Just and Unjust Occupations
Walzer, Michael
How is POSTWAR justice related to the justice of the war itself and the conduct of its battles? Iraq poses this question in an especially urgent way, but the question would be compelling even...
...And then the leaders of those countries ask, Why are we responsible for its costs...
...But is the opposite case also possible: to fight an unjust war and then produce a decent postwar political order...
...The Europeans want to share authority without sharing costs...
...But a misguided military intervention or a preventive war fought before its time might nonetheless end with the displacement of a brutal regime and the construction of a decent one...
...The distribution of contracts to politically connected American companies is a scandal...
...These are opposed but equally untenable positions, and the result of the opposition is simply to confirm American unilateralism...
...In the Iraqi case, however, President Bush and his advisers seem committed to profiteering at the center...
...We want minorities protected against persecution, neighboring states protected against aggression, the poorest of the people protected against destitution and starvation...
...Democratic political theory, which plays a relatively small part in our arguments about jus ad bellum and in Bello, provides the central principles of this account...
...DISSENT / Winter 2004 • 63...
...we have to provide the resources—soldiers and dollars—necessary to guarantee their security and begin the political and economic reconstruction of their country...
...it doesn't make money...
...still, I want to make them explicit...
...It was widely accepted that the neighboring states and all the internal and external victims of Nazism had this entitlement: that the new German regime be definitively postNazi...
...These two are acts of theft—of sovereignty, territory, or resources—and so they end with critically important goods in the wrong hands...
...these are the scavengers of war, profiteering at the margins...
...second, it must be committed to debaathification and to the equal protection of Iraq's different ethnic and religious groups...
...The combination of unilateralism and laissez-faire is a recipe for disaster...
...Or a war unjust on both sides might result in a settlement, negotiated or imposed, that is fair to both and makes for a stable peace between them...
...Surely occupying powers are morally bound to think seriously about what they are going to do in someone else's country...
...Whatever the prehistory of its achievement, a stable and democratic Iraq, even a relatively stable and more or less democratic Iraq, would be a good thing for the Middle East generally, for Europe and Japan, and (if it was involved in the achievement) for the UN...
...It sometimes turns out that occupying is harder than fighting...
...But what determines the overall justice of a military occupation is less its planning or its length than its political direction and the distribution of the benefits it provides...
...I doubt that a settlement of this sort would retrospectively justify the war (in the second case, whose war would it justify...
...But others argue, rightly, it seems to me, that having fought the war, we are now responsible for the well-being of the Iraqi people...
...That moral test we have obviously failed to meet...
...In Iraq, we have (officially) set our sights even higher than this, on a fully demoDISSENT / Winter 2004 n 61 OCCUPATIONS cratic and federalist regime, but postwar justice is probably best understood in a minimalist way...
...If the European Union had a larger sense of its global responsibilities, if its constituent states were really interested in modifying American behavior (rather than just complaining about it), they would make the contribution...
...I don't believe that any of the allied powers called for an early transfer of sovereignty to the German people...
...But would it make any difference if the United Nations were distributing contracts to politically connected French, German, or Russian companies...
...We don't seem to have thought much about this process in advance of the war or to have carried it out, thus far, with anything like the necessary understanding of Iraqi politics or history...
...But that is not going to happen...
...fits post helium can't be entirely independent of jus ad bellum...
...That possibility is harder to imagine, since wars of conquest are unjust ad bellum and post bellum, before and after, and so, presumably, are wars of economic aggrandizement...
...In both cases, there has to be someone regulating the conduct of the companies— not only their honesty and efficiency but also their readiness to employ, and gradually yield authority to, competent Iraqi managers and technicians...
...SO THE JUSTICE of the occupation is up to the citizens of the United States...
...After the defeat of Germany in World War II, there was a four-year military occupation, during which many Nazi leaders were brought to trial and a general "denazification" was instituted...
...It is not as if victors in war have been all that successful at achieving the minimum...
...But the tyrannical regime is still being defended from that base, which means that "debaathification" is still a necessary political/military process, so that Iraqis participating in (what we hope will be) an open society, forming civil associations, joining parties and movements, making choices, don't do so in fear of a restoration...
...The distribution of the costs of the post bellum settlement is necessarily related to the moral character of the war...
...It is possible to imagine a makeshift compromise between them but not a serious cooperation...
...but it might still be just in itself...
...third, it must be prepared to cede power to a legitimate and genuinely independent Iraqi government—which could even, if the bidding went that way, give its oil contracts to European rather than American companies...
...What is the relation of planned and unplanned occupations to just and unjust occupations...
...If its steady tendency is to empower the locals and if its benefits are widely distributed, the occupying power can plausibly be called just...
...Still others argue that the aftermath of the war has to be managed by international agencies like the UN Security Council—with contributions from many countries that were not part of the war at all...
...This is a good argument...
...The Iraq War is a case in point: the American debate about whether to fight doesn't seem particularly relevant to the debate about the occupation: how long to stay, how much to spend, when to begin the transfer of power—and, finally, who should answer these questions...
...Iraq poses this question in an especially urgent way, but the question would be compelling even without Iraq...
...the Bush administration wants to share costs without sharing authority...
...The timetable for self-determination depends heavily on the character of the previous regime and the extent of its defeat...
...Whatever one thinks about these different views, the debate about them requires an account of postwar justice...
...The countries that would have to provide the resources insist, however, that since this was an American war, America must bear the costs of the occupation—and also of political and economic reconstruction...
...These are the tests that the Bush administration has to meet, and that we should insist on: first, the administration must be prepared to spend the money necessary for reconstruction...
...But there is still a case to be made for the partial independence of the two and then for a wider distribution of the burdens of Iraq's reconstruction...
...We can argue for a much quicker transfer of power in Iraq since the large majority of the population, Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, were not complicit in Baathist tyranny, which seems to have had a narrowly regional and sectarian base...
...Given the likely benefits, why shouldn't the international community contribute to the costs of an occupation whose justice it could then guarantee...
...A multilateral occupation would be better than the unilateralist regime we have established— for legitimacy, certainly, and probably for efficiency—but at this writing that does not seem a lively prospect...
...This was a war of choice, they say, politically and morally unnecessary, and what one chooses in such OCCUPATIONS a case is the whole thing: the war and its aftermath, with all their attendant burdens...
...An international agency of proven impartiality would be best, but even American regulators, under congressional mandate, would be an improvement over no regulators at all...
...These postbellum judgments are probably easier than the ones we are forced to make in the heat of battle...
...The positions we took before the war don't determine the positions we take, or should take, on the occupation...
...Of course, the occupying army, like every army, will attract camp followers...
...And this undercuts the legitimacy of the occupation and puts its putative democratic goals in jeopardy...
...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent...
...They claim to be bringing democracy to Iraq, and we all have to hope that they succeed...
...We have to be able to argue about aftermaths as if this were a new argument—because, though it often isn't, it might be...
...AJUST OCCUPATION costs money...
...If power is tightly held and the procedures and motives of decision-making are concealed, if resources accumulated for the occupation end up in the hands of foreign companies and local favorites, 62 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 then the occupation is unjust...
...It seems clear that you can fight a just war, and fight it justly, and still make a moral mess of the aftermath—by establishing a satellite regime, for example, or by seeking revenge against the citizens of the defeated (aggressor) state, or by failing, after a humanitarian intervention, to help the people you have rescued rebuild their lives...
...Some people who opposed the war demand that we immediately "bring the troops home...
...If this argument is right, then we need criteria for jus post bellum that are distinct from (though not wholly independent of) those that we use to judge the war and its conduct...
...We want wars to end with governments in power in the defeated states that are chosen by the people they rule—or, at least, recognized by them as legitimate—and that are visibly committed to the welfare of those same people (all of them...
...many critics of the war made it even before the fighting began...
...They include self-determination, popular legitimacy, civil rights, and the idea of a common good...
...It is easy and right to argue for an authoritative role for the UN, but the argument is plausible only if the UN can mobilize the resources to take charge of Iraq as it is today...
...But with much greater speed and effectiveness, they have brought to Iraq the crony capitalism that now prevails in Washington...
Vol. 51 • January 2004 • No. 1
