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Chinese steel worker, the French farmer against the Nigerian farmer, the French filmmaker against the American filmmaker, each side trying to figure out how to subsidize and keep up their own products. We are antagonists across borders. The conservatives and neo conservatives and market neo liberals are friends across borders, because they're allies. They're allies in market strategy, in free trade. We have yet to begin to really work out a model that answers that and allows for cooperation across borders rather than antagonism.
So on all of these counts I think you're exactly right, Bernard, and that while there are issues of power and media and money, those are not the key issues, or not nearly as much as the need for powerful ideas. Remember that the socialist rank and file voted against the European constitution. They turned it down. European multiculturalism is in shambles, in the Netherlands and France and Denmark and elsewhere. Young middleclass people have been demonstrating in the streets of Paris against the people who were recently burning the suburbs down, believing that a bill meant to provide work for young immigrants might well make their lives tougher. So there's a lot of confusion on the left, and the problems can't routinely be blamed on the greed or corruption of the powerful.
Elshtain: Well, Ben's in very big trouble, because on the issues he just addressed I agree with him. It has mystified me since 1973 and Roe v. Wade why the left has been so undiscerning on the abortion question, on the fact that there are real moral issues at stake, refusing to acknowledge that you just can't say the words "women's rights" and have all questions done with. Just acknowledging that would have been a very, very good thing to do, but it wasn't done. Why not? Often in a university setting people become so insular that they fail to realize the resonance of issues that seem to them easily resolved. It's important for intellectuals to acknowledge that people they disagree with can be quite capable of making nuanced moral decisions. There is a difference, after all, between absolute prohibition or criminalization of abortion and the extreme abortion regime favored by American intellectuals, who refuse to countenance restraints of any kind. Should a society tolerate abortions sought by those who simply don't like the gender of their unborn child? If that's not the kind of discrimination you're willing at least to consider then you can't acknowledge that there are complex moral issues involved in the abortion debate. And that's just one example among many where the left has sort of immunized itself from the whole set of concerns that it should be involved with.
But I wanted also to respond to Jackson, who makes a big mistake to see what's going on as some sort of unseemly power grab. I agree with Mr. Lévy on this. And in fact, if you go back and read, as I've done, multiple accounts of the way the Kennedys functioned, it makes a lot of the Bush people seem like St. Francis. Hardball politics is the way it's done. I don't see any point in lamenting that. I don't think there's a lot of evidence that there was "widespread voter fraud" in the last election. If you read the 2002 National security Strategy documents you find they're full of ideas, and full of the language of universalism, the language of the need to intervene under particular circumstances. Those documents have to be taken seriously; they have to be debated. The situation we confront is not just about a gang taking over. It just isn't.
Lears: Look, I don't disagree that the left has gotten a lot of ideas screwed up, that we have misread the American public. And this is not something deeply embedded in the history of the American left. On the contrary it represents a swerve away from the social gospel Christianity of the early 20th century, which was really the basis of much of the New Deal and the welfare state. So we're talking about a shift away from social democracy toward identity politics in the last 25 years, and that, I think, has been a major tactical error. There were understandable reasons for it at the outset, and historically powerful ones. The problem is we have created this fragmented model of cultural interest groups that doesn't really present a compelling case for the old social democratic agenda, which does still have its appeal.
But I will just have to flat out disagree with both Mr. Lévy and Jean on another matter. I've never idealized the Kennedys, and I know that they were ruthless and corrupt in many ways. Sure there has been ruthlessness and corruption on both sides of the political aisle. But the circumstances of the 2000 election were unique, and the circumstances of the 2004 election would be better known to all of us if the media had actually done its job. You know, the New York Times did run an editorial approximately once a week before the election on the dangers of electronic voter fraud. But after the election that subject simply disappeared from the New York Times. It has not, however, disappeared either from the internet or from the world of publishing. A good friend of mine-a professor of media studies at N.Y.U. named Mark Crispin-Miller-published a book called Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and How They 'Il Do It Again if We Don't Stop Them. Now this was published not by some wacko fringe press but by Basic Books, an outfit not known for its leftist commitments, and Mark's book has sold 16,000 copies, though it has not been reviewed anywhere in any newspaper except the Florida Union Sentinel. It's also been marginalized by the left, incidentally, because the left loves to talk about "what we did wrong" and "oh my god we blew it again." I don't think that the left, contrary to what people have been saying, is averse to self-criticism and self-laceration. I think it's a great Bolshevik tradition. And I think self-criticism is in order sometimes. I don't deny that. And I agree with Jean and Ben on the importance of religion to the American electorate and the way in which we do sometimes get seduced by our own tendency to blame things on convenient dangers without really taking seriously our own blindness about essential matters. I also agree that conspiracy theories are usually apt to be delusional. But there are in fact varieties of voter fraud available to the political parties today that may well have been adopted by the Republicans in the last presidential election and will come to seem more and more an issue as we go forward toward 2008. And, in closing, I'll say that there is something very strange to me about a serious book on the subject, a book with extensive documentation, being published by a major press which sent the author on a national book tour and put the book at the top of its list, receiving no attention at all. Zero attention in the newspapers and the mainstream media. I think this should raise a flag about the state of the media and about all of us.
Massing: Strange that with all we know, sophisticated people-including some at this table-believe that you have to be childish or naïve to blame at least some of our problems on the influence of corrupt elites or money. To listen to Jean, for example, you'd think there was some kind of level playing field out there and that everyone just competes for influence and effect in the same old-fashioned hard-boiled ways. To that I say, come on, you don't know that money and power are part of how ideas get adopted, get publicized, get picked up and used to shape public opinion? Let me just cite some examples. First, the healthcare issue. In 1993, as we all remember, the Clintons came up with a plan that had a lot of flaws. All of us knew it was flawed, but it was a pretty good effort to deal with a major problem in the country. And what happened to this proposal? It got eviscerated. The New Republic hired an obscure journalist to write what turned out to be a completely fallacious account, full of misrepresentations, which in turn got picked up by all the think tanks. By RR. people, the lobbyists for the healthcare industry, the chamber of commerce, the national association of manufacturers, the national federation of independent businesses. They all ran campaigns. They saturated the airwaves with their invective. You don't think money has anything to do with which ideas get adopted and which don't? With how the public is managed and made to shut down or turn on to a proposal that requires sustained attention? Or consider the fuel efficiency issue. In 1975 the U.S. Congress passed standards setting minimum requirements for miles per gallon, for cars and light trucks. That was a good standard. In 1990 there was an effort in Congress to raise them by 40%. It almost passed. It needed 60 votes to get past the filibuster that was mounted. The car industry, the autoworkers, the car dealerships, they all descended on Congress and torpedoed this. They froze the standards for fuel efficiency for twenty years.
You don't think that money and power, not ideas, shaped that outcome? Come on. Bernard, you talk about oil. Of course oil was not the only reason for American intervention in Iraq. But why was there no discussion of oil until three years after the invasion? Do we give a damn about what kind of government rules Saudi Arabia? Obviously we're involved there because we want their oil. We cannot ignore the fact that it's an important factor, and if it's totally marginalized by the press, there are reasons for that. And while we're on the Middle East, and I know this is a sensitive topic, let's not forget the role of pro-Israel lobbying groups like APAC, which have a major effect on U.S. policy. I think that most of us here would agree that the Oslo accords probably gave us the best possible approach that we could have had. But it was lobbied against so much by groups with huge amounts of money and an electoral campaign contribution structure and a lock on Congress. Now I support Israel's right to exist, of course, but I want a two-state solution which I think most Jews support. But this is a classic case in which groups which feel passionately to the contrary are using the system. They use money and buy influence. Money drives our political system. Are these irrelevant factors? I think not. We can't talk about the present situation we're in, not seriously, if we're reluctant to notice things that are central to what's happening. The press has for the most part done a lousy job of calling our attention to important developments, and there are reasons for that we have to do our best to identify. Ideas don't get taken up simply because they're good or seductive.
Look, I'm filled with admiration for what the political right has been able to do on behalf of what are usually very bad ideas. They have a program where they find people who are very promising on campuses and bring them to Washington. They offer internship programs. They teach young people about the market. They provide them with ideas. They offer a wide variety of fellowships. Now I don't want to sound like somebody who thinks fellowships are the answer to everything, but I am an independent writer who has to think about this. I work totally on my own, I have to find ways to support myself, and I did a study recently for the Open Society Institute, which was asking what they can do to promote investigative journalism in America. In the course of my research I talked to a number of journalists, and often I heard about the sense of isolation experienced by people left of center. They lack the kind of support routinely available to people on the right. On the right, very admirable really, you have the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and others willing to bring promising journalists to Washington and pay them serious money. They say we like your ideas. We want you to come up with something that interests you. Bill Moyers is trying that approach now, trying to put seed money out there, calling up promising journalists and saying, I like what you're doing. I want you to go out there, be a pundit and kick ass. I know that money is not everything. Ideas have to be there. But to think that ideas just generate themselves is ludicrous. If you don't have a support structure and can't get to a place where power is exercised on behalf of your ideas, then you have no chance of making your ideas effectual. Money has come to have a thoroughly warping effect on our political system, and the failures of the media are at least in part explainable in those terms.
Session 4: On Just and Unjust War
Jean Elshtain: The just and unjust war tradition will often come down to nothing more than a cluster of concrete injunctions. What is permissible? What is not permissible? When is the resort to the use of coercive force justifiable? And under what kinds of conditions? These questions get discussed in a variety of ways. Some people will say there are five criteria for considering the occasion for war. Certainly the following will always be on the list:
1. War needs to be openly pursued. It can't be a private venture undertaken by a small group. There has to be legitimate governmental authority involved.
2. War must be a response to a specific act of unjust aggression, or the threat of such. That is, there must be reasonable certainty that some terrible act of aggression is going to be perpetrated.
3. A war maybe triggered by an obligation to protect the innocent who are not members of your own society. The innocent need not be morally innocent, because none of us is that, but innocent in the sense that they can't defend themselves. They will simply be slaughtered unless others do something about it. In this sense we see that the just war tradition does not celebrate state sovereignty as an inviolable absolute. In fact it predates the emergence of the sovereign state system.
4. By its obligation to protect the innocent, war should be a last resort, not a first resort, that is, a potential initiator of the war should have considered other possible ways to deal with the situation.
5. There should be some probability of success. That is, you don't embark on something as sober and tragic as war even if you've determined it's necessary unless you believe that the world after the war will be a more just place than it was before the use of coercive force.
Of course there's another aspect of the just war tradition which considers the means. How do you fight a war? Again, people cite many distinctions, but they all come down to two fundamental ones. The first is the rule of proportionality. That is, you don't, for some kind of minor event, let's say a border skirmish, come in with weapons blazing or use a response that is wildly disproportionate to the initial assault. second, and most importantly, you have the norm that has been most important to the American armed forces since the end of the Vietnam War, which is the rule of discrimination. That is, you are obliged to do whatever you can to discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, even to the point where you might endanger your own soldiers in certain circumstances. You need to err on the side of caution when it comes to combatants and noncombatants. That is obviously an intrinsically trying and difficult norm. Combatants know that it's hard to identify an enemy when they're not wearing uniforms or are indistinguishable from the rest of the population, and yet that norm of discrimination is absolutely central.
Now, if you accept the framework of the just war tradition, you have to accept as a starting point that war can be an instrument of justice. You cannot rely absolutely on the two central great values, justice being one and peace being another. Peace, after all, is a slippery concept. Is peace simply the absence of war? Because then you can have a peace that is founded on massive injustice. Whenever one thinks of the Iraq War, I daresay no one would contend that the Iraqi people were somehow at peace under the rule of Saddam Hussein and the Baathists. The massive injustices perpetrated by Saddam were well known. You don't have 300 mass graves being uncovered if there has been a just regime. So whatever you think about the use of force in Iraq, one of the aspects of the just war tradition is that you are ongoingly called upon to critically evaluate what is being called peace, because the language of peace can be a language that covers up and promotes illusion. The veil of peace can enable horrors. So throughout there must be, we need, a language of critical evaluation. And I think that when we look back at the past, we recognize moments when almost all of us, even those of us who are absolute pacifists, might well have seen war as an instrument of justice.
Here I think of a scene in a film called Glory, about the 54th Massachusetts infantry, a black unit in the Civil War under the command of a young white abolitionist. Many of you will recall that there was a real struggle on the part of African Americans to get into the fight, and it took real effort for them to convince Lincoln that in fact there should be black units fighting for their own freedom in the Union army. Anyway, in one scene it's the evening before a big battle that is going to be a very dangerous one, an assault on Fort Wagner, which was a Confederate fort guarding the entrance to Charleston harbor. The soldiers are sitting around testifying, and one of them says, you know, if tomorrow's my great getting up morning, I'll die standing like a man rather than on my knees like a slave. And I think there are moments when we recognize and appropriately honor those who stood up for themselves in those circumstances, who sacrificed their own lives on behalf of something that seemed precious to them. And so the just war tradition then emerged as a way of thinking that acknowledged that possibility but also condemned many of the occasions for war, including so-called holy wars, wars to expand the boundaries of a religion through coercive violence, wars of acquisitive violence, wars of vengeance. At the same time, advocates of this tradition attest that the use of force is sometimes, under particular circumstances, justifiable, but also attest that in fighting war there are limits on what one is permitted to do. One of the things that I was struck by in reading the very interesting book by Bernard-Henri Lévy that was assigned to us was Lévy's ambivalence about war. In fact, the language in which it is discussed by Lévy reflects in several ways the ambiguities of the just war tradition itself: that there is no aestheticization of war, that war is not a beautiful thing, that it is always terrible even when it is necessary and justified. There's a recognition that we need somehow to avoid both glory, on the one hand, and language of a kind of cynicism and terminal irony, on the other, if we are to think seriously about war. And the question Lévy puts to us reflects this concern: do wars really have any meaning any longer? Surely that depends in part on the war, but as I've said before, even attempting to stop some of the horrible things that are happening in black holes or small, apparently unimportant places would seem to have a great deal of meaning.
Forché: Perhaps Jean can clarify what are the criteria for determining right authority? Is there, in the just war tradition, a right to insurrection against oppressive regimes? Does a people have the right to resist military occupation?
Elshtain: Your question about the right to revolt against unjust regimes is actually trickier to answer than you might suspect. Certainly in the classic, pre-modern just war tradition the answer would be yes. That is because you had the category St. Thomas talked about, along with others in the medieval tradition, of tyrannicide. That is, if the king, and the king is a normative concept, if the king has ceased to be a king, he is now a tyrant and can be justly overthrown. The harder question really was who was authorized to do that? So yes, you can develop moral justification for overthrowing a tyrant. As for military occupation, well, that also can be complicated. If it's the occupation of Germany after WWII, we wouldn't think that a sort of Nazi insurrection against the American occupation was a good thing, or justifiable. So on the question of armed resistance to occupation you'd have to fill in lots more particulars before making a judgment.
Barber: Just a word on pacifism. Jean has said that pacifists don't think through the consequences. I think that's true. That's precisely the point: they are non-consequentialists. They refuse to engage the world philosophically or morally by estimating or guessing at possible consequences. They start with the notion that all we can control is our own behavior and our own will. People will die; I will not kill. That's basically the position. I can't take responsibility for all the death that otherwise happens, but I won't take responsibility for death. That, I think, is a defensible and important moral position that rises out of what the ethicists call deontology rather than consequentialist morals. I think this position is also based on some empirical evidence that when we think through consequences we often get them wrong.
Let's take the case of America in Iraq. At best we went to get rid of a terrible, murderous dictator and to save lives. What's not clear is that the tens of thousands of civilians who have died as a result of our actions do not outweigh the lives likely to have been taken by Saddam had we not intervened. That's why the deontologists say: "That's always the case. We never know what exactly is going to happen." In WWII, the use of the atomic bomb by the US was based on a reckoning, a calculation, that dropping the bomb would save lives, Japanese as well as American. We did know when we dropped the bomb that we were going to take many lives. But the calculus there about what would be preferable was by no means certain. As a political theorist, I say that pacifism is a perfectly sensible and defensible position for individuals, but is not a defensible position for collectivities, for politicians or statesmen. Why? Because they are responsible for deaths they don't directly cause. If your homeland is invaded and you are the president of the sovereign people, and you say we will not resist because we don't want to kill people, you are in a sense killing the people who get killed by the invaders. Brecht says it's a terrible thing to kill but that it is not given to us not to kill. But that's actually not true for individuals. For individuals it is given to us not to kill, but for collectivities it is not given to us not to kill, and at that point the consequentialist calculus, dangerous and risky as it is, is the only thing we have to rely upon, and there, you know, doctrine comes in.
Elshtain: I'm grateful to Ben for reminding us that when Augustine began this tradition of discourse about just war he was very clear: these were admonitions to statesmen. They were directed toward the people who were responsible for the collectivity.
Massing: I want to try to pose a question for Jean. In the debate over the Iraq War, discussion always seemed to ask whether there was a justification for going in or not? Did Saddam have WMD's? Was he such a horrible dictator that he should have been gotten rid of? With that emphasis the consequences or costs of the war just somehow fell off the table. All we heard was, did he have WMD's? If he did we had to go in. If he didn't, we should not have gone in. This didn't at all seem to me a moral discussion. And was it moral that the debate was waged with almost no attention to the probability of success? If you start talking about the cost of the war, not only civilian casualties, but instability in the region, more terrorism, damage to the US image in the world, you find that there was virtually no attention paid to issues that should have informed a just war appraisal of the American intervention. Or am I missing something here?
Glotzbach: I want to add just one observation to what Michael has just said. It has to do with the question of good faith. How do you engage in a debate on matters of life and death in good faith, and how do you come to rely on the good faith of those who are in a position to shape your thinking? Consider the question of whether or not a move to engage in war is in fact a last resort. When do we conclude that good faith efforts to avoid a war have actually been made? The calculus, so-called, that we're required to use would seem to depend on some assumption of good faith that may, in a given circumstance, be impossible to have.
Lears: I couldn't agree more that the question of good faith is central here, and may be more slippery than any other aspect of the larger issue we're discussing. But I want to return to the subject of pacifism and to come at it in what is for me an unavoidably confessional way. I was a naval officer during the Vietnam War in the Pacific. I was assigned to a cruiser that carried nuclear weapons, and one of my duties, should the order have come down, would have been to authorize the use of those nuclear weapons. The chaplain, who was a good man in his way, told me that I needed to be interviewed by him to see if I had any particular axe to grind against nuclear war. That was the language the chaplain used. It was about that time I realized I did have an axe to grind against nuclear war, and in fact I was against it all along. This concentrated the mind. In fact I had been opposed to the Vietnam War in general, but I had gone to a conservative southern university, and there was no real alternative in anyone's mind to military service. That's just what you did, and so I went to serve. I went through ROTC and became a naval officer, and this dilemma regarding nuclear weapons was the upshot of that. In thinking about my role, contemplating the cute little tactical nuclear weapons that we had on the ship, good maybe for just taking out a neighborhood rather than a whole city, I began to realize that I had an axe to grind not only against nuclear war but against war in general. And under the circumstances in which I found myself, and remembering the principles Jean recited a short while ago, I could not imagine participating in a war that didn't involve killing innocent civilians. And I decided I didn't want to do that, and I discovered that I could in fact apply, even though I was already in the military, for discharge as a conscientious objector. And so I did apply, and ultimately received an honorable discharge. So in fact I was a beneficiary of the class system in this country. I had an education, I knew how to use the language, and I succeeded at this task much more easily than enlisted men with equally sincere sentiments would have done. I am certain of that. But in any case, I had this formative experience. And I consider myself very fortunate, on the one hand to have been exposed to actual combat, and on the other hand placed in a position where I could actually formulate genuine principles and stand up for them, and to this day I maintain those principles. I was always asked what would you do if the US were attacked, and I always said well, then I'd have to reevaluate the situation at the time, though in 1970 it was very difficult to imagine that the US was in imminent danger. It was very difficult to imagine the US actually conducting a war in selfdefense. Of course that was the argument in respect to the Vietnam War, but it convinced almost no one by that juncture. At least no one I knew, including most of our military officers.
And so to the question, when does pacifism become indefensible? And the answer, the only answer that I can come up with is, if our homeland, please excuse the expression, is actually threatened. Directly threatened. Only then would war seem necessary and justifiable. When we were attacked on 9/11, I did reevaluate my position. It was an entirely theoretical exercise at that point because I wasn't faced, as I was in 1969, with the possibility of actually serving in the military. Nevertheless, I came to the conclusion that there were at least strong arguments for an attack on Afghanistan and the places that harbored terrorists. There were pacifist arguments that merited attention, that would define the whole terrorist problem in terms of international law and criminal justice. And though I realized that there are people who scoff at such thoughts, it seems to me still a more realistic approach. Woodrow Wilson once said, when he was in one of his more pacifistic moods, "there are times when a nation must be too proud to fight." And it does seem to me that the question of how one uses one's power when one has as much power as the US does, often requires that we be more scrupulous than we have been.
One does not always use one's power most effectively by flailing out at aggressors and oppressors, but instead by renouncing the use of power or using it in restrained ways. The war in Iraq was a no-brainer as far as I was concerned, as it had nothing to do with self-defense. But it never occurred to me when I made my decision to apply for conscientious objector status in 1969 to take seriously the possibility of war for humanitarian aims. The very idea seemed laughable, in light of the absurd humanitarian claims the US government was still making at the time, the providentialist sense of the mission, the confusion of power with virtue that was rampant among the American foreign policy elite at the time. And of course we've seen a great resurrection of that mentality more recently. So I've always been skeptical of those arguments, largely because of my formative experiences.
At the same time, I am willing to acknowledge that the situation of the 90's in Bosnia may in fact have justified intervention in retrospect. So I remain attached to the pacifist tradition in what I hope is a thoughtful way. Pacifism needs to be taken seriously at least as an individual moral option, and maybe even as an informing vision with respect to national policy. You know, as I tossed on my bunk at sea thinking about these things, I read a great deal on the just war tradition, and I read Niebuhr's Moral Man in an Immoral Society, which makes precisely the distinction that Ben made a while ago, on the difference between individual and collective responsibility. I do recognize that it's very difficult to adopt absolute pacifism as a standard for public policy. Nevertheless there is a pacifism that is not unthinking and reactive but is in fact tough-minded about the uses and abuses of power.
The only other issue I want to mention has to do with the distinction that is often made between what you might call freelance terrorism and state terrorism. And the latter often gets off the hook strictly on the grounds of intentionality, that it represents a policy undertaken by a duly constituted government. So we have a situation where many find it very easy to condemn suicide bombers, Palestinian suicide bombers, but not to condemn the Israelis who target an apartment building full of women and children so long as they are said to contain a Hamas leader. And it's not the Israelis alone who get off the hook by arguing that there's always some collateral damage. I'm resistant to the distinction that we make between different kinds of terrorism, when we want to keep our eye on the slaughter of innocents, which is what you get in both variants of terrorism.
Lévy: I hate two things equally: bellicosity and pacifism. Cult of war, and cult of peace. And for me they are really in important respects equivalent, symmetric, two faces of the same coin. Of course peace is always to be preferred to war, but that is not a reason to miss what is terrible in each of these. The cult of war allows men to believe that war can be beautiful. That it can be spiritually elevating, an occasion for mankind to be higher than itself. The cult of peace also allows for delusional thinking and posturing in the name of noble sentiments and higher values. The reason why to me they are equally detestable is that they ignore the very subtle, very necessary chemistry between morality and politics. As an example of pacifism, take the French example, from the years of the thirties and the rise of fascism. The French pacifists entirely overlooked the dimension of ethics. They could not imagine that there was a goal superior to their own moral rectitude, which was to get rid of fascism, to protect the Jews and the Poles and all the other victims of Nazism. The grave of the pacifist movement in France was Hitlerism. Nazism. Even when they were leftists, as most of the pacifists were, they could not see where their pacifism would lead them. They insisted that there was no law which could lead them to choose war, and a number of them, on these grounds, collaborated with the Germans and helped build the French Nazi party. So you have here a case where the cult of peace itself led to the worst. And all these people, the pacifists, were tried, were tried at the time of liberation.
The current war in Iraq is my example of bellicosity, but it must not be compared with World War II, because even if it is a mistake it is an entirely different phenomenon. In some ways I see in this present war an excess of morality and a defect of politics. For me the real crime of the neo-conservatives is not to have been unmoral, or immoral, but to have been unpolitical. Not political enough. Morally speaking it was of course right to invade Iraq. It was right to overthrow Saddam Hussein, as it is right to overthrow any dictator. I could not have objected to the intervention on moral grounds. But to seriously justify this intervention you would need political considerations and conditions, the lack of which made the venture catastrophic. You would need, for example, a multilateral coalition, which would have prevented the operation from being regarded as a bad example all over the world. You would have needed real support on the ground, support from the population of Iraq, a desire for assistance actually expressed. Of course you would also have needed adequate political and military force.
But the biggest failing of the neo-conservatives is that they don't believe in politics at all. They don't even believe in politics at home, as you know. They don't believe in politics to save New Orleans, they don't believe in politics to save the poor, they don't believe in politics to give Healthcare to people who need it. Obviously they don't believe in politics when they make war and so don't consider that they have to rebuild a country which they have occupied. It is a failure of political will and political imagination to make a war without having a plan for the day after. It is an instance of what Pascal called the angel who turns into a beast, operating with a sort of moral principle which is completely empty, completely devoid of any content because without any political foundation. By contrast, remember that in Bosnia you had three conditions. You had the support on the ground, the Bosnian army, you had the multilateral coalition, and you had a plan for after. In Iraq you did not have anything. So for me again Iraq presented a pragmatic problem, not a metaphysical one. The question about the just war and the unjust war, about when an intervention is necessary or not, is to be answered concretely. You need a theoretical and an empirical analysis.
Of course I disagree with my friend Jackson, my neighbor at this table, when he says that for him the condition for a just war would only be an attack on his own land. This I don't accept.
Lears: I knew you wouldn't.
Lévy: Of course not! I am sorry. The attack on the Twin Towers was a good reason to go to Afghanistan. But you had other good reasons to go to Afghanistan. To help the population there, to save women who were put into cages by the Taliban. And to stop genocide in Rwanda which killed at least 800,000, was that not at least as good a reason for military action as the desire to avenge the 3,800 victims of the World Trade Center attack? So again, homeland is one reason, but not the only one.
Elshtain: You know, the just war tradition does not sit easily with either pure consequentialism or with pure deontology. The just war tradition is based upon a supposition of human moral equality. All lives have value. At the same time there's the language of prudence, the language that Bernard-Henri just suggested was missing in the discourse about the Iraq war. Absent was basic political or prudential considerations. And those prudential considerations are the task of statesman and states women, their primary obligation, really. We don't want political leaders who don't or won't think of the consequences of acting or not acting. I couldn't agree more with Bernard-Henri on these matters.
To Phil on the issue of good faith and intentions, let me just say that in the run-up to, or mobilization for war, the only way we have to judge by intentions is by what people tell us, the reasons people give us for why an intervention is necessary or not. That's what we've got to evaluate, because we can't really plumb their motives or their heart. So we can't know intention in any pure sense.
Boyers: But isn't it a little too easy, Jean, to dismiss this issue by resorting to those words, "in any pure sense"? I don't think Phil was speaking about a pure sense. We do, after all, have grounds for assessing good faith and real intentions by examining the track records of people who are preparing us for war and by thinking seriously about whether we have good reason to trust what they tell us. Do they tend to mislead and withhold vital information? Do their contentions accord with what we have heard from independent observers, like the members of the weapons inspection team? Sure good faith and intention are slippery concepts, but we need them to know what we're doing and where our leaders are trying to take us.
Elshtain: I take your point, Bob, though I'm not sure we can agree on how useful these considerations can be when we're trying to assess a course of action. But let me turn back to Jackson and say that your comments reminded me that within the current teaching of the just war tradition in our military academies students are taught about disobeying unjust orders and the responsibility for doing that. That's a heavy responsibility to put on a person, needless to say, in a situation of war, but that's taken very seriously, and it flows logically from the tradition that I have talked about. But I do think that your discussion about other ways to deal with terrorism, including state terrorism, relies somewhat on a notion of international law as a self-enforcing instrument. One of the frustrations, for all of us, I think, is that there is no international army or police force that can enforce international law. Instead we have all these different bureaus and commissions and so on. Bernard-Henri rightly explains that while states are themselves committed to values having to do with the dignity of persons as a universal value, they themselves must then be called upon to be the enforcers of those universal values. There's no one else to do it, and that is a problem. But it becomes a somewhat peculiar problem for those committed to what Lévy calls the cult of peace. There was certainly such a cult in the US before WWII. You can see it in the writings of the liberal theologians of the era, who disdained any distinction between Nazi Germany and Great Britain on the grounds that Britain was just another empire and so why should we go to war to defend Britain. They're as bad as the Nazis, in their way, and so on. And it was really in response to such theologians that Niebuhr, out of the neo-orthodox theological tradition, argued that this was simply not an acceptable way for Christian theologians to be thinking. And I'm afraid that a comparable, comparably culpable naïveté continues to reign in many theological circles. You hear it all the time from the pulpit, alas.
Schell : First a comment about Clause witz, who developed the idea that war has a kind of logic of its own, and a kind of energy that can drive towards expansion and run to extremes until finally it approaches a so-called ideal of absolute war. But there's a whole other tendency there which really runs sharply counter to that, and that's expressed in his famous maxim that war is politics conducted by other means. I've never read a writer who more thoroughly insisted that military aims should be subordinated to the means of policy.
But I'm afraid that peace is getting rather short shrift here, rather a bad name. We have the cult of war sort of equated with the cult of peace, as if peace was not a deep and abiding longing of the human species. For my money, I've always hated the idea of the good war. In my opinion war is always a catastrophe, as Bernard-Henri earlier attested. That's the one thing you can always be sure of. All wars are bad wars; some bad wars are fought for a good cause, and occasionally with luck they succeed in attaining the cause. But war itself is something bad, and that cannot be said of peace. Just war theory proceeds from the understanding that wars are always terrible. To make a war that breaks a peace is to commit a crime. So many of us believe.
You know, when I hear the kind of discussion of just war that's conducted here I am always filled with respect for the carefulness and sobriety of the discussion. But at the same time I feel that the whole thing often strangely misses the point, the actual questions which are before us. Certainly when we think of nuclear war, which we'll be discussing later, we see how it actually has almost nothing to do with just war. After all, the nuclear doctrine is mutual assured destruction, which actually authorizes genocide to produce some notion of safety and peace. If you want to look at a peace that is rather compromised by the means used to achieve it, that would be one excellent example. I know that the Catholic bishops back in the 1980's did address nuclear war in just war terms. I was not satisfied with that attempt, although it commanded great respect in some circles.
In some ways when you think about this business of just war and especially the injunction to go protect the innocent of the earth, you see that this would seem to apply to the United States alone out of the nations of the earth, and I'm very uneasy about a rule or generalization that applies only to a single power. If the Danes were having a debate about whether Saddam Hussein should remain in power, that would be a strictly academic discussion. But here in the United States such a discussion has another sort of meaning. And that fact leads me to think that it's not easy to evaluate just war when it can realistically apply only, or largely, to a single country which spends as much on its military as all the other nations of the earth combined and, since World War II, has never really demobilized, not even with the end of the Cold War. The just war argument seems to entail a necessary component of sobriety and restraint and reluctance, based upon the sense that in making war you are doing something dreadful and terrible which at the very least must have a drastic justification. But I don't see that dread and reluctance in the deliberations of American officials and their ideological enablers, who really operate as if the US alone had the right to choose whether or not to initiate a war, whether in Iraq or Iran or North Korea or who knows where else.
This attitude I find very disturbing, and I can't think that the discussion has a lot to do with a serious, thoughtful application of just war theory. More like an abuse of it. In fact, it seems to me that never and nowhere has any state actually taken the rules of just war as its guide to policy. And that presents me with a fundamental problem. If I decide to support war on just war grounds, I am sort of supporting a war that isn't actually the one that my government is fighting. This has obvious bearing on what Phil and Bob were saying about good faith. So, for instance, if I look at the proposition that we are innocent, and then think about the poor people in Iraq who were tormented by Saddam Hussein and are now suffering additional torment as a result of the American invasion, well, I'm not likely to think about the justice of an invasion.
Lears: Jonathan has already anticipated a lot of what I wanted to say, but it does seem to me the term "cult of peace" is a little problematic in our current situation in the US, given our military budget and our capacity to project our military anywhere and everywhere in the world, and our willingness to do so. It seems to me what we're looking at here is a cult of war rather than a cult of peace. The intelligentsia and the shapers of public discourse and public policy who have brought us to our present situation are at least as guilty of culpable naïveté, to use Jean's language, as any devotes of the cult of peace which existed in the 1930's. I can assure you that I was not participating in the cult of peace when I decided to resign my commission in the US Navy. I was simply expressing my unwillingness to kill innocent people. Period. I also brought that up to express my whole skepticism about the concept of humanitarian war, which realistically ought to be viewed as a laughable oxymoron in most cases. Even in the 1960's humanitarian rhetoric was trotted out to support the American war in Vietnam. Most often humanitarian rhetoric is used, I would argue, quite cynically to conceal other aims. Who actually believes that the US is in the Middle East in order to protect Muslim women from patriarchal authority? The reasons we are in the Middle East have largely, though not exclusively, to do with what Joseph Biden somewhat mysteriously referred to as our core interest in the region, which is access to oil. I realize that ideas and ideology are important, but this is another instance, and in many ways a quite dramatic instance, of humanitarian rhetoric being used quite successfully to conceal what are actually more palpable and material war aims.
Lévy: Did I hear that you are against the oxymoron of humanitarian war because Vietnam was presented as a humanitarian struggle?
Lears: I said that even that conflict was sometimes justified in those terms.
Lévy: The Vietnam War was not proposed as a humanitarian war. Never.
Lears: Of course it was!
Lévy: By whom?
Lears: By our leaders, who spoke often of our mission there and even sometimes invoked the will of those who wanted us in there to protect them.
Lévy: That war was presented as a political war against Communism, as a war of containment. A humanitarian war would have meant an intervention in order to stop a bloodbath, with an army on one side, innocents on the other, with the army intent on killing the innocents. Nobody pretended that Vietnam was a humanitarian war!
Lears: I'm sorry, but I was there, and it was some of the time talked about as an American mission.
Lévy: A mission okay. But a humanitarian mission? Never.
Lears: Sorry, but it was often humanized with providential rhetoric about our national destiny and our responsibility and so on. If you want to define humanitarian as having to do exclusively with the defense of innocents against armed combatants, then you can say Vietnam was not presented as a humanitarian war, but I don't accept that narrow definition.
Lévy: You don't accept the language, but the terms are important. They present us with a new concept.
Lears: Well I think it's a problematic concept. I think it needs some careful scrutiny. I don't think we should simply accept that language and go from there to think of humanitarian wars as in some way the defining mission of our generation. In fact I think it's a very dangerous concept.
Massing: Jackson, should we intervene in Rwanda or not?
Lears: Well, that's a different question.
Forché: That's a humanitarian war.
Lévy: I believe it's a very complicated, very dangerous concept, but that this concept of protecting civilians without weapons from an army that is armed is a concept that, with some precautions, can help us to define not a mission but a task for our generation.
Lears: I said dangerous. I didn't say we should rule out any and all intervention.
Lévy: In Rwanda, I would have liked some blue helmets, an intervention to prevent a bloodbath. In Angola, I would have liked, after fourteen years of war, to see anybody moving his ass to prevent that. I would have liked an intervention in Angola. And in Darfur, today, you have what can only be called a bloodbath! In such places we need humanitarian interventions designed to protect civilians. Of course I am in favor of that, and of course I believe that the very concept is one of the few new good ideas which has been produced by our generation.
Is war always a catastrophe? Yes and no. I am not sure. War is always ugly. But again, you have to distinguish between wars. You have, after all, antifascist wars, wars of decolonization. Can they be put on the same level as the Nazi war for conquest in Eastern Europe? These are not the same. And when you say things are not the same, you can remember, again, that peace can be a catastrophe. When I was in Bosnia with Sontag and others, the pacifist discourse was exactly what helped the war. Why? Because it meant don't give weapons to the Bosnians. The war would've stopped much earlier, years before, without the pacifism. Pacifists fueled the war.
Barber: You know, humanitarian wars need not always entail actual violence or even the threat of violence. Sometimes, as Bernard can attest, the mere presence of witnesses obviates the necessity for war. The black holes are characterized by the absence of real local power, and the people who commit the murders are not very powerful. It's fairly easy, if you wish to stop them. Not just by armed means. Often it's enough to go in and threaten and be present. As you said, Jonathan, for 50 years we threatened to annihilate each other's civilizations and the threat alone was enough. It was a terrible chance we took but it worked. Nowadays we don't seem to threaten much in the smaller places where threat alone might work.
Forché: Aquestion I 'd like to put to Bernard-Henri. You ' ve been in Pakistan and Afghanistan and other parts of the region, and you've spoken there and elsewhere within Islam about war and terror. But we in this country, who use war as currency and have common expressions like War on Terror or War on Drugs, are perhaps too comfortable with the discourse of war to think about what we can expect from a so-called war on terror.
Lévy: The war in Iraq was of course the wrong answer to the war on terror because it did not produce less terror but more terror. But really I don't believe that the war against terror is the main problem facing us today. I believe that the wars I study in my book, the ignored wars, which kill millions and millions of people, are much more dangerous for the future of mankind than terrorism. This view may seem strange, or shocking, but it is my view. Of course Osama bin Laden and those who follow him are the worst guys imaginable, but I think that the order of the world, the future of mankind, our inner compass, all of these are less threatened by Osama bin Laden and terrorism than by our indifference and our lack of a sense of real involvement in the fate of people trapped in those wars.
But should the war on terror be called a war at all? I am not sure. If it has to be called a war, I think it must be regarded as a new sort of war in every respect, a war that cannot be described in the usual way, a war without state, without army, without frontlines, and so on. So it is probably not a good idea even to think about the situation of terror by pretending that a war is being fought against it.
One last point about the clash inside Islam, which is not, as I said earlier, a clash between Islam and the western world. If the struggle going on is inside Islam, I believe our role, our task, is to be involved not with force, of course, but with our words, our economic assistance. We want to help those who, in Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and so on are fighting against fundamentalism. I have seen with my own eyes the despair of the democrats and freedom fighters in Arab countries when they see Europeans and Americans kissing and making deals with dictators in Saudi Arabia or others who are the enemies of democracy in Islamic countries.
Elshtain: Clearly, in most of what has been said here about humanitarian intervention, the understanding is that it comes down to what is called the responsibility to protect. This language really dominates the thinking of people who are writing reports on genocide prevention and so forth. They ask, what are the responsibilities of the more powerful in situations where they have the capacity to intervene, as Bernard-Henri suggested, to put themselves in between murderers and those about to be slaughtered? How are the powerful authorized to exercise their responsibilities especially when the UN is often paralyzed, incapable of acting? Is it not then the case that particular member states are in fact called upon to act on behalf of these norms? So the fact that we may dispute the language used doesn't dismiss the phenomenon. I think that Bernard-Henri has done a huge service to us by warning us about the insidious corruption of indifference, and what that might mean over time to the human spirit and our human community.
Session 5: Nuclear Terror and Other Evils
Jonathan Schell: In the introduction to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguished between the modern age, whose beginning she dated from Galileo's discovery of the telescope, and the modern world, which was "born with the first atomic explosion." The distinction was necessary, she believed, for the advent of nuclear weapons, by bringing human extinction within the compass of human power, instantaneously altered the terms on which life was given to human beings on earth. Which is to say that it altered the human condition Arendt was writing about. Indeed, for the first time in human history, it opened the possibility that conditions on earth would no longer be human, for they would preclude the possibility of human life, in which case the phrase, "human condition," would be rendered obsolete, along, of course, with human beings. The danger, sprung out of total secrecy in 1945, came as a shock, and yet more than a half century later it still bewilders the world. Yet it did have a historical context, which has continued to develop and expand. The antecedent events were the increasing destructiveness of the instruments of war, and the eruption of genocide as a modern political project in the first half of the 20th century. The sequel has been the protracted awakening in the century's second half, and now in the 21st century, to the damage that human beings are doing to other species and to the terrestrial environment. Damage that alters not just the human condition, but the condition of all life. The antecedents to the events of 1945 - the event itself and the sequel - exhibit a common theme. All are what I call acts of extermination, which is something quite specific and to be distinguished from other evils. Extermination almost always involves mass killing, but mass killing and extermination are not the same. So let's consider genocide. Although historically mass killing has been the chief instrument of genocide, the definition of genocide does not hinge on the numbers killed. It hinges on the intention to destroy utterly a particular definable community, whether this might be a people, a race, or an ethnic group. The definition is rooted in the origin of the word, which means to kill a kind, a genus of human beings. And whether killing hundreds of thousands or millions of people can in fact be carried out without targeting a specific genus as a matter of state policy may be doubted, nevertheless, formally speaking, while the murder of a few hundred people who constituted a very small genus, for example a small tribe, might constitute genocide, the killing of hundreds of thousands of randomly chosen people might not. Acts of genocide that lack killing entirely are at least theoretically imaginable. Samuel Lemkin, who led the campaign to establish the convention against genocide, argued that the annihilation of a tradition merely, or a culture, for example, through expulsion of a people from their homeland, should, even in the absence of mass killing, be considered genocide. And genocide could also be accomplished by somehow destroying the regenerative capacity of a people. And human extinction likewise, a danger that's posed solely so far by nuclear weapons today, could theoretically be brought about without actual killing. Not in a nuclear war but theoretically.
So let's imagine, for example, that universal plagues destroyed the sperm