How Not To Write About Michael Walzer

I was at the Dissent office when Michael Walzer was (politely) vivisecting George Scialabba in print. Now Scialabba has apparently licked his wounds and is eager to get back into the fray. Titling his idiotic review of Arguing About War "Dissent or Assent?" [take a fucking guess how many times we Dissentniks have heard that one--ed.], Scialabba proceeds to offer a criticism of just war theory as bitchy as it is unserious, and lays out an alternative proposal that would amount to a complete renunciation of global moral responsibility.

Here's Scialabba's basically complete sketch of the rules for determining a legitimate (let's not say "just") casus belli:

The UN Charter is the supreme law of the United States and of most or all other countries who have signed it. It is a pledge to renounce the use of force except as authorized by the Security Council. It does not include a provision releasing states from this pledge whenever they decide that other states aren't living up to it. So a law-abiding state may not, since 1945, make a determination--whether based on just-war theory, on its views about its "national interest" or on anything else--to use force (except in an emergency, very narrowly defined in Article 51).

This is rather like a drawing in Highlights for Kids in which precocious youngsters are asked to identify as many mistakes as they can spot. I'll do my best. The UN Charter, for starters, is not a law at all let alone the "supreme law of the United States." Note, by the way, that Scialabba is indubitably certain that the UN Charter governs the United States, but leaves open the possibility that other signatory nations to the UN Charter might be exempt from its supremacy. Unless Scialabba believes in an ad hoc principle in international law whereby the United States qua United States has legal obligations different from those of the rest of the world [he might--ed.], then this is simply incoherent.

States facing existential threats are most certainly within their rights to use force (Scialabba later notes this by reference to a crisis "very narrowly defined" in Article 51). Are states not within their rights to prevent and stop genocide when doing so is clearly within their means? Perhaps Scialabba would argue that they are not. But I wonder how well anyone could sleep at night who remained steadfast in the view that the right, and indeed legal thing to do---if, say, China vetoed a Security Council resolution authorizing force to stop the genocide in Darfur---would be to act as spectators to slaughter.

It was Kant among moral theorists who placed such extraordinary emphasis on the distinction between doing and allowing to happen. At the very least, Scialabba's krazy Kantianism should serve as a heuristic reminder that ethics totally divorced from practical consideration is a way of seceding from reality.

I get burned out criticizing fools like Scialabba at any length, but I want to close with this observation. Channeling Noam Chomsky (actually, quoting him directly), Scialabba writes:

Twenty-five years ago, in a review of Just and Unjust Wars, Noam Chomsky tellingly observed that Walzer all too often "assigns a special status to Israel and reconstructs the moral world accordingly." Sadly, Walzer has not profited from that comradely criticism.

One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens, as many wise and learned scholars before me have said, and this attempted put-down of Chomsky's is a profound if unintentional admission. Of whom other than the Chomskyites could it be quite so truly said that they "assign a special status to Israel and reconstruct the moral world accordingly."?