Category: “Just war”

Truth & Reconciliation, Part III, by Ross Caputi

Posted on by kathiemm

 

 

Child at Fallujah Maternity and Children’s hospital. Photo by Dahr Jamail, used with permission
Child at Fallujah Maternity and Children’s hospital.
Photo by Dahr Jamail, used with permission

 

There was no casus belli (just cause) for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The leaders of the coalition forces treated the lives of Iraqi civilians with reckless disregard as they bombed and invaded Iraq, citing intelligence they knew to be questionable. The shock-and-awe bombing of Iraq claimed over 7,000 lives, and the subsequent occupation claimed hundreds of thousands more.

The occupation also shredded the social fabric of Iraqi society, exploited a social division in Iraq that previously held little significance, provoked a civil war between the Sunni and Shia communities, and has resulted in entrenched resentments and a divided country.

Entire communities have been displaced, uprooting people, robbing them of their historical bond with their locality. The agricultural system, the historic seed bank, the marshes, have all been forced to change.

The medical and educational systems have been destroyed too. Many Iraqi researchers, instructors, and doctors have been assassinated. Many others have fled the country, leaving these essential services understaffed and incapable of meeting the needs of Iraqis.

Worse yet, pollution from war has left Iraq with a crippling public health crisis. Rises in birth defects and cancers have been reported throughout the country, with extreme rates in cities like Fallujah and Basra. Iraq will remain contaminated with radiation for billions of years because of uranium weapons. And the extent of the contamination from other sources—such as burn pits and lead and mercury from conventional munitions—is still unknown.

The occupation has left Iraq divided, polluted, and silenced under a corrupt political system and an oppressive government that enjoys considerable support from both the US and Iran.

What was taken from Iraqis can never be given back to them in its entirety. The harm our society caused theirs is immeasurable. Reparations are a moral imperative. Though the cause of the harm may be unidirectional, the healing will not be. Assisting Iraqis in the rebuilding of their society will cultivate in us a culture of responsibility, solidarity, and caring.

Join us at Islah [http://www.reparations.org/projects/truth-reconciliation/ in collaborating with Iraqis who are rebuilding the social infrastructure of their society. Help us in confronting the public silence surrounding the crimes committed against the Iraqi people. By campaigning for an international war crimes tribunal too, we hope to collaborate with Iraqis to create the requisite conditions for a future truth and reconciliation commission.

Ross is currently on the Board of Directors of ISLAH. He is also a graduate student and a writer. In 2004, he was a US Marine in the US-led occupation of Iraq. His experience there, in particular his experience during the 2nd siege of Fallujah, compelled him to leave the US military and join the anti-war movement. His activism has focused on our society’s moral obligation to our victims in Iraq, and to the responsibility of veterans to renounce their hero status in America.

Drone warfare: Immoral? Unjust?

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Michael Furtado

Drone launched from U.S. Navy ship
Drone launched from U.S. Navy ship. Image in public domain.

My most fundamental concern about drones relates to the question of moral proportionality.

Granted there are terrorists, but to battle them with unmanned weapons of destruction smacks of policing and preemptive attack rather than honoring the principles of the just war. It places the U.S. in the position of being the world’s police-person while protecting its own interests, which is the kind of binary that sets up a conflict of interest.

Not that I support the just war theory in an era when collateral damage is routine. To wreak this damage with unmanned remote surveillance aircraft appears to be particularly intrusive and punitive, and unmanned intrusions into another country’s airspace are a clear breach of sovereignty.

Moreover, part of that sovereignty entails providing guarantees to citizens about protecting their human rights, especially their right to life and limb. The power imbalance ensuing when one party can ride roughshod over another by invading its airspace and killing its citizens completely out-trumps any secondary considerations regarding rationales for the invasion.

At best, arguments justifying such a transgression claim a need to protect soldiers engaged in peace-keeping assignments. However, the greater likelihood is that drones are used because of the high cost and increasing non-viability of stationing U.S. troops around the world for search and destroy missions.

Because of the surveillance technologies drones employ, they also intrude beyond all reasonable expectation and justification into the private lives of third parties, which ought to be a freedom that is sacrosanct.

Michael Furtado has served as education officer (Peace, Justice & Development) for the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane, Australia, and contributed to peace and human rights education projects in Catholic schools as with the Catholic Archdiocesan Justice and Peace Commission in Queensland.

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

9/11 and just war

Posted on by kathiemm
9-11 We Remember
U.S. Marines in Iraq remember 9/11. Image in public domain.

For most Americans, the words “September 11” continue to evoke fear, anger, distrust, and a desire to return to the way things used to be before we were attacked on our own soil.

September 11, 2011, we learned, to our horror, that we too, the golden people on the hill, are vulnerable.

In this blog, we have devoted several posts to just war principles.

Based on just war principles, can the attackers argue that the 9/11 assault on largely civilian sites in the US was justified?

We can say No in regard to many of those principles:

  • The attack was not undertaken as a last resort.
  • The attack was not committed by a legitimate authority.
  • The attack was committed in pursuit of a hopeless cause, which is considered not morally justifiable by just war principles. (Attacking the U.S. could be seen as a hopeless cause.)
  • 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 principles 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 about this issue?  Was the US invasion of Iraq justified? How about the invasion of Afghanistan? How about US violence elsewhere in the Middle East since 9/11? Have these been just wars? If not, why is the US still killing people there?  And what are you going to do to stop it?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology