Tag: Dr. Michael Corgan

Syria: Between a rock and a hard place

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author, Michael Corgan

Does the ongoing Syrian civil war have echoes of the Spanish civil war of nearly 80 years ago?

Unnamed grave with teddy bear for fallen children in Syria.
Unnamed grave with teddy bear for fallen children in Syria. Photo by Bernd Schwabe used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

If the conflict were only between the Syrian government and rebel forces (as was true in opposing Franco), then it would be easy for liberal or humanitarian interventionists to oppose what Assad has done to his people and support the rebellion. Indeed, many have already done so.

During the Spanish civil war, as far as outsiders were concerned, there were communists versus Nazis, and a choice was unappealing on those grounds. In Syria today, outsiders of equally unsavory character and practices are intervening for their own purposes, and that makes choosing sides problematic.

Hezbollah supports Assad and Al Qaeda has an increasing role in shaping rebel efforts. How can one aid either side without aiding those Shia and Sunni extremist militant groups so fond of terrorists tactics, and so responsible, in Syria as elsewhere, for the deaths of many innocent Muslims?

As far as outside interests go, you also have the U.S. trying to assert some role in the area versus Russia, which is loath to abandon a long-time client state and lose its only overseas base.

The biggest problem is for the neighboring outsiders. Turkey can probably handle the huge influx of refugees from the fighting, but Jordan is strained and poor fractured Lebanon could fall apart as enlivened Shia-Sunni fighting spills into its land.

There seems to be no workable ending in sight. Nor even a less deadly one. The best that the watching world can do now is to take care of the refugees whose numbers continually swell.

Gaza: A just war on either side?

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Dr. Mike Corgan

We are all hoping for a cease fire in Gaza, and possibly even one that lasts for longer than it takes to clear the rubble and mourn the dead.

Gaza Strip
Gaza Strip. Photo by NASA in public domain.

Is there a just war going on here on either side?

Hamas has fired rockets into Israel and this certainly violates the principle of targeting only enemy forces. Rockets by their nature are not aimed at any particular point but are “area” weapons that can be expected to come down anywhere in the general direction to which they are pointed. Unless they are being fired at a massed military formation, rockets cannot be part of just war.

For their part, the Israelis are using drone and air strikes with what appear to be precision-guided weapons. Those weapons do hit where they are aimed–at targets, perhaps legitimate, in the middle of an extremely dense civilian population. Thus they are certain to cause casualties among innocents and they certainly have.

So far, over 150 are dead, many of whom are clearly not Hamas militants. The Israeli response is not part of just war either.

Israel claims that it faces an existential threat. Hamas’s fundamental documents do call for the abolition of Israel altogether and they are doing what they can to achieve that end by force.

Israel obviously has extraordinarily good intelligence on exactly where the Hamas leaders are located. However, they are choosing to eliminate what may be legitimate targets by methods that keep their military casualties low but raise casualties among Palestinian civilians.

Is there a just war going on here on either side? Not the way things appear.

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of International Relations, Boston University

The holy text of the NRA

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Dr. Mike Corgan

The Second Amendment’s 27 words are the holiest of holy texts to the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its supporters. “We get to have guns” is an absolute right, says the NRA.

Assault rifle
Photo by 82josh used under CCA-SA 3.0 Unported license.

Is the Second or any of the other Bill of Rights Amendments absolute? Not so in the case of the First Amendment–freedom of speech. Federal courts have said you can’t “falsely call fire in a theater.”

But gun advocates seem to think differently, i.e., any infringement begins the “slippery slope” to confiscation.

Of all the Amendments in the Bill Of Rights, only the Second has an introductory clause that states its purpose: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State….”

In this Amendment, the words Militia, State, and Arms are capitalized, but “people” is not. Does this suggest an emphasis on what was deemed important, as writers of those days usually intended?

A number of federal courts have held that that the introductory clause is not itself  restrictive, yet it does stand alone in the Bill.

A recent article in the New York Times reported that the U.S. Constitution is no longer the model for new democracies around the globe. The reason? The Second Amendment.

Gun violence is still one of of the areas in which the U.S. leads the world. Another recent article in the Times noted that American buyers are keeping the Kalashnikov assault rifle factory in Russia going strong.

Is this how we want to be known?

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of International Relations, Boston University

9/11 and “just war”

Posted on by kathiemm

As the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. approaches, we suggest that you review the principles of just war described here by Dr. Michael Corgan. Then consider:

Aftermath of 9/11 attacks: View of World Trade Center ruins
Image in public domain
  • Can the extremists who made the attacks in 2001 justify them based on just war principles?
  • Was the U.S. response to those attacks consistent with just war principles?

First, it is clear that the 9/11  attacks violated most–but perhaps not all–of the generally accepted principles of a “just war.”  Specifically:

  • It was not undertaken as a last resort.
  • It was not committed by a legitimate authority.
  • It was committed in pursuit of a hopeless cause, which is not morally justifiable according to just war principles.
  • Establishing peace was not the goal of the attack (as stated by Bin Laden himself).
  • The attackers did not discriminate between combatants and civilians; worse, they deliberately targeted civilians.

Whether the attack violated two other just war principles is a matter of debate. Specifically, for a war to be just:

  • It must have a just cause. Although some people around the world would argue that there was some truth to Bin Laden’s diatribe concerning American aggression against Muslims in the Middle East, the attacks were not undertaken to prevent or stop a genocide.
  • The violence inflicted must be proportional to the injury suffered. The death, pain, and destruction created by the attacks was tremendous. Was it disproportionately high in relation to any violence the U.S. might have been responsible for prior to the 9/11 attacks?

Finally, many proponents of just war theory in the U.S. (including President Jimmy Carter) have argued that the post 9/11 attack on Iraq by the U.S. was also not a just war. As you consider the just war principles stated above, what do you think of this question?

Listen to what this Iraq war veteran says:

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology