Michael Walzer on killing children in war

Michael Walzer is the editor of Dissent magazine a leading neoconservative and a Princeton philosopher who is known for his scholarly work on Just War theory. Unlike the academic work of some neocons, Walzer's is widely respected outside the neocon fraternity. (Update: Walzer's arguments in the main article I'm discussing here is very similar to those of the neoconservatives; but he did oppose the Iraq War and it would be misleading to characterize him as a "leading neoconservative" as I did initially.)

The new Spring 2009 issue of the Army War College's Parameters features an article by Walzer, Responsibility and Proportionality in State and Nonstate Wars. It's perspective seems very different, even contradictory, to a current piece that he co-authored with Avishai Margalit, Israel: Civilians & Combatants New York Review of Books 05/14/09 edition.

The New York Review piece is a commentary on the article "Assassination and Preventive Killing" by Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin SAIS Review of International Affairs (Winter-Spring 2005). Kasher was an adviser Israeli Defense Force (IDF) College of National Defense, and Yadlin the military attaché of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Though their article includes the disclaimer that they were not speaking in an official capacity, they focus particularly on the Israeli context. And they make what boils down to an argument that the IDF shouldn't worry about enemy civilian casualties in its wars and military actions.

Margalit and Walzer sort through their argument, which looks to me like cynical sophistry. And while they aren't quite that dismissive, they clearly refute the ethical argument being made. Their bottom line is:

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. A guideline like that should not seem strange to people who are guided by the counterfactual line from the Passover Haggadah, "In every generation, a man must regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt."

And they argue:

There is nothing unusual in this demand, and nothing unique to Israel. When soldiers in Afghanistan, or Sri Lanka, or Gaza take fire from the rooftop of a building, they should not pull back and call for artillery or air strikes that may destroy most or all of the people in or near the building; they should try to get close enough to the building to find out who is inside or to aim directly at the fighters on the roof. Without a willingness to fight in that way, Israel's condemnation of terrorism and of the use of human shields by its enemies rings hollow; no one will believe it.

Yet in the Parameters article, Walzer makes an argument that sounds more like the Kasher-Yadlin position. His Parameters article sounds like a general justification for not worrying too much about the number of civilians killed in combat zones. And he also puts it in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which heavily influences the thinking of many American policymakers toward the Middle East and counterinsurgency - and just just the neocons.

He frames his Parameters argument in more characteristic neocon terms with pompous sneering at those who complain about civilian deaths:

The difficulty with an argument against conflict is that it can be made against any conflict, whether it is a war of aggression or a war of self-defense, whether it is fought to conquer another people or to rescue them from conquest, whether its purpose is to defend an empire or stop a massacre. Children die in all these wars. The only exceptions are wars that consist entirely of tank battles in the remote desert or naval battles on the high seas, but there are not many conflicts like that. And some of the wars that are not as limited and precise as those are "just wars," which means that one side is fighting rightfully. From a moral standpoint, perhaps, this is a war that should be fought—because of the character of the enemy, whose success is a prospect more fearful than war itself. What if stopping the conflict now means victory for a conquering army; or the triumph of a government bent on mass murder; or the brutal repression of religious minorities; or the survival-in-strength of a militarist or terrorist force that fully intends to renew the fighting? Should we still be persuaded by the pictures? [my emphasis]

The argument that naturally flows from this pitch is, yeah, hell, don't worry about the damn children, Our Side stands for goodness and justice and they're better off being killed by us than by somebody who would probably kill them later anyway. He actually starts early in the article trashing the notion that we should bother ourselves about those enemy children:

Children have an obvious, palpable, insurmountable innocence. The easiest way to impress upon society the awfulness of war is to show pictures of the children killed in its course.

Sometimes these pictures are used to persuade us to condemn a particular conflict, one that is currently under way - one that should be stopped, right now, because these children have been killed and many more like them remain at risk. Everyone has seen pictures like that, designed to influence the viewer. They were plentiful during the 2006 Lebanon war and more recently during the conflict in Gaza. Curiously, we are rarely shown pictures of dead or wounded children from Afghanistan, though the war against the Taliban is not entirely different from the wars against Hezbollah and Hamas; again, civilians have been killed. Those pictures make the best possible argument for stopping the fighting; nothing can be more persuasive. [my emphasis]

This is an interesting kind of whine, apparently meant to suggest that those bad liberals talk about dead children in Israel's wars but not in the AfPak War that liberals consider to be a good war. Of course, one of the biggest news items about the AkPak War for weeks has been the anger in both countries over civilian deaths from NATO air strikes. Whatever. Neocons aren't in the habit of letting facts get in the way of a good whine. Maybe he wrote the article months ago when the news reports on that were less frequent.

And what would a neocon article be without a Munich analogy coupled with a sneer at all those contemptible pussies who wanted to avoid another world war? I have a hard time avoiding sarcasm over this kind of argument, because this cavalier attitude toward war and civilian casualties did such incredible damage during the Cheney-Bush administration:

Often, it is morally necessary to fight; and then it may also be necessary, this time in the sense of “inevitable,” that civilians will die, and those who are fighting on the side of right will do some of the killing.

For very good reasons, this prospect is difficult to accept. There was too much killing in the twentieth century. One could learn any number of lessons from this fact, but the dominant lesson that has been learned is that we should avoid killing altogether, if there is any way to do that. Following World War I, a kind of pacifism, the pacifism of exhaustion and fear, spread throughout Western Europe, and since World War II a fierce aversion to war - indeed, to the use of any type of force - has played a prominent role in the politics of most European nations. In the United States, media coverage of recent conflicts brought their savagery into brutally clear focus. Even Hollywood, which once only provided movies about heroic soldiers fighting in sanitized battles, has turned to stark realism and now forces us to view the actual, unbearable carnage of war. We have learned to be skeptical of military glory. [my emphasis]

One of the lessons that much of the officer corps and the entire Republican Party took from the Vietnam War is that seeing television news about the war made people turn against it, one of the mainstreams of the Republican Party's "liberal press" dogma. And they decided the way to handle it is to do more effective propaganda and media management. We see the results now: a village is bombed or rocketed by an American aircraft; lots of people die; the locals say civilians were killed; the military says it was only "terrorists"; more investigation shows that lots of civilians were killed; the military admits a few were but most of them were "terrorists"; they say that anyway it's all the terrorists' fault because they use local people as human shields; if the reports persist and the host government is insistent about it, the military then says their careful investigation shows that some civilians were indeed killed. Reset. Repeat.

It would have been very beneficial if they had integrated what they thought they were learning about TV coverage of wars with a recognition that the fabled "credibility gap" of the Vietnam War days also had to do with the fact that persistent lying makes people not believe what you say.

But Walzer's article isn't focused on media management, except to the extent he's offering arguments to use in the later stages of the process described when the military is forced to admit civilians were killed. He particularly focuses on arguments that object to the number of civilians killed was disproportionate to the military necessity involved.

Since proportionality is a key concept of his specialty, Just War theory, it's an odd argument. But the marketing of excuses for killing civilians requires updating the packaging. So his new packaging proposal is: let's say that proportionality doesn't matter nearly so much as responsibility and The Terrorists are the ones responsible for putting civilians at risk so killing a bunch of children and adult noncombatants is all good. He doesn't put it quite that crassly. But I believe that's a fair rendering of his argument.

And one might think that a specialist in Just War theory might not want to encourage people to dismiss the whole concept. But it's hard to read this any other way:

Historically, just war theory was meant to be an alternative to Christian pacifism; now, for some of its advocates, it is pacifism’s functional equivalent — a kind of cover for people who are not prepared to admit that there are no wars they will support.

He doesn't offer any specific examples of this alleged phenomenon. And it should be obvious to anyone vaguely familiar with the concept of Just War doctrine that if the doctrine is seen as primarily a contemptible excuse for contemptible pacifist cowards and appeasers and girls, then it has no practical value in deciding whether a war one's own country is considering to wage is just or not.

The crux of Walzer's argument here comes very close to the Kasher-Yadlin argument he and Avishai Margalit criticize in the New York Review. In Parameters, Walzer says:

But if the number of likely civilian deaths is always disproportionate to the value of destroying the rocket launcher and its operatives, or the cache of rockets, so that Israel would be prohibited from responding in any fashion to the rocket attacks, then the prohibition associated with counterattacking collapses. Now even “disproportionate” counterattacks are justified and, assuming the Israelis exercise the necessary care, responsibility for civilian deaths falls solely on Hezbollah and Hamas. It is a central principle of just war theory that the self-defense of a people or a country cannot be made morally impossible, and so the more successful Hezbollah and Hamas are in hiding among civilians, the less useful the proportionality argument is—or, to be more precise, the less limiting it is. The more civilians are used as shields, the greater the danger to which they are exposed, and responsibility for that exposure falls on the people who are using them. We now recognize that this is a common strategy utilized by nonstate fighters. It does not really matter, from a moral standpoint, whether the civilians agree to be used by these fighters or resent the position into which they are forced. In Lebanon and Gaza, it is obvious that some civilians fell into both categories. That is probably also the case in Afghanistan. [my emphasis]

Cut through the thin layer of sophistry and the argument is pretty simple: go ahead and kill all the civilians you want as long as you can claim there's a terrorist somewhere in the same country.

Morally repugnant doesn't always equate to impractical. But it's well worth noticing that Walzer is drawing his examples primarily from the IDF's battles with Hamas and Hizbullah. Israeli policymakers of recent years have not been seeking to win the sympathy and support of the civilian population in the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon. Israel also isn't going anywhere. The nation has existed in a hostile neighborhood since its War of Independence in 1948 (61 years ago) and the Six Day War of 1967 (42 years ago next month). Their policymakers are very much aware that they could be facing decades of recurrent military conflict in those areas.

But in the Iraq War and the AkPak War, most Americans presumably have a notion that they will lead to a decrease in violence with something close to peace and stability resulting. And that all or most of the American troops will be removed from those areas when that goal is attained. We've already been fighting six years in Iraq, though we now have an official goal of 2011 to get our troops out. We've been fighting in Afghanistan for seven and a half years with no end in sight.

How long are we willing to continue in those places in a state of permanent war? Eight more years? Forty-two? Sixty-one? If we want to see some exit earlier than those time frames, then killing a lot of civilians probably isn't conducive to that goal.

One last thing from the Parameters article. It's an accepted part of US military practice that we use heavy firepower to minimize the loss of the lives of US soldiers. It's widely accepted in the military and among politicians of both parties. Rarely specified is that this often means causing a large number of civilian deaths on the other side. Their relatives don't vote in American elections. But whether attempting to fight the AkPak war by killing and displacing large numbers of civilians is a practical policy is still a relevant question. And one which has its own relation to the number of American casualties incurred in a war, as distinct from a single battle. Walzer gets cute in the following paragraph, which one the face of it seems to be an argument for attempting to minimize civilian casualties even if it risks more of Our Side's soldiers' lives in an individual operation:

In early 1943, the Allies discovered that the Germans were operating a heavy-water plant in Vemork, Norway, an operation vital to the Nazis’ effort to produce an atomic bomb. It seemed—realistically enough — critically important to destroy this plant. The plant was, unfortunately, located in the center of a small Norwegian town and could not be attacked from the air without endangering Norwegian civilians. The Germans had not deliberately built the plant there; that just happened to be where it was. The proportionality argument would readily justify an air attack; indeed, if every civilian in the town were killed, the toll would not have been "disproportionate to" the value of stopping the Nazis from acquiring atomic weapons. But the Allies felt that it was their responsibility to avoid civilian deaths, and so they decided to send commandos to destroy the plant. The first commando raid failed, with the loss of 34 British soldiers; a second attempt succeeded — to everyone’s amazement, without loss. The responsibility argument is a bit easier in this example, since the inhabitants of Vemork were friendly civilians; still, it is important that responsibility, in the eyes of Allied decisionmakers, clearly trumped proportionality. Later in the war, heavy-water production at the plant was restarted and security tightened. Following debates in London, the decision was made to bomb the plant; 22 civilians were killed. It is doubtful that the Allies paid reparations to the families of the civilians killed, which would have been the responsible thing to do. But what is most impressive about this example is the acceptance of responsibility that led 34 soldiers to give their lives in an effort to avoid the air-raid. [my emphasis]

Most American readers of this article are likely to draw the conclusion, not that the British were admirably responsible, but that obviously they should have just blown the facility up and not worry about the civilian deaths. Because we use firepower to save the lives of our soldiers, the argument goes, and the civilians 22 civilians killed in the later air attack would just be "collateral damage". After all, as the second raid showed, the 34 British soldiers died to spare the lives of "only" 22 civilians.

This is an odd story on other levels. It's worth noting that under the rules of engagement followed in the air war in the Second World War, such a facility was a legitimate target for bombing. And the British were nominally less scrupulous than the Americans in their concern for civilians during bomber attacks. Britain adopted an explicit strategy of using bombing to damage the morale of the civilian population. But since both British and American bombers were lucky to hit the right city in their bombing runs in that war, much less a particular building, I'm not sure how much different the results were. And speaking of that lack of precision, I wonder if the decision to run two commando raids on the Vemork facility didn't have more to do with a concern for precision than scruples about civilian casualties, especially after the first run failed at the cost of 34 lives.

That example serves in the Parameters article as an argument for "responsibility" which Walzer uses to say (pretty much explicitly) that The Terrorists are responsible for any civilian casualties Israel or the United States may cause in fighting The Terrorists in Gaza, Lebanon or Afghanistan. He does say that the "free fire zones" that were used in the Vietnam War, in which any human being there was considered to be a legitimate target for lethal force, aren't morally acceptable. But, then, that's safe enough to argue now, because that experience isn't being used prominently as a justification for current practices by the US or Israel. And Walzer's own argument effectively declares Gaza, Lebanon and Afghanistan free-fire zones for the US and Israel.

It really makes me wonder why he wrote the article with Avishai Margalit at around the same time. Because he is really making a very similar argument to the one he an Margalit are refuting in their piece for the New York Review. Although I was surprised in reading the NY Review piece that Walzer was one of the co-authors; I was thinking at the time that he seems to be changing his outlook. But the Parameters article suggests otherwise.

For another article critical of Walzer's perspective, see Michael Walzer's Tortured Ethics by Mark LeVine 07/26/06. That was during the last Israel-Lebanon War in which Walzer was defending Israel's most controversial military practices in that conflict.

Tags: just war doctrine, michael walzer