A Just War? Hardly
[Iraq]
by Noam Chomsky
www.zmag,org, May 20, 2006
Spurred by these times of invasions and
evasions, discussion of "just war" has had a renaissance
among scholars and even among policy-makers.
Concepts aside, actions in the real world
all too often reinforce the maxim of Thucydides that "The
strong do as they can, while the weak suffer what they must"
- which is not only indisputably unjust, but at the present stage
of human civilisation, a literal threat to the survival of the
species.
In his highly praised reflections on just
war, Michael Walzer describes the invasion of Afghanistan as "a
triumph of just war theory," standing alongside Kosovo as
a "just war." Unfortunately, in these two cases, as
throughout, his arguments rely crucially on premises like "seems
to me entirely justified," or "I believe" or "no
doubt."
Facts are ignored, even the most obvious
ones. Consider Afghanistan. As the bombing began in October 2001,
President Bush warned Afghans that it would continue until they
handed over people that the US suspected of terrorism.
The word "suspected" is important.
Eight months later, FBI head Robert S. Mueller III told editors
at The Washington Post that after what must have been the most
intense manhunt in history, "We think the masterminds of
(the Sept. 11 attacks) were in Afghanistan, high in the al-Qaida
leadership. Plotters and others - the principals - came together
in Germany and perhaps elsewhere."
What was still unclear in June 2002 could
not have been known definitively the preceding October, though
few doubted at once that it was true. Nor did I, for what it's
worth, but surmise and evidence are two different things. At least
it seems fair to say that the circumstances raise a question about
whether bombing Afghans was a transparent example of "just
war."
Walzer's arguments are directed to unnamed
targets - for example, campus opponents who are "pacifists."
He adds that their "pacifism" is a "bad argument,"
because he thinks violence is sometimes legitimate. We may well
agree that violence is sometimes legitimate (I do), but "I
think" is hardly an overwhelming argument in the real-world
cases that he discusses.
By "just war," counterterrorism
or some other rationale, the US exempts itself from the fundamental
principles of world order that it played the primary role in formulating
and enacting.
After World War II, a new regime of international
law was instituted. Its provisions on laws of war are codified
in the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg principles,
adopted by the General Assembly. The Charter bars the threat or
use of force unless authorized by the Security Council or, under
Article 51, in self-defense against armed attack until the Security
Council acts.
In 2004, a high level UN panel, including,
among others, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft,
concluded that "Article 51 needs neither extension nor restriction
of its long-understood scope ... In a world full of perceived
potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of
nonintervention on which it continues to be based is simply too
great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct
from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one
to so act is to allow all."
The National Security Strategy of September
2002, just largely reiterated in March, grants the US the right
to carry out what it calls "pre-emptive war," which
means not pre-emptive, but "preventive war." That's
the right to commit aggression, plain and simple.
In the wording of the Nuremberg Tribunal,
aggression is "the supreme international crime differing
only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole" - all the evil in the tortured
land of Iraq that flowed from the US-UK invasion, for example.
The concept of aggression was defined
clearly enough by US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who
was chief prosecutor for the United States at Nuremberg. The concept
was restated in an authoritative General Assembly resolution.
An "aggressor," Jackson proposed to the tribunal, is
a state that is the first to commit such actions as "invasion
of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of
the territory of another State."
That applies to the invasion of Iraq.
Also relevant are Justice Jackson's eloquent words at Nuremberg:
"If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they
are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany
does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal
conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked
against us." And elsewhere: "We must never forget that
the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on
which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants
a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well."
For the political leadership, the threat
of adherence to these principles - and to the rule of law in general
- is serious indeed. Or it would be, if anyone dared to defy "the
single ruthless superpower whose leadership intends to shape the
world according to its own forceful world view," as Reuven
Pedatzur wrote in Haaretz last May.
Let me state a couple of simple truths.
The first is that actions are evaluated in terms of the range
of likely consequences. A second is the principle of universality;
we apply to ourselves the same standards we apply to others, if
not more stringent ones.
Apart from being the merest truisms, these
principles are also the foundation of just war theory, at least
any version of it that deserves to be taken seriously.
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