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Title: A Just War? Hardly Author: Noam Chomsky Date: May 9, 2006 Language: en Topics: US foreign interventions, Iraq War, Afghanistan Source: Retrieved on 1st October 2021 from https://www.khaleejtimes.com/editorials-columns/a-just-war-hardly Notes: Published in the Khaleej Times.
Spurred by these times of invasions and evasions, discussion of “just
war” has had a renaissance among scholars and even among policy-makers.
Concepts aside, actions in the real world all too often reinforce the
maxim of Thucydides that “The strong do as they can, while the weak
suffer what they must” — which is not only indisputably unjust, but at
the present stage of human civilisation, a literal threat to the
survival of the species.
In his highly praised reflections on just war, Michael Walzer describes
the invasion of Afghanistan as “a triumph of just war theory,” standing
alongside Kosovo as a “just war.” Unfortunately, in these two cases, as
throughout, his arguments rely crucially on premises like “seems to me
entirely justified,” or “I believe” or “no doubt.”
Facts are ignored, even the most obvious ones. Consider Afghanistan. As
the bombing began in October 2001, President Bush warned Afghans that it
would continue until they handed over people that the US suspected of
terrorism.
The word “suspected” is important. Eight months later, FBI head Robert
S. Mueller III told editors at The Washington Post that after what must
have been the most intense manhunt in history, “We think the masterminds
of (the Sept. 11 attacks) were in Afghanistan, high in the al-Qaida
leadership. Plotters and others — the principals — came together in
Germany and perhaps elsewhere.”
What was still unclear in June 2002 could not have been known
definitively the preceding October, though few doubted at once that it
was true. Nor did I, for what it’s worth, but surmise and evidence are
two different things. At least it seems fair to say that the
circumstances raise a question about whether bombing Afghans was a
transparent example of “just war.”
Walzer’s arguments are directed to unnamed targets — for example, campus
opponents who are “pacifists.” He adds that their “pacifism” is a “bad
argument,” because he thinks violence is sometimes legitimate. We may
well agree that violence is sometimes legitimate (I do), but “I think”
is hardly an overwhelming argument in the real-world cases that he
discusses.
By “just war,” counterterrorism or some other rationale, the US exempts
itself from the fundamental principles of world order that it played the
primary role in formulating and enacting.
After World War II, a new regime of international law was instituted.
Its provisions on laws of war are codified in the UN Charter, the Geneva
Conventions and the Nuremberg principles, adopted by the General
Assembly. The Charter bars the threat or use of force unless authorized
by the Security Council or, under Article 51, in self-defense against
armed attack until the Security Council acts.
In 2004, a high level UN panel, including, among others, former National
Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, concluded that “Article 51 needs
neither extension nor restriction of its long-understood scope … In a
world full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order
and the norm of nonintervention on which it continues to be based is
simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as
distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one
to so act is to allow all.”
The National Security Strategy of September 2002, just largely
reiterated in March, grants the US the right to carry out what it calls
“pre-emptive war,” which means not pre-emptive, but “preventive war.”
That’s the right to commit aggression, plain and simple.
In the wording of the Nuremberg Tribunal, aggression is “the supreme
international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it
contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” — all the evil
in the tortured land of Iraq that flowed from the US-UK invasion, for
example.
The concept of aggression was defined clearly enough by US Supreme Court
Justice Robert Jackson, who was chief prosecutor for the United States
at Nuremberg. The concept was restated in an authoritative General
Assembly resolution. An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the tribunal,
is a state that is the first to commit such actions as “invasion of its
armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of
another State.”
That applies to the invasion of Iraq. Also relevant are Justice
Jackson’s eloquent words at Nuremberg: “If certain acts of violation of
treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them
or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule
of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have
invoked against us.” And elsewhere: “We must never forget that the
record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history
will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is
to put it to our own lips as well.”
For the political leadership, the threat of adherence to these
principles — and to the rule of law in general — is serious indeed. Or
it would be, if anyone dared to defy “the single ruthless superpower
whose leadership intends to shape the world according to its own
forceful world view,” as Reuven Pedatzur wrote in Haaretz last May.
Let me state a couple of simple truths. The first is that actions are
evaluated in terms of the range of likely consequences. A second is the
principle of universality; we apply to ourselves the same standards we
apply to others, if not more stringent ones.
Apart from being the merest truisms, these principles are also the
foundation of just war theory, at least any version of it that deserves
to be taken seriously.