There was considerable just war argument before, during, and after the Iraq War. Some of it was not terribly insightful, but, in the main, the debate demonstrated that the principles of the classic just war tradition, if not the tradition’s intellectual architecture, were still in place in American public life.
The post-major-combat just war debate over Iraq was particularly important, as it surfaced an idea that I had been promoting, without much success, since 1987: that, in addition to the classic theory’s ius ad bellum (war-decision law) and ius in bello (war-conduct law), there was a ius ad pacem, or what others called a ius post bellum, implicit in the just war tradition – that is, a morally justified use of force had to be aimed at creating the conditions for the possibility of a peace composed of security, order, justice, and freedom, the classic ends of politics.
There has been relatively little just war debate about the war underway in Afghanistan, but there ought to be in light of Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars (Simon and Schuster).
In his 2009 Nobel Prize address, the President spoke about the just war tradition as the moral framework in which statesmen had to ponder their responsibilities in the face of either conventional armed threat or terrorism. But Woodward’s description of an administration that treats treat the life-and-death decisions of war-and-peace as an annoying distraction from its domestic agenda, that bases decisions on troop deployments on domestic political calculation rather than military necessity, and that seems to have lost sight of the moral imperative to use armed force in such a way that victory and peace—not withdrawal according to a domestic political time-table—become possible suggests that neither the President nor his advisors are very well versed in the tradition the President lifted up in Oslo last December.
It’s not as if political calculation never played a part in any previous administration’s thinking about war and peace: political calculation is what politicians do, and a healthy sense of what the public will support is essential to democratic leadership, especially in a long-haul war like Afghanistan. But what is so disheartening about the account of administration deliberations in Woodward’s book is that it’s all politics, all the time.
Moreover, on Woodward’s account, the President and his team, from the moment they took office, were thinking about an exit strategy rather than about victory: and this, despite the fact that, during the 2008 campaign, the President, long critical of the Iraq War, had seemed to juxtapose it to Afghanistan, the good war.
No war is good, in an important sense. But some wars are necessary, and if the war is necessary, then a leader should tell his people that, explain that it might take a long time to resolve, think about military strategy in terms of the morally-acceptable means necessary to achieve victory—and then perhaps stay and enforce the peace. Significant American forces remained in Europe for almost a half-century after World War II, and in Korea for decades after the Korean War armistice was signed in 1953.
It’s simply not true that the American people have no staying-power. But they are unlikely to support an extended effort in Afghanistan, or anywhere else, if the first question being posed by their political leadership is, How do we get this over with and get out in the least politically damaging way?
That the President and his team seem not to be thinking in just war terms—that their intention, which is one of the core principles of classic just war analysis—seems flawed does not mean that American and allied troops in Afghanistan are participating in an unjust war. A very powerful just war case can be made for bringing a measure of order to Afghanistan, draining the terrorist swamps along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and trying to build a new Afghanistan whose people can benefit from its ample mineral resources can be made.
The President and his people aren’t making it. In one of the administration’s favorite images, a re-boot is morally imperative.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Comments:
Now let's look and Iraq and Afghanistan. We have propped up puppet regimes that will fall the moment we leave their countries, so we can never leave. That fails Aristotle 101 already.
We invaded Iraq to block Russia and China from extending themselves into "our" Arab world -- the Arab world that our control of the petroleum business worldwide has bought us, c.f. British Petroleum. But can we justify the sickening horrors we inflicted on the Iraqi people as a mere tactic in the "Great Game?"
When he asked his advisors the population of Iraq, they answered 25 million. His answer -- Paul Bremer's answer -- was "Too many." We have addressed that problem by driving millions of Iraqis into exile. Now they can't threaten Israel, and their wasted homeland can't either. All they can do is take their revenge on France, their new home.
And what is the end result of all this? We are now at war with Iran. For the moment the fighting is confined to Afghanistan, but it will inevitably spread. We have invaded Iran with small terrorist bands of Kurds. We have brought commercial war on them by economic sanctions. Is this making peace? Remember that war with Iran is war with Russia and China because it is a mortal threat to those nations. How will that end?
Or is it an attempt to crush resistence thoughout the Middle East for the sake of Israel and Big Oil? By the way, I highly recommend as bedside reading Carroll Quigley's treatise "The Anglo-American Establishment," penned in the 1960's by an unabashed but clear-eyed admirer. If you have a taste for that sort of thing, many others have written on it, including yours truly. My book is The Empire Strikes a Match in a World Full of Oil.
Let us assume, for argument's sake, that Mr. Weigel's position about George W. Bush's war policies was wrong, or even terribly wrong.
Does that mean you cannot assess any other argument made by him on its own merits?
Now that taints anything you have to say about his treatment of the issue.
Weigel is certainly correct, then, about U.S. staying power. But it has never been clear -- under either President Bush or President Obama -- what victory looks like in Afghanistan, or how the United States is to attain it. President Bush gradually increased U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 5000 in 2002 to 30,000 by the time he left office. He devoted many more resources to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Woodward's book indicates that under President Obama, victory in Afghanistan remains ambiguous. In the short term he has doubled the U.S. military presence, but to what end?
Richard, this is just a form of ad hominum fallacy. Just because someone supports an individual and their position does not necessarily taint the remainder of their thoughts about a related subject. It would be more constructive to advance your thoughts by saying what exactly is wrong with Weigel's thoughts. Deal with his ideas, not his possible failings of supporting a past president's foreign policy and actions.
