us today.

John Langan, what is a just war? What makes a war a just war?

Langan: A war is just if it meets certain conditions and the conditions have to do with the circumstances of entering into the war, that there has to be a just cause, proper authority, right intention on the part of the decision-makers. And the war then has to meet certain tests of proportionality, likelihood of success, and I'm freezing on one now.

Host: And this is something that comes out of a tradition of debate going back how far?

Langan: Oh, certainly back to Saint Augustine and the Christian community and there are elements of it in Cicero and Plato earlier.

Host: Shaun Casey, let's talk a little bit about some of these particulars that John Langan has alluded to. One of the principles that is most often mentioned is the principle of self-defense. How is that defined in the tradition of just war theory?

Casey: In some ways it's really the beginning of the discussion. The right to self-defense is recognized certainly in Christian circles, that one has even a positive duty to help a neighbor who's unjustly being attacked. So that's the origin in a sense of just cause. That if one sees a country invading an innocent third country, then you have a positive duty in the name of Christian love of neighbor to intervene and try to repel that attack.

Host: How about some of the other principles, Robert Royal, that go into just war theory? For example, likelihood of success is often cited as one of the principles. How does that generally come up?

Royal: It's a bit like a football game. Are you likely to win if you go out and play the game? That's a very difficult one to decide but obviously anybody who's going into a war, knowing what you're going to do is wreak havoc and destruction and death, it would not be justifiable to go to war for that reason. But the one that we haven't mentioned is last resort. And that may be the most difficult of all to decide on because at what point do the negotiations, do the various diplomatic initiatives, do the other less than warlike means of applying pressure to a given country or group of countries -- can you say to a certain moral certainty that there's no other recourse but to armed engagement? And that's really quite different.

Host: John Langan.

Langan: I think in most presentations of the theory, proportionality, last resort, and probability of success are all recognized as judgment calls or what in the jargon is called a prudential judgment. And people looking at the situation, reasonable people, conscientious people could come to different conclusions.

Host: Shaun Casey, how would you define what comes as a last resort?

Casey: Well, one classic formulation is that all peaceable means have to be tried and exhausted. The contrast of that is, well, you can always call one more peace conference and try one more time to bring people to the table. But certainly as long as there are diplomatic avenues, like if the Security Council of the United Nations has not finished its deliberations, I would argue that last resort has not been observed in any case. If there are in fact large international actors still willing to talk and negotiate, I think the presumption has to be you allow those conversations to go on.

Host: Robert Royal, is there any point at which those conversations would no longer be required in terms of last resort theory?

Royal: It's not that they're not required. As John rightly says, there is just a matter of judgment at a certain point. The statesman is not a moral philosopher writing out abstract rules about what constitutes morality and immorality. The world is messy. So when you're dealing with regimes, they're usually regimes that have some doubtful authority. You're dealing with regimes that are probably long-standing problems in the world and obviously we can think of many places around the world where that's the case, not only Iraq. So, therefore, to say that you have to play out all the cards I think is true, but there comes a point at which just practically speaking a statesman has to make a judgment, either yes or no.

Casey: There are times, frankly, when events on the ground overtake diplomacy. Armies can be amassing, massacres, I mean, Rwanda comes to mind, even some of the events in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia. Events on the ground really overtook the diplomats as they continued to talk and at that point last resort really loses a lot of its meaning when the killing is actually started.

Host: John Langan?

Langan: I think the problem that we may very well be confronted with is that the United States and the United Nations come down on different sides of how to resolve this. Now, the United Nations can't decide this in some ways, because we could veto one way of resolving it, the Russians, French, Chinese could veto another way of resolving it. The U-N may wind up with something like a hung jury. But the U-N may fail to endorse the decisions that President Bush would like endorsed.

Host: Well, let me ask you about the U-N role here. The general secretary of the United Methodist Church General Board of Church and Society, a gentleman by the name of Jim Winkler, said recently, "No member nation has the right to take unilateral military action without the approval of the U-N Security Council." The Wall Street Journal in an editorial responded to that by asking, "Since when did multilateralism become the linchpin of just war theory?" Robert Royal, how does just war theory relate to international bodies. Obviously, just war theory has a tradition going back before the United Nations existed.

Royal: Well, in the case of this international system that we now have, it's a good thing, generally speaking, that we've tried to build up this system of international law. And we prevent any nation from just casually or with what it believes to be some kind of grievance going to war under conditions that could perhaps lead to a different resolution of the situation. The problem for me, in this particular case, is that when we talk about responsibility, it's simply factually so that the United States is going to be the country that is going to have to bear the burden of the final decision. If there's a decision, say, to confront Iraq in the next few months, the United States is going to have to lead that. If it's going to be a case that we wait two or three years, we're going to have to deal with it at that point. So, certain countries, if you want to put it this way, have a kind of a weighted opinion because there are a lot of countries that are not going to have to be engaged in this in any substantive way. And probably other than the United States, there is no one who is really going to be on the line and that entails, obviously, certain responsibilities on the United States part. But it means that we also have certain prerogatives.

Langan: You used an interesting word there, namely "lead," and one of the key questions is whether there will be any followers. So far, I think we only have one seriously committed follower and that's the United Kingdom. We're really dealing here with a world-order question. It's not as if there's been an attack on the United States by Iraq. There was an attack by al-Qaida, but that's a different matter. Then the question is whether we, in effect, become the unique determiners of world order.

Host: John Langan, you say there hasn't yet been an attack on the United States. That raises the question of preemption, which has been a big part of this debate. And Shaun Casey, you've spoken about how it's not as though Iraq is massing troops on the U-S border. How do you consider the issue of preemption in a world in which weapons and terrorist means don't necessarily entail a threat being made in terms of troops on a border?

Casey: I think a number of things. First of all, the ethic itself takes a pretty dim view of preemption. Exceptional cases where preemption is entertained as being moral is when the threat is grave and imminent -- troops amassing on your borders or missiles literally in the air heading towards your shores. The difficulty with simply then walking away from that and saying if another country possesses ill-will toward us and weapons of mass destruction -- there are a lot of countries that don't like one another that also possess weapons of mass destruction. So if we normalize the notion of going to war preemptively under those conditions, I think we open up the globe to really ghastly prospects of increased war.

Host: Robert Royal, how do you come down on the preemption question?

Royal: I come down quite a bit differently than Shaun does, obviously. [laughter] I think we have to recognize that we're in a new, empirical situation and this does put a lot of strain on the old just war tradition as actually the cold war did as well.

Host: And by empirical, you mean, a different set of facts on the ground.

Royal: Yes, a different set of facts on the ground. The old stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States also placed a great deal of strain on just war conditions because when you have missiles that can cross continents in a matter of twenty or thirty minutes, it makes the need to confront that power with a countervailing power all the more urgent. I think that the really sensitive issue about Iraq and perhaps some of the other countries as well is that you can't wait for say, nuclear material to cycle its way through the pipeline to certain terrorist groups and then say after something unthinkable has actually happened in the United States or Europe or somewhere else in the world, "oh, perhaps we should have done something about that earlier." It's not that I dispute what Shaun is saying. I think that in general terms, yes, there should be a high presumption against going to war. But we now have a different type of warfare that we're engaged in, and it's very difficult to say that some sort of regime change should not occur in an Iraq that very soon might be passing along some weapons of mass destruction that could threaten the world order and could actually lead further down the line to much more destructive responses.

Host: John Langan?

Langan: The question then becomes whether Saddam Hussein is deterrable, because he would be very foolish to pass on weapons of mass destruction to other political agents. For one thing, it would be very likely that this could be traced and then he would face the danger of serious counterstrikes from the United States and perhaps from other states as well. So, this is a difficult matter to settle, because Saddam Hussein clearly is a master of self-preservation. He's also opportunistic and irresponsible in certain ways. But it's not as if it's clear that he would welcome death for a cause like the al-Qaida people.

Casey: And too, I think the final point is there are a lot of countries that possess missiles that can deliver nasty weapons. There are a lot of countries that have tried to get access and do have access to fissile material. If we normalize preemptive strikes against those kinds of countries, that's my point. Particularly when you look at South Asia, with Pakistan and India. If we normalize preemption with respect to bad neighbors and weapons of mass destruction, there's a formula for unleashing World War Three.

Host: Shaun Casey, let me ask you though, does it make a difference that Saddam Hussein, unlike many of these actors you refer to, has actually had a history of using weapons of mass destruction, first in his war against Iran and then also against his own people in Halabja, killing thousands with mustard gas?

Casey: Well, that's the reason we have the two no-fly zones in the North and the South. We can restrain him proportionately there and we prevent him from attacking the Kurds or the Shiites in that fashion. I think a very clear signal has been sent that he can't engage in that kind of behavior anymore without really dire consequences.

Royal: I wouldn't formulate this quite the way you do, Shaun. I don't think that anybody is talking about normalizing American activity or even international activity.

Casey: I think if you take a look at the security statement that the White House sent up to the hill, [Congress], in fact it does normalize preemption as a tool of American diplomacy. It's very clear the document says that.

Royal: Preemption in the sense that where we judge there will be an immediate or, let us say, medium-term threat there.

Casey: I don't think it's that nuanced in the document. The document's very open-ended.

Langan: Yes, it's very expansive.

Royal: That may be the case, but look, the fact of the matter is that one of the reasons why we're having this debate at all is that the Bush administration has put the international community on notice that for the last eleven years we've had no movement in any serious way against Saddam Hussein, he's continued to develop these weapons.

[crosstalk]

Casey: Well, that's not really true. We shut down his nuclear program with the inspectors in 1996, so we have done that.

Host: Actually, let's look at this point of the way President Bush has made his case. He went to the U-N September 12th and he made his case and he put it in, often in, very moral terms. Let's look at a bite of that:

Bush: The United Nations was born in the hope that survived a world war, the hope of a world moving toward justice, escaping old patterns of conflict and fear. The founding members resolved that the peace of the world must never again be destroyed by the will and wickedness of any man.

Host: John Langan, the term "wickedness," that is a very morally charged word. How much impact of President Bush's speech, which all commentators have acknowledged really did get the U-N moving in a way it wasn't moving before, how much of that impact can be tied to the moral clarity, if you will, or the moral force of the language used by President Bush?

Langan: Morality is trumps in many settings.

Host: Trumps refers to a game of cards in which the winning card is always the "trump" card.

Langan: Yes. So, he was able to, I think, make a strong case. The issue is not so much about his moral conviction or the moral iniquity of Saddam, which we have lots of evidence for. But it's about the extent of the commitment that we might be asked to make and that's where the issues of proportionality and so on come back in. It's also about whether we want to set up a pattern in which we fire the first shot without an international consensus.

Host: Sean Casey, President Bush has made an effort to put these issues in moral terms. He's set forth an agenda that is in moral terms. Has the theological, ethical community of scholars, have they made an effort to join the debate in those same terms? To create a debate on those issues?

Casey: Actually, what a number of us have done is [we've] made the observation that the moral terms that he is casting, they are not sufficient themselves. In contrast to his father, back in 1991 in the Persian Gulf War, his father made a public speech trying to justify the Persian Gulf War in the terms of the just war ethic. A number of us have made a public statement essentially calling for the current president to make the same kind of case in the categories of the just war ethic and to this point he really hasn't. He has at times spoken in fragments from the just war ethic, but he hasn't made a comprehensive systematic case and that's what we're hoping will emerge.

Host: Robert Royal, does the president need to make a comprehensive just-war case?

Royal: I would return to the fact that we're dealing with a different type of situation. You don't have a Kuwait that's been invaded -- one country that's overtaken another and then there are very obvious just-war categories that can be applied to that. This is a much more difficult set of circumstances. And the international community itself, it seems to me, has now had a challenge placed in front of it. Is it going to be capable of dealing in a forceful way with these difficult situations which are going to repeat themselves? I think we can predict to a certainty they will repeat themselves in different parts of the world. No one is talking about intervening in Pakistan or in India, these are very different circumstances. But in these loose situations where weapons of mass destruction now are becoming, alas, all too common and may find themselves in the wrong hands and may wreak havoc in all sorts of places. I mean, I can remember just after nine-eleven a little over a year ago here in the United States, liberal commentators saying that they feared that there might be nuclear material in the hands of al-Qaida -- because if a nuclear explosion were to go off somewhere in the West, there might very well be a hundred-million Muslims dead. Which would of course be a terrible tragedy. So, listen, the question, I just want to leave it with this. The question is going to be, if we can see an international system that is capable of being tough and responding to this situation, it may satisfy all of us. We may see a disarmed [Iraq], which is what we want -- not an inspected but a disarmed Iraq. I have my doubts about it because I don't think we've seen that will there until the United States has put the question in forceful enough terms that it's forced the international community to give an answer.

Host: Shaun Casey, let me elaborate that question. If the U-N fails to act decisively, at what point is the case made for U-S action?

Casey: I don't think the case can be made, in a sense, without that legitimate authorization of the U-N Security Council. But the increased political complexity is not a reason for ethicists to fold their hands and go home. In fact, it calls for more careful moral reasoning and more careful application of the traditional categories, not abandonment.

Host: John Langan?

Langan: I guess I want to take issue with something that Shaun just said. I'm not ready to move to requiring U-N Security Council authorization. For one thing, we need to bear in mind the precedent of Kosovo, where we felt we could not get Security Council authorization. We kept it multilateral through NATO. And the president and the major Western governments need to keep some freedom of maneuver in relationship to the U-N.

Host: We don't have very much time left Robert Royal, one of the issues that keeps coming up in the discussion is the issue of proportionality. And it's often pointed to by strategic thinkers that while al-Qaida was building its capability -- first making bombing of embassies in Africa, attacking the Cole, U-S-S Cole in Yemen -- that in each of those cases the response from the U-S, if not wholehearted, was meant to be sort of proportional to the attack, and that at the end of the day, that encouraged al-Qaida. Is proportionality always the best way to save lives, keep the peace, or isn't there a case that can be made that the moral thing to do is to have such a disproportionate response that bad action is discouraged?

Royal: This is a complicated question and probably the three of us could debate this for several days. [laughter]

Host: We only have about thirty seconds to do it in.

Royal: No, this goes back to the heart of this particular problem. It is a problem that will not resolve itself. It's a problem that we know has festered for ten years. And this is not a man who will allow even inspections of certain parts of his country without serious pressure and that has to be a moral fact in the decision of what we do in response to his recalcitrance. You can parse this out in various ways but it seems to me that he's very unlikely to anything unless he's forced to do it.

Host: Well, I'm afraid that's going to have to be the last word and we'll all think about proportionality and how that would really play out in practice. I'd like to thank my guests: John Langan of Georgetown Univeristy, Shaun Casey of the Wesley Theological Seminary, and Robert Royal of the Faith and Reason Institute. For On the Line, I'm Eric Felten.