On
April 13, the United States launched a missile attack on Syria, in response to
an alleged chemical attack using chlorine gas by the Syrian government on the
town of Douma, Was this attack justified? One way to answer this question
appeals to the “just war” tradition, developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,
and further refined by Vitoria, Suarez, Hugo Grotius, and other thinkers.
The criteria for a just war are stringent, and the missile attack violates a
number of them. So stringent are the criteria that one authority, Charles
Journet, said “if the definition of just war provided by Saint Thomas Aquinas .
. . is taken seriously, one probably can count the number of actual and
completely just wars on one’s fingers.”
Probably
the central one of these criteria is that act of war must right a wrong.
Nations generally go to war because it is in their interest to do so, where
“interest” is understood as an effort to increase one’s power and influence;
but this is not the way the just war tradition views the matter. Here the wrong
would be the chemical attack; but this raises a problem. What is the evidence
that there was such an attack? A Russian team of experts found no evidence that
an attack had taken place; and, even if one were to dismiss their account as
propaganda and accept that there had been an attack, evidence would still be
required that Syrian government forces had perpetrated it The CIA assured us of
it, but given the record of that agency, one can hardly accept its word as
conclusive. Surely, if a chemical attack was supposed to justify launching the
missiles, a full inquiry ought to have taken place first to establish the facts
of the case.
Suppose, though, contrary to
fact, such an inquiry had
established the
responsibility of Assad’s regime for a chemical attack. Would the American
missile assault then be acceptable? No, it would not. As the Anglican
theologian Oliver O’Donovan points out in The Just War Revisited (Cambridge Univ. Press,
2003) Popes Pius XII and John XXIII held that under modern conditions, when
a confrontation between states can easily escalate to a nuclear war with its
indiscriminate horrors, only defensive wars qualified as just: “Pius XII
condemned ‘aggressive wars’ (using that term in a technical sense, to mean wars
of reparation or punishment), and John XXIII condemned wars of reparation: ‘It
is hard to imagine that in the atomic era war could be a fit means to restore
violated rights.’” (O’Donovan rejects this opinion, on what seem to me flimsy
grounds) Syria in no way threatens the United States, so on this understanding
the purported chemical attack would not justify an American response.
What
happens, though, if this understanding of the “righting a wrong” condition is
rejected? In that case, the wrong would be that the Syrian government launched
a direct attack on civilians, using a chemical weapon forbidden to it by the
Chemical Weapons Convention. (To reiterate, we are here assuming, manifestly
contrary to fact, that the guilt of the Syrian government had been
established.) Would the missile response then be justifiable?
No, it would not. Righting
the wrong must be the actual motive of the intervention. In the present case,
the United States wishes to block Iran and Russia from gaining influence in
Syria, and hence wishes to interdict a complete victory for Assad’s regime.
Acting to promote power political interests does not meet the criterion, even
if the missile attack is defended as a humanitarian gesture.
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But suppose, again contrary
to fact, that writing the wrong was the principal motive behind American
intervention. Would this suffice to justify intervention? Once again, it would
not. The attack would fail another requirement, the criterion of last resort.
Jean Bethke Elshtain in her Just War Against Terror, (Basic Books, 2003) states
the criterion in this way: “Properly understood, last resort is a resort to
armed force taken after deliberation rather than as an immediate reaction. The
criterion of last resort does not compel a government to try everything else in
actual fact but rather to explore other options before concluding that none
seems appropriate or viable in light of the nature of the threat.” (I have
cited her because she cannot possibly be accused of anti-interventionist bias.)
It is clear that the United States made no efforts to arrive at a peaceful
resolution of the issue with the Syrian government, but instead acted as judge,
jury, and executioner.
There
is yet another criterion of just war by which America’s action may be “weighed
in the balance and found wanting,” and this is one of the most important. The
armed attack must have a good prospect of averting the evil it is directed
against, without bringing worse consequences with it.
Once
again it is evident that the missile strike fails to meet the required
standard. The attack opens the door an indefinite number of further attacks. It
is a recipe for continual war, because rights violations among the nations of
the world unfortunately are no rare occurrence. The use of a humanitarian cloak
to justify an aggressive foreign policy will result, as Charles Beard put it,
in “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”
David
Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and Distinguished Columnist
at LewRockwell.com.
He is also author of Resurrecting Marx and An Introduction to Economic Reasoning and
editor of numerous books including Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of
Murray N. Rothbard. Send him mail.
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