An imperfectly just war

...Just-war theory is the primary instrument that ethicists have for surmounting conflicting perceptions, analogies, and claims that naturally develop in any debate over a violent conflict...

...The key step for the allies was to convert their air superiority into a decisive edge in the ground war...

...The first, a very broad coalition of states concerned about Iraq's violation of Kuwaiti sovereignty, was likely to be satisfied by achieving the minimal objective of evicting Iraq from Kuwait...

...Congress debated the morality and the timeliness of the war and gave its less than resounding approval...

...Enforcing the embargo over a period of time, particularly since this would have meant maintaining the narrow coalition on a war-ready footing while preventing major evasions of the embargo, would have meant that U.S...

...The second objective is one that the coalition has chosen to pursue by limited means that fall between the complete occupation and demilitarization of the country, and a tortuous and lengthy process of arms control negotiation...

...The U.S...

...Those who hoped that this war could be averted or, at least, postponed did so in the honorable belief that better ways of resolving this dispute and others like it should be tried...

...and its allies would prevail against the highly militarized but very vulnerable society of Iraq...

...larifying the war's objectives came relatively late in the public debate, which made it difficult to determine whether the war could meet the justwar criterion of proportionality...

...What about the sanctions...

...There was little doubt that the U.S...

...This requires that alternatives to war be tried and found wanting and that the only way to maintain justice--and the values that are wrongfully threatened by the adversary--is to fight...

...First, whether as a result of the speedy response of the United States to the Saudi request for troops or because Hussein's original plans had not extended beyond Kuwait, it quickly became apparent that the Iraqis were not going to invade Saudi Arabia or to annex its oil-producing areas...

...these included the removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime as well as the removal of the weapons of mass destruction that the Iraqi military had been accumulating...

...It includes elements that require the exercise of sophisticated and informed political judgment, and it recognizes the complexity of political disputes...

...France, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States had all in different ways provided support for what the world now agrees was a murderous, tyrannical, and aggressive regime...

...This constituted what I would call the minimal objective for the coalition forces, and it enjoyed widespread support around the world...

...3) thwarting Saddam Hussein from achieving a predominant position in the world oil market...

...This did not eliminate the problem of civilian casualties, some of which are inevitable given the confusion and ignorance found in combat situations, and some of which are the result of inherently controversial judgments over how to proceed in attacking military targets embedded in an urban or civilian setting...

...Congress took its share of the responsibility for the decision, and the possibility that the war would lead sooner or later to a constitutional crisis was avoided...

...Nonetheless, there was a morally serious reason for being concerned about higher oil prices: their negative effect on the nations of Eastern Europe and the third world...

...That judgment is that (1) Iraq under his rule was deeply committed to an aggressive and destructive policy...

...Including the disarmament requirements within the cease-fire provisions was a positive move in that it combined two morally compelling objectives: the end of hostilities and restrictions on Iraq's ability to develop more weapons of mass destruction...

...Clearly, it would have been a great gain for international order to have this kind of crisis solved with nonlethal measures...

...What can be given are reasonable estimates and neither side has been forthcoming about these...

...The Iraqi army, while technologically inferior to the allies, was a large and experienced force...

...diplomacy was to build and maintain the coalition against Saddam Hussein...

...It thus includes states that are not keen about being seen in public agreement with each other as well as states that have fought wars with each other in the recent past...

...maintenance of gasoline at $1 per gallon as a justifying reason for any use of violence, much less for a fullscale war...

...It is not possible to offer a convincing apologiafor Saddam Hussein, who has shown considerable ingenuity in finding ever novel ways to outrage world public opinion, from mistreating the citizens of Kuwait, to exhibiting prisoners of war on television, to polluting the waters of the Gulf, torching Kuwait's oil industry, and, most recently, crushing the Shiites and the Kurds...

...Many of us, especially after the great changes in Europe in 1989, were hoping that prospects would brighten for more peaceful methods of settling disputes and that in the future, we would not have to confront the situations that have historically made just-war theory an essential part of social ethics and of Catholic moral theology...

...Both proponents and critics have attempted to evaluate it in moral terms...

...Answering such a question requires more knowledge than either proponents or opponents of U.S...

...The United States had to function as the leader of both...

...Saddam Hussein is a serial aggressor, a man ready to use lethal force against his opponents, a man who has invested large sums for a long time in building a war machine meant to bully and abuse his neighbors...

...The history of Western dealing with Saddam Hussein's regime over the years before 1990 exhibits a mixture of wishful thinking and willful ignorance, of economic greed and legalistic formalism that Western governments often adopt when they find themselves facing a distasteful despotism with which, for various reasol~ (good and bad), they think they have to deal and which they think they are powerless to alter...

...So we can expect significant and serious disagreements about whether this criterion is met or not...

...A basic principle of international law requiring respect for the sovereignty of states was violated without 1 June 1991:361 warning...

...The major exception to this point is in cases of self-defense...

...Part of this uncertainty is factual...

...The history of OPEC shows that, even while the world depends heavily on a small number of producers in one highly volatile region, the direction of oil prices is not simply up and that the forging of a consistent policy within the oil cartel is extraordinarily difficult...

...My own judgment is that taken together the following factors justified the resort to war: (1) protecting the principle of the inviolability of sovereignty (especially in an area that contains a number of very vulnerable states...

...But how is any commander in a position to make such calibrations with confidence that things will work out as anticipated...

...The key question about last resort is whether less coercive measures, particularly sanctions, would have been sufficient over time, and whether the diplomatic process was pursued with sufficient vigor and commitment from August through January...

...allies in the region would have had to carry considerable stress in a situation of continuing tension...

...Kuwait was entitled to wage a war of self-defense and to ask for help both from its allies and from states concerned over the threat to international order presented by Iraq...

...Another part of the uncertainty arises from the imprecision inherent in the notion of proportionality itself...

...Second, the Kuwaiti government was not able to mount a sustained resistance against the Iraqi invasions and occupation, which was carried out with overwhelming force...

...All of these factors obscured reality: the fundamental act of war had been committed by Iraq with little provocation or warning...

...It was also an objective that was always obtainable by the free consent of the Iraqi government...

...What Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait threatened to do was to start a chain of events that would give him both enormous wealth for carrying out further aggressions as well as a decisive voice in allocating one of the world's most essential commodities, particularly if he were to control, directly or indirectly, Saudi supplies...

...No doubt, such analogies provided orientation and legitimation for advocates of alternative policies as they confronted the uncertainties of the Gulf conflict, but finally they did not prove useful or convincing...

...During that time, the allies and other concerned powers had time and opportunity to explore alternative ways of resolving the dispute without resorting to war...

...The debate reminded us both of the gravity and of the inescapably political character of the war...

...The initiative--the decision to launch a war to undo the Iraqi aggression--passed to the United States and to those states that found Hussein's hold on Kuwait profoundly objectionable...

...Later events also made it clear that Iraqi military power was far from totally destroyed...

...t is clear that no lasting peace in the Middle East is possible without a resolution of the Palestinian issue...

...The criterion of proportionality should direct military planners to prefer strategies that will minimize the loss of life on both sides...

...Given the requirement for a continuing deployment of substantial forces and the constraints that the climate and the religious calendar would have put on military operations and thus on the plausible threat to Iraq, a strong case can be made that the January 15 deadline was a reasonable decision...

...Pearl Harbor and the subsequent German declaration of war abruptly terminated the internal American debate of 1940-41 about whether and to what extent the United States should intervene to stop Axis aggression in Asia and Europe...

...policy possess...

...and (4) such a war was best conducted before Iraq's arsenal was capable of dealing catastrophic blows to its neighbors...

...I leave aside the political difficulties involved in judgments that seem to trade American lives for enemy lives...

...This was done by hammering the ground forces from the air, by misleading the Iraqi command about our plan of battle, and by encouraging desertions from 362: Commonweal the relatively inexperienced troops near the frontier...

...Just-war theory also includes a requirement that the war being considered must have a reasonable prospect of success...

...They were seen to be morally unacceptable and devastating for the long-term stability of the Middle East and for the future of American relations with the people of the region...

...Were the objectives sufficiently urgent and important to make war both necessary and plausible as a course that would prevent serious evils and were they likely to produce a better outcome than nonviolent alternatives...

...It is very unlikely that any one (Iraqi or American or other) knows with any accuracy the number of Iraqi soldiers killed by the air war...

...One important sign of progress is that a serious and conscientious effort was made to observe the principle of discrimination or noncombatant immunity...

...At the same time, the United States had to avoid agreeing to concessions that would shatter the confidence of key members of the narrow coalition that the United States really was prepared to use force against Iraq...

...But it also became clear that Saddam Hussein was not inclined to pull out of Kuwait even when the threat of war became credible and imminent...

...This was easy to do in the ground war which was waged in the desert...

...The critics of the war have had a hard time staking out a counterposition...

...In the first instance, it underlines the enormous difficulty that sanctions would have encountered in changing Iraq's policy...

...It also overlooks the point that, precisely because there are important elements of justice in the Palestinian cause, it is important not to allow them to be captured and exploited by an unscrupulous demagogue like Saddam Hussein, whose interest in the Palestinians is secondary and manipulative...

...I am not claiming that the United States and its allies have consistently defended these values in their foreign policy, only that these and related considerations about attainable objectives and values to be protected against an aggressor provide a reasonable basis for affirming that the test of proportionality between the means and the end was met in this decision to go to war...

...So far, Saddam Hussein seems to have fared rather better than the Don...

...Whether the casualties inflicted by the air war on Iraqi ground troops meet the test of proportionality is a matter of some uncertainty...

...This overlooked the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that the conference would fail on both counts with a consequent shattering of the coalition and with the Iraqis more deeply entrenched than ever in Kuwait...

...If we move beyond defining success only in terms of military victory and think of it as including significant progress toward making the Middle East a more secure and peaceful region, then we have to admit that our technological superiority and our ability to win battles in the air and on land can do little more than buy time for working out a settlement that the major players (including popular movements as well as governments) are prepared to live with for the short- and medium-term future...

...but once chosen, a strategy has to be pressed home vigorously...

...in the air war, new technology, and the nearly complete control the allies established over Iraqi air space made the observance of this principle much easier than it has been in previous wars...

...But this invites us to take the lives of soldiers too lightly...

...It seems to me that this was the hardest matter on which to come to a judgment...

...The norm in just-war theory that has probably been most prominently invoked by critics of the Gulf War is that of last resort...

...Though the theory itself offers neither a blanket condemnation nor a blanket endorsement of this most dangerous and destructive human activity, it operates with a strong presumption against the use of violence...

...Would it have been possible to stop the bombing and begin the ground war at a point where we would have lost a thousand troops and the Iraqis would have lost twenty thousand, rather than fifty thousand or more...

...From one angle, this was never a problem for the coalition in the Gulf...

...Another requirement that a just war must meet is that the war must be conducted by competent authority...

...That interval was lengthy, but it makes more difference for political perception than for moral analysis...

...Yet it inevitably created more pressure for a shorter timetable for the working of sanctions and other measures...

...It is a matter of regret to nearly everyone that this did not happen...

...He resembled Don Giovanni in the last scene of the opera, who, with his hand firmly in the grasp of the Commendatore, persists in saying "no" to every urging that he change his mind...

...Whether there ever came a point at which reasonable commanders should have concluded that the Iraqi soldiers had taken enough punishment and that further hammering of their positions harmed them far more than it could possibly benefit us and our allies is something that I do not know...

...The first of these more ambitious objectives would be attained, it was hoped, either as a consequence of defeat or as the result of an internal coup...

...but not if it ends in a way that makes a war on less favorable terms even more likely...

...In this matter, however, the Iraqi people are as much the victims of their own government's intransigence (which makes humanitarian aid both hard to offer and hard to deliver) as they are victims of the coalition's bombs...

...We can see that the primary task of U.S...

...364: Commonweal I have grave reservations about the major increase in U.S...

...It will take independent scholars and observers a long time to determine what further steps the United States and its allies could or should have taken to achieve a diplomatic solution...

...This was not a false or foolish belief...

...But the failure to see this point early does not invalidate a policy that attempts to reverse a mistaken judgment before its consequences become catastrophic...

...On the one hand, this deployment made our threats of military action against Iraq considerably more credible...

...Then, it took several months for the coalition to assemble sufficient forces to make threats that would be plausible to Hussein, a guileful and unyielding leader...

...a war that many people feel need not have been fought...

...In the public discussion there was a certain inevitable escalation of objectives...

...Butsome government and military officials and many participants in the public debate spoke of more ambitious objectives...

...Third, once the occupation of Kuwait was complete and overt hostilities ceased, Iraq settled in to exploit its victim and to integrate Kuwait into its territory...

...The fact that we have not reached such a point is a tragedy, especially for the people of Iraq...

...for surely it is possible to kill enemy soldiers without necessity or proportionate benefit, and this has to be wrong...

...It is true that large portions of the West, including governments and the media, have come relatively late to a clearheaded recognition of Saddam Hussein's threat to peace and order in the Middle East...

...But such a denial would only constitute serious pressure on Hussein if there were a powerful military force in the region capable of making the shortage of supplies a starkly urgent priority...

...1 June 1991:363 There is no doubt that alternatives to fighting were offered to the Iraqi government and that the coalition would not have fought a war if Kuwait had been evacuated...

...JUST-WAR TEACHING & THE GULF WAR: AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS AN IMPERFECTLY JUST WAR PART OF THE UNCERTAINTY IS FACTUAL JOHN LANGAN he conflict in the Persian Gulf has been a war of mixed signals and contrary intentions...

...and (4) terminating the grave human rights abuses that his regime inflicted on the people of Kuwait and Iraq...

...Though the oil supply was a common theme of analysts and cartoonists, of commentators and protesters, no serious moralist regards the U.S...

...These revolts raised the troubling question of whether the unity of Iraq could be preserved without enormous human suffering or without reliance on dictatorial methods...

...fter the fact, more questions have been raised about whether the war was conducted in a proportionate way or, whether the allies inflicted excessive or unnecessary casualties and damage on Iraq...

...Occasionally, their language lacked conceptual precision and diplomatic finesse, for instance, when assault on various parts of Saddam Hussein's anatomy was presented as a desirable objective...

...the point is that the nature of this particular adversary and what we could reasonably expect from his regime made it inapplicable...

...The narrow coalition presents us with a situation in which nations are willing to take very strong measures against a common adversary but cannot be relied on to cooperate over an extended period of time...

...More broadly, an entire generation of Americans who acquired a deep distrust of government and the military from the sad experience of Vietnam were left searching for an appropriate framework for interpreting this very different situation...

...But I believe that in the last analysis, the decisive judgment is one that was reached by most of the Middle East powers and that has been confirmed by Hussein's behavior during the last nine months...

...Granted that the electricity and communications systems are legitimate targets, was it possible to restrict the damage to Iraq's infrastructure so that the civilian population would be less at risk than it now seems to be...

...1 June 1991:365...

...But the course of events ensured that this factor counted for less than it would normally...

...Of course, even an unsuccessful conference is less a disaster than war...

...The main uncertainty was not about ultimate victory but about the level of casualties that would be required to achieve this result and therefore about the willingness of the American public to sustain the war effort...

...Looking to the future, I would argue that more care should be taken to protect civilians from the consequences of a catastrophic demolition of the infrastructure that modem societies rely on to sustain life...

...In this regard, it is extremely important that the war on Iraq was authorized by the UN Security Council on behalf of the international community, by several states in the Middle East, and by the U.S...

...France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union took positions that fall somewhere between the broad coalition and the narrow one...

...The analogies that critics of the Gulf War tried to make to Vietnam and the war of attrition on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 were rendered useless by the rapid pace and conclusion of the war...

...But this is primarily a problem about the administration's lack of candor in dealing with the American people...

...While retreating troops who have not indicated an intention to surrender are a legitimate military target, they did not constitute an immediate or serious threat to our own troops or military operations...

...At the same time it can be no surprise for those who have grasped the persistence of injustice in our world...

...Such an outcome seems preferable...

...a war that is unlikely to resolve the problems of the Middle East...

...Such disagreement is not surprising since this narrow coalition includes Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States...

...t is true that the brutal character of Saddam Hussein's regime did not prevent various powers from collaborating with him before the invasion of Kuwait...

...But this left many observers unsatisfied, presumably not because they thought it unjust but because they thought it unlikely to be acceptable to a leader with his ambitions...

...From August 2, 1990, when Hussein's troops seized Kuwait and converted it into the nineteenth province of Iraq, there was a strong basis for arguing that a war for the liberation of Kuwait was morally justified...

...From another angle, the prospect of ultimate success was, and remains, uncertain...

...It was particularly important to cut the connections between Iraq and the Soviet Union, which had long been its primary source of weapons and military and technical expertise...

...But the criterion is extremely hard to apply in the course of war...

...This combination--a bloodthirsty and tyrannical adversary and the mobilization of vast forces by a diverse coalition led and orchestrated by the United States--left much of the religious leadership of the United States in a quandary about whether to accept or to condemn our use of force against him...

...Further objectives such as the territorial dismemberment of Iraq and the destruction of its people and culture were ruled out by President Bush...

...forces after the November congressional elections...

...In the second, it undermines some of the more dramatic claims about what Iraq could have done to its neighbors and enemies...

...Industrial economies have shown that they can make the adjustments required to pay for increased oil prices...

...His invasion of Kuwait has cost the Palestinian community billions of dollars in aid from the Kuwaitis and Saudis, in remittances from Palestinians working in Kuwait, and in losses experienced by refugees and costs borne by those aiding them...

...For this reason, military officers and many moralists prefer to restrict their effective concern to the principle of discrimination...

...Sustaining this folly is not worth the bones of a single American or allied soldier...

...of the Iraqi forces became apparent...

...At least this seemed to be the view that would have drawn general assent before the revolts in northern and southern Iraq...

...I have grave doubts about whether it was really necessary to bomb the Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait as intensively as we did...

...The brutal occupation of Kuwait, the seizure of its assets, the dispersal of large numbers of its citizens and residents compounded the original crime...

...The Bush administration, which had unwisely attempted to operate on the principle that the war did not need congressional authorization, fortunately agreed to the congressional debate that took place before the January 15 deadline...

...President George Bush assured the American people that this conflict was indeed a just war, a conflict between good and evil, fight and wrong...

...Like the criterion of proportionality, it is applied through a judgment about a situation that is particular, complex, and changing...

...From the beginning the requirement that there be a just cause for hostilities was present...

...The course of the war made it clear that we had underestimated the tenacity and obduracy of the Iraqis and that we had overestimated their effective fighting power...

...This coalition is unstable, since it agrees on the need to alter the direction of Iraq's foreign and military policies while its members disagree on how they understand this need and what they would put in place of Hussein's regime...

...It may well be that "winning" in the present crisis does little more than preserve us and our allies from disasters that would have undermined our entire position in the Middle East if we had not successfully resisted Saddam Hussein...

...To maintain the broad coalition, Saddam Hussein was offered a no-frills deal: withdrawal from Kuwait without a retaliatory attack...

...There is no evidence that any significant element of Kuwaiti society, with the exception of some Palestinians, preferred Iraqi occupation to the rule of the al-Sabah family...

...The second, far narrower coalition demanded a decisive reorientation in Iraq's external policy, for which the defeat or removal of Saddam Hussein was an indispensable requirement...

...Given the inevitable imprecision of warfare, it is reasonable to err on the side of mercy and life when one's forces are in an overwhelmingly dominant position, even if this means allowing some of the enemy to escape...

...President Bush and the military leadership repeatedly spoke of our objectives as: (1) the eviction of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and (2) the enforcement of the relevant UN resolutions...

...Questions about success and objectives were given many different answers during the months from August to January...

...3) war with Iraq was inevitable at some point...

...In the face of the vast array of military personnel and technology that the coalition assembled, he refused to give up his hold on Kuwait...

...2) Iraq posed a threat to almost all of its neighbors...

...Those who had been hoping for an international conference or some other process requiring the lsraelis to deal with the Palestinians were too inclined to think that a complex negotiation aimed at a peaceful settlement of both Kuwait and Palestinian demands was an avenue worth exploring...

...The Israelis, in particular, had strong and understandable objections to allowing linkage between the Gulf dispute and the claims of the Palestinians...

...On closer inspection, the worldwide coalition against Saddam Hussein is really divided into two coalitions...

...The best hope for sanctions did not turn on a general slowing down of the Iraqi economy or on the denial of essential food and medicine to the Iraqi people (which were not included in the embargo), but on the denial of spare parts and military supplies...

...Certainly, as the stories of their occupation of Kuwait made clear, many of them were no innocents...

...It commits us to a critical and questioning attitude to any war...

...Congress...

...This double error cuts two ways...

...But so was Bush's comparison of Saddam Hussein to Hitler, which came to seem overdrawn as the weakness JOHN LANGAN, S.J., is the Rose Kennedy professor of Ch ristian ethics at Georgetown University...

...The lack of clear answers made it difficult to determine whether the military option met the just-war criterion of proportionality...

...2) preventing Iraq from achieving a weapons capability that would enable it to attack the major population centers of the region...