Boston Richard Falk (a friend whom I admire and respect for his long advocacy of peace and justice) has said this is “the first truly just war since World War II.” I have puzzled over this. How can a war be “truly just” that involves the daily killing of civilians; that is terrorizing the people of Afghanistan, causing hundreds of thousands to leave their homes to escape the bombs; that has little chance of finding those who planned the September 11 attacks (and even if found, no chance that this would stop terrorism); and that can only multiply the ranks of people who are angry at this country, from whose ranks terrorists are born? The stories of the effects of our bombing are beginning to come through, in bits and pieces: the wounded children arriving across the border, one barely two months old, swathed in bloody bandages; the Red Cross warehouses bombed, the use of deadly cluster bombs, a small mountain village bombed and entire families wiped out. That is only a few weeks into the bombing, The “war against terrorism” has become a war against innocent men, women and children, who are in no way responsible for the terrorist attack on New York. I believe the supporters of the war have confused a just cause with a just war. A cause may be just–like ending terrorism. But it does not follow that going to war on behalf of that cause, with the inevitable mayhem that follows, is just. Falk talks of “limited military action.” But the momentum of war rides roughshod over limits. Atrocities are explained by the deceptive language of “accident,” “military targets,” “collateral damage.” Killing innocent people in war is not an “accident.” It is an inevitability. The moral equation in Afghanistan is clear. Civilian casualties are certain. The outcome is uncertain. Use the money allotted our huge military machine to combat starvation and disease around the world. One-third of our military budget would provide water and sanitation facilities for the billion people worldwide who have none. Let us be a more modest nation. The modest nations of the world don’t face the threat of terrorism. Let us pull back from being a military superpower and become a humanitarian superpower. We, and everyone else, will then be more secure.HOWARD ZINN
New York City Here is bad news indeed: Our friend Richard Falk, speaker of truth to power, guru to activists, antiestablishmentarian par excellence, has cloned himself. We now have the old Falk, on October 8 calling for “A Just Response” in his prophetic voice and on October 29 the new Falk “Defining a Just War” in tones of neorealism. Those who took to heart the old Falk’s admonition that this is “above all, a war without military solutions” are now chastised by the new Falk for being “irrelevant to meeting the central challenge of restoring some sense of security among our citizenry.” The old Falk told us that “reliance on the rule of law,” possibly through a due process trial under UN authority, “would be a major step in seeking to make the struggle against terrorism enjoy the genuine support of the entire organized international community.” The new Falk says this is pie in the sky, since the United States would never agree to such a trial, which in any case would only offer Osama bin Laden an opportunity to have himself declared a bona fide legal martyr. The old Falk declares “the only way to win this ‘war’ (if war it is)…is with a credible commitment to the global promotion of social justice.” Correction from the new Falk: “Global suffering and injustice…cannot be addressed so long as this movement of global terrorism is at large.” True enough, both the old and the new Falk call for limited ends and means. But, given the precedents of US behavior in Central America, Serbia and Iraq, how realistic is that demand? We are bombing a country in which there was nothing left to bomb to begin with. In dealing with this greatest of contemporary crimes against humanity, a judicious use of force cannot be ruled out altogether. But perhaps the real realist is Donald Rumsfeld, who warns that bin Laden may never be found and that the Taliban are not about to roll over and play dead. We can all hope that this prediction will turn out to be wrong. In the meantime what is needed is better security, better intelligence, better communication and that commitment to global justice, both criminal and social. Easier said than done, but absolutely necessary. Will the old Falk please stand up? We need you, Richard! PETER WEISS
Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy
New York City; Pittsburgh Richard Falk’s endorsement of a limited war is fraught with immeasurable harm. Thousands of refugees are fleeing daily; the United Nations is predicting the death of 100,000 children; and hate for Americans is pouring into the streets of Pakistan, Indonesia and other Muslim countries. We are creating the terrorists that will visit terror upon our children. Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal, may be destabilized. Innocents have been killed, and we may face a fractionalized and warfaring post-Taliban Afghanistan. There was another way. Treat the attacks on September 11 as a crime against humanity (mass or systematic killing of civilians), establish a UN tribunal, extradite or, if that fails, capture the suspects with a UN force and try them. The US experience with Libya demonstrates both the perils of a military response and the possibilities for international justice. US officials believed that the 1986 bombing of Libya led to the downing of Pan Am 103 and that more bombing would lead to a spiraling cycle of violence. The United States turned to the UN, which applied international pressure; eventually the Libyans extradited the suspects for trial. The objections Falk makes to such a tribunal revolve primarily around his belief that Washington would not accept such a court, in part because the court might not be authorized to give the death penalty. But since when should respected international legal experts like Falk, who generally favor peaceful resolutions of conflicts, shy away from arguing what is right simply because they believe the United States will not listen? Falk says that it is “unreasonable to expect the US government to rely on the UN to fulfill its defensive needs.” But Falk did not think that it was unreasonable for the Kuwaitis to rely on the UN to counteract Iraqi aggression in 1990. Is Falk bowing to US exceptionalism–the UN is good for everybody else, but not for the only superpower? It is remarkable that Falk, while recognizing that the global role of the United States has given rise to widespread resentment that fuels the terrorist impulse, claims that this role “cannot be addressed so long as this movement of global terrorism is at large.” But it is now that we must examine this resentment: our tilt in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the use of the Persian Gulf as a US base and support for corrupt, authoritarian regimes. We must do so not to “give in to terrorists” but to promote a more just and peaceful world and to enhance our long-term security. To do so only when the global terrorist movement is no longer “at large” insures that such an examination will never occur. Developing a proper response to terrorism is incredibly difficult, and no short-term solution seems particularly attractive. Only by taking the road toward creating a more equal, democratic and just world can we create conditions of security from terrorism for our children. Bombing Afghanistan–whatever the justness of the cause–seems the wrong way to start down that path.MICHAEL RATNER, JULES LOBEL
Center for Constitutional Rights
FALK REPLIESPrinceton, N.J. With each passing day, my assessment shifts to reach the conclusion that the United States is waging an unjust war in Afghanistan, and it is doing so in a manner that is likely to have severe blowback consequences. I was misled by the language of George W. Bush, Colin Powell and others, which seemed at the time to exhibit an understanding that this was a drastically different kind of war that required a core reliance on nonmilitary approaches. I accepted the claim that it was necessary to make some selective use of force so as to displace the Taliban and to disable to the extent possible the Al Qaeda network. I also proceeded from the premise that the threat posed was of an unprecedented magnitude, both because it successfully used weapons of mass destruction against US civilian society in a gruesome manner that revealed its pervasive vulnerability, and because there was every likelihood of efforts to repeat the attack in even more devastating forms in the future. Particularly in response to Howard Zinn, with whom I cannot imagine ever disagreeing on any core issue, my initial reference to the Afghanistan war as a just war was a technical matter. It qualified as a just war because the scope of the military response seemed initially to be proportional to the gravity of the attack and the continuing threat of further attacks, but as with World War II, the prospect of significant civilian casualties is consistent with such a conclusion, and an inevitable effect of any recourse to war, however justified the cause. War, even as a necessary instrument to restore security, is inherently cruel in its effects on innocent civilians, creating an urgent moral imperative that we work for nonviolent forms of global governance and conflict resolution. Tragically, we are not there yet and must adopt the least bad available alternative, which I had hoped (falsely, it turns out) would be a limited war with primary reliance on nonmilitary solutions. And, of course, I am ready to join Zinn and others in seeking to make our country “a humanitarian superpower,” but in the meantime nothing is possible until the Al Qaeda sword dangling above our collective existence is removed. To clarify, the September 11 attack was a criminal, warlike assault on this country that engaged the right of self-defense under international law and morality. How to exercise this right under such unprecedented circumstances, in which the main adversary is a nonstate actor, challenged the imagination to combine effectiveness with legitimacy. I can now say, as some of my critics perceived from the outset, that our government seems incapable of learning from its past moral and political disasters, especially the excessive reliance on bombing to achieve political goals. Any satisfactory US recourse to war had to make every reasonable effort to minimize civilian casualties. The use of cluster bombs, the reliance on B-52 carpet-bombing, the failure to adapt tactics in light of targeting errors, combine to produce disastrous results from a moral, legal and political perspective. The political impact of relying on indiscriminate and cruel high-tech military tactics while shielding one’s own forces from serious risk of casualty confirms the worst images of the US role in the world, especially in the Islamic portions of the Third World. The predictable result is to inflame anti-Americanism around the world and to sow seeds of doubt and despair among our like-minded European allies. But having acknowledged this much does not imply an acceptance of several lines of criticism. I can assure Peter Weiss that my values and worldview did not shift in a matter of a couple of weeks but that the nature of the challenge required a response that had some reasonable prospect of being effective. We must start with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be, although we should act to make our hopes and dreams come true. The nonstate, multistate locus of this terrorist adversary does not fit the existing structures of law and authority. In dealing with warlike attacks on major countries, the UN is not entrusted with either the capabilities or the mandate to fashion a response. International society is still based on a self-help system as far as major states are concerned, a fact acknowledged by the veto power given to the permanent members of the Security Council. Where should we go from here? I agree very much with Mansour Farhang that the removal of the Taliban is an independently beneficial goal, especially for the Afghan people, and should have been stressed by the US government. Ample justification for “humanitarian intervention” exists, but its humanitarian character is lost if the means relied upon abandon the constraints of law and morality and do not exhibit a credible commitment to the protection of the Afghan people. Such a commitment requires interveners to take casualty risks to the extent needed to avoid killing large numbers of civilians and damaging their social infrastructure. If the tactics contradict the mission, as now seems the case in Afghanistan, the case for humanitarian intervention is undermined. Is it “ludicrous,” as Robert Merrill suggests, to label the September 11 attacks as “apocalyptic terrorism”? I think not. Some have tried other labels to express their distinctiveness: Michael Ignatieff has referred to “nihilistic terrorism” and others to “megaterrorism.” I think “apocalyptic” captures best the horizons of destructive violence and purifying religious salvation that animate Osama bin Laden and his followers. The point is to find language that distinguishes these attacks from prior instances of terrorism associated with ongoing conflicts over national self-determination. I have read the utterances of bin Laden, and they express an unmistakable genocidal intention, backed up by fanatical views and practices. The presence of US forces near Islam’s holiest sites may have pushed bin Laden over the edge, but the whole tenor of Al Qaeda, its attitude toward the totality of “Crusaders,” “Jews” and “Americans,” and its training programs and tactics suggests a commitment to intercivilizational warfare. To understand such operations as preparing the ground for negotiations I find implausible. Besides, it is not a breach of any fundamental code for a government, as in Saudi Arabia, to seek a foreign military presence to safeguard its security. We may not like the regime in Riyadh, but it is playing by the international rules of the game of world politics. We find ourselves trapped between a severe continuing threat to our security and a government that is acting in such a way as to aggravate that threat. At the same time, it is not obvious what can and should be done. It is clear that the roots of terrorism are intermingled with unjust policies, and that these should be abandoned as early as possible for both pragmatic and intrinsic reasons. Pushing for a viable Palestinian state is now finally surfacing on the Western agenda in an explicit manner. Recognizing the need to address poverty, oppression and corruption in the Islamic world is clearly essential if the underlying needs of human security are to be satisfied. Even more ambitious, it should be part of the progressive discourse to propose the sort of UN–and accompanying arrangements like independent peacekeeping and enforcement capabilities, an international criminal court and police force–that is needed to overcome the deficiencies of a self-help system of world order that treats war as the ultimate arbiter. To reach these results, however, will require that the militarist political culture here at home be challenged and transformed. These undertakings are urgent, but they cannot be undertaken successfully in the midst of the atmosphere of fear and foreboding that currently grips the vast majority of Americans, a mood accentuated by the anthrax ordeal. Finally, the disorienting character of September 11 underscores the relevance of discussion and debate. The Nation has been an admirable forum for the expression of diverse views, and I hope that this role will be maintained. I would also hope that all of us who take part exhibit the realization that we would benefit from listening to those with whom we disagree, and that no one has any plausible basis for certitude or condescension.RICHARD FALK
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