Regime Change and Just War: Responds
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
WHETHER IN agreement or demurral, one reads Michael Walzer with interest and respect. His work is a welcome contrast to the vicious rhetoric of accusation and denunciation that is so much...
...It would be odd for someone to claim that "just cause" in the Second World War was besmirched because regime change wasn't articulated from the get-go as a sine qua non for the use of force...
...Given that the nature of the Iraqi state was such that effective internal transformation could not be anticipated, such statements played into fears about WMD and assessments of Saddam's willingness to use them, given his horrific attack on the Kurds...
...This leads us to ask what criteria are deployed to determine whether the internal abuses of a regime are of an egregious and systematic sort that may—if other factors are present—trigger intervention...
...This gets tricky...
...To be sure, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) featured foremost in the denunciations by then-President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who declared that Saddam's Iraq possessed sufficient WMD to "destroy all of humanity...
...Unless Clinton, Gore, Albright, and Prime Minister Tony Blair, as well as President Bush, were, or are, all "lying," there was sufficient compelling evidence of WMD to raise the level of concern and enhance the case for intervention...
...My answer to this question is, No, not in and of itself as an abstract proposition...
...Presumably this means can regime change as such ever be a just cause...
...But who knew for sure...
...Although I do not share Walzer's overall hopefulness where "indirection" is concerned, I join hands with him in a commitment to minimal justice for all beleaguered peoples, tormented by the brutal, that we too readily ignore or forget...
...Just war doesn't function like that, as Walzer points out in his classic work, Just and Unjust Wars, a text that has played a central role in the revival of just war thinking in our time...
...For example, a nation or group of nations may have just cause to deploy force to stop genocide, but the same cannot be said for the practice of genital sexual mutilation...
...for example, the fact that by UN figures as many as eighty thousand Iraqi children per year were dying as a direct result of Saddam's "gaming" of the oil for food and medicine program—a shameful episode in the history of a shameful regime...
...It is vexing, to put it mildly, when the (alleged) moral high ground is seized by those prepared for the United States to provide for the defense of the West generally as well as its own security, even as anti-Americanism is rampant and American culture is treated with burning contempt...
...The hard fact of the matter is that many alternatives to the use of force cannot be implemented or even initiated until coercive force is deployed to stabilize a situation...
...Much of the time they seem not to be at their posts...
...Whatever one thinks of regime change in Iraq, the argument that the use of force in such matters is always illegitimate unless it is undertaken collectively is false, as the UN charter demonstrates...
...His work is a welcome contrast to the vicious rhetoric of accusation and denunciation that is so much a part of our public life...
...Here we arrive at "humanitarian intervention...
...The basics of Walzer's argument are straightforward: is regime change a just cause for war...
...It is true that regime change was not a stipulated goal at the onset of World War II...
...The burdens of these policies fall disproportionately on a society's most defenseless members: that is another debate for another day...
...The just war tradition is thick with the soot of history and cannot be wrenched free from particular cases, as Walzer insists...
...This is deeply contested, as is the norm of a "responsibility to protect" (RTP) now proffered routinely as an international duty of a sort...
...But under whose auspices, given what criteria, and to what end or ends...
...RTP derives from a hard-hitting document issued under the auspices of the United Nations that declares that a UN member state or group of states may be justified in intervening in the internal affairs of a criminal or rogue state engaged in systematic and egregious crimes against its own people or an identifiable portion of its people...
...As the war went forward, regime change came into focus as a compelling and legitimate war aim...
...Regime change in Iraq cannot be severed from these, and other, considerations...
...Fascinatingly, these early formulations connect directly to the current norms of humanitarian intervention and RTP...
...The cultural transDISSENT / Summer 2006 109 formations attendant upon regime change in post–World War II Japan demonstrate the legitimacy that enforced cultural transformation may acquire over time...
...This is not equivocation but a recognition that the just war tradition does not present a series of boxes to check, and, should you get more than a given number, then war it is...
...Walzer's claim that containment was a better option in the Iraq case than war is a prudential judgment flowing from the factors he takes into account and how he evaluates each...
...For now, the upshot of my remarks is that a regime's continuing policies, should they lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent victims as a matter of policy, not unavoidable happenstance, must be taken into account as one fleshes out a case for—or against—intervention...
...You cannot use "soft power" effectively in the thick of a situation akin to Hobbes's war of all against all...
...Walzer does not...
...Or, for that matter, a very nasty regime that has, up to this point, stood down from terrorizing its own population systematically or actually using WMD...
...Each case must be evaluated along the entire menu of just war considerations...
...I believe that, on balance, the 2003 war against Saddam's Iraq was one of these...
...However, in a given case and in light of other factors and additional information, regime change may well be one feature of the deployment of justifiable force...
...The culture of a "republic of fear" is surely relevant to how one makes determinations about the use of force...
...This is Walzer's position as I understand it...
...This is a "family quarrel...
...110 DISSENT / Summer 2006 TWO FINAL POINTS: it is annoying, as Walzer points out, that many of the Western European leaders calling vociferously for maintenance of the containment regime were unwilling to put their shoulders to the wheel by way of personnel, equipment, and treasure in order to ensure its enforcement...
...The character of the Iraqi state told us a lot about the nature of the Saddam regime and the culture out of which it emerged...
...The elites and leaders in Western Europe present a troubling picture...
...Such regimes "bear watching...
...THIS MEANS THAT the Iraq case is something very different from the possession of WMD as a stand-alone fact...
...I suspect that I am giving heavier consideration to the earliest formulations of the just war tradition (for example, St...
...Additionally, cultural transformation is not so easily severed from political change—as Walzer appears to suggest...
...It may not be a rule, but there is a very strong probability that a criminal regime—whether Fascist, communist, or Baathist—will engage in criminal policies externally and internally...
...These political-cultural factors were not irrelevant to the negative assessments of that regime by several American administrations...
...Any state in breach of peace terms and believed to possess WMD will trigger a more negative assessment than a relatively transparent democratic state not similarly in breach and in defiance...
...There is no "bright line" here...
...I am not convinced that the mass murder question is settled by observing that the gassing of the Kurds and the slaughter of Shiites, together with other egregious abuses, were all in the past...
...As well, embargo and sanction policies, although they may be justifiable in specific cases, are not necessarily ethically preferable to the use of force...
...Walzer's overall position in these matters might be described as "minimalist universalism...
...The fact that regime change is not articulated as overriding at the outset does not invalidate an otherwise strong case...
...Here, the empirical record—I've mentioned the Kurds, but one must include the brutal suppression of the Shiite uprising, the destruction of the way of life of the Marsh Arabs, the horror of Saddam's children's prisons, systematic torture as a policy, arbitrary arrest, and on and on—all figure into how one weighs concerns about possession of WMD...
...JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN is most recently the author of Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World...
...DISSENT / Summer 2006 111...
...Walzer is correct that there are occasions when "preventive force" can be justified...
...That disturbing custom, and how to modify or end it, is best left in the hands of a given country and open to pressure from international human rights groups...
...I dissent somewhat from Walzer's claim that in the classical formulation of just war "aggression is regarded as the criminal policy of a government, not as the policy of a criminal government...
...Any argument against a nation's use of force, including pushing for regime change, must proceed on other grounds if it is to be compelling...
...Walzer throws down the gauntlet to those of us who supported intervention by claiming that the "post–Persian Gulf War containment system" prevented both WMD development and mass murder...
...Walzer recognizes this in a way many of the loudest voices do not...
...Even as bringing an end to chattel slavery gained momentum as a war aim during the Civil War, although it wasn't the casus belli at the outset...
...There are other forms of culpable killing...
...Significant as well, and adding additional heft to the WMD issue, was Iraq's defiance of the terms of the truce ending the Persian Gulf War of 1991...
...For some of us, RTP was important in evaluating Iraq and the use of force...
...If one values sovereignty highly, as Walzer does, preventive war is very difficult to justify, but not impossible...
...Augustine's), which argued that an outside party may be justified in intervening in a state in order to prevent certain harm to the innocent...
Vol. 53 • July 2006 • No. 3
