The Mitey Walzer

Could you provide a for instance example of “not excessive relative to the concrete definite military objective”. I have always taken this to mean you didnt blow up the city to take out the power station. Others take this to mean you dont blow up the power station because its connected to the hospital.

Doesn’t this mean effectively “given what a nuclear weapon can do, you’re entitled to do pretty much anything to take it out”?

Daniel’s “Geneva standard” is what many of us call proportionality, while Walzer’s “minimize” idea is “necessity” (i.e. don’t use more force than is necessary to achieve a legitimate goal). Both are vital to the ius in bello, yet Walzer has tended to treat the second as his invention while downplaying the first, because of skepticism about the weighing of values it requires. But I’m with Daniel: proportionality is vital to the ethics of war and is standardly used in just war critiques, e.g. today’s Amnesty report on Gaza.

But while Margalit and Walzer argue that all noncombatants’ lives, whatever their citizenry, should have equal weight, there’s a point where they seem to accept a key premise of Kasher and Yadlin. That’s where they say that, if Israeli soldiers obey the rules, e.g. necessity, then “responsibility for the deaths of Hezbollah’s human shields — in all the cases — falls only on Hezbollah.” (Compare this with the last two passages they quote from K and Y.)

One of K and Y’s reasons for placing Israeli soldiers’ lives above Palestinian civilians’ lives — their *very* controversial claim — is that since the terrorists are responsible for placing the civilians at risk, the responsibility for the civilians’ deaths, where those are unavoidable given a legitimate objective, belongs to the terrorists rather than to the soldiers. Doesn’t the M and W quote above seem to endorse that line?

If so, Daniel may want to reconsider his apology.

more or less yes; this was the basis of deterrence.

When you say “was”…..

Tom H has it correct above – there is a duty both to minimise casualties and to ensure they are not excessive. For various technical reasons that occasionally seem terribly important I prefer “not excessive” to “proportionate”

One of K and Y’s reasons for placing Israeli soldiers’ lives above Palestinian civilians’ lives—their very controversial claim—is that since the terrorists are responsible for placing the civilians at risk, the responsibility for the civilians’ deaths, where those are unavoidable given a legitimate objective, belongs to the terrorists rather than to the soldiers. Doesn’t the M and W quote above seem to endorse that line?

This is a rare case in history of highly intelligent people desperately seeking legal justifications to do what their enemies would like to convince everyone they want to do. See also: Iraq. Seems to be a lot of it about.

When I read this article back in May, it seemed to me that Margalit and Walzer were proposing a hopelessly idealistic standard. Here is their concluding fomulation:

This is the guideline we advocate: Conduct your war in the presence of noncombatants on the other side with the same care as if your citizens were the noncombatants.”

The thing is, no one does this – no one comes even close to doing this. And doing it would drastically interfere with the ability to win the war.

First, if an invading army protects civilian lives and property, then the defending army has no need to do so – which may mean that it cannot be defeated. In the American Civil War, the Union Army began with the philosophy that Confederate civilians were American citizens whose lives and property had to be protected. This meant that the Confederate armies had no need to protect civilian productive assets. The Confederates could engage or refuse to engage Union forces at their discretion. It was only when the Union began to free slaves, seize animals and stores, and burn farms and cities that the Confederates were forced to join battle on the Union’s terms. If the Union had fought on the basis of the Margalit/Waltzer principle, it would have lost the war.

And conducting combat “with care” for civilians means exposing one’s own soldiers to death. If the Blue Army has a military objective – a hilltop outpost, say, with a village on the slope – it will want to bomb it before attacking with ground troops. If the villagers are Red civilians, the Blue commander may as a matter of decency conduct the bombing to cause as little damage to the village as possible, even though he knows that by destroying the village he would restrict resupply to the outpost. He accepts the risk that bombs may accidentally fall in the village.

But if the villagers are Blues, he will not bomb at all – the damage to the war effort from accidental Blue civilian deaths would outweigh the military benefits of the shelling. He attacks only with ground troops, knowing that many more soldiers will die, in order to prevent the more serious losses that would be engendered by self-inflicted civilian deaths, or he may simply besiege the hilltop, tying down men and resources that are badly needed elsewhere.

But according to Margalit/Walzer, this commander is behaving immorally. If he would not shell in order to protect the Blue village then he must not shell in order to protect the Red village. No one does this – we are in Peter Singer land, in terms of impracticality.

Lastly, in many modern conflicts, a major goal of one side or both sides is to hold territory and maintain civilian habitation, in anticipation that borders will be drawn based on cease fire lines – which means that protecting one’s own civilians is a military objective. For example, the Bosnian army’s primary goal in fighting the Serb insurgency was to protect Bosnian civilians from the Serb “ethnic cleansing” ( ie genocide) in order to protect the territorial integrity of majority-Bosniak areas. Margalit/Walzer appear to be saying that the Bosnian war goal was immoral. Their argument, taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that the only legitimate Bosnian goal would have been to defeat the Serbs militarily – an impossible task that, if pursued, would have led to the destruction of Bosnia.

The question of proportionality isn’t even raised by nuclear deterrence. MAD is premised on countervalue, striking the enemy population centres. Killing the enemy civilian population isn’t an unwanted but inevitable result of massive retaliation, but the object. It’s a modern form of hostage taking and therefore raises a different set of issues. Nuclear weapons may indeed be inherently indiscriminate, but that is beside the point when you are aiming to harm enemy civilians.

Nuclear counterforce of course raises the issues of proportionality and discrimination, but counterforce raises unusual strategic issues and wasn’t in any case the basis of deterrence doctrines in the Cold War.

I’m sure there are events in which an army has bombed or shelled its own village without being able to evacuate it first. I’m not saying it never happened. Perhaps I should have said “may.” The point is that there are political and morale calculations involved in killing one’s own citizens that don’t apply to those of an enemy or a neutral.

To take a factual example- when NATO bombed Serbia in order to force Milosevich to withdraw from Kosovo, the planes flew at high altitude in order to avoid Serbian anti-aircraft weapons. This increased the number of off-target bombs and resulting civilian deaths. Thus a calculation was made that in order to protect NATO airmen (and thereby to avoid the political fallout of casualties), extra Serb civilian deaths would be tolerated. No such calculation would have been possible if the civilians had belonged to NATO member states.

This kind of thing goes on all the time. Whether it’s moral or immoral, it’s how war is fought. Margalit/Walzter don’t seem to understand that their proposal would be a radical change in the practice of war, and that in many cases it would, if accepted, make war impossible. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – but I am saying that they don’t admit that they are effectively arguing for pacifism.

I read somewhere that in the WWII the allies bombed the hell out of Normandy before the invasion

You read right. Caen in particular got pretty comprehensively shot-up before it was liberated, and apparently without making it much easier to liberate. Add that to the widespread French conviction that the country was liberated by the Resistance (with a bit of outside help), and you can see how there could be a fair bit of ill-feeling.

One shudders to think what would be deemed permissible in the case of an enemy possessing shoggoths.

Well, clearly you’d be allowed to deploy shoggoths of your own. Which could end badly.

The Waltzer/Margalit piece is unimpressive as a philosophical article (and being published in a non-academic publication is no excuse). Tedious (and suspect) unclarity aside, the wrongnesses cut both ways along the notional excessive/insufficient force axis, as well as along dimensions orthogonal to it. PErhaps unfiar to say so without giving chapter and verse, but still.

I’d focus on one obvious and pretty conclusive problem with ‘necessity’ as the sole criterion of justification: it’s unrestrictedly resource-relative. Strictly interpreted (for how else?) it implies that if all you happen to have at your disposal is a nuke, then you can use that to destroy a spear in the middle of Manhattan. (Or if you are not of a philosophical disposition, tone down the example until you get to one that’s ‘realistic’.)

More specifically, Bloix’s reference to tying down men and resources that are badly needed elsewhere illustrates how assessment of ‘necessity’ rapidly becomes a global matter – if you spread your civilian-preserving resources (misleadingly equated, btw, with engangerment of soldiers) thinly enough by adopting a sufficiently ambitious range of ‘legitimate’ objectives, then more or less anything can be made out to be necessary.

It’s also worth pointing ou that what counts as a legitimate military objective is presented as an independently answerable question, but almost certanly isn’t. Destroying a field of crops which may feed enemy soldiers (as well as the civilain population) may be regarded as a lgit objective if the relevant soldiers can’t be (or won’t be) killed directly, but possibly not otherwise. Not suer about this particular example, but certainly ‘necessity’, unlike ‘proportionality’, requires that legitmate objectives can be dientified prior to any consideration of the means of achieving them.

Were the French allies in World War Two? Just like the Austrians? Bombing Mers-el-Kébir may have been more justified than the damage to Normandy, but both seem to fall under the same doctrine.

Hadn’t the French surrendered long before the advancing German lines reached that point?

Sure. The thing is, French and Americans alike, or so it seems to me, nowadays like to think about WWII as a conflict between pure good-allied forces-and pure evil-the German occupying forces. Of course, things were not as simple and people who actually lived the period remember something much more nuanced.

But all this was in response to the question whether Americans ever bombed allied cities. The answer is of course yes, and I think their decision was justified and strategically sound

My grand-father dug out burning bodies from under destroyed houses and my grand-mother, who was an active member of the Resistance, nonetheless has not so fond memories of the liberation of her hometown by the Americans (apparently, they looted more properties in a week than the Germans in four years).

Also: “Were the French allies in World War Two? Just like the Austrians?”

Yes, they were, you silly man. The French army suffered half as many war dead as the US army during the war (from a population a quarter the size) and France was a combatant power for almost as long as the US – 1939-40 and 1944-45, v. 1941-45.