Oliver Kamm, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the supreme emergency exception

I was slightly relieved by what I found there. Walzer doesn’t justify the bombings of Dresden (1945) or the firebombing of Hamburg (1943) but rather holds that Britain, with no other effective means of waging war against the appalling evil of Nazi Germany, and facing the threat of national annihilation, was only justified in the area bombing of German cities — in violation of the prohibition on attacking noncombatants — until early 1942. Nevertheless, what Walzer calls “the supreme emergency” exception is there, and the grounds for it are reasonably clear: necessity. The bombers were the only weapon available to leaders the continued independent existence of whose people was mortally jeopardized.

I am unsure that that area bombing was the “only effective means of waging war” until 1942 – I would have thought that this period would have ended earlier sometime after the Battle of Britain and the failure of Operation Barbarossa. Additionally, it isn’t a moral point, but there is a strong case that area bombing of cities, or terror bombing wasn’t very successful in damaging civilian morale or significantly crippling war production and didn’t succeed by the purely tactical objectives that were set out for it.

The ‘Supreme Emergency’ exception reminds me of the old jibe about Liberals being in favour of all sorts of principles except when it really matters. Like most exceptions to such general rules it is open to abuse; this in itself is not surprising, what is troubling is the lack of acknowledgement that such abuses can be endemic, especially when states are considered as actors. There needs to be a recognition that states, in themselves, and even when accountable aren’t moral actors in the way individuals do.

It seems like we have two possibilities. Either we allow everyone the option of invoking supreme emergency (including Hamas and the Iraqi “resistance”) or we close off that escape route to state and non-state actors alike. Of course the mere invocation of the excuse wouldn’t justify, it would have to be supported by argument and evidence. If someone claims that suicide bombing is the only (effective) means the Palestinians have, then that claim is obviously open to challenge

Another possibility would be to classify terrorism as a form of warfare, though one, which effectively borders on illegality. Considering purely moral issues, the problem is that the principle of ‘non-combatant’ immunity is going to violated at some stage or another in any form of open warfare; the question remains as to how it is violated and to what degree. Obviously, for a number of reasons, states have more leeway and greater capacity in this regard than non-state actors, which is behind the asymmetric warfare argument that is sometimes used to rationalise terrorism. However, I think one thing that should not be lost sight of, is that there is almost always another effective option, but one that entails a different set of costs and implies a different sort of time scale for possible success. One may choose not to take these routes for all sorts of CBA-type reasons but that doesn’t invalidate the fact that some choice exists and so rarely is terrorism the sole means available. The main exception would be an open war of mutual annihilation, where the physical liquidation of the opposing side is a prime war aim in itself shorn of strategic necessity. The Eastern Front in WWII is usually taken to be an example of this kind of scenario. There is an implicit acceptance of this, which is one of the reasons why accusations of genocide or genocidal intent, genocidal mindset etc. are so often bandied about as part of the propaganda war in many conflicts.

But if we were to extend the definition so as to include such threats, that would pose a problem for Kamm. For Kamm is on record (here , for example) as supporting the policy of nuclear deterrence in the Cold War and, of course, deterrence involves exactly such a threat to attack noncombatants for political purposes in violation of their immunity.

Poses a (moral) problem for many of us. Particularly, all NWS most of whom have some theory of deterrence built in to their strategic and political calculations and who can draw upon a large level of support from their societies for such a position. To return to an earlier point made, the problem is partly that modern forms of warfare at a functional level, whether between non-state groups and states or between states possessing some type of WMD or advanced industrial weapons; the kind of totalisation of warfare being adopted, tends to lead to a gradual erosion of the lines between combatants and non-combatants by its very nature. All of which poses a very serious problem for moral philosophers in developing an adequate moral theory of conduct in warfare.

abb1: Oliver Kamm is not an academic, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi is not a victim of temporary insanity.

Conrad, all good points to make.

On the effectiveness point, it is notable that Walzer is very indulgent to state decision-makers (see pp. 260-1 on J&UJW 1st edn) on this but places a very high burden of proof on non-state actors. This asymmetry in his approach is one of the principal targets of Coady’s article.

I don’t aim this at the Crooked Timber people, but fulmination about the evils of suicide bombing (which I agree with) would be more convincing if the fulminators would admit that countries such as the US habitually target civilians and barely bother to disguise it with some obligatory doubletalk. Here’s an example from an article by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt on page A14 of the October 12, 2004 NYT–
START NYT QUOTE
Senior administration, Pentagon and military officials said the air campaign was in part intended to present a stark choice to the people of Falluja, especially those who ma be supporting Iraqi insurgents or the foreign fighters network.
“If there are civilians dying in connections with these attacks and with the destruction, the locals at some point have to make a decision” one Pentagon officials said. “Do they want to harbor the insurgents and suffer the consequences that come with that or do they want to get rid of the insurgents and have the benefits of not having them there?” A senior administration official said the new air strategy over Falluja was also intended to drive a wedge between Iraqi insurgents and foreign terrorists. ” We’re doing kinetic strikes in Falluja and working on the Zarqawi elements and setting up divisions among the various antiregime elements that are in Falluja”, the official said. “Now we begn to see Fallujan leaders come out and say ‘No mas! What do we do about this? How do we work with you Prime Minister Allawi to try to stop this kind of warfare.’ That’s beginning to show some success.” These may be “people in Falluja who don’t necessarily like us or the Iraqi government,” the official said, but they “also are not particularly keen on blowing up women and children.” END NYT QUOTE

Change the names as necessary and you’ve got an all-purpose argument for killing civilians in order to pressure some group of bad guys, an argument that anyone can use since bad guys come in many flavors. You get admissions of this sort from US officials and their cheerleading pundit friends every now and then. Lefties notice it, while the mainstream continues to think deep thoughts about how we civilized types need to stamp out barbarism and condemn those who support it.

I’ve got some problems with this whole line of thought. Maybe it’s my Mennonite heritage shining through, I dunno. If Qaradawi is “by definition and without extenuation, an evil man” because he is unwilling to morally condemn all attacks on innocents, that places him in about the same moral category as every American president ever and probably the bulk if not all British PM’s. We need not go back to WWII, the “Shock and Awe” strategy in Iraq provides ample morally equivalent acts if you intend to categorise things exclusively on the basis of targetting violence against non-combatants. Every form of warfare in modern times is known in advance to guarantee the deaths of non-combatants. Claiming to have another goal is no justification when you know with certainty that non-combatants will die, especially when (as is usually the case) someone calculates the potential positive impact on the war effort of the terror this will cause among the non-combatants. The attackers, uniformed or not, nonetheless judge the ends to justify the deaths of non-combatants.

Terrorists judge their ends to justify the deaths of some civilians; so do the American Chiefs of Staff. There are moral distinctions between the two, but the tolerance of political violence against non-combatants is not one of them. By this definition Israel and the United States really do qualify as the world’s greatest terrorist nations.

Far more fertile ground for making moral distinctions is this: The perpetrators of political violence merit greater moral consideration to the degree that they will actually stop perpetrating it when clear goals have been met or when an organised leadership tells them to stop. Political violence deserves respect only when it is measured, controlled, proportionate, efficient and limited in scope. It merits none when it is uncontrolled, disproportionate, does not plausibly lead to the achievement of stated goals and is undertaken without an intention to eventually stop. The most moral acts of political violence are probably the least moral acts that can be qualifed as moral at all. The only moral grounds for distinction are between those who will really stop committing it and those who won’t.

By this standard, Palestinian terrorism is something of a mixed bag. There are stated goals, there is some leadership, and there are reasons to believe that there are conditions under which it might diminish. On the other hand, it’s hard to see a real world settlement that would completely end it, it’s clear that it is not all that effectively led, and it’s debatable whether or not it is helping to produce the desired outcome. Sort of the same for the IRA.

Soldiers in Iraq come out better. They’ll stop if ordered to. Their political leaders less so, since it’s not so clear that the political violence they’ve ordered actually plausibly leads to any desired outcome or has any definite end in mind.

Walzer gave a talk at Penn last year on the subject of just war, and I tried to ask him about this sort of thing- he wasn’t very open to questions, but did essentially dismiss the idea that his “supreme emergency” exception could possibly apply to guerrilla’s (who he also condemns) or terrorist actions. The principle behind this was far from clear, and I suspect there was none. It was very disapointing. In general I’ve not found the Just and Unjust wars book to be much us- it’s the sort of thing that gives causistry a bad name. (You can kill the munitions worker at work, or on his way to work, but not on his way home. WHat about on his lunch break, then, I aks?)

Donald,
Are you inferrnig that the US was targetting civilians? For your premise to be true, B-52’s would have to have been involved in the bombing and Faluja should have bunred for days. As it was, the strikes were carefully targetted at specific buildings which were considered to have military value. Maybe you should spend your venom on the US after the insurgents start going out of their way to save civilian lives. The US obviously did, because it would have cost far fewer US lives if B-52’s would have been employed.

I’m also mystefied that, in hindsight, anyone questions the total war waged by the Allies in WWII. In light of the 10 million Chinese civilians , 11 million Russian civilians, 6 million Jews, 5 million gypsies, ethnic minorities, and political prisoners, unrecorded amounts of Koreans and people in Indo-China, civilians all killed by the unrestricted warfare of the Axis, how can anyone question the Allies responding in kind? Even if it only marginally helped end the war faster (a thought I find highly implausible), it was a medicine to force those cultures to taste their own warfare. The Axis caused around 30,000,000 civilian deaths in the countries they attacked. In return, Japan suffered less than 300,000 civilian deaths and Germany suffered about 4,000,000 civilian deaths (mostly from the Russians). Axis civilian casulties were 15% of what they caused and they were the aggressors. They got off easy.

Walzer has no business reprimanding suicide bombers in light of the fact that he defended torture as a means to extracting information in “The Problem of Dirty Hands.” Just to show that I am not some kind of dirty commie fabricating things, here’s what Sanford Levinson had to say in Dissent magazine, justifying torture himself:

I would adopt some version of the view articulated by Michael Walzer in his essay “The Problem of Dirty Hands,” (War and Moral Responsibility, op. cit.) where he explicitly endorses the necessity of having political leaders who
are willing, in dire circumstances, to engage in horrendous actions,
including torture.

I don’t know – siucide bombings or some other manifestation of this Hanadi Jaradat’s mental/emotional state (see my link above) would’ve existed with or without any political strategy. It’s a natual phenomenon, a fact of life.

I can’t imagine someone committing suicide for ‘political strategy’, at least not at the scale it happens in Sri Lanka, Palestine and Iraq. I remember in one of the Dostoevsky’s novels he describes an anarchist who is trying to commit suicide for political reasons and fails (IIRC). It’s almost impossible, not to the tune of dozens and hundreds of people every year.

Now, that ideologs and politicians use this phenomenon – well, where’s surprise in that? But what about those who create it, who create the conditions?

Jet, it is illogical to say that the US wasn’t targeting civilians because it didn’t kill as many as possible. If you use aerial bombing on urban targets then you’re going to be killing civilians–the Lancet paper (whatever you think of its broader conclusions) found one neighborhood in Falluja where about 50 civilians, 24 of them children, had been killed in several months of bombing. That was nearly a quarter of the neighborhood sample. The officials quoted in the NYT clearly know this and they said that this might be a good thing if it led people to turn against the insurgents. I happen to think the insurgents are also bad–probably most wars are unjust on both sides.

It’s true the US could kill a much larger number of civilians if it wished–there are political constraints against this. I usually avoid citing Chomsky (because it leads to thread drift), but I think he’s right when he says that public pressure over the past several decades has led to more and more restrictions on what the US government can get away with.

As for WWII, one could defend the bombing of civilians on the grounds that it was the way best suited to bring the war to an end with the least amount of total suffering. That’s how people justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One can disagree with this, but at least the argument is about how to minimize the death toll. Trying to justify it on the grounds that the Axis civilians get to taste what others suffered is indefensible, unless you think Japanese children were responsible for the Bataan death march and the Rape of Nanking. Presumably then Hutu children should be murdered to give their parents a taste of what was done to the Tutsis and if the number is lower, then they’re getting off easy. And since Palestinian terrorism has killed fewer Israelis than Israelis have killed Palestinians , well, everything is just fine.

Really, really bad argument, Jet, to be polite about it.

I know you were being deliberately absurd to make a point, abb1, but remember, no-one condemns suicide bombers for “commit[ting] suicide in a certain wrong way”. The condemnation is directed at their habit of also committing homicide on the way out.

Also, “[m]orality does not apply by reason of temporary insanity, extreme emotional disturbance” sounds a bit extreme. If I come home, find my husband in bed with my best friend, and shoot them both in a jealous rage, would you really not think that I had done anything wrong?

If the reply is “no, that IS wrong, because the response was disproportionate to the provocation”, then morality has crept in through the back door, and since I don’t believe scientists have yet developed a way to precisely measure historical suffering as felt by abstractions like “nations”, in the case of the Israelis vs. the Palestinians it’s really just about whose side you’re on, isn’t it?

I do agree with you that arguing about morality is of negligible importance compared to actually removing the stimuli that inspire people to become suicide bombers.

Godd@mmit jet, even Churchill had second thoughts about the indiscriminate aerial bombing of german cities, referring to them as “acts of terror and wanton destruction.” (memo to Harris, 28th March 1945)

I wouldn’t put Israel at the very top of the list of bad actors in the world on a quantitative scale, but on a per capita basis they’re pretty bad, running what amounts to an apartheid state for decades with torture and killing of innocent civilians and yet they’re a Western democracy. And they’ve been partners with the US in some of its more nefarious foreign policy adventures, such as supporting Central American fascists in the 70’s and 80’s, and we seem to be joined at the hip in the war on those acts of terror that we don’t sponsor, so it’s kind of natural to group the US and Israel together on this subject. The original post was about Qaradawi’s defense of suicide bombing against Israelis. Why do we talk so much about Palestinian terrorism when so many other acts of violence by state and non-state actors kill many more people? But rather than jump to the conclusion that it is anti-Palestinian racism at work, I’d say it’s because, for better or worse, people are more interested in Israel. The US gives billions of dollars a year, for instance, which is rather amazing. It’s a small-scale example of a something universal–atrocities committed on both sides and one-sided condemnations of one or the other.

Donald,
I did qualify my statement by saying that it was acceptable under the minimal requirements that it at least “marginally” helped end the war faster, and then expressed my doubts that the effects were only marginal. No one would be okay with collective punishment that served only to punish. At least no one I would talk to.

My point was that if the Germans didn’t want their military targets bombed from 30,000 feet where 99% of the bombs land on civilians, they shouldn’t have broken the rules and spent large amounts of R&D figuring out how to kill civilians faster. If Japan didn’t want their military pruduction capacity eroded through cilivan attacks, they shouldn’t have ran public contests on which officer could behead Chinese civilians the fastest.

To put it in the most grotesque terms, if killing German children hastened the end of the war and thus saved Polish, Russian, Jewish, etc etc children, why is that wrong? If you are a fireman and can only save one floor of people in a building, is it immoral that you chose the floor with the most people. What if you skip the floor that has the most people because it ran an illegal fireworks shop that started the fire? Morality is so tricky, but in the face of Nazi death camps, fuck Dresden.

Chris Bertram: “I’m glad that others continue to see the importance of making moral choices in circumstances of war [in contrast to Jet and Barry Ross].”

Do we conclude from this that Jet and Barry Ross are unworthy to share a platform with Ken Livingstone? This was the aspect of Oliver Kamm’s post that struck me as most bizarre – the leap from the demonstration that Qaradawi does not apply Walzer’s principles to the conclusion that Qaradawi is an evil man. Now Chris seems to be making a similar jump. He doesn’t brand anyone as evil, but there is a clear implication of moral blindness.

There are many approaches to the ethics of conflict. Walzer and Kamm, Coady and Chris Bertram evidently espouse variants of Just War doctrine. Qaradawi has another variant. But it is a big world out there and it includes devotees of international law, utilitarians, realists and people who just believe that their own nation is good and the enemy is evil. They all “see the importance of making moral choices in circumstances of war.” They just apply different rules.

There is a moral distinction between intent of the actor and result of the action. For many groups or nation states the declared intent is to specifically target civilians. This would seem to be vastly different morally from either intending to kill both military and civilians (I.E. fire bombing of Dresden) or unintentionally killing civilians. This is not to say that the killing of civilians should ever be considered a good thing.

What about the moral distinction between intentionally putting civilians in harms way and responding to an event where civilians are in harms way. If a gunman, standing in the middle of a crowd, opens fire on a soldier, to what extent is each party responsible for the resulting civilian deaths? Even if the civilians are not the intended target it seems that the terrorist is never held accountable for putting the civilians in harms way.

Well, you have a point, hector bim, though I’d say that there’s a double standard used when counting the deaths that occur under communism vs. the deaths elsewhere–deaths from commie economic policies are included and deaths from non-commie policies aren’t. But that’s true about East Timor, for instance, though a funny choice, since the US supported and armed Indonesia when it was doing this. I think the US is off the hook with respect to Burma, but maybe that’s my ignorance talking.

Israel rates fairly high on my oppression scale because they’ve kept a large population of Palestinians living under something similar to apartheid. I think the number of Palestinians who’ve been tortured is also very high, though I don’t have numbers.
And Israel exists as a Jewish state because the majority of the Palestinians were forced out. But if someone wants to argue that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a run-of-the-mill sordid struggle between two peoples with fairly ordinary amounts of disgusting and immoral violence on both sides and that really, we should pay more attention to larger conflicts instead, I’d listen. I wouldn’t quite agree. But I’ve never seen anyone make that argument about both sides–usually just one.

Besides being able to say you don’t have as much blood of innocents on my hands, what does making “moral” decisions in a war gain you? If the US would have refrained from any targets over Germany and Japan that had a decent chance of causing civilian casulties, what would that have gained the US? It surely would have extended the war, but in order for this morality thing to hold water, there must be something gained. Integrity and the knowledge that while you sent thousands of your soldiers to slaughter, you helped preserve the citizens of the country that started the war? The right to demand that the next war not involve your own citizens? A good retirement villiage on cloud 9 after you die? In a war where you are convinced you are in the right, why should you place a premium on enemy civilians and not on your own soldier-citizens?

And this is just about WWII so that it doesn’t get caught up in unknowns.

Jet,

You are asking too general a question and building a straw man. Nobody is suggesting that refraining from targets that will likley yield collateral damage.

The Dresden raid carried an opportunity cost and might have been known not to be likely to be effective against morale or military capability. So it harmed progress toward the objective and spilled the blood of ‘innocents’.

A raid which blew up, say, a German nuclear facility might have caused the same civilian damage but would have been less blameworthy. The point is not necessarily that the trade off is wrong but that there must be a limit to the exchange rate and that this trade off was not always being made. In any case if you accept that killing enemy civilians is not so bad you can’t be too upset about it when it is done by suicide bombers.

Surely the US benefits in not having the blood of innocents on its hands in any case. Spiritually and later practically.

Being convinced that you are in the right does not mean that you are in the right. Being in the right involves more than having intentions better than the enemies actions. Being in the right is contingent on what you do — if I steal your parking spot, is it OK for you to shoot me because I jumped the queue?

What is wrong with a good retirement village on cloud 9 after you die? Now I’m assuming you are not a Christian (or professor of any of several other major faiths)

Personally if I knew that in 1941 a suicide bombing in a Berlin shopping arcade would have stopped the war I would have been up for it myself.

Jack,

I think it is very hard to say that the Dresden raid didn’t set back the German war effort in any way. If anything, it sucked up resources to care for the displaced and wounded. Resources that could have been put into treating wounded German soldiers, speeding them back to killing Americans.

I just don’t see how we’ve come to the point where we are willing to send our 18 year olds into the slaughter to spare the civilians of the enemy. And maybe it would make sense if the enemy appreciated and responded in kind. If our respect for civilian life resulted in their respect for civilian life, then I’m all for it. But since they don’t it gains us nothing but a strengthened enemy and more dead soldiers. It has no advantages to me besides saying I’d rather my kids die than theirs. And that is no advantage.

Donald,
Let me reiterate that Dresden wasn’t because “they had it coming” it was to end the war as fast as possible. And just because the Germans had lost the ability to respond in kind doesn’t mean the British forfeited the right of that tactic. You are putting the value of those Dresden citizens higher than those 18 year old US soldiers, millions of Jews, Poles, and Russians in death camps, etc. To not bomb the German citizens is a choice which would prolong the war killing citizens of countries that weren’t “bad”.

If anything, it sucked up resources to care for the displaced and wounded. Resources that could have been put into treating wounded German soldiers, speeding them back to killing Americans.

Now this is just plain ridiculous. Using this metric there is no question of jus in bello at all, because any attack of any scale on civilians will cause a drain of resources and will weaken the enemy and possibly shorten the war. Heck, if the life of Amercian soldiers is so infinitely more valuable than that of civilians among the enemy’s population, one should strive to kill as many as possible in the shortest amount of time.

Hektor, I was trying to explain the suicide bomber phenomenon as I see it a couple of times in this thread already. That was the best I can do.

Try the Haaretz profile of Hanadi Jaradat I posted above, maybe that’ll help.

My theory about why the Israel/Palestine conflict gets so much attention in the US is that it’s because of Christians. Liberal Christians feel guilty about 2000 years of Christian antisemitism, so they think they have to say nice things about Israel. They make up for antisemitism by being anti-Arab. Conservative Christians tie it up with end-times beliefs and of course they are also enthusiastic Muslim-bashers. Both groups see Israelis as being Westerners like themselves while the Arabs are the evil Other. That’s the pro-Israel side. Then sometimes people (like me) find out that the silly romanticized slogans aren’t true– “Israel took a barren desert and made it bloom”: , “Israel has always wanted peace and it’s all the Arab’s fault”, “land without a people for the people without a land”, “the Arabs left because they were ordered to by their own people”. Some of those slogans are contradict each other, but I think many Americans start out believing them–I did. Then the disillusionment sets in and sometimes people overreact and go to the other extreme, where it’s entirely Israel’s fault.
So anyway, in the US there’s a whole mythology built around Israel, our plucky little democratic ally in the Mideast, and disillusioned lefties tend to see it as a classic example of the hypocrisy of American foreign policy–Israel has also played an ugly little role helping the US in places like Central America, oddly enough. In other countries where anti-Israel sentiment is more common, it’s presumably seen as the last vestige of European colonialism. So the I/P conflict has become this huge symbol for everyone. It might be better for both sides if it hadn’t–I don’t know.

Anyway, that’s my late night theory.

abb1 : Kirilov in The Possessed

Ah, that’s right: “Demons”

so Martin Luther King and Gandhi are complete failures, hunh?

They sure would’ve been failures had their opponents been willing to use overwhelming violence. One little missile – and where’s your Gandhi? No one would’ve ever heard about any Gandhi.

I don’t see how the suicide bomber is relevant.

She is relevant because this example clearly explains why they do it and who (or what) is responsible for it. And it’s not Sheikh Al-Qaradawi.

And the arguments get circular here

The situation is not circular, it’s only being demagogued as circular. There is clear cause and effect.

My choice would be not to allow exceptions at all.

This won’t work. This leads to pacifism and capitulation, the strong dominating the weak forever.

Think of remote-controlled bulldozers, unmanned planes firing missiles at you. And at the place where those bulldozers have come from no one is wearing uniform, everyone is an innocent civilian. Should you blame the bulldozer, piece of metal for what’s being done to you?

Mr. Walzer opines:

The fourth excuse plays on the notion of innocence. Of course, it is wrong to kill the innocent, but these victims aren’t entirely innocent. They are the beneficiaries of oppression; they enjoy its tainted fruits. And so, while their murder isn’t justifiable, it is … understandable. What else could they expect? Well, the children among them, and even the adults, have every right to expect a long life like anyone else who isn’t actively engaged in war or enslavement or ethnic cleansing or brutal political repression. This is called noncombatant immunity, the crucial principle not only of war but of any decent politics. Those who give it up for a moment of schadenfreude are not simply making excuses for terrorism; they have joined the ranks of terror’s supporters.

Forget the children for a minute, what about the adults? It seems that he can’t deny that the adults aren’t really innocent and has to grasp at this “noncombatant immunity” concept.

Well, perhaps intoduction of the remote-controlled bulldozers and and long-range missiles makes the “noncombatant immunity” obsolete?

To ignore all of the above comments and to focus on the question of whether state-actors should be held to a different standard of proof than non-state-actors – I think there is a case, though I can’t figure out which way it goes.

The decision-making process in states that are not totalitarian dictatorships is different from that of individuals. If it is less prone to being swayed by the emotions, if people who are suffering from dementia or other incapacitating mental illnesses are removed from decisions, if it effectively makes use of dispersed information, etc, we could maybe offer more freedom to the state actor than to the individual.

Certainly most of us seem to prefer as a matter of policy crimes being investigated by the police and people only being punished if found guilty after a formal consideration of evidence than any vigilante being able to pick up a shotgun and kill the person they *think* shot their husband. (Yes, we may enjoy Batman, but unlike viligantes in the real world Batman has authors who make sure he doesn’t beat up the wrong guys.) In this case – more powers to state actors than private.

However one can also argue that the government can make worse decisions than individuals – for example the NZ electoral system threw up Winston Peters as a king-maker. So you can also argue that the state should be more restricted than individuals.

The situation is not circular, it’s only being demagogued as circular. There is clear cause and effect.

Which, not entirely unexpected, is also my opinion. so I agree with you on that.

My opinion was in relation to what was just in war. And there this circular reasoning does exists, in my opinion. If you make an exception for this, then someone else would say you’ll need an exeption for that, and before you know it you are arguing about if the occupation justifies terror, or whether terror justifies occupation. If you agree to both you’ll get ugly wars, if you’ll agree to only one, I doubt you can call it just to the other party. And if you simply allow none, at least you can aspire to being just.

This leads to pacifism and capitulation, the strong dominating the weak forever.

If pacifism means no more wars i’m all for it. But for the other choices, it would lead to that if only one party is held to those standards, and the other not.

If the Israeli occupation were to serve the interests and understandings of the people living in that territory, I doubt there would be much of a problem in Palestine. But as noted, they do not.

So I don’t know whether it is useful to make a defense for killing civilians. It hardly serves a purpose (the defense, that is), it is in conflict with what people perceive as just, and it opens you up all kinds of ugly rhetoric.

Sometimes ideals are not in accordance with what happens on the ground. That doesn’t prevent for example human rights organizations to aspire to those ideals. And thus condemn Israel for the occupation, and condemn the suicide bombers for killing civilians.

But to appease you, if you apply this reasoning to Oliver Kamm, he is a sincere hypocrite, to denounce Qaradawi as evil for arguing against one rule, while going to Israel on invitation of its government, which is responsible for breaking the other rule.

This is hardly an argument against what you say, but Mr. Mandela has spoken against terrorism on more than one occasion.

Abb1,

The judgments aren’t as much about people but about events.

If i’d have to translate that into something abstract:

You have a set of events, a moral theory, and the resulting judgements.

A good moral theory should deliver acceptable judgements for all possible sets of events.

Now back to reality.

Human rights are relevant. Translating them into rules is relevant, because then you can use them to judge. There is a European Court for Human Rights that does nothing but that.

But these rules and judgements are human made, thus they ain’t perfect. And the part that is currently in dispute, the targetting of civilians during war, is heavily contested.

See the followup of Brad Delong.

And there you see Chris argue about suicide bombing in a way that you and I probably disagree with. But then I do agree with his conclusion (targetting civilians is wrong), and you probably don’t.

To make it simpler, the last suicide attack was against a checkpoint. That is infrastructure and infrastructure used to repress Palestinians, so according to this “rule” it could be justified, even if all the dead were civilians.

But targetting a restaurant cannot.

My conclusion is that interpreted as such, this “rule” doesn’t deprive the Palestininans of their means of fighting the occupation.

And, as part of a theory, see the abstract stuff above, it delivers consistent results, independent of which war or party you apply it to.

(Forget about the ECHR above. They ain’t a good example)

I’m not sure I agree with *anyone* on these issues, even myself. I’m uncomfortable with the position that I think I hold–which is that the supreme emergency exemption applies to the WWII bombing effort if for no other reason than that diverting German soldiers and weapons from the eastern front to home defense was worth doing. And I think everybody else ought to be uncomfortable with the position they think they hold on these issues.

I doubt I can make a rational response, given the sound judgement of Brad Delong

I’m not sure I agree with anyone on these issues, even myself.

But there’s two things,

First there’s human rights. The pacifist in me says they should be respected even during war.
Since this obviously doesn’t happen there a backup position.

I think of ‘just war’ theory as a last desperate attempt to maintain the romantic view of war as uniformed soldiers that go to war for a honourable cause, fight honourable, and maintain honour in victory, defeat or death.

Central to maintaining this myth, is that you separate those three phases. If a soldier wants to know whether it is morally justifiable to drop a bomb on target x, and he gets the answer, that depends on whether our war is just, there would be little use for him asking. But a question of “are we targetting a military target or a civilian”, is a question that can be asked and answered.

Thus you are right that in the end the morality of some action is determined by elements from all the three phases. But while in war, that is not something that is useful to a soldier.

You may thing this is just meaningless drivel, but the military is the biggest fan of this honourable myth. Thus a set of generally accepted rules about how to fight a war would be meaningful and generally (not uniformly) adhered to.

And even for the Palestinians it has some relevance. If those rules are widely accepted, the external support for their cause, and the internal support for their actions, would depend on the adherence to those rules. And the suicide bombings that targeted civilians did some damage to that support.

But as was noted before the rationale for state and non-state actors are different.

[you] are not buying into Walzer’s ‘noncombatant immunity’ concept, not unconditionally at least.

According to Chris, Walzer did have those exceptions. That’s what started this. Now I don’t know much about Walzer or Just War theory, I just jumped in to say that exceptions or not, that it wouldn’t alter much for the mentioned Qaradawi case.

My thanks to Chris Bertram for a thought-provoking post (on which I am far closer to his approach than I am to Brad DeLong’s), which I appreciate and hope to respond to shortly. In the meantime, I have one one minor point not about the post but about the comment immediately before this one. In referring to “a government headed by the war criminal responsible for Sabra and Shatila”, Bob appears to be alluding to the Kahan Commission, whose report is frequently invoked but rarely cited accurately. The Commission in fact concluded the near-opposite of what Bob claims: “that the atrocities in the refugee camps were perpetrated by members of the Phalangists, and that absolutely no direct responsibility devolves upon Israel or upon those who acted in its behalf”. It then went on to discuss the “indirect responsibility” of Israeli officials to fail to prevent those massacres. It concluded that “responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps”. That is a serious finding in itself, which rightly led to Sharon’s departure from government; it is not at all the same thing as Bob’s allegation, which is a good deal more extreme than those made by Time magazine and found to be false and defamatory (though made without malice) in a famous US court case.

My observations here have nothing to do with the substantive issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict, on which I have often written, or of the 1982 Lebanon War, which I opposed at the time and on which I have never changed my view.

Oliver Kamm is quite aware that the Kahan Commission was not a court of law, was Israeli, and was limited in both its scope and means. Therefore its outcome is not a judgement that could and should be accepted by all as definitive. And as Bob didn’t made that reference to the commission, but simply stated that Sharon is a war criminal because of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, it might be inferred that he has made a stronger judgement as the commission.

And as he didn’t allude to a secret annex I don’t see the relevance of the Sharon vs. Time Magazine libel suit.

How to interpret the Sabra and Shatila massacre and the Kahan commission is a “substantive issue” in the I/P conflict.

Oliver Kamm is here the same dishonest self as everywhere. Try reading your Amazon comments on some Chomsky books. And then apply that strictness to yourself once, Oliver.

I don’t know why you chose to misrepresent the Time Magazine vs. Sharon case.

It did not judge on whether Sharon was responsible or not. For if that were to be the case it would have to do the work of the Kahan commission again. It did not.

It judged that Time Magazine used unsubstantiated facts, like the meeting with the Gemayel family and the secret annex to the Kahan report, to state that Sharon was responsible. That was ruled to be wrong and defamatory.

It then ruled that this was not libel, and thus Sharon lost the case.

And it would be strange if we were to depend on the lawyers of Time Magazine, on the final verdict on Sharon’s responsibility in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Those lawyers were bound to respresent their client, not the rest of the world. And their client won the case.

I might add that, whatever Bob actually was saying, he has a good case. The Phalangists were a militia with a known history of killing civilians. Sharon chose to ally the IDF with them for practical reasons.

I don’t know which excuse you can make for allying yourself with known terrorists, and then coordinating a refugee camp raid with them. The Kahan commission thought of that as an indirect responsibility. Other people have judged that as a direct responsibility.

Then words have no meaning for you.

The proper word being acquittal, instead of winning, but since words are already meaningless, what’s the difference.

Sharon sued for libel, no libel was found by the jury, Time Magazine was acquitted.

There’s little to quote from the internet from those days but here’s one:

A recent libel trial which resulted in the acquittal of a publisher under the actual malice standard illustrates this point. The trial judge in Sharon v. Time, Inc. [fn132] was lauded for the care and innovation with which he charged the jury on the actual malice issue. [fn133] This charge apparently allowed the jury to appreciate fully the constitutional implications of the actual malice standard and led to an acquittal.

And a newspaper article from 1984:

Ariel Sharon yesterday lost his 2-year legal battle to prove that Time magazine libeled him when a federal jury found “no malice” in a false and defamatory paragraph the magazine published about the former Israeli defense minister.

“… whatever Bob actually was saying, he has a good case.” I must say I find this remark very funny. It has nothing to do with the subject that Chris Bertram raised, however.

It had to do with the wordgames you played regarding the meaning of being responsible for.
As you know the duties of a minister of defense are such that it is not neccesary that there is a direct order to kill civilians, for establishing responsibility for that fact.

And that Time Magazine could not substantiate their claim that there is evidence against Sharon in the so called secret annex B, does not lead to a conclusion, in no way whatsoever, that all allegations of direct reponsibility of Sharon already have been proven wrong.

The only thing that has been established as false and defamatory is a single paragraph in Time Magazine.

That leaves your use of the Time Magazine trial as a rhetorical device against opinions like those of Bob, as dishonest.

But then, words are meaningless to you, anyway.

Bob’s claim is factually untrue, unless he can present evidence that Sharon directly authorised the murders (as opposed to being culpably negligent in failing to anticipate and prevent them). As that claim has already been found to be false and defamatory in a court of law, I’m not expecting him to do so.

The view that Sharon is a war criminal is held by people with more direct experience of Sabra and Shatila than either Oliver Kamm or myself:

http://www.palestinemonitor.org/israelipoli/why_sharon_is_a_war_criminal.htm

In any case, Oliver’s argument about Sharon is a bit of a diversion from my original point.

Which is, if Livingstone is to be condemned for meeting with a supporter of Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis, should he not be equally condemned for meeting with anyone who supports Israeli state terrorism against the Palestinians?