Moral Judgment in Time of War

...But perhaps what Rustin means is that each side is as brutal as it can be, given its relative power...

...The popularity of the guerrillas (they are not always popular) forces their powerful enemies either to give up the fight or accept responsibility for actions universally condemned by the moral opinion of mankind...

...In every war, however, there exist agreements, mostly informal, which rule out certain actions...

...The tensions and ambiguities implicit in the very idea of morality in the midst of war are all too easy to ignore...

...By the special use they make of the civilian population, it is said, the guerrillas themselves destroy all conventional distinctions...

...They are, for all practical purposes, combatants...

...There are moral as well as strategic disadvantages to fighting wars in other peoples' countries...

...We judge our comrades and our enemies, in the name of ourselves, our comrades and our enemies...

...Insofar as wars are territorially limited (most wars are), one side probably has to be more brutal than the other...

...It only requires that we be undogmatic, pay close attention to the facts, and struggle to grasp, as best we can, the anguish of each concrete decision...

...Once war begins, there are no moral limits, only practical ones, only the "limitations of force itself" and of the "law of violence...

...Strangely enough, men seem to prefer to wear uniforms and fight set battles when they can...

...It leaves the guerrillas isolated and subject to attacks which will be horrifying to non-combatants only if the attackers are wantonly careless and cruel...

...He is entitled (according to explicit international conventions) to benevolent quar rantine for the duration of the war...

...The maintenance of some internal limits on war-making is almost certainly more important than the military or political objectives of either side...

...If the escalation breaks down limits useful not merely to the enemy, but to humanity generally, if precedents are established which make it likely that future wars will be more brutal than they would otherwise be, the initiating party can and must be condemned...

...Let us judge with due hesitation, judge without certainty...

...Until then, however, decisions are moral and political as well as military, and all of us are involved...

...The real issue, then, is not whether the justice of one's cause legitimatizes this or that act of unlimited violence, but whether one's own conviction as to the justice of one's cause does so...

...It still might be said that this provides no basis for a final judgment...

...Protest and disobedience are now the necessary consequences of their judgments, the only way they have to "humanize" the struggle...

...It is never the case that wartime actions are limited only by the force available to one side or to the other...

...They are sometimes right...

...For the bar against the systematic slaughter of civilians is of such immense benefit to mankind that it could only be broken by a country absolutely certain not only that the immediate gains would be enormous, but that the shattered limit would never again be of any use...

...That is a brutal business when compared to peacetime pursuits...

...In effect, necessity is the only standard, and trained officers and strategists of the armed forces are the only competent judges...

...We also pay attention to the purposes that brutality serves or supposedly serves...

...Nevertheless, it must be recognized that guerrilla warfare is effective, in part, precisely because of the moral onus it imposes on the strong...

...But apparently nothing whatsoever can be said about morality in war, about justice or injustice in the midst of the strife, because the "logic of war" imposes brutality equally on all participants...

...For what if the guerrillas advocate the establishment of a tyrannical regime, while the foreign troops are defending democracy...

...Obviously, judgments of relative brutality are not the only basis of our political choices...

...But it may be the case that only some act of brutality against the enemy will save the lives of the soldiers under their command, to whom they have an even clearer responsibility...

...This is indeed a struggle limited only by the nature of available force: confessions and conversions cannot be won by killing prisoners...

...Here the rigorous "law of violence" comes into conflict with what are more loosely called the "laws" of international society...

...Limited success is a different matter...

...Sometimes these different intentions are an inherent part of different strategies, sometimes of diffferent military situations...

...They both suggest that only one judgment is possible...

...We would have said at the time that despite the supplies we were providing for the British, German bombing of American factories would not have been morally justified...

...And, of course, a point may be reached when assistance from some ostensibly neutral country passes over into active participation: then the limits have been broken by the other side, and the soldiers must do what they can...

...Under the circumstances, attacks on local magistrates probably constitute legitimate warfare...

...Allowance might be made for the interdiction of supplies, for example, if it could be carried out with sufficient precision or at the very borders of the battle area...

...The view is common enough that the side fighting a just war has greater latitude in choosing means than does the side fighting an unjust war...

...IV I do not mean to deny the possibility of justifying some degree of wartime brutality by reference to the purposes of the fighting...

...I see no reason not to admit that it is almost always better to give up the fight...

...The terror campaigns of even moderately successful guerrillas tend to be more discriminating than those of the authorities, partly because the guerrillas have better sources of information, but also because their enemies are forced by their positions to make themselves visible...

...But this is a very unstable position, since both sides always claim to be fighting a just war and so might argue that the limits don't apply to them...

...Let us assume that in a particular case the balance favors the guerrillas...

...crucial issues are being decided...

...But in the case of Vietnam, where the destructive powers of the two protagonists are so radically unequal, a casual insistence on equal brutality cannot satisfy even the least scrupulous of moralists...

...at the same time, moral principles cannot invalidate necessary destruction...

...It does not hold, for example, against all efforts to limit the geographic areas within which military judgments can apply...

...participated informally in efforts to prevent the French from bombing Morocco and Tunisia during the Algerian war (February, 1958) , despite the con structions which French strategists, perhaps quite reasonably, put upon the notion of military necessity...

...Limits of this sort are very precarious and need to be re-examined in every case...

...All this is criminal brutality...

...It is, to be sure, disturbing to see a few men seize upon this other logic and make it the basis for hysterical and self-righteous denunciation...

...I have to take part in the struggle, not to humanize it," Jean Paul Sartre has said...

...Exceptions are always possible...

...Sometimes mutual de• terrence doesn't work...

...The resort to war is at best a desperate wager that things will be better, men happier or more free, when it is over than they would be if it were never fought...

...I want to argue that it is profoundly wrong and that what the old lawyers called jus in bello (justice in war) is at least as important as jus ad bellum (the justice of war) . War is indeed ugly, but there are degrees of ugliness and humane men must, as always, be concerned with degrees...

...First of all, modern military technology makes it very difficult to limit the damage one inflicts to enemy soldiers alone or even to military installations...

...After all, it might be said, the purpose of soldiers is to escape reciprocity, to inflict more damage on the enemy than he can inflict on them...

...It is generally recognized that virtually anything can be done to combatants...

...They solemnly conclude that civilian deaths are part of the inevitable ugliness of war...

...Whether one is among the battling Pakistanis and Indians, or in Watts, or in warfare anywhere, the law of violence is such that each side becomes equally vicious...

...Surely there is a point at which the means employed for the sake of this or that political goal come into conflict with a more general human purpose: the maintenance of moral stan dards and the survival of some sort of international society...

...the second is especially effective...

...I have only tried to suggest that such choices ought to be worrying (that they do not simply trap us in the inexorable logic of war) and that they have their moral limits: there come moments when the sheer criminality of the means adopted by one side or another overwhelms and annuls all righteous intentions...

...111 The second argument currently being made relies on the character of guerrilla warfare...

...It is fairly obvious, for example, that armies fighting in friendly territory are likely to intend less brutality—whatever the limits of their power—than armies fighting amidst a hostile population...

...But any effort to destroy a guerrilla movement which has won some substantial degree of popular support is almost certain to involve the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the shelling and bombing of inhabited villages (it may even require the development of atrocious "anti-personnel" weapons) , the burning of homes, the forced transfer of populations, the establishment of civilian internment camps, and so on...

...They have every reason to expect the worst and presumably are trained to defend themselves...

...Yet ends, we all know, do not justify any means, both because ends are contingent and uncertain (the results of the war depend in large part upon the ways in which it is fought) , and because there are other ends in the world besides the ones we have most recently chosen...

...If you got deeper and deeper, there was just no limit except what was imposed by the limitations of force itself...

...At that point, political arguments against the use of such means are overshadowed, or ought to be, by moral arguments...

...Any war that requires the methods of General Okamura, or anything approaching them, is itself immoral, however exalted the purposes in the name of which it is being fought...

...Then we fight, and since we hope to finish fighting as soon as possible, and since we are convinced that our cause is just, we resort to the means that seem to promise victory...

...Then it is probably true that officers ought to disobey, or at least to protest, the commands which follow from the policy (and which are unrelated to the exigencies of some particular situation) . They ought to do so even if they still approve of the ends for which the war is being fought...

...Prisoners are sometimes killed, for ex ample, because there seems no other way to guarantee their helplessness and protect one's own men...

...The problems faced by foreign troops fighting local guerrillas are different again: their very presence is generally enough to extend the limits of guerrilla success in such a way that the foreigners must assume that all natives are at least potential enemies...

...This is so even if it can plausibly be said (for it can always be said) that the other side would have done the same if it could...

...It is no use saying that the guerrillas bring all this on themselves, or on their own people, by not wearing uniforms and fighting set battles...

...At that point, war is not merely ugly, but criminal...

...the theories behind this warfare and the methods employed in it seem to have been adapted from the Chinese Communists...

...Fear of the enemy often has a wonderfully moralizing effect...

...This is so for a great number of reasons, several of which have been brought forward in recent months as justifications for American actions in Vietnam...

...But it is something else again when brutality becomes a settled policy...

...Not that such limits are no limits at all...

...1 There is an immediate improbability about Rustin's statement which is worth noting at the outset...

...After all, war is not a game...

...and then defend our judgments with all the passion we can command...

...But it is, I think, only another kind of bad faith to refuse altogether to total up the gruesome balance, to apply one's moral reason even to the business of war...

...As we watch the continued escalation of the war in Vietnam, this truth is driven home with especial force...

...Even if the lives of one's own troops are spared by a policy of unlimited violence, and even if more lives are spared than are lost on the other side, the policy is not justified...

...Even if a decision is made not to wage a full-scale campaign of terror against civilian populations, civilians are bound to be hurt and killed by what are called necessary efforts to prevent the production and transportation of military supplies...

...For both these reasons, it ought never to be a total rupture...

...In such cases, more than in other types of war, it is enormously important that the moral opinion of neutral nations and of all mankind be mobilized to uphold those precarious barriers, distinctions and limits which stand between conventional warfare, ugly as it is, and criminal brutality...

...Military decisions are guided by a kind of reciprocity: one side must do, or thinks it must do, whatever the other side does...

...Foreigners fighting local guerrillas are likely to find themselves driven to justify, or rather to attempt to justify, virtually every conceivable action against a hostile population—until they reach that climactic brutality summed up in the orders issued by General Okamura, Japanese commander in the struggle against Communist guerrillas in North China during World War II: "Kill All Bum All Destroy all...

...That is presumably also Eisenhower's meaning...

...Once again, however, exceptions are always possible...

...The very least that can be said is that most often it doesn't...

...If one must take sides, it is not in order to escape having to impose limits on oneself and one's comrades, but (in part) in order to do so effectively...

...Dwight Eisenhower, at a press conference, January 12, 1955 I have said to these young men that they make too much of American brutality...

...perhaps one side is so strong that it need not fear retaliation from the other, whatever it does...

...Unlimited violence, whatever its immediate effects, compromises everyone's future: for some it is a final solution, for others a warning of things to come...

...Such men have consciously joined one side in a civil dispute and presumably know the risks their choice entails...

...There is surely nothing in the "logic of war" that requires it...

...Failure clearly destroys no distinctions at all...

...These limits are never easy to specify, and it may be that they need to be newly specified for every war...

...Virtually every form of violence short of murder, however, has been used...

...But that is not so, for there are many different ways of taking advantage of one's strength...

...Rearward areas are not always subject to the same political jurisdiction as are the armies at the front...

...It may be that morality in war is a discretionary morality...

...The Viet Cong is equally brutal...

...Still, many wars will be fought between states of radically unequal strength...

...Such agreements are usually enforced by mutual deterrence, though self-restraint also plays a part...

...In every case where superiority is attained and the war escalated beyond some previously established set of limits, a hard judgment has to be made...

...I cannot think of any historical case in which these two conditions are met, but they are possible conditions and need to be discussed...

...It serves to foreclose the very possibility of moral protest...

...Moral judgment, like moral choice, is highly vulnerable to distortion...

...There are limits to what can be done in wartime, even by men convinced that they are pursuing justice...

...War itself (Rustin is a pacifist) , or some particular war, can be called just or unjust...

...Guerrilla warfare is brutal on both sides, though the brutality of the guerrillas is likely to be inhibited by their need to maintain support among the population...

...If brutality is something that can be measured and apportioned, as he seems to suggest, then there are an infinite number of possible apportionments, and it is extremely unlikely that equality will ever be attained...

...Then self-restraint may break down also, and the agreements will be violated...

...Brutality stops only when force is limited or when it encounters superior force...

...But I find it very difficult even to conceive of circumstances in which such a defense could be good enough to warrant the denial and eradication of these distinctions...

...Even here, however, they are probably not right...

...So a man may decide that he wants to fight alongside soldiers who burn peasant villages, because he approves of their long-term goals or fears the consequences of their defeat...

...never certain, either, what actions against the population might be justified...

...A prisoner is an ex combatant, helplessly in the hands of his enemies...

...But it has to be added that guerrillas do this only when they are successful in winning popular support...

...But then what the two men are talking about is, so to speak, the logic of intentions and not of behavior...

...They encourage men to think that this time anything goes, for there will never be another time...

...Soldiers can never be blamed for taking advantage of superior strength...

...we may even choose, not necessarily rightly, greater brutality for the sake of greater purposes...

...One further point should be made: even short of such moments, our political choices do not free us from the business of judging...

...In many wars it is possible to say that different degrees of brutality are intended by the different sides...

...All that can finally be said is that there is an extraordinarily powerful prima facie case for jus in bello...

...1I When we speak of brutality in wartime, we do not mean the killing of enemy combatants...

...On the other hand, the arbitrary selection of hostages from unfriendly villages, the murder of suspects and "class enemies," the public administration of atrocious punishments—all fairly common guerrilla practices—are illegitimate actions, inadequately justified by some underground version of military necessity...

...It is simply not the case that every war requires such methods or that violence has some inherent logic which imposes this ultimate brutality on every combatant...

...Men are guilty of the crimes they commit, not the ones they are said to have wished to commit...

...War is never an end in itself, and so it either can never be justified or it can be justified only by reference to ends outside itself...

...But that does not absolve us from making judgments...

...And when the exigencies of each incident are taken into account, they are possibly justifiable: here the end may justify the means...

...Morality in war is not settled by any single measure...

...Whatever one thinks of such acts, when they are literally incidents, they are at least understandable...

...Guerrilla warfare is a means the weak have invented for fighting the strong...

...The same principle applies with even greater force, I should think, to "little wars" where limitation of the struggle is much more likely than in big ones...

...This is a very common American view and one sufficiently serious to warrant careful refutation...

...The same argument holds, I think, in the interior moments of war, when officers sometimes face the most difficult and agonizing choices...

...nevertheless, it involves behavior which is appropriate in time of war...

...it is a matter of long-term agreements and precedents as much or more than of immediate arithmetic...

...That seems to me precisely wrong...

...It can open the way for anything from endemic banditry to actual civil war, with the local authorities never certain just who or how many their enemies are...

...One would have to be morally obtuse to insist that near-certainty is certainty itself...

...The distinction between civilian and soldier still stands, and among civilians that between partial participants in the business of war (workers in munitions factories) and virtual non-participants...

...It is their business to kill others until they are themselves killed...

...Bayard Rustin, in Civil Disobedience, an occasional paper of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1966 From opposite sides of the spectrum of American politics, Eisenhower and Rustin suggest the same general theory of moral djugment in wartime...

...With regard to these laws soldiers must keep two facts in mind: that war is only a temporary rupture in international society and that it is a recurrent rupture...

...Even if there is an identity of brutal intentions, however, it does not follow that the judgments we make of the two sides should be the same...

...But there is always another time, and so jus in bello is always of crucial importance...

...In the past, serious attempts have been made to recognize different degrees of neutrality for such areas and to admit the possibility of benevolent neutrality short of war—the kind of position the U. S. adopted vis-a-vis Great Britain in 1940 and 1941...

...We must all pray that we never find ourselves at war with an utterly powerless country, deprived of every retaliatory capacity...

...The function of the word "necessary" in arguments of this sort is worth examining...

...In the past, systematic terror bombing of urban residential areas has been defended in the name of military necessity—and it has been carried out, as it probably will be again, even when the defense was none too good...

...sticking to the rules may well be less important than winning...

...Brutality begins with the killing of prisoners and non-combatants...

...In every war, the likelihood is that one side is more brutal than the other, though often the differences are too small to matter much, even to the most scrupulous of moralists...

...And then moral judgments are made in bad faith...

...In the case of prisoners, the line between legitimate and illegitimate behavior is fairly easy to draw, in part because the condition which makes a man a prisoner is fairly easy to specify...

...With regard to non-combatants, the theoretical problems are much more difficult...

...Both can become occasions for the shrill expression of personal malaise...

...but the argument does not hold in every case...

...In one sense, however, that is always true, for there are limits to the arguments that can be made from military necessity even after the disappearance of every distinction between battleground and hinterland...

...They, above all, have a clear responsibility to uphold the limits...

...See "The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam," by Marshall Sahlins, DISSENT, January—February, 1966, for a description of ideological warfare against Vietcong prisoners...

...Bombing is legitimate in war, the argument goes, whenever it is necessary to victory (or stalemate, or attrition, or whatever purpose is being pursued) . Military necessity cannot justify wanton destruction...

...Thus the U.S...

...There has been a tendency in recent years to deny the quarrantine and maintain a state of warfare, a struggle for the minds of the prisoners, even in the prison camps themselves...

...To try to distinguish which is more vicious is to fail to recognize the logic of war...

...They fight as guerrillas only when they lack the material resources to fight as soldiers...

...There are times, it seems to me, when that wager is morally acceptable...

...The violence of the guerrillas themselves, for example, takes a very different form...

...That is why wars to end war (or to end aggression, subversion, or anything else) are potentially so much more brutal than wars fought for realistic and limited objectives...

...It is not for that reason automatically justifiable: the weak have no monopoly on morality...

...At this point, the questions of morality in war and of the morality of a particular war come together...