Just WAr
War is always evil, but some thinkers have maintained that under limited circumstances it may be the lesser evil.
From Cicero to St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas to Hugo Grotius, philosophers and theologians have proposed numer-ous criteria for determining if a war is just. According to contemporary Just War Theory, a war is just only if it meets the six conditions presented in the following debate. The theory has been formulated to prevent war, not justify it. A nation must satisfy all six conditions or the war is not just. The theory is designed to show states the rigorous criteria they must meet to justify the use of violence and prompt them to find other ways of solving conflicts.
Just War |151
Pros Cons
A Just War satisfies six criteria:
1. Wars are just if the cause is just. Nations should be allowed to defend themselves from aggression, just as individuals are permitted to defend themselves against violence.
The criteria for just war present several problems:
1. Just cause is an elastic concept. Who determines what is “aggression”? Could violating a border or impos-ing economic sanctions be aggression? And if a state is unable to defend itself, can another state intervene mili-tarily on its behalf? These borderline cases make invok-ing this criterion very problematic.
2. The war must be lawfully declared by a lawful author-ity. This prevents inappropriate, terrorist-style chaos, and ensures that other rules of war will be observed. For exam-ple, when states declare war, they generally follow spe-cific legislative procedures; a guaranteed respect for such procedures is likely to ensure that the nation will respect other rules of war, such as the Geneva Convention.
2. Many nations wage war without an official declara-tion. Moreover, who is to decide which entities can and cannot issue calls to arms? Legitimate authorities have sanctioned some of the most horrific wars in history.
3. The intentions behind the war must be good. States have the right to use war to restore a just peace, to help the innocent, or to right a wrong. For example, the US and NATO where justified in using force in Bosnia.
Waging war was far more ethical than standing by and permitting genocide.
3. Reality is a lot murkier than theory. How are we to determine a state’s intent? Sometimes good intentions are bound up with bad. And who is to determine if a peace is just or a wrong has been committed? The nation initiating the war will use its own values to justify its intentions, and these values may be at odds with those of other the party in the conflict. Furthermore, the best way to protect innocent lives is by peaceful means, not by endangering them further through armed conflict.
4. War must be a last resort. The state is justified in using war after it has tried all nonviolent alternatives.
Sometimes peaceful measures—diplomacy, economic sanctions, international pressure, or condemnation from other nations—simply do not work.
4. Sometimes going to war before all alternatives are exhausted is the most moral action. For example, a nation might decide to go to war if it determines that waiting would enable the enemy to increase its strength and to do much more damage than an early war would have inflicted. Waiting might allow an invading state to entrench itself so that far greater force would be neces-sary to remove it at a later date.
5. The war must have a reasonable chance of success.
War always involves a loss of life, but expending life with no possibility of achieving a goal is unacceptable. Thus, if a fighting force cannot achieve its goal, however just, it should not proceed. Charging an enemy’s cannons on horseback or throwing troops at a pointless occupation are clearly not just actions.
5. Sometimes it is morally imperative to fight against over-whelming odds, as resistance fighters did in World War II.
Also, this condition may give large nations free rein to bully small ones because they could not win a war. It also may cause a country to surrender in a war it might actu-ally win. Weak countries have won wars against powerful ones—look at the American Revolution.
6. The goal of the war should be proportional to the offense and the benefits proportional to the costs. For example, when an attacker violates a nation’s border, a proportionate response might extend to restoring the border, not sacking the attacker’s capital. A war must prevent more suffering than it causes.
6. We have seen that a proportional response frequently doesn’t work. Suicide bombers continue to blow up victims in the Middle East despite the response. Why should a nation tolerate continued aggression for the sake of proportionality? And if a nation knows it is likely to be attacked, why should it wait to disarm the aggres-sor? Is not preemptive action justified to prevent the loss of innocent life?
sample motions:
This House believes that war is sometimes justified.
This House believes swords are as necessary as ploughshares.
This House believes that justifying war is unjustifiable.
Web Links:
BBC Religion and Ethics. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/ethics/war/index.shtml> Excellent discussion of Just War Theory.
•
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s History of Philosophy. <http://www.iep.utm.edu/j/justwar.htm> Summary of Just
• War Theory with review of the literature.
Just War: The Stanford University Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/> Philosophical
• analysis of war in general and just war in particular.
JustWarTheory.com. <http://www.justwartheory.com> Overview of the just war theory with links to other sources for more
in-• depth treatment.
Further reading:
Johnson, James Turner. Morality and Contemporary Warfare. Yale University Press, 2001.
Temes, Peter S. The Just War: An American Reflection on the Morality of War in Our Time. Ivan R. Dee, 2003.
Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. Basic Books, 2006
LAndmInes, us ProduCtIon And use oF
The 1997 Ottawa Convention, signed by 135 nations, banned the use and stockpiling of antipersonnel mines. The United States is not a signatory. The Ottawa Convention requires signatories to abandon the use of landmines within 10 years and also requires the destruction of the signatory’s stockpile of landmines. The convention’s aims became official UN policy in 1998 with the adoption of General Assembly Resolution 53/77. In 2004 the United States announced that it would eliminate persistent landmines from its arsenal and seek a worldwide ban on their sale or export. However, it continued to develop nonpersistent (self-destructing/self-deactivating) landmines that would not pose a humanitarian threat after use in battle.
Pros Cons
Landmines do great harm to people, but so do all weap-ons of war. Landmines are not uniquely unpleasant, and the debate about them has distorted public perception.
In truth, they are little different from a hundred other types of weaponry that remain legal under the Ottawa ban.
Landmines are a terrible, immoral tool of war. America should neither practice nor condone this kind of warfare.
Unlike other weaponry, landmines remain hidden long after conflicts have ended, killing and maiming civil-ians in some of the world’s poorest countries years, even decades later. Just because other weaponry has similar effects, doesn’t mean that landmines are acceptable—it means that other weapons are unconscionable, too. But we must start somewhere. We can make a difference by capitalizing on the global movement against landmines and we should.
Landmines are an excellent way of defending a wide area for very little money and with very few military person-nel. This is a legitimate aim in warfare, when military personnel are spread too thinly to protect all civilians, and in peacetime, when poor countries want to invest
The usefulness of landmines is significantly overstated.
They are easily removed by quite low-technology mili-tary equipment, which means that they are not very dangerous to armed forces, but are incredibly harmful to civilians.
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in infrastructure rather than in defense. In the future, nations may not need landmines, but while armies still depend on conventional weapons, using landmines to defend borders is highly appropriate. Landmines can slow or stop an advance, delaying or even halting con-flict; they can deter invasion in the first place. By pro-tecting wide areas from a swift military advance on civil-ians, they can prevent genocide.
The use of landmines is a totally separate issue from removing them. We can do the latter without banning the former. The proposition accepts that those who use landmines must fund clean-up efforts, and the United States is doing this. The attention of the very humanitar-ian organizations calling for a ban will ensure that this obligation is met.
Suggesting that the use and removal of landmines are two separate issues is absurd—the two are inextricably inter-linked. Most nations that deploy landmines, including those manufactured in the United States, never remove them. As history has shown, relying on goodwill or trust to remove landmines is folly. Simply put, if landmines are deployed, innocent people inevitably die. The United States should not dirty its hands by trading in these wicked weapons.
Banning landmines disproportionately punishes under-developed countries unable to acquire the higher-tech-nology military capacity that has made mines less useful to richer nations. Banning landmines harms precisely the nations most likely to need them for defensive pur-poses.
Landmines provide a false sense of security. Nations often use them in lieu of negotiating with their neighbors.
Landmines are the symbol of exactly the wrong approach to international affairs. Underdeveloped countries should channel their efforts into improving their economies. The United States should not encourage them or frighten them into to buying US military equipment.
The ban on landmines has an asymmetric effect: it only stops nations that honor the ban. Nations that want to use landmines will do so regardless of the US position (or that of any other nation)—as demonstrated by the current prolific use of mines despite the large number of signatories to the Ottawa Convention. In addition, if we might one day face an enemy deploying landmines, we must expose our soldiers to their use in training so that they learn how to deal with them.
Obviously only those nations that stand behind their commitments will honor their commitments. That is a rationale for never entering into international treaties.
Certainly some nations will ignore the ban—but as a ban gains acceptance, such nations will eventually succumb to pressure, especially if US diplomatic and moral might is behind it. Even if other nations ignore such ban, doing the right thing in and of itself is very important. Ulti-mately, this debate is about what kind of global society you want to live in. Do you want to live in a society that tries hard to stop the use of such horrible weapons and occasionally fails, or one that never even bothers to try?
The ban fails to distinguish between different kinds of mines. The Americans have mines that can deactivate themselves and can self-destruct. America manufactures only nonpersistent “smart mines”; since 1976, the US has tested 32,000 mines with a successful self-destruc-tion rate of 99.996%. The ban also fails to distinguish between responsible and irresponsible users. Under American deployment, only smart mines are used, and they are used responsibly.
Faith in these so-called smart mines is hugely misplaced.
Testing cannot duplicate battlefield conditions, in which areas of deployment are often not properly recorded or marked. Even if smart mines work as claimed, regimes that use them may not want to deactivate them upon a cease-fire, particularly if their dispute still smolders.
The equipment required for deactivation may be lost or destroyed. The best way to ensure that these weapons are not left in the soil is never to put them there in the first place. That some users might be responsible is not good enough, since if anyone uses landmines everyone will.
Pros Cons Used in peacekeeping initiatives, these mines protect
US troops and present little danger to civilians. Stop-ping their use would endanger the lives of peacekeep-ers and make the United States less likely to enter into such operations. This is one reason why the United States refused to sign the Ottawa treaty in 1997 and has declined to do so since.
Suggesting that landmines are the prime protector of US forces, or even an important one, is absurd. The princi-pal protection US troops (as opposed to those of other nations) have in peacekeeping is the threat of using over-whelming force if defied. The damage done to relations with the civilian community from using landmines far outweighs any narrow military benefit garnered from landmine deployment.
sample motions:
This House believes the US should cease production and export of landmines and sign the Ottawa Convention.
This House would sign the Ottawa Convention.
This House would ban landmines.
Web Links:
BBC News. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2149352.stm> Article and debate on the campaign to ban landmines.
•
Global Issues. <http://www.globalissues.org/article/79/landmines> Information about use of landmines throughout the world as
• well as the US specifically.
International Campaign to Ban Landmines. <http://www.icbl.org> Information on the impact of landmines and on the
cam-• paign to ban them.
Further reading:
Harpviken, Kristian Berg. The Future of Humanitarian Mine Action. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Maslen, Stuart. Mine Action After Diana: Progress in the Struggle Against Landmines. Pluto Press, 2004.
Sigal, Leon. The Landmines Ban in American Politics. Routledge, 2006.