(Un)just War?

My old boss and mentor Michael Walzer, who is without a doubt the leading figure in contemporary just war theory, has always drawn a conceptual distinction between the justice of a war and just conduct of war. Though they are distinct, the two tracks run together, and cannot come apart independently and without any reciprocal consequences. Thus, even a just war can be rendered unjust through unjust conduct. The torture memo and the disgrace at Abu Ghraib [not being as awful as Saddam Hussein is nothing to brag about, my warblogging comrades--ed.] have certainly stretched the justice of the Iraq war to near its breaking point, and for me marked the end of the WMD-independent moral case for war.

Presumably, the next edition of Just And Unjust Wars will include a new chapter or at least an addendum on the second Gulf War. Until it is released, however, we'll have to wait to see whether, according to Walzer, simple non-malicious incompetence on a large enough scale is enough to render a particular cause unjust. The answer will depend upon the extent to which intention and conduct are interrelated.

In the case of the Iraq war, something like this is going on: the regnant policymakers in the Bush administration were ideologically wedded to the idea that the external imposition of a certain form of government in Iraq was vitally necessary for the security of the United States; let's suspend judgement on whether or not that certain form of government was democracy (there is, after all, no determinate evidence one way or another). The crucial attribute of this ideological commitment is that it is not a position of x-type government fostering for the sake of x-type government (or human rights, or other similarly lofty abstract principles); rather, the ideology argues for x-type government instrumentally, as a means of furthering the national interest of the United States. (Hence, it's no mystery why the Bush administration coddles anti-democratic leaders elsewhere in the world). The ideology of neoconservatism, if I may use the term, at least as practiced in the Bush administration, is in fact a deeply cynical meta-Realpolitik, and not at all an instance of flawed but noble internationalist idealism.

In the internal conversation of the liberal hawks, among whose number I may be counted, there was certainly the intuition that the sort of people who populate the Bush administration, whether Kissingerian anti-democrats or neoconservatives trained in the sophistical defense of authoritarianism, were not to be entrusted with the promotion of democracy. Our calculation, ultimately, was that the ouster of Saddam Hussein was such a large net good that it justified gambling on the possibility of establishing a liberal state. But there were factors we didn't account for. They are (perhaps not exhaustively) as follows:

1. The hyper rationalism of Bush's policy makers. All empirical data---regardless of their apparent plausibility or verity---that cut against their bedrock premises were interpreted as evidence that the methodology by which such data was obtained had to be flawed; the possibility that the premises themselves might be flawed wasn't even perfunctorily considered.
2. The extent to which, once involved in the war, ideology continued to affect tactics. Point 2 is in a sense the post-war version of point 1. Since it was an unchallenged article of faith that American occupying forces would be embraced by the Iraqi population, and that the establishment of a new government would be straightforward and simple, there were absolutely no contingent plans in place to deal with the less-than-rosy scenarios that turned out to be the case. This strikes me as tactical and ideological incompetence, but not malice.
   
2a) A particular subspecies of this point is Donald "Best Defense Secretary Ever" Rumsfeld's string of odious miscalculations, from the necessary troop levels to the means by which the war would be paid for.
3. The extent to which even facile anti-war criticisms turned out to be right. When the opponents of the Iraq war claimed that it would be a diversion from the broader war against al-Qaeda and terrorism, no one could have anticipated thoroughness of the Bush administration's insouciance on nuclear proliferation and its pronounced inability even to suggest a coherent policy vis-a-vis states like Iran and North Korea.
4. The anti-democratic ideology of the Bush administration itself. This I think, is the most resonsantly damaging charge to be leveled, and the instance in which we liberal hawks were most decidedly in error by giving the administration the benefit of the doubt. The general principles to be adduced from the torture memo are that, according to the Bush administration, the exexcutive is above domestic and international law, the executive has inherently a fiat power by which all domestic and international obligations can be overridden, and, quite simply, the use of torture might be okay. It's as bad as Nixon.
5. The extent to which domestic electoral considerations have affected the crafting of policy in Iraq. If anything to do with Iraq is manifestly clear, it's that the status quo is untenable. Yet the status quo persists because to correct error would be to admit error, and to admit error would be to risk losing the election. Bush won't do it, or Rove won't let him, and the result is that the insurgency constantly gains ground, the probability of even having elections, let alone non-fraudulent ones, constantly diminishes, and Iraq inches closer towards multilateral civil war; all the while the Bush campaign mocks John Kerry for being a windsurfer. (Does that qualify as "dicking around," Christopher?)

Just wars and just causes are not self-sustaining, immutable metaphysical entities. Even the paradigm, indubitable cases of just wars can be rendered unjust through conduct, e.g., the possible world in which the entire German population was deliberately annihilated during World War II. The case I made for the Iraq war holds up still in virtue of the facts that were available at that time in 2003. But the justice of this cause has, finally, moved beyond its critical mass.