[Newspoetry] RE, Ethics of War, and me

[Donald L Emerick]

Cover Story: Ethics of War

The Rules of War, describing the international laws of armed conflict and incorporated into the 1949 Geneva Conventions, actually go back at least 1,500 years to St. Augustine. Although commanding generals have considered these laws during warfare, the current war with Iraq is no exception to the disputes that arise as to which countries are in violation.

Lucky Severson talks with Dr. James Turner Johnson, religion professor at Rutgers University and co-editor of the Journal of Military Ethics, and Dr. Louay Safi, a scholar at the International Institute of Islamic Thought, about their views on the military conduct in the war with Iraq and what Islamic law teaches about this subject. Dr. Johnson asserts that Iraqi soldiers have been using unconventional tactics to deceive: "To come out under a white flag or come out dressed as civilians with your weapons hidden, these are both illegitimate means of destruction..." According to Dr. Safi, who is a critic of the war, but believes American forces have been careful to avoid civilian quarters, states that targeting civilians is against the Koran:  "You can not use a human as a means to protect soldiers, that's a human shield, and you can't target civilians, these are very clear rules."

Click here to read more about the ethics of war: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/transcripts/322.html

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Comments from viewers like me:

The Just War tradition, as mentioned in its lead-in, not only dates back 15 centuries, but also derives much of its thinking from largely Western ideas about the relationship between man and the state.  A just war presumes that at least one of the two states that are party to a conflict is a just state: unjust states could never fight each other in an unjust war.

But, one problem, here, at the state level, has been the absence of any independent international authority, that might declare which states are just and unjust.  For many of those 15 centuries, until comparatively recently, the Catholic Church was nominally such an independent authority.  The Protestant Reformation of the Enlightenment, which withered the authority behind the doctrine, thus had no global basis on which to assert, meaningfully, the continued viability of the just-state component of the just-war doctrine.

It is true that the various Councils of Europe, and other multi-lateral treaties, sometimes formally made obeisance to such doctrines, such as the bow of the Geneva Conventions in that direction.  More simply put, the United Nations might be deemed an organization of presumptively just states.  If so, then the UN would have to make a preliminary finding of an unjust state, in some sense, before authorizing any member actions, to enforce by armed action (unilaterally, or under regional agreements) consistent with such findings.

The failure to adhere such procedures would, itself, be a violation of the very rules of just war, depriving the pre-emptive state of any merit to its claim of being a just state.  Hence, any war that it initiated would also be unjust.  However there may be some viable theory of subsequent ratification or adoption, concerning UN approval, that might later remove the taint of such a state's unjust actions, just as a pardon or a commutation shows the grace and the mercy of higher legal authority.

However, if we take a cue from some more recent thinker, like Gandhi, whose views are not yet international law, even on his "home" subcontinent of India, then we might have quite a different view about the relationship of authority to armed force in the organized violence that we call a war.  It could be quite possible that all such uses of force are equally suspect and symptomatic of the moral problem.

Perhaps, if we wish to say only what is moral, we can never have an anticipatory standard of authority to which any potential wrong-doer might cling.  God, for instance, would never authorize any war -- not any more at least.

Instead, we might legally have only the kind of ratificatory standard, after-the-fact, that declares some degree of legal forgiveness, for the wrongs that any state necessarily commits during the course of waging a war, however necessary they may happen to think that that war may be.  All combatants would always know, then, already that the use of armed violence is morally wrong, and that fact of wrongness will not, by any consideration of usefulness to some state's interests, be justified.

At most, higher authority could only excuse justifiable errors and foolish indiscretions of lesser authority.  That's what moral authority might have to say, today, to avoid the quagmire that bogs us down in corrupted Western traditions.  Gandhi furnishes us with a better standard for international law, than the professorial quisling followers of American military camps and campaigns who spoke on your show.  War could never be just, but its violence might be forgiven or even excused.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick
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