Ethics and War in the 21st Century

Christopher Coker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134054633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book explores the ethical implications of war in the contemporary world. The author, a leading theorist of warfare, explains why it is of crucial importance that Western countries should continue to apply traditional ethical rules and practices in war, even when engaging with international terrorist groups.The book uses the work of the late Am

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The war on terror

A new discourse on war?

On 3 April 2006, the British Defence Secretary, John Reid, gave a talk before a largely military audience about the rules of twenty-first century warfare. For centuries, he told his audience, conflict between tribes, cities and states had been unbridled and savage. Only gradually had mankind developed a range of conventions that could be applied to constrain and moderate what was, in essence, a brutal activity. Eventually those agreements had become rules which over time had become laws. Much had been achieved, he added, in the current legal frameworks which went by the name of international humanitarian law. However, warfare continues to evolve, and in its moral dimensions we now have to cope with the deliberate regression towards barbaric terrorism.

Today, against the background of the uneven nature of the modern battlefield and the unconstrained enemy ranged against us, we must be swifter to support and slower to condemn, our armed forces. I am not in any way suggesting that British forces should operate outside the law. The legal constraints upon us, which set against an enemy which adheres to none whatsoever, but is swift to insist that we do, make life very difficult for the forces of democracy …

We owe it to ourselves, to our people, to our forces and to the cause of international order, to constantly reappraise and update the relationship between our underlying values, the legal instruments which apply them to the world of conflict, and the historical circumstances in which they are to be applied, including the nature of that conflict.¹

John Reid concluded by remarking: ‘I believe we need now to consider whether we – the international community in its wider sense – need to re-examine these conventions. If we do not, we risk continuing to fight twenty-first century conflicts with twentieth century rules.’ ² When he became Home Secretary a few months later, Reid took this new remit with him. He even went so far as to suggest that the law be changed so that torture could be justified in circumstances where the state considered it essential to the security of everyone else.

John Reid was not alone in his thoughts. Many other, better informed observers have complained that while the nature of war has changed dramatically, the rules designed to govern the actions of soldiers engaging in battle have remained, for the most part, static. In the context of the War on Terror this inflexibility is said to have created a dilemma in which ‘the rules of war’ clash with ‘the situational demands of military necessity’. Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Secretary of Defense, famously insisted that the world had changed and that business as usual will not do. If this is indeed the case then we should ask ourselves as a matter of urgency whether it is not time to think the unthinkable, including the use of torture.

Let me list the ways in which war seems to have changed in three critical respects and on which there is some agreement (there are many others but from the point of view of the ethics of war those I shall cite seem to me by far the most significant).

First, the post-Westphalian codes we have in our repertoire of political controls presuppose a political battlefield: two states battling it out for a recognised political end. In such conflicts there is room for negotiation and compromise, the foundations of any enduring peace. It is this political space that seems to have been hollowed out since 2001. One of the reasons why John Reid could be forgiven for thinking that the laws of war need to be revised is obvious: the enemies we now face are (largely) non-state actors. Because many of them are not governed by the same prudential rules as (most) states it is easy to fall into the trap of seeing them as distinctly malign.

It was especially foolish of the Bush administration, however, to claim that the perpetrators of 9/11 were ‘evil’ by nature, not just by design. At the funeral oration at the National Cathedral in Washington three days after the World Trade Center attack, Bush declared that Americans did not yet have the distance of history – yet he also insisted that ‘their responsibility to history’ was already clear: to rid the world of evil. It was Michael Gerson, his speech writer and a strong Evangelical Christian, who transformed the original phrase ‘axis of hatred’ into ‘axis of evil’ a few months later. This was translated into a combat doctrine once the War on Terror began in earnest.³

We have often demonised our enemies in the past, of course. In the heat of battle it is difficult to be dispassionate. Yet we have tried to draw a distinction between the states with which we have found ourselves at war and the citizens they have sent into battle. In World War I this distinction was gradually obscured as the conflict deepened; in World War II the distinction was maintained until the very end. However, Nazi Germany retains its exceptionalism as it was, indisputably, the most evil regime of the modern era, both Britain and the United States insisted that they were not at war with the German people. What makes the present conflict different in the eyes of many is that the enemies we face seem to be so intractable. Some are suicidal, others seem eager not only to kill but to kill the largest number of people possible; some are apocalyptic in their dreams, others are more apparently rational. Whatever the issues, the US now believes itself to be engaged in a life or death struggle against evil: ‘Wherever there is evil, we will fight it’, declared the deputy commander of Europe Command in 2005.⁴

This view was expressed much earlier in a book which was published by David Frumm and Richard Perle in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War (2003). It was provocatively entitled An End to Evil. Its first chapter ends with the following conclusion:

For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time and the war against evil, our generation’s greatest cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimise it, or manage it. We believe they are fighting to win – to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.⁵

Rarely has a case been presented with such clarity of vision. But is the vision well informed? There are a number of objections that can be raised in framing the issue so tendentiously. The first objection is that it feeds our obsession with what Carl Sagan called ‘our demon-haunted world’. Our world seems to be full of demons including terrorists, muggers, drug lords, loggers in the Amazon and people with diseases. Conspiracy theories abound, so much so that the 1997 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary felt it necessary to define the term ‘conspiracy theory’ for the first time. As a people Americans, in particular, have a tendency to see universal conspiracies where none exist; to identify demons when we only encounter flawed human beings who are much more fallible than we think, and therefore easier to deal with.

But a second objection to invoking ‘evil’ in the abstract is that it depoliticises politics. We do indeed find ourselves at war with a number of evils. We have even declared war on many of them, which is why we speak of the War on AIDS, the War on Drugs, the War on Crime and, though less often than before, the War on Poverty. In terrorism we have another abstract enemy, but unlike the above it is an old-fashioned political one even if its methods are anything but old fashioned. Terrorists have agendas. If you identify terrorism as ‘evil’ rather than ‘an evil’, and if you refuse to manage, contain or limit it, then you are in danger of depoliticising it at the same time. There are some who would have us believe that terrorism is meta-political (that it is beyond politics, that it is something more transcendent and other worldly).⁶ There are others who insist it is dispersed, disarticulated and without political expression; they contend that it is simply apocalyptic and therefore not open to interrogation or serious analysis.

One must be careful here. ‘Evil can only be dealt with by means of evil,’ warned Jean Baudrillard some years ago.⁷ To fight evil is not without its own irony, or propensity to evil for it encourages us to fight terror with terror at the same time. Evils, by contrast, can indeed by managed, which is the business of politics and politicians. In managing evils we are enjoined to act in accordance with our own ethical codes, in order to be better placed to win the political discussion.

Second, some claim that the War on Terror differs from every other conflict because of the question of religion. Our moral codes have traditionally been derived from religious injunctions, but in the last three hundred years the West has largely derived the laws of war from what philosophers have had to say, not the theologians. Beginning with Suarez, Grotius and Pufendorff and going on to Kant, it is philosophy which has carried the burden of the ethical debate. What are we to make of a world in which religion has returned, sacralising violence and transforming the terrorist into a martyr?

The War on Terror is an inherently ethical struggle. Whether we identify it as does President Bush as ‘the first war of the twenty-first century’, or treat it as part of a much larger conflict: a ‘clash of civilisations’, ‘the West v the Rest’ (the formulations differ, although they hold a tenacious purchase on our imagination, whether we agree with them or not), the central reality of conflict, at the time of writing, is religion, not inter-state rivalry over resources. Nor is it a war of the ‘haves’ against the ‘have-nots’ prompted by global inequality, or an ideological clash between the forces of globalisation and those movements who oppose it.

What I think lies at the root of this conviction is the belief that this conflict is quite different from any other because there can be no compromise on Truth. It is especially daunting, for example, to be faced with an adversary who believes that faith itself is a virtue, even when it flies in the face of reason. If one is dealing with an irrational enemy who prefers death to life, can the old rules be upheld? As Voltaire once famously remarked, ‘Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ ⁸ Is this what war has now become – atrocity management?

At the root of our difficulties with religious or sacramental violence lies the fundamental debate about the role of human reason in political affairs. We find it difficult to understand so much of Islamist terrorism in pragmatic or politically rational terms. What is being demanded of us by some is the surrender of the bedrock of the Western conception of itself, of everything (to use the word advisedly) that Western liberals themselves regard as ‘sacred’ (i.e. non-negotiable). At the same time, in this very real ideological struggle the West is being challenged with the cooperation of the Muslim majority to separate the faith from its violent exponents. That means it has to act rationally (or reasonably). It cannot fight evil with evil. I do not suggest that we have exaggerated the threat. It is precisely because it is very real that we need to treat ethics seriously. It is because we are engaged in a war against those who consider and proclaim themselves to be at war with us that we must understand why, over time, we have developed the ethical codes that we ask our soldiers to observe even in the most challenging of circumstances.

Finally, our ethical and legal codes have tended to take the Weberian understanding that violence is legitimate only when exercised by the state. It was this understanding which allowed Clausewitz, long before Max Weber put pen to paper, to conceive of war as a duel between states or moral equals. Duels, after all, are the practice of members of a freemasonry who hold certain values in common and are prepared to defend their honour, at times at great risk to themselves. In a duel there is always a winner and a loser, unless one of the parties (or both) agrees to suspend the exchange, confident that honour has been satisfied. States, insofar as they are legally constituted, are by definition legitimate actors. The only exception in three hundred years of European history occurred in 1815 when the Congress of Vienna declared Napoleon an international outlaw.

Today we face a series of non-state actors instead. In the case of Iraq these include warlords, foreign volunteers (terrorists), gangs, militias, separate political parties and even the police and the army (or at least factions within them). Iraq indeed has entered a stage beyond civil war – instead of breaking apart (like Yugoslavia) it is breaking down. In the case of the latter, at least the separate armies were on subcontract to factional leaders or warlords with whom we could cut a deal. No-one in Iraq can. The violence is self-generating for that reason. It has its own rationale. The former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges calls it a Hobbesian playground; the columnist Tom Friedman calls it ‘Hobbes’ jungle’ (with no Leviathan in the wings).⁹ By definition, Iraq is a country from which the ‘political’ seems to be largely absent, or so hollowed out that it is difficult to imagine a brokered agreement, a Dayton Accord, that could concentrate everyone’s minds on the future.

All three factors, I would suggest, explain why our politicians have begun to question whether our traditional ethical codes can be applied to the present conflict. Wars, it would seem, are no longer symmetrical, even when it comes to traditional ideas of what is right or wrong, or proper or improper behaviour. We know that our enemies (those who think, or claim to be at war with us) scorn our own values, and would not sign up to the Geneva Conventions even if asked. In short, we are dealing with movements or leaders who are not willing to abide by those etiquettes of war which most states, with only a few exceptions, have chosen to recognise for centuries or more – if sometimes only in the breach, not the observance.

Let me take one example of this – the value we attach to historic and cultural sites. One of the hallmarks of conflict in the twentieth century was its wanton cultural vandalism. Back in 1947 the literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote a book, Europe without a Baedeker, which chronicled in embarrassing detail how a society had not only surrendered its power but had also almost forfeited its soul.¹⁰ Some of the great cultural achievements had gone up in smoke including, in the last air raid on Berlin, some 435 irreplaceable works by Titian, Caravaggio and Veronese disappeared in a single night’s bombing. Likewise much of the Continent’s architectural heart disappeared: much of the fabric of pre-eighteenth century London disappeared in the Blitz; baroque Dresden was burnt out in the final months of the war; the centre of renaissance Rotterdam incinerated at its outset.

Today, we congratulate ourselves on being more civilised. One of the milestones in what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls the ‘juridification’ (as opposed to the moralisation) of war is an arti...