NEWS FEATURE: `Just-war’ theory went AWOL in Kosovo conflict

c. 1999 Religion News Service UNDATED _ On the morning when the first bombs dropped, a call came from the White House for Robert Royal, a scholar in Washington who studies the ethics of war and peace. As Royal relates, the midlevel official asked,”Could we just go through this one more time?” What they rehashed […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ On the morning when the first bombs dropped, a call came from the White House for Robert Royal, a scholar in Washington who studies the ethics of war and peace. As Royal relates, the midlevel official asked,”Could we just go through this one more time?” What they rehashed were the principles of the classical Christian”just-war”theory. The conflict that occasioned this particular phone call, however, was not in Kosovo, but in the Persian Gulf, a decade ago. At the time, officials of the Bush administration took pains to plead what they called the”just-war case”against Iraq.

In contrast, neither President Clinton nor his top aides engaged explicitly in a national conversation about whether the airstrikes in Yugoslavia met the conditions of a morally permissible use of force. Indeed, the just-war tradition was largely AWOL during the 11 weeks of bombing.”No one seems to have reached into the just-war categories”to deploy arguments for the war in general and the bombing targets in particular, said Royal, referring to officials in Washington.


That probably reflects the seat-of-the-pants way NATO launched the offensive, without thinking it all the way through, morally or strategically, Royal argues.”This time around, it really was like a humanitarian impulse,”he said.

Other ethicists, more unsettled by the air strategy than Royal, offer another explanation. They say the”just-war case”in Kosovo foundered with NATO’s far-flung bombardments, making the whole subject less inviting for officials.

What is undisputed is that the allies progressively expanded the strike targets, from military installations to electrical grids and reservoirs, to unleash deadlier force on Serb society. That was viewed as the alternative to a ground war, which would have undoubtedly brought American casualties.”They were clearly not willing to take the risk of NATO pilots or the military being exposed to casualties, but they’re willing to sacrifice innocents on the other side, or innocents in the middle, namely the Kosovars,”said the Rev. Drew Christiansen, a Jesuit priest and international ethicist in Washington.”Clearly, the extension of targets represents something very problematic, morally,”said Christiansen, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center.

His apprehension is rooted in his reading of the Christian just-war tradition, which stretches back to the fourth century. Departing from the early Christian stance of strict nonviolence, St. Augustine postulated a war can be moral if it adheres to certain conditions.

The most basic tenet of the teaching is that there must be a good reason to go to war; the theorists refer to this as”just cause.”And war must be the”last resort”after all diplomatic channels have been exhausted.

Many ethicists, like Christiansen, concluded early on that the NATO operation passed these tests because of the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and the intransigence of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

In the tradition, there are also rules for the conduct of war. For example, civilian populations must never be targeted for attack, and military planners should avoid the likelihood of indirect harm to civilians. This is known as the principle of”non-combatant immunity.” It is especially the notion of civilian immunity that triggered moral misgivings about NATO’s war. Along the way, ethicists of varied persuasions worried that the war’s toll of destruction might overwhelm whatever good comes of the fighting. That argument, which relates to the principle of”proportionality,”is likely to continue in the war’s aftermath.


One Catholic bishop who is influential in military circles laments that political leaders in Washington showed no interest in having such a discussion.”There seems to be silence in Washington,”said Archbishop Edward F. O’Brien, head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, in an interview a few days before NATO suspended the airstrikes.”They’re just ignoring the questions being raised”by church leaders and others, he said. The archdiocese ministers to nearly 1.4 million Catholics in the armed services.

Yet, while clerical leaders fret over this, others who stand in the just-war tradition have aired anxieties about another institution that has scarcely invoked the just-war canons _ the Vatican.

From the start of the conflict in Kosovo, Pope John Paul II and his aides not only railed against the bombing raids but also renewed their rhetoric about the futility of war in general _ not a sentiment usually voiced from a just-war standpoint.

Earlier this year, before the war began, Royal arranged a gathering of ethicists and strategists to assess the Vatican’s drift on matters of war and peace. Rome is emerging as a topic itself within just-war discourse because the Catholic Church is the holder of what is often referred to specifically as the”Catholic”just-war theory.

Royal said he and others have been perplexed by”the Holy Father’s almost pacifist statements that war never solves anything.”Royal has recently formed his own research group, the Faith and Reason Institute.”On the one hand, he (the pope) doesn’t like war, and he has spoken out against this particular conflict”in Yugoslavia, said Royal, who is a Catholic layman.”On the other hand, he wants to do something to separate the two sides, because he knows you just can’t allow something like that to happen.” He added:”I’m just puzzled at how you put those two pieces together. If you want to separate the two warring parties _ which involves military force _ it doesn’t seem to me to jibe with the statement that war never solves anything.” Over the past decade, the Holy See has shown its distaste for military solutions in a number of trouble spots, including Iraq and Yugoslavia. Nonetheless, Pope John Paul II has endorsed the concept of”humanitarian intervention”by military forces.

And, for nearly a year, the Vatican urged international action in Kosovo. In January it called for steps to separate the warring parties and disarm them.


In the past few months, however, Rome didn’t called attention to the”duty to disarm”the aggressor _ and for good reason, said one American theologian who closely reflects Vatican thinking.”How can you expect them to say that, when we weren’t doing anything like that in Yugoslavia? We’re not disarming the aggressor,”said Germain Grisez, a lay professor of Christian ethics at Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Md., referring to NATO allies.”We’re bombing the hell out of all kinds of targets, all over Serbia _ objectives that don’t have anything to do with the arms that they (the Serbs) are using to throw the Kosovars out.” Christiansen said he doesn’t believe the Vatican is retreating from the just-war position. Rather, he said, Rome is applying a more”stringent”analysis that elevates nonviolent solutions and is more sensitive to what the 19th century Prussian general and military strategist Karl von Clausewitz called the”fog of war”_ the uncertain consequences of modern warfare.

As for Washington and Brussels, many ethicists are lamenting the just-war conversation that never got started. It is far from certain, though, that a wider public debate, like that before and during the Gulf War, would have produced a wider moral consensus.

That is because just-war theorists, like most others, usually march in different directions. While Christiansen, for example, believes the operation devolved into an unjust war, Royal said he is resigned to the fact that”war is messy.””The principles can be bent to people’s predilections, and even when they’re not, you’re ultimately left with a prudential judgment,”an educated guess as to whether the use of force will make things better or worse in the long run, Royal acknowledged.

But that doesn’t mean the just-war theory is of little use in negotiating the moral terms of war and strategic relations, he added.”I don’t know what else exists other than the use of these principles. (The just-war theory) doesn’t always tell you what to do in a given set of circumstances, but that’s just to say that like all moral principles, it’s got a human dimension that’s inescapable.” DEA END BOLE

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