Twenty-five years ago, when I started to teach at the University of Denver, Condoleeza Rice took 5 seminars with me, including “Just and Unjust Wars.” Josef Korbel (Madeleine Albright’s father) and I also supervised her year long independent project on “Music and Politics in the Soviet Union.” Rice was a thoughtful and bold student whom it was a privilege to teach.
As National Security Advisor today, Condoleezza Rice has spoken forcefully
for discarding “outmoded” Cold War doctrines. She defended President Bush’s scrapping
of the anti-ballistic missile treaty on the grounds that Russia is no longer the
enemy of the United States. Abandoning that treaty occasions no direct harm to
either Russians or Americans.
President Bush’s new First Strike doctrine similarly attempts to abandon an older approach. But here, the National Security Advisor and the President have lost their way. The main crime of war is aggression. It is initiating a deliberate armed attack against another state, putting its people “to the sword.” Over more than 2000 years, diverse cultures - ancient Greek, Christian, Jewish, Islamic - have rightly named aggression as the central crime of war. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter enshrines self-defense against aggression in international law.
In The New York Times (Sept. 22, 2002), Professor Bruce Ackerman noted that through signing the founding documents of the United Nations, the United States has also legally outlawed aggression as the highest law of the land. But to bar aggression – mass murder by the state – is no more controversial than to prohibit murder. Professor Ackerman spoke of Bush’s error as only one of illegal “unilateralism,” a violation of “two generations” of international law to which the U.S. is signatory. More deeply, however, the central moral judgment, made historically by every culture, about the horrors of war underlies these treaties.
Secretary of State Powell has defended a supposed American right to “take out” Saddam Hussain as part of a Presidential repertoire of tools: a “preemptive war.” But the idea of a preemptive war is to head off the immediate threat of armed aggression. No showing of immediacy – or, for that matter, significant new evidence – has been introduced by the Bush administration or British Prime Minister Blair.
If President Hussain threatened a nuclear attack on Tel Aviv next week, if he had provided Al Qaeda with nuclear or chemical weapons to be involved in a likely attack on Los Angeles this November, the Bush administration would still have show that wiping out Baghdad – taking several hundred thousand innocent lives - would be an effective measure of prevention. For that vast taking of life would be a crime equivalent to the horror it supposedly seeks to prevent. Nonetheless, with significant evidence and serious argument, a preemptive strike – despite its horrors - could potentially be justified as self-defense.
Now, Saddam Hussain is a brutal dictator. He has used chemical and biological weapons, supplied to him by the United States and with US officials turning a blind eye, in attacking Iran and the Kurds. But for more than a decade, defeated Iraq has been subjected to famine and impoverishment through UN boycott and a purging of weapons through UN inspections. Neither evidence nor plausible argument exists that Hussain is an immediate danger to the United States.
Under the first President Bush, the United States created an international coalition to reverse Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait. But the second President Bush proposes – international coalition or not – to wage aggression against Iraq.
Further, the Bush doctrine announces this aggression as prelude to a potentially unending string of future aggressions. Bush policy has already licensed the Russian oppression of Chechnya which the US government used to condemn. It might “justify” Indian invasion of Pakistan, or the opposite. It destroys the most significant moral as well as legal feature of international law.
This past weekend in London several hundred thousand people demonstrated against the Bush war in Iraq. In Italy, 50,000, in Washington, 20,000, in Denver, 3,000…But even internationally, many people have not yet found the right name for their unease at the war. When they realize that aggression, and not unilateralism, is that name, this movement will become much more massive. Yet there is still time for the Bush administration to alter its relentless plans for belligerence, to renew serious weapons inspections in Iraq, to proceed with a decent respect for international law and “the opinion of [hu]mankind”…
As the overwhelming military power in the world, the Bush administration proposes a doctrine of unending aggression against sovereign states and arrogant military superiority. This policy will not make any of us feel more secure getting on an airplane or walking near a public building…Worse yet, we will have on our hands the blood of large numbers of innocents.
Alan Gilbert is a democratic theorist, and author, most recently, of Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy? (Princeton University Press, 1999). He is John Evans Professor of International Studies at the University of Denver.
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