[casi] Staying Serious: Answers to the Warniks

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http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/papers/serious2003.html

FPIF Discussion Paper
May 2003

Staying Serious: Answers to the Warniks
By Wade L. Huntley

Wade L. Huntley <huntley@peace.hiroshima-cu.ac.jp> is an associate professor
for security studies at the Peace Institute of the Hiroshima City University
and an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org).


Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org



On the eve of the war in Iraq, Pete Du Pont published an essay in the Wall
Street Journal entitled "Getting Serious: Questions for the Peaceniks." Du
Pont posed six "familiar" questions "we ought to be asking the peace
protesters." Although Du Pont's tone is depreciatory and cynical, the
challenge to peace advocacy that the questions convey merits serious
response, especially in light of the neoconservative exultancy that the
disposition of the Iraq war has elicited.

Before turning to these questions, it is necessary to consider: who exactly
are the "peaceniks" about whom Du Pont is concerned? If by peacenik Du Pont
means the pacifist position that views all acts of war under any
circumstances as unjustified, then I do not qualify. I acknowledge the right
of collective self-defense as traditionally defined in just war doctrine.
But, then, peace advocacy has never been limited to total pacifism.

On the other hand, to have opposed the war on Iraq does not by itself make
one a peacenik either. Many people opposed this war for a myriad of reasons.
I myself considered Washington's initiation of war on Iraq as both an
ethical breach and a practical mistake. But, peace advocacy is more than
opposition; it is defined not by what it opposes but by what it proposes.

Presumably Du Pont was not addressing his questions to only pacifists or to
all opponents of the war. However, the community of peace advocates is
itself amorphous and kaleidoscopic. If I am indeed one of the "peaceniks"
from whom Du Pont was seeking his answers, it is because I support the
following convictions:

Peace is more than the absence of war. This is no mere slogan of peace
advocates but rather a philosophical statement with genuine content. For
example, Hobbes' famous concept of a "state of nature"--often used by modern
realists to describe contemporary international relations--was not merely a
condition of open warfare but rather a condition in which, even absent
warfare, the fear of violent conflict dominates life. In this same vein,
peace advocates seek not merely to end military conflict but to end the fear
of militarized violence, whether it stems from interstate conflict, domestic
lawlessness, or oppressive government. Note a key implication of this last
point: no peace advocate would consider oppressive government a peace
solution. Political freedom is a precondition of peace--this is one of the
ways in which peace is more than the absence of war.
Peace is possible. Confronting the viewpoint that propensity to violence is
intrinsic to human nature and that fighting and suffering are permanent
features of human relations, peace advocates contend that peace is a
concrete, realizable aim, not a utopian chimera. And history demonstrates
the reality of this position. We see progress toward peace in the global
delegitimization and abolition of human slavery. We also see this progress
in the birth and spread of liberal democratic governance in the modern age.
Indeed, most peace advocates see democracy as a great principle, and they
simply exhort polities calling themselves free and democratic live up to
these claims in practice.
Each of us, as individuals, is morally bound to work to bring peace into our
lives and our world, insofar as we are able. Hobbes himself saw this duty as
the "first law of nature": "That every man, ought to endeavour Peace, as
farre [sic] as he has hope of obtaining it." For Kant, the genuine
possibility of peace meant that the individual duty to seek peace is a
categorical imperative. For peace advocates, building peace is not only a
mandate of conscience but also a social responsibility, usually requiring
political action--and thus most peace advocates are peace activists as well.
This moral motivation does not entail pacifism, but it does firmly reject
the Clauswitzian formulation that war is merely "politics by other means."
Building genuine peace requires, among other things, holding agents of war
accountable for their actions in both moral and practical terms. As the Bush
administration commenced its march toward war on Iraq, peace advocates
helped rouse the citizens of the United States and people throughout the
world to insistently press the administration to justify its compulsion in
terms of both U.S. national interests and U.S. fidelity to the ethical norms
of international behavior. If peace advocates were unable to stop the war,
they were able to help establish the terms of reference by which the current
administration may be held accountable--to U.S. voters, to the global
audience, and to history. In this, peace advocacy tested and exercised the
institutions of American democracy, compensating for their inevitable
atrophy under a steady diet of sugar-pill patriotism, and doing American
democracy a significant service in the process.
On the basis of these principles, let me now turn to Du Pont's six
questions.



1. Peace is important, but is peace without freedom acceptable?
This one is easy: of course not. As I noted above, peace advocates consider
freedom to be a necessary precondition of peace. Freedom in this context
means, minimally, eliminating fear of militarized violence, whether arising
from interstate conflict, domestic lawlessness, or oppressive government.
Such freedom includes the capacity to think and speak freely and to exercise
individual and collective control over the terms of one's life
(self-determination).

Let us consider the cases of freedom deprivation that Du Pont
mentioned--Soviet gulag communism, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's
bloody Cambodian reign, and (currently) Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe and Kim
Jong-il's North Korea. Each of these Du Pont described as countries "at
peace." Few peace advocates would agree!

The deeper answer to Du Pont's question is this: just because peace without
freedom is unacceptable does not mean that war in the name of freedom is
always justified. This is especially true in the nuclear age, in which the
ancient Greek adage, "Let justice be done, even if the world shall perish,"
now connotes a prospect too real to serve as a simple proclamation of
principle.

One must notice that in none of the cases Du Pont mentions did the United
States launch a military invasion in the name of restoring freedom. Is Du
Pont now advocating a U.S. intervention in Zimbabwe? Probably not.

One may recall several other freedom-based uprisings that the United States
failed to support with force of arms: Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in
1968, and Iraq in 1991. At the risk of getting too far afield, one might
also mention the countless liberation movements of the past century that the
United States has actively suppressed in the name of anticommunism (no less
cynically than the Soviet Union's undercutting of foreign communist
movements in the name of its own national interests).

Du Pont concludes that war is awful, but "enslaved peoples and peace without
freedom are worse." Yet, would Du Pont really have been willing to risk
nuclear war to provide U.S. military support to the 1956 Hungarian
Revolution? Would Du Pont really have supported further loss of U.S.
soldiers' lives in Indochina to prevent Pol Pot's murderous reign? I suspect
not. In fact, conservative realists frequently prioritize national security
and global stability above defense of freedom in specific cases (sometimes
in the name of freedom in a larger but less immediately tangible sense).
Thus one does not have to be a peace advocate to recognize that the real
world presents hard choices that cannot be reduced to the simple slogan
"peace without freedom is unacceptable."



2. If you believe that peace is paramount, which of the following wars would
you not have fought:
The Gulf War of 1991, which liberated Kuwait from Iraqi invasion and
terrorism?
World War II against Nazi Germany?
The American Revolutionary War?
The Civil War?
The Korean War?
The war that freed Afghanistan from the Taliban?
And if at the height of the Berlin blockade in 1948 the Soviet Army had
attacked West Germany, Belgium, and France, would you have opposed an
American military response?
I have already mentioned that peace advocacy and pacifism are different
things; peace advocacy does not entail opposition to national self-defense.
But Du Pont's second question is most illuminating for what it fails to ask:
the list of U.S. wars that he presents, stretching back to the American
Revolutionary War, is highly selective. So one might easily ask Du Pont
which of the following wars, omitted from his list, he would support:

The Seminole Wars, which forcibly displaced native tribes in Florida to
lesser lands west of the Mississippi River, costing the lives of thousands
of U.S. troops?
The Mexican-American War, opposed by many northerners due to its potential
to extend slavery, costing thousands of U.S. lives and nearly $100,000,000?
The Spanish-American War, in which the United States used the pretext of the
sinking of the U.S.S. Maine to seize Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines
from Spain?
The Philippine-American War, caused by U.S. determination to retain colonial
possession of the Philippines and costing thousands of U.S. lives and over
100,000 Philippine civilian lives?
The U.S.-Vietnam War?
Du Pont's mention of the hypothetical case of a Soviet attack on West
Germany, Belgium, and France at the height of the 1948 Berlin Crisis
suggests that he would have viewed a U.S. military response to such an
attack wholly justified. Yet Du Pont does not mention the Soviet attack on
Afghanistan in 1979. Does he consider it a mistake that the U.S. did not
prevent the subjugation of the Afghan people with U.S. troops? Du Pont
supports the 1991 Gulf War, which he says "liberated Kuwait from Iraqi
invasion and terrorism." Would not repelling Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan have been an equally justifiable defense of the international
sovereignty norm and a protection of the Afghan people's freedom? Or was the
Soviet occupation somehow less onerous to the Afghan people than the Taliban
regime, whose ouster Du Pont applauds?

As I have mentioned, the point here is that holding freedom to be paramount
does not justify every war undertaken in freedom's name, any more than
holding peace to be paramount blinds peace activists to the moral
distinctions among different wars. The duty to peace does not proscribe
recognizing a necessary and justifiable war when it takes place. However,
few wars present the moral clarity of purpose of World War II (and even in
that example, valid criticisms have been raised of certain Allied actions,
such as the use of atomic bombs on Japan and the failure to bomb
infrastructure used for the extermination of Jews).

Certainly, the recent U.S. invasion of Iraq does not rank nearly as high in
terms of moral clarity as most of the wars listed in Du Pont's question. One
wonders: would Du Pont claim otherwise?



3. Why will appeasement succeed with Saddam Hussein when it has failed with
so many other dictators?
Let us take this question on the terms before it was made moot by the U.S.
invasion. In illustrating the question, Du Pont cites the failure of the
League of Nations to thwart Hitler's and Mussolini's aggressions and the
reticence of the United Nations to use military means in defense of Bosnian
Serbs. Both of these Du Pont describes as failures of collective security.

Of course, collective security and appeasement are not at all the same
things. Appeasement as a conflict avoidance tactic can be used unilaterally
as well as multilaterally. Collective security, by contrast, differs from
unilateral military action in that it is sanctioned by a consensus of states
with some appeal to international law and is not derived from a singular,
self-interested government decision. So, collective security is not
appeasement and the effort to achieve a collective security resolution in
Iraq was not appeasement, by definition.

Moreover, in both of the historical cases Du Pont cites, the story is not
really that collective security failed, but that it was not sufficiently
tried. It is worth reviewing these cases for the lessons they yield relative
to Iraq.

The United States did not even join the League of Nations, due to the U.S.
Senate's rejection of the Versailles Treaty, thus handicapping this
collective security mechanism from the outset. U.S. membership could have
lent League of Nations mandates the leadership and enforcement muscle they
needed. The United States also walked away from any role in the
reconstruction of post-WWI Europe, allowing onerous reparations and economic
collapse to fuel nationalistic resentments that led to the rise of fascism
in Germany and Italy. Learning from these failures to create meaningful
collective security mechanisms after WWI, the United States after WWII led
creation of the United Nations and the reconstruction of Europe under the
Marshall Plan (note that the Marshall Plan preceded NATO, and that the
Soviet Union and Soviet-occupied states were invited to join).

Not unlike the United Nations, the United States, too, was reluctant to
involve itself in the Balkans, supporting the UN resolutions but undertaking
little effort to develop and lead a coalition for collective security
enforcement. Indeed, conservative Republicans were the most vociferous
opponents of the use of U.S. forces in the Balkans, objecting to
"humanitarian intervention" and insisting that U.S. military forces not be
used unless U.S. interests were directly at stake. Given that Mr. Du Pont in
retrospect apparently applauds the Clinton administration's use of military
force in Bosnia in 1995, one wonders if Du Pont supported this action at the
time. One also wonders whether Du Pont objected when Mr. Bush, in the 2000
campaign, condemned all "nation building" exercises. If the answer to these
questions is no, then Mr. Du Pont appears to be one of the many
conservatives fully prepared to appease dictators and ignore oppression when
doing so suits U.S political purposes.

These considerations apply revealingly to the case of collective security
enforcement in Iraq. I share the view of war opponents such as Michael
Walzer, who saw the collapse of UN inspections in 1998 as a danger to peace
and who understood that the hesitancy by France and Russia (among others)
was driven less by principle than by self-interest and was partly to blame
for the inspections collapse.1 Moreover, many self-described realists (not
just peace advocates) favored containment of Iraq and continued UN
inspections rather than war.2 This position was hardly appeasement.

Peace advocates would have much preferred the United States to have been
unambiguously committed to strengthening the enforcement capacity of
collective security mechanisms. However, peace advocates recognized from the
outset that Bush administration lip service to collective security was a
pretense; the administration's passion for extracting the U.S. from every
possible multilateral engagement is palpable and, in some cases, proudly
proclaimed. President Bush's challenge to the United Nations last September
to enforce its resolutions or risk irrelevance would have been welcome had
it not been clearly a political ploy (ultimately failed) to gain UN sanction
for the Iraq outcome (regime change) to which the administration had
unilaterally committed itself long before.

Peace advocates do not oppose enforcing international law. Quite the
contrary: most feel that collective security has yet to be seriously
attempted, and many avidly favor strengthening the enforcement capacity of
the UN and similar mechanisms. Peace advocates, however, do strongly oppose
appropriation of the UN's international legal authority and the ideals of
multilateralism to provide a veil of legitimacy for an aggressive and
unilateral exercise of military force.



4. May the United States take action to prevent attacks--before they
occur--on its territory or people?
The central role of proactive use of military force in the Bush
administration's national security policy has cast new attention on an old
topic: legitimation of preemption.

Just war doctrine, based on the principles of legitimate self-defense, has
long recognized a limited right of preemption. This right has always been
restricted by prudential criteria: it must be a last resort, be proportional
to the threat, and have a reasonable chance of success. More importantly, a
real and imminent threat of attack must exist. Even in its early incarnation
in the thought of Hugo Grotius, preemption was never justified merely to
"weaken a rising power."

As emerging nationalism and total war technologies qualitatively magnified
the dangers of offensive war, international law increasingly emphasized the
self-defense limitation of legitimate war making and the imminence-of-attack
limitation of legitimate preemption. Many interpret Article 51 of the United
Nations Charter, affirming the right of self-defense "if an armed attack
occurs," to forbid preemptive attack of any sort. Many peace advocates would
ascribe to this view.

At the same time, peace advocates acknowledge that newly emerging issues,
such as humanitarian crises, require that principles for ethical use of
military intervention evolve to meet the needs of the times.

Many peace advocates critical of preemption have focused on the almost
unlimited scope that the Bush administration allows itself in applying its
new national security doctrine. Even measured against standards of
legitimate preemption that are more permissive than most peace advocates
would allow, the administration's position (both in principle and as applied
to Iraq) is virtually unconstrained.

For example, in a 1998 work assessing whether there can be a moral case for
preemptive attack to thwart emerging threats from proliferation of nuclear,
biological, chemical, or radiological weapons, Brad Roberts (no peacenik)
offers six criteria whose satisfaction would establish the "strongest moral
case" for U.S. preemptive action:3

Actual threatened use of such weapons specifically against the United
States;
Acquisition of such weapons in violation of international law;
Concern for broader U.S. regional security guarantees and/or power
stability;
Approval of presidential action by the U.S. Congress;
Backing of the UN Security Council and any relevant regional organization;
Satisfaction of the prudential tests of last resort, proportionality, and
reasonable chance of success.
Many peace advocates would insist on even more demanding criteria than these
(some reject preemption outright). Yet, even by Roberts' criteria, the Bush
administration's basis for war against Iraq is sorely wanting:

Iraq never threatened the use of such weapons specifically against the
United States.
Even the Bush administration did not claim that Iraq still had an active
nuclear weapons program. Moreover, the administration failed to convince
most of the international community that Iraq still possessed biological and
chemical weapons prohibited by UN sanctions, and it preempted the
inspections process intended to discover these weapons.
Iraq's weak military posed no imminent risk to regional stability (as it had
12 years earlier), and the credibility of U.S. security guarantees to Iraq's
neighbors was not in peril.
President Bush did obtain U.S. congressional approval.
President Bush failed to obtain either the backing of the UN Security
Council, support from NATO, or or even the full cooperation of key NATO ally
Turkey.
Most of the world views the invasion of Iraq to have been both
disproportional to the proven threat and commenced long before other
reasonable options were exhausted.
At minimum, the Bush administration appears to have provably failed to meet
criteria (1) and (5), demonstrably failed to meet criteria (2), (3), and
(6), and satisfied only criterion (4). (Many peace advocates would claim
that Bush satisfied none of these criteria--questioning, for example, the
sufficiency of the domestic debate underlying U.S. congressional approval).

The example of justified preemption that Du Pont cites--President
Roosevelt's order to the Navy in late 1941 to patrol the North Atlantic to
defend against German submarines--is nearly as justifiable as any preemptive
action can be. In this example, Roosevelt's action--eminently defensive in
character--satisfied all the prudential criteria as well as the core
standard of self-defense against imminent threat.

Peace advocates sorely wish that President Bush would be so prudent. Indeed,
by palpably failing to meet even minimal criteria for a moral defense of
preemptive war on Iraq, President Bush has probably undermined any hope that
a U.S. doctrine of preemptive action could be reconciled to the ethical
demands of the international community any time in the foreseeable future.



5. If not America, who? If not now, when?
The short answers that peace advocates would answer to these questions are:
the United States only if fully supported by the international community,
and only when all reasonable alternatives have been exhausted. But the real
meaning of Du Pont's question lies in its supporting commentary, which
requires explicit attention and response.

Du Pont states: "America's security objectives also call for changing the
failed political culture of the Arab region." No peace advocate would
support this position. By my reading of the public opinion polls, few
Americans would support it either. This messianic vision exceeds even the
amoral renderings of classic realpolitik; it is a transformational agenda
rekindling the self-righteous divination of nineteenth century Manifest
Destiny. One suspects that Du Pont would also concur with Franklin Graham's
unapologetic judgment of Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion" and
would welcome the Bush administration's unleashing of U.S. evangelicalism in
Iraq as implementation of the requisite remaking of Arab political society
in the American image.

Du Pont also states: "People in these nations hate America, because they
envy us. Their societies have failed, while democratic capitalism has
succeeded." Of course, this is a profoundly ahistorical viewpoint, ignoring
the legacies of colonialism and continued great power meddling with which
Middle Eastern states have had to cope. More to the point, however; if
indeed the people of the region "hate" America, it is mainly not from envy
but from fear. The Iraq invasion demonstrates that the United States is now
an undeterrable power. As the war wanes, the United States is ignoring the
destruction of Iraq's archaeological heritage, elevating a discredited Iraqi
exile to leadership, sanctioning anti-Islamic evangelicalism, and
acknowledging its intention to maintain military bases in Iraq for the
foreseeable future (with undisguised intentions to thereby intimidate Syria
and Iran). If indeed U.S. policy interest is, as Du Pont suggests, a
wholesale reconstruction of Arab political culture, is the anger and fear of
the people of this region really that surprising? Would Americans,
confronting a nation implacably committed to the remaking of U.S. political
culture by force of arms, feel any less insecurity and compulsion to resist?
To answer this last question, we need look no further than U.S.
anticommunism throughout the twentieth century.



6. Finally, Abraham Lincoln said there was no middle ground between freedom
and slavery. Can there be a middle ground between freedom and terrorism?
Slavery involves mass subjugation, publicly, indefinitely, and backed by the
authority and coercive instruments of government. It was the last of these
qualities that elicited Lincoln's absolutism: he recognized that a citizenry
whose own government condoned slavery in any measure could never truly call
itself free or stand as a beacon to the world.

Much terrorism is renegade, secretive, and fugitive. Such terrorism is
symptomatic of deeper global maladies. Peace advocates have no sympathy for
terrorism, but they judge that tit-for-tat attacks on agents of terrorism
treat only the symptoms, not the disease. The world's pervasive poverty and
oppression does not cause terrorism, but the frustration and disaffection
these conditions engender do function as a wellspring for the tiny minority
(often themselves neither poor nor oppressed) willing to commit graphic
violence for sensationalistic effect. Such individuals parasitically depend
upon the existence of large communities of suffering people for support and
concealment, and they commandeer the resentment in these communities by
claiming (often falsely) to be acting on behalf of these communities' needs.
Peace advocates argue that concerted U.S. action to alleviate poverty and
oppression worldwide would starve and expose such terrorists both materially
and ideologically and, in so doing, would thwart terrorism in the long run
more effectively than a thousand military strikes. In short, freedom, not
military force, is the real antidote to terrorism.

State-sponsored terrorism does display many of the characteristics of
slavery. At this level, peace advocates would concur with Lincoln's
absolutism: a citizenry whose own government condones terrorism in its name
cannot yet call itself free nor represent itself as a model to other
nations. Peace advocates also believe in exposing and condemning terrorism
in all its forms, and therefore, mindful of U.S. aid to authoritarian
governments and CIA adventurism over recent decades, they consider it no
compromise of their censure of the Taliban's Afghanistan or Saddam's Iraq to
also point out that the nation of Lincoln itself still stands on a shaky
"middle ground."




Endnotes
Michael Walzer, "N-inspection yes, war no," The Daily Yomiuri, February 1,
2003, p.15.
John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, "An Unnecessary War," Foreign
Policy, January-February, 2003.
Brad Roberts, "NBC-Armed Rogues: Is There a Moral Case for Preemption?" in
Elliott Abrams, ed., Close Calls: Intervention, Terrorism, Missile Defense,
and "Just War" Today (Washington: Ethics & Public Policy Center, 1998).








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