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Ethics of this war have yet to be spelled out By Shaun A. Casey, 10/11/2001 The ethic is designed to limit the resort to war and regulate its
conduct once war breaks out. With its ancient roots in the thought of St.
Augustine, this tradition serves as a guide both for personal conscience
and as a means to structure public debate.
The initial question is whether or not there is a just cause for going
to war. The ethic recognizes the right to self-defense, and the
devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon provide
clear justification for the use of force in response. It is here that
President Bush's moral analysis begins and ends. But there are other tests
to be met before force may be legitimately used.
First, there must be a right intention. It was Augustine who noted that
most wars are fought for motives stemming from the desire to dominate.
Instead, he argued the proper intention has to be the restoration of
peace, not revenge and retaliation. The president's call to rid the world
of evil comes closer to holy war rhetoric than it does to the limited goal
of reestablishing peace.
Second, the ethic calls for a public declaration of war. The thrust
here is to identify and limit the scope of force to those responsible for
the initial offense. To expand the category of war beyond the Al Qaeda
network to include the Taliban or any other country that harbors
terrorists represents a dangerous expansion. Since terrorists make
difficult targets, the administration has issued itself a blank check to
pursue governments, individuals, or groups in this war even if they were
not directly involved in the attacks in the United States.
Third, the ethic requires that the good to be achieved by going to war
outweighs the evil to be incurred while prosecuting the war. By expanding
the targets of war beyond the immediate perpetrators, the president risks
a huge backlash among many of the world's Muslims. The Taliban regime, as
repressive as it is, apparently was not an active participant in the
attacks on America.
But by targeting them we risk setting the entire Middle East aflame as
some Muslims react to the attacks on the Taliban. In addition, hitting
targets across Afghanistan creates the possibility of the largest
humanitarian disaster in history as up to seven million Afghanis may flee
the fighting. It is not clear that any good produced by an expansive,
ill-defined shooting war on terrorism outweighs either of these outcomes.
Fourth, all other means of settling the dispute must be exhausted
before resorting to force. The administration's refusal to continue to
negotiate with the Taliban over the surrender of Osama bin Laden signals
an impatience on our part for a solution that might have resolved the
conflict without going to war.
The remaining criteria governing the resort to force are legitimate
authority and reasonable chance of success. The current conflict is being
waged with the consent of the people's representatives. The chance of
success depends on how one defines success. We will not rid the world of
evil. We can reasonably expect to bring the perpetrators of the Sept. 11
attacks to justice. A limited use of force against them may be justifiable
under the terms of the ethic. But such use of force does not appear to be
what the president is pursuing.
Once war breaks out, the ''just war'' ethic has two criteria to limit
the conduct of war: noncombatant immunity and proportionality of means.
The first states that noncombatants may not be directly targeted.
While our bombing policies in recent conflicts have attempted to avoid
civilian targets, the temptation in target-poor areas such as Afghanistan
is to strike the infrastructure beyond military command and control sites
in efforts to undermine regimes. This is morally dangerous in that
civilians are the ones who bear the brunt of such a strategy. The second
criterion calls for using only the amount of force necessary to achieve
tactical goals. Thus the use of nuclear weapons to destroy bunkered
terrorists is not permissible, as other less drastic means would suffice.
The war on terrorism is being waged by hardened realists who see only
marginal room for talk of ethics. But the American people deserve better.
They need a full moral explanation, and the administration would do well
to follow the lead of the earlier Bush administration and make a moral
case for its action. The ''just war'' ethic identifies some important
moral issues yet to be assessed.
Sadly, citizens, soldiers, politicians, and ethicists may come to rue
the day America went to war without a vigorous moral assessment of what it
was doing.
Shaun A. Casey teaches ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in
Washington, D.C.
This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on
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