Taking Ramsey to Task on Just War

May 4, 2010 
I’ve been suspicious of Just War theory for quite a while now.  Some of it has to do with the pacifistic inroads Hauerwas and others made on my thinking, and some of it just has to do with the theory’s terrible historical track record.  The Just War theory has much more often served as a way of providing a justification for desired wars than as a criterion for refusing wars.  By reducing the requirements of justice in war to a convenient little list of criteria, the just war tradition has made it all too easy for politicians to spin the facts and stoke up the rhetoric so as to give a passable imitation of having met the criteria.  And so the most absurd prideful bloodbaths get whitewashed as “just wars”--the Civil War, World War I, the Iraq War.  

And so, as I said, I’d become suspicious, skeptical--not hostile, mind you, just dubious as to whether the theory actually enabled us to fight just wars and refuse unjust ones.  And so I thought, in all fairness to the tradition, I ought to hear its ablest defenders speak, and I planned to read Paul Ramsey’s The Just War and O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited.  I haven’t gotten to the latter yet, but we were assigned portions of the former to read for class this past term.  I was, I am afraid, sorely disappointed--my hopes in the abilities of modern just war theorists to effectively challenge our warmongering societies were quite dashed.

Paul Ramsey, you see, chooses not merely to major on, but to pretty much exclusively deal with the ius in bello criteria, in my mind the less significant part of the just war tradition; ius ad bellum, in his mind, is essentially useless.

Let me take a moment to elucidate the distinction.  The criteria for just war that the theory has developed can be classified under these two headings, which may be translated as “justice toward war” and “justice in war.”  Under the former heading are the principles of just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, probability of success, last resort, and proportionality, principles that help us figure out whether a proposed or contemplated conflict can indeed be justly entered into.  Under the latter heading are the principles of discrimination--no intentional targeting of civilians--and (again) proportionality--using no means or targets that are likely to cause excessive suffering and death that far outweighs the envisioned benefits.  Without ius in bello, we’d be two pugilists whose friends restrained them from fighting 90% of the time, but who could haul out machine guns and chainsaws once they had a chance to duke it out.  Without ius in bellum, we’d be allowed to fight whenever we wanted, but would have to do it with one hand tied behind our backs.  Perhaps then I wouldn’t want to say that ius in bello is “less significant,” but certainly ius ad bellum has to come first.  

Why then does Ramsey want to leave it out of the equation?  O’Donovan explained it this way: Ramsey was fed up with the Church’s increasingly powerless naysaying.  By refusing to be pacifist, yet indignantly protesting every particular war that came up as “unjust,” the Church was just making itself look ridiculous.  Why?  Because the questions of ius ad bellum are hazy ones, that depend on weighing many different facts and interpreting them in ways that are ultimately somewhat subjective.  So the Church can come across as always just second-guessing the more well-informed politicians.  The questions of ius in bello, on the other hand (or at least regarding the first criterion), can be pared down to a rather sharp moral decision for every soldier and politician: “Will you intentionally target civilians?  Will you take all reasonable steps to avoid unintended civilian casualties?”  These questions the Church can insist on continuing to raise, and can hope to be heard--here, the Church has sufficient expertise to address the conscience, expertise that it cannot expect to have on the complex questions of international diplomacy surrounding ius ad bellum.  

Ramsey’s concern here is understandable, of course.  The Church can make a fool of itself when, without taking a principled pacifist stance, it instantly cries foul whenever a war is declared.  Even in a matter as important as war, we should not hastily rush to assume the worst of policy-makers, but should allow the possibility that they have accurately construed the situation, and it is one that justly calls for a military response.  

However, I am skeptical that this is really the biggest problem for us today.  In my background, at least, it is much more common for the Church to uncritically assume that the war is just than to uncritically assume that it is unjust.  But even if that were not so, Ramsey’s approach seems to leave a huge hole in our responsibility to witness Christ to our society; it leaves the Church as no more than a referee at a wrestling match, blowing the whistle whenever the combatants start fighting too dirty.  Do we really want to consign ourselves to the position of submissively nodding our heads whenever our politicians want to go to war, however unjust, and merely speaking up from time to time to try to keep the war from becoming too bloody?  Let’s look at the ius ad bellum criteria a bit more closely, with the Iraq War as a case study, to see if they are really as useless as Ramsey seems to think.  I will consider only just cause here, to try to stay concise; the other criteria, it seems to me (aside from legitimate authority), are the sort of thing that Ramsey could legitimately object that would be very difficult to judge, and on which we might to some degree have to just give our leaders the benefit of the doubt.  However, even here, the Church ought to ask hard questions of our leaders, rather than accepting vague reassuring declarations of justice--we should at least ask our leaders to make a convincing case to us that they are acting with the right intentions, as a last resort, with a high probability of success, and with proportionality--that is, a likelihood that the harm would not outweigh the benefit.  If they barely even try to make such a case, then we should immediately assume that something is not right.  

But now, let’s look closely at just cause: properly, just cause means innocent life must be in imminent danger and intervention must be to protect life.  It cannot mean merely a defense of national interest, or a defense of property, nor can it be simply for purposes of retaliation.  That is to say, the mere fact that someone else fired first doesn’t mean you can go after them with everything you’ve got--you have to be able to show that they continue to pose a threat.  The notion of pre-emptive strike is debated, but the general consensus is that pre-emption can only be just when the other party has literally pulled out theirs weapon and aimed them at you with clear and imminent intent to fire.  

Now, to be sure, it can be very difficult to ascertain for certain when there is in fact just cause, since, for example, it may look like we have been attacked first, when in fact our leaders secretly incited the other party to attack.  So we should be hesitant to ever affirm just cause without reservation.  But there are many times when we can be quite clear that there is not just cause, and the Church is responsible to speak up in such situations.  It should generally be fairly obvious to the citizens of a country whether or not they are under attack, or under the threat of imminent attack, by a hostile foreign power that is determined to kill them.  It should have been clear at the time, for instance, that the US had no just cause to engage in World War I, and it shouldn’t have required any detailed inside information to make that judgment.  World War II is a more difficult case, and I can understand Christians at the time who thought the US was just to engage.  Vietnam was obviously fought without just cause; so obvious that it’s remarkable to me that Ramsey, writing on just war theory during the Vietnam War, did not see any opportunity for Christians to speak against this failure of ius ad bellum.  

In the age of the War on Terror, this criterion has been deliberately obfuscated.  We are told that we are not dealing with hostile nations anymore, but with hostile groups of individuals who hail from many different nations and derive their support from many different nations, and who are liable to attack us at any moment.  It thus becomes a matter of secret intelligence, rather than visible reality, as to whether our lives are imminently threatened, and if so, by whom.  Christians should know enough to be suspicious about claims made in such murky waters.  But even if we had to withhold judgment, and trust our leaders to do right whenever there was uncertainty (and I can’t see where Christian citizens are called upon to give their leaders such a huge benefit of the doubt), there was still ample basis to call the invasion of Iraq unjust.  For one thing, there was the constantly shifting story as to why we were supposed to attack, with multiple conflicting rationales being thrown around.  This should’ve been an obvious red flag.  If there was a compelling just cause, it should’ve been focused on, to the exclusion of other issues.  

What were some of the reasons given?  1) Saddam was killing innocent Kurds and his own people.  2) It would be beneficial for the nation, and for the region, to have a democratic government.  3) They had harbored and possibly funded Al-Qaeda members at various times, possibly the same ones as had attacked us.  4) They were developing weapons of mass destruction, that they might someday use against us, or give to someone else to use against us.  Let’s cross-examine these.  

What about #1?  Assuming this was happening, and to some extent we would have to take the word of our leaders on this point, though we have a responsibility to look at other sources as well, does that constitute just cause?  Well, just possibly, if you believe that defending other people’s innocents, not merely your own, can be a just cause.  This is a debatable point, but I am inclined to say that it may be in situations where the situation is dire, and the innocent and the murderers are clearly discernable--the only situation like this I can think of off the top of my head is the Rwandan genocides.  90% of the time, though, either the plot is much too thorny to justly and successfully intervene from a distance (both sides are at war and guilty of atrocities), or else the murder and oppression is on too limited a scale to justify invasion and the horrors of war, which would kill at least as many innocents as they would protect (here, the criterion of proportionality comes in).  In Iraq, I think both of these ambiguities were clearly operative, which should have made us deeply skeptical that #1 could constitute just cause.  

#2 doesn’t even make an attempt to satisfy just war criteria, and seems to stem from the school of thought that treats war as “politics by other means”--a useful tool for accomplishing any beneficial purpose, not a means of last resort for preventing mass murder. 

#3 has a vague aura of justice about it, but when you look closely, this aura disappears.  Nowhere in just war theory does it say that anyone who has at any time been friendly to an enemy of yours is a just target for invasion, and I can’t imagine how one could begin to justify such a broad rationale.  Even if it were conclusively shown that Iraq had directly and intentionally aided those who carried out 9/11 attacks, that wouldn’t suffice for just cause, since just cause does not mean retaliation, but protection.  The Bush administration would have had to show that Iraq was currently offering direct and significant support to people who were currently attacking, or imminently planning to attack, innocent Americans.  I don’t even recall them trying to claim this, and even if they had, we would’ve then turned to the criterion of proportionality, and so it’s hard to imagine how such support could have justified a massive invasion.

#4 also has a vague aura of justice, since it makes it look like we’re defending ourselves.  But this strains the notion of pre-emption well beyond the breaking point.  So far as I recall, not even the wildest rhetorical excesses of the lead-up to war tried to show us that they were clearly armed and preparing to attack any day--it was all based on foggy fears about the future.

Now, what are we to make of this?  Of the four criteria, #2 could not possibly comprise a just cause, while #3 and #4, although lying in the general neighborhood of a just cause, could not themselves, as they were presented in the lead-up to the war, comprise just causes.  Only #1 could have, in theory, comprised a just cause, though it seems almost certain to have failed the test of proportionality, and, in any case, would have failed utterly to move public sentiment to war. 

All of this suggests that, leaving out the benefit of hindsight and considering what was publicly known at the time, there was ample cause for the Church to stand up and say, “This appears to be an unjust war; as it stands now, Christians cannot support it.”  This would be no pouty pseudo-pacifist naysaying of the sort Ramsey derides, but an objective, principled, thoroughly defensible stand that could have prevented a great deal of evil.  I would thus suggest that, if we are to revive the just war doctrine, it is both crucial and practicable that we revive, and insist upon to the best of our ability, ius ad bellum, rather than merely trying to referee the brawl after its already started, as Ramsey would have us do.

War and Peace, Byzantine style

I was recently reading Stephen Runciman’s magisterial History of the Crusades for a little relaxing summer reading, and I found myself coming across all kinds of fascinating pieces of church history. I was particularly struck by Runciman’s discussion of the difference between attitudes toward war in Western and Eastern Christendom, which offers some very instructive examples for the Church today’s attempts to develop a clear stance on war and violence. We often think as if there were no alternative to either pacifism or our traditional Western Christian attitudes toward war. Pacifists allege that traditional Christian attitudes have welcomed war and violence as a means of accomplishing God’s will—it’s that attitude that leads to things like the Crusades, they allege. And they have a good point—for all the theoretical restraint of the Just War Theory, Western Christianity in practice has had little qualms about going to war, and has often even tried to surround it with an aura of holiness. Advocates of this stance insist that as soon as you start acting like war is a bad thing, then you create a society of weakness that will collapse before the first invader. Runciman’s assessment suggests an alternative, in the practice of Byzantine Christianity.

Its great canonist, Saint Basil, while he realized that the soldier must obey orders, yet maintained that anyone guilty of killing in war should refrain for three years from taking communion as a sign of repentance. This counsel was too strict. The Byzantine soldier was not in fact treated as a murderer. But his profession brought him no glamour. Death in battle was not considered glorious, nor was death in battle against the infidel considered martyrdom; the martyr died armed only with his faith. To fight against the infidel was deplorable though it might at times be unavoidable; to fight against fellow-Christians was doubly bad. Indeed, Byzantine history was remarkably free of wars of aggression. Justinian’s campaigns had been undertaken to liberate Romans from heretic barbarian governors, Basil II’s against the Bulgars to recover imperial provinces and to remove a danger that menaced Constantinople. Peaceful methods were always preferable, even if they involved tortuous diplomacy or the payment of money. To western historians, accustomed to admire martial valour, the actions of many Byzantine statesmen appear cowardly or sly; but the motive was usually a genuine desire to avoid bloodshed. The princess Anna Comnena, one of the most typical of Byzantines, makes it clear in her history that, deep as was her interest in military questions and much as she appreciated her father’s successes in battle, she considered war a shameful thing, a last resort when all else had failed, indeed in itself a confession of failure.

“Deplorable though it might at times be unavoidable”; “a shameful thing, a last resort when all else had failed, indeed in itself a confession of failure”—this sounds exactly right—the painful tension that we must endure in this time between the times, when peace on earth has been declared but not established. This anti-martial culture that the Church in Byzantium fostered is truly remarkable, especially when you consider the history of the Eastern Empire, which was essentially under siege for the entirety of its 1,100-year history, first by the Sassanian Persians, and then by a succession of vicious Islamic invaders. In most societies that are constantly under threat, the culture becomes militarized, so that men of war have the most honored place in society, the primary role in government, the central roles in literature and art, and military concerns come to dominate all other priorities of society (Tolkien insightfully depicts this historical phenomenon in the kingdom of Gondor…Faramir’s lament in The Window on the West is especially interesting). That a nation as perpetually at war as Byzantium resisted this militarization, resisted the temptation to glorify war and the warrior, and resisted it indeed for eleven centuries, is a remarkable testimony to the powerful witness of the Church, and a rebuke to all who doubt that the Church could successfully preach a message of peace. It is also a stinging rebuke of Western Christendom, where despite the lack of many continuing external threats that required defensive war, the culture was very militarized.

Runciman describes the “less enlightened” Western point of view a bit one-sidedly, but his assessment is fair overall:
the military society that had emerged in the West out of the barbarian invasions

inevitably sought to justify its habitual pastime. The code of chivalry that was developing, supported by popular epics, gave prestige to the military hero; and the pacifist acquired a disrepute from which he has never recovered. Against this sentiment the Church could do little. It sought, rather, to direct bellicose energy into paths that would lead to its own advantage. The holy war, that is to say, war in the interests of the Church, became permissible, even desirable.

The experience of Byzantium also refutes the idea that a bias towards peace, that considering war to be “a shameful thing,” will lead to weakness and make a people the prey of the first invader that comes along. Though hating war, the Byzantines defended their people when necessary, and they did so doggedly and tenaciously, lasting longer than any empire in world history. Their eschewal of offensive warfare did not send signals of weakness and invite enemies; on the contrary, it was probably this strategy—of preferring a live-and-let-live policy with their Islamic neighbors, rather than a Crusader strategy—that allowed them to endure so long. All they had to do was weather each wave of invasion for a few years, and soon the Moslems would turn to more interesting pursuits, like fighting one another, and leave the peace-loving Byzantines alone for a hundred years or so. This also suggests an interesting lesson for Christians today who think the only way to deal with Muslims on the other side of the world is to fight them until they submit.

Peace Between Just War and Pacifism?

Hauerwas shrewdly remarks in an essay entitled "Courage Exemplified" from the Hauerwas Reader:

While we think just warriors are wrong, they might not be--another way of saying that we think the just war position as articulated by an Augustine or a Paul Ramsey is a significant challenge to our own Christian pacifism and is theological to its core. Just warriors and pacifists within the Christian church must be committed to continued engagements that teach them not only to recognize their differences but also their similarities, similarities that make them far more like one another than the standard realists' accounts of war that rule our contemporary culture and that have taken a firm hold in the church.

This confirms my growing suspicion that it is missing the main point of folks like Hauerwas or Jones to get mired down in debate between just war and pacifism. And folks who get up in arms about pacifism from a "just war" perspective are usually far from the true just war tradition. None of the wars any of us are familiar with, and which modern Christian "pacifists" have condemned, come close to fitting traditional just war criteria. It seems to me that there is an important decision to be made between the two options, but it is one that the church can postpone for a while...in the meantime, she should be united in her condemnation of the wars we’ve seen for the last couple centuries.