When Can a War Be Just?

By Lawrence P. Rockwood

1999, A Just War Argument for the Left's Return to Social Democratic Realism in Critiquing American Foreign Policy

Soon after these words were published in Irving Howe's A Dissenter's Guide to Foreign Policy (1968), the American Left imploded. During and after the course of America's intervention in Southeast Asia, the organizational legacy of Eugene Debb's and Norman Thomas' Socialist Party of America, of which Harrington was then considered heir apparent, split into three mutually exclusive organizations (from the right or the left) : the Social Democrats USA (SDUSA); the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee, later merging with New Left moderates of the former Students for a Democratic Society to form the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); and a reconstituted Socialist Party USA (SDUSA). None of the approaches to US foreign policy of these successor organizations resembled Harrington's social democratic realism. The SDUSA returned to an uncritical pre-Vietnam Wilsonian internationalism and holds dinners honoring the architect of the Reagan policy in Central America, Elliot Abrams. The SPUSA's "Third Force" position emphasized the moral equivalency of America's and the Soviet Union's Cold War policies. DSA with the best and the brightest, without a systematic alternative, sojourned in the wilderness between these positions.

Unlike the Right, the Left is still faced with the legacy of being on both sides of the Cold War. As a career US soldier who served three times under a NATO command, I always felt indebted to the Soviet Army. It payed by far the highest price in the war against Hitler. I admired the Warsaw Pact forces whose professionalism continued, along with ours, to keep a world war from breaking out in Europe for half a century. But I never doubted that I was on the side that won the Cold War, the side of Michael Harrington and West German Social Democratic Chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. I wonder how many American leftists recall that the architect of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was a socialist, the British labour leader and Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin.

The majority of DSA's major European partners in the Socialist International belong to governments that supported or participated in the problematically executed mission on the behalf of the oppressed in the poorest part of Europe (Kosovo and Albania). The United States was the only major participant in the Kosovo intervention whose government was not led by a party belonging to the Socialist International. To understand the pro or anti NATO rhetoric thrown around by the American Left over the issue of the intervention, you have to go back to the rift in the American Left over Vietnam and the Cold War. The recent debates over the intervention of NATO underscores the fact that the post-Vietnam era discussion of the character of American foreign policy has not provided a "usable history" for the post-Cold War era.

The progressive media and the peace movement have made a strong case for alternatives to our military action in Kosovo. In a world where the responsible use of force is guided by humanitarian principles, a ground force consisting of a United Nations Rapid Deployment Forces (the type initially supported by President Clinton after his first election and before he succumbed to General Colin Powell and the Chiefs of Staff) that would be willing to voluntarily suffer a reasonable level of casualties in an effort to limit noncombatant deaths could have deployed to the Balkans years ago. One of the many reasons this option failed was the antipathy to any kind of military initiative on the part of the post-Vietnam American Left.

Why did the intervention in the Balkans have to be by NATO and not the UN? Because the UN is incapable of responding to large scale domestic violence by legal or defacto governments. This was demonstrated in both Bosnia and Rwanda. The question was never whether NATO was the right tool for the intervention. Unfortunately, it was question of NATO or no one. Rather than question NATO's accommodation to an unorthodox mission, would it not be more productive to criticize those who fail to discuss, let alone support, alternative international forces specifically designed for such contingencies? The hegemony of dogmatic Cold War revisionism on the Left and realpolitik on the right precluded that development. Both hold rigidly to the belief that a person in a military uniform cannot (in the case of the former) or should not (in the case of the latter) be utilized for humanitarian or emancipatory purposes.

The leading modern theoretician of the western concept of just war, DSA's own Michael Walzer, in his Just and Unjust Wars (1977), delimits the moral reality of war by dividing it into two parts. "War is always judged twice, first in reference to the reasons states have for fighting, second with reference to the means they adopt. The first is adjectival: we say that a war is just or unjust. The second is adverbial: we say a war is being fought justly or unjustly." Western just war tradition began with St. Augustine's address on the conditions of war, promulgated on the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD). It proclaimed that it was possible "to please God while engaged in military service." Augustine's primary concern was the justice of the decision to initiate war (jus ad bello) rather than the justice of conduct in war (jus in bellum). Later, St. Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274), the official philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church, extended the scope of the Augustinian jus ad bello mandates by arguing that war must be initiated for a just reason and be declared by a legitimate authority. [ii]

The weight on jus ad bellum is not universally applied in the discussion of the morality and the ethics of violence in war. Rather it is a uniquely Western focus. Islamic law stresses the conduct of war and the mitigation of its "harmful consequences" rather than the just or unjust causes of wars. Hindu sacred texts and several traditional African societies also emphasize jus in bellum ethics in the conduct of war.[iii]

Many on the Left have critiqued NATO by alleging a strenuously constructed anti-humanitarian intent on the part of NATO rather then focusing on the incongruity between the humanitarian intent of the mission and the seemingly anti-humanitarian conduct of the mission. The revisionist evil "intent" or insufficient jus ad bello (cause of war) case usually falls into three major categories: (1) the inviolability of national sovereignty; (2) the victim population's imperfections; and (3) the hidden imperial ambitions of the liberators. As a socialist internationalist, I can't understand all the lefty crying over the compromise of the sovereign state. Anyone who thinks the interest of the sovereign state is the interest of international justice is not a socialist. Vaclav Havel is right in his support of NATO: the UN Declaration of Human Rights is not compatible with the UN Charter. The Declaration is truly a democratic socialist document, while the charter is not. National sovereignty is one of the greatest diseases the West ever gave humankind. Can any true internationalist believe that the lip service paid in the UN Charter to defending the national sovereignty of third world nation states whose boundaries were drawn by European colonial officials can be a basis for human emancipation? Let the only remaining military superpower and the only functioning mutual security organization (NATO) on the planet undermine this sorry myth of international equality. The Socialist International, in its darkest hour, succumbed to the primacy of the nation-state during the outbreak of the First World War (another dilemma over someone invading Serbia). Is not the major European socialist parties' position on national sovereignty at the end of the century an improvement on their position at its start?

It is understandable that the American Left based so much of its just war rhetoric on arguments about the evil of interventions in sovereign nations. These arguments represented an extremely convenient weapon against the particular unjust war that inaugurated most contemporary American political thought on foreign and security policy, the Vietnam War. In the wake of our interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and our conspicuous unwillingness to intervene in Rwanda, a foreign policy based on anti-interventionism places progressives uncomfortably in the position of reinforcing the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger and Samuel P. Huntington. Just as the seminal example of post-Vietnam anti-interventionism is Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer's recent editorial position in Dissent now calls for the left to support humanitarian military operations. Walzer's words contrast sharply with the old rhetoric of anti-war culture. "What is most important for the future of the left is that our people, our activists and supporters," he counsels, see international humanitarian "fires for what they are..." and find the "will to put out the fire."[iv]

The second jus ad bello argument that the victims of Serb aggression did not measure up to high standards of behavior themselves is even more problematic. These anti-Albanian tirades follow a logic that would justify inaction toward the Holocaust because there were Jewish anti-German terrorists in Europe. There are no perfect victims and there will never be. Even Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan human rights activist and Nobel Prize winner, has been exposed as flawed. My fellow Tibetan Buddhist Richard Gere tries to reinvent Tibetans as if they were baby seals being clubbed to death by Chinese hunters. He would have an historical Tibet with no army, no death penalty, and no feudalism. Eugene Debs said, "I am no better than the meanest of the earth." That means, victims do not have to be perfect victims for us to give a damn about the atrocities committed against them.

The final jus ad bello argument, and the favorite of Cold War revisionists, is that NATO's intentions were not clean. It is interesting that the war that did the most to popularize revisionism in America was the one which Eugene Debs went to jail for opposing, the First World War. I agree with the revisionists that Debs was right and Woodrow Wilson was wrong about World War I. But did the liberated inmates of the concentration camps of World War II complain of the impure war motives of Roosevelt? Did the millions who perished consider themselves lucky not to have survived to suffer the shame of being liberated by hypocrites? Did the enslaved in the American South complain of the North's impure motives of sending the Union Army to invade the South? The revisionist historians and guilt-ridden World War II veterans, Howard Zinn and William Appleton Williams, have yet to dissuade me from the obvious empirical truth, however perplexing, that a lot of good has been done for humanity in spite of bad intentions.

The social democratic realism of Michael Harrington and Willy Brandt always weighs means against ends. However, the two major worldviews of scholars of American foreign policy, conservative realism (realpolitik) and Cold-War Revisionism, have failed to provide a model for the development of a non-exploitive American foreign and military policy for the Post-Cold War. To borrow a phrase from the architect of political realism and international relations, Hans Morgenthau, neither the conservative realists on the right (his erstwhile successors) nor revisionist critics on the Left have been able to constructively "speak truth to power."

Unlike the realism of Morgenthau and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, which questioned the efficacy of placing faith in the inherent goodness of man in the wake of the Holocaust, its conservative offspring, Realpolitik, dismissed the idea of the possibility of human progress in the affairs of states. The epic Cold War diplomat George Kennan, the spiritual father of Realpolitik, explains its morally relativistic tenents: "Tere are no internationally accepted standards of morality to which the U.S. government could appeal if it wished to act in the name of morality."[v]

The revisionist school, on the other hand, is associated (mainly by non-revisionists) with the legacy of the American diplomatic historian William Appleman Williams and is often categorized by its critics as Marxist or "New Left" in relation to the history of the Cold War. Scholars following the more vulgar models of revisionist, dependency, and world systems models are unable to challenge moral relativism in U.S. policy because they don't accept the possibility of there being moral ends in US foreign policy since it is economically determined by the needs of capitalism. In practice, this has confined the Leftist critique to those already convinced of the basic tenets of revisionism.

On the other extreme, relativism, as a philosophical term, is the theory that significant core values (1) differ from society to society; (2) arise within the context of a society's peculiarities; (3) are not universal and; (4) are not valid outside of accepted group norms.[vi] Moral relativism was first associated with the liberal social critique of cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who often incorporated models of cultural relativism as expressions of sympathy for societies characterized as either oppressed, different, or marginal. By the later phases of the Cold War, moral relativism had been successfully co-opted by the conservative paragons of Realpolitik to undermine the universalistic premise that all peoples, regardless of culture, share basic values such as human rights, civil rights, and democracy. Regardless of evidence to the contrary found on the blood-stained streets of Burma, Indonesia, and China, the Realpolitik sages of Harvard Yard, Henry Kissinger and Samuel P. Huntington, would have us believe that to attribute such values to non-Western cultures is a form of neo-colonial coercion.

In Robert A. Gorman's new biography of Harrington, the revisionist/ anti-revisionist debate between Harrington and the historian William Appleman Williams not mentioned. Gorman implies that Harrington died as a contentedThird Party socialist who assigned equal blame to both sides of the Cold War. Paul M. Buhle's and Edward Rice-Maximin's new biography of William Appleman Williams leads one to the opposite conclusion. Part of the problem is that many confuse Vietnam with the Cold War. Harrington, like his close friend, the anti-revisionist historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., eschewed his early support of Johnson's Vietnam policy in particular and American policy toward the third world in general without succumbing to the Cold War revisionism of William Appleton Williams, the Hooverite Republican isolationist darling of the American New Left.[vii]

Like his close colleague Willy Brandt, Harrington never condoned the unequal cost the Cold War placed on the lives of citizens of the developing world. Any jus in bellum analysis reveals that the respect for the lives of noncombatants always depends more on their identity than on the ends sought by the combatant nations. This is what those who equate Vietnam with the Cold War fail to grasp. Vietnam was not just about the Cold War. It was also about racism. John Dower in his 1986 work on the Second World War, War Without Mercy, exposed how that war was in reality a number of wars and the war between Russia and Germany and the war between the United States and Japan were race wars when compared to the Western European theater of operation.[viii] In the same way, the Cold War was in reality a number of wars. In Vietnam it was a race war and the evidence is obvious when one applies a jus in bellum rather than a jus ad bellum yardstick, especially concerning the treatment of noncombatants.

For the Left to equate NATO with flawed American policies elsewhere is as ludicrous as holding the alliance accountable for the American intervention in Vietnam in which no NATO member except the U.S. participated. It is as simple-minded as those on the Right who unequivocally equate the policies of Stalin's successors with the terror of Stalin's regime itself. Nor is it fair to blame NATO for following the cowardly "force protection" over "civilian lives" priority of the United States. That policy was based in large part on President Nixon's Vietnam era insight that there would have been no major anti-war movement if there had been no draft. The development of the U.S.'s unabashed live and let die doctrine of no military body bags is particularly related to the American political response to the Vietnam War on both the Left and the Right.

The Left's revisionism has been just as feeble in speaking truth to power as the right's amoral conservative realism. Both offer no constructive solutions of how to reduce the human misery that encompasses the indefatigable human practice of waging war. Neither effectively challenges the means power uses to obtain its ends. Unlike the Right, the Left is only galvanized after the bombs start falling. It is reactive instead of offering a proactive critique of official American hypocrisy on human rights. The Left needs a new formula to speak truth to power that can constructively discuss both means and ends. The social democratic realism of DSA's founder Michael Harrington is a good place to start.