Kevin Kiley
Granite Bay High School
Granite Bay, California
Coordinator: Ms. Rita Prichard

War causes harm; of this there is no doubt. In determining the justification of war, the question hence becomes: when is it justified to cause harm? The only morally acceptable answer is that causing harm is justified if it prevents further harm. Thus, in general terms, the only justifiable reason to go to war is to minimize harm—if war is the lesser of two evils.

Underlying the issue of just and unjust war is the concept of sovereignty, for declaring war on a nation is a direct violation of its right to self-government. This adds another element to the harms calculation involved in justifying war. Even the United Nations accepts the view that sovereignty has inherent value, stating in a 1970 declaration, "Every state has an inalienable right to choose its political, economic, social, and cultural system, without interference in any form by another state."¹ Waging war against a sovereign nation constitutes a direct violation of this "inalienable right."

In determining what circumstances justify violating a nation's sovereignty, the laws governing the conduct of individuals provide a useful analogy. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill establishes the Harm Principle, a criterion for when it is justified to violate an individual's sovereignty. Mill writes, "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."² Mill's aphorism can be taken a step further; it applies with equal force to sovereign nations. Just as an individual's freedom must be restricted if it harms other individuals, so too must a nation's freedom be restricted if it harms other nations. This principle, however, does not simply govern the relationship between two warring nations, for today's complex world is one of political interdependence. With the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United Nations, the Arab League, and other alliances, even those wars that are relatively limited in scope are becoming "world wars." Therefore, in applying the Harm Principal to the realm of nation states, any just war standard must specify what circumstances justify intervention by an international coalition. International intervention in Kuwait and Kosovo illustrate the success and failure of meeting just war criteria.

In 1990, Iraq sent shockwaves around the world by invading Kuwait, its small but wealthy neighbor. Within twelve hours of the invasion, "all of Kuwait . . . was under Iraqi control."³ Following Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's overwhelming victory, the resolve of U.S. President George Bush quickly became apparent; he immediately declared that the invasion "will not stand," that "no nation should rape, pillage, and brutalize its neighbor."⁴ In the five months between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the dropping of the first U.S. bomb, Bush tried to convince the American people, along with the international community, that intervention was a moral responsibility.

At the time of the invasion, the depth of Hussein's motives was unclear. Was he a power-hungry despot—another Hitler—or was he simply trying to claim the territory he felt was rightfully his? Would he stop with Kuwait, or did he have his sights set on hegemony in the Middle East? While Hussein's territorial ambitions remained uncertain, there were more tangible consequences of appeasing Iraq's territorial gains. Western oil interests in the region—and the fate of these interests if Hussein were to gain control of OPEC—were undoubtedly a weight on the scale. Moreover, beyond these utilitarian considerations, the fact remained that Kuwait's sovereignty had been violated, and according to the Harm Principal, a military response was justified on this basis alone.

When the war was over, the stated objectives of the United States and its allies had been achieved: "Kuwait was liberated, Saudi sovereignty assured, Persian Gulf oil secure."⁵ Given these results, the ejection of Iraq from Kuwait was a just end, but a just end is only half of the just war equation. For a war to be justified, the benefits must outweigh the costs-the harm of action must be less than the harm of inaction. Whether this was possible in the Persian Gulf was a matter of much speculation. As with any war, the loss of American lives was a foremost concern. This concern led some—including General Colin Powell—to suggest that economic sanctions might be a viable alternative to war. In late 1990, however, it became increasingly clear that sanctions would do little more than starve the Iraqi people. According to a PBS Frontline report, "the CIA was telling President Bush it could take years for sanctions to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait."⁶ Furthermore, it also became clear that U.S. technology could enable the U.S. to fight a relatively painless war, one with few U.S. lives lost and minimal civilian casualties. And this optimistic outlook became a reality, as the United States and its allies waged one of the most flawless military campaigns in history. Thus, the Gulf War meets the criteria of a just war: It achieved a just end and minimized harms.

While the involvement of the United States in the Gulf War demonstrates the validity of Mill's Harm Principle as a justification for war, a key distinction must be made between the principle's applicability on an individual level and on a national level. The constituent parts of an individual have no inherent worth; it is only the individual himself that is of value. Nations, conversely, are comprised of individuals. Thus, the constituent parts of the nation are themselves valuable. While Mill holds that morality demands the individual be completely sovereign in his sphere—that no just law could prevent him from harming himself—this is not the case with nation states. For if the actions of a government cause harm to its citizens, the sovereignty of the nation and the sovereignty of the individuals conflict. And on this basis, a case can be made for humanitarian war—military intervention that prevents a nation from harming its citizens, its constituent parts.

In the last decade, the most vivid example of humanitarian intervention was the crisis in Kosovo, a "paradigmatic instance of humanitarian intervention in the very name of humanity itself."⁷ There was little doubt, in 1999, that Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing of Albanians constituted a crime against humanity. While Milosevic's actions did not directly harm another sovereign nation, they so egregiously harmed his own people—so "shocked the conscience of mankind"⁸—that international action was deemed necessary. The end of saving Albanian lives was certainly justified. In fact, the moral responsibility espoused by U.S. President Bill Clinton was perhaps even greater than that Bush spoke of in 1990. And aside from war, there existed no viable option for fulfilling this responsibility. The means employed by the Clinton administration and NATO, however, were inconsistent with just war principles.

The history of the Kosovo crisis is replete with "collateral damage" to civilians. According to Jean Elshtain, "once we had exhausted the obvious military targets, we degraded the infrastructure on which civilian life depends."⁹ Largely as a result of high altitude bombing by NATO forces, 2,000 civilians were killed and 6,000 wounded, and countless others would suffer and die because of infrastructure destruction.¹⁰ This "collateral damage" can be directly attributed to the "no-cost" strategy employed by NATO troops, which refused to risk American and European lives even as the welfare of the Serbian people hung in the balance. In the end, this overemphasis on some lives and devaluation of others undermined the moral authority of NATO's crusade. In "War and Sacrifice in Kosovo," Paul W. Kahn sums up this contradiction well when he writes of the "incompatibility between the morality of the ends, which are universal, and the morality of the means, which seem to privilege a particular community."¹¹

The incompatibility Kahn speaks of not only caused unnecessary civilian casualties, but also expedited the very atrocities NATO forces had entered Kosovo to prevent. According to Elshtain, NATO attacked Milosevic to halt ethnic cleansing, but "our means speeded up the process, as the opening sorties in the bombing campaign gave Milosveic the excuse he needed to declare martial law and move rapidly in order to complete what he had already begun."¹² As a tragic consequence, an estimated 20,000 Kosovo Albanians were murdered by Serbs in the first eleven weeks of bombing, compared with some 2,500 people that had died before the bombing campaign.¹³ Thus, the just end NATO entered Kosovo to achieve was not merely tainted, but completely undercut by unjust means.

The United States' crusade to liberate Kuwait, along with NATO's effort to free the Albanians from the torturous grip of Milosevic, demonstrate two separate, but equally justifiable criteria for waging war. In the case of Kuwait, the Harm Principal criterion was met, as one sovereign nation had harmed another, and a successful war minimized costs. But in the case of Kosovo, a righteous cause was rendered unjust by immoral means. The conflicts in Kuwait and Kosovo demonstrate two situations in which sovereignty can be justifiably violated and illustrate the necessity of just means in waging war.

Notes

1. United Nations General Assembly, Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States.

2. Mill, On Liberty, 9.

3. Smith, George Bush's War, 13.

4. Smith, George Bush's War, 6.

5. Atkinson, Crusade, 4.

6. Frontline transcript.

7. Elshtain, "Just War and Humanitarian Intervention."

8. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars.

9. Elshtain, "Just War."

10. Elshtain, "Just War."

11. Kahn, "War and Sacrifice in Kosovo."

12. Elshtain, "Just War."

13. Elshtain, "Just War."

Bibliography

Works Cited

Atkinson, Rick. Crusade. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1869.

Smith, Jean Edwards. George Bush's War. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992.

United Nations General Assembly. Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty. Resolution 2131(XX), New York, 1965.

Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Internet Sources

Elshtain, Jean. "Just War and Humanitarian Intervention," Ideas for the National Humanities Center. www.nhc.rtp.nc.us:8080/ideasv82/elshtain.pdf. December 29, 2002.

Frontline transcript. www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_a.html. December 28, 2002.

Kahn, Paul. "War and Sacrifice in Kosovo." Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. www.puaf.umd.edu/IPPP/spring_summer99/kosovo.htm. December 29, 2002.