In the Gulf War, a considerable effort was made to avoid the direct attack on the civilian population of Iraq.  That effort appears to have been on the whole quite successful, a success made possible in part by the precision of the weapons employed to destroy targets proximate to the civilian population.  At the same time, there has been a substantial, and still growing, number of civilian deaths that are the indirect result of allied air strikes.  In bombing what were designated as military objectives, facilities were destroyed that also sustained civilian life.  The severe disabling of Iraq's electrical power grid, to cite perhaps the most prominent example, was undertaken to impede the enemy's communications.  It has also had the effect, however, of contributing to the undermining of the public health system--the electric grid forms a key part of that system, the disability of which has led to inadequate sanitation and, ultimately, to epidemics.

It may be and has been contended that these and similar effects of the bombing were beside the intention of the actors, even if they were in some measure foreseen, and that the death of and injury done to noncombatants did not constitute a means for achieving an otherwise legitimate military end.  Provided these requirements of bellum justum are satisfied, there remains only the requirement of proportionality--that the evil effects not outweigh the good effects--in order to give moral sanction to the air attacks on Iraq.  But the difficulties that have so often been raised in the past by bombing are in large measure also raised in the present case.  What is termed collateral effects may reach a point at which it becomes very difficult to consider these effects as being beside the intention of the actors.  Inevitably, there is a point where one must deduce intent from effects or consequences, the determination of that point being, in turn, dependent largely on quantitative considerations.  In practice, then, whether the death and injury done to the innocent is intended or is beside the intention of the actor is determined by the scope of this death and injury.  And even though there are no objective criteria for determining how much death and injury may be done to the innocent while still preserving the right intention, this cannot affect the judgment that there are such criteria, however difficult and uncertain their delineation.  Whether these criteria were breached in the recent war is an issue that is yet to be persuasively addressed.  

The view has nevertheless arisen that the advent of precision-guided weapons has alleviated the hitherto almost intractable issues attending efforts to reconcile the principle of discrimination with the conduct of modern warfare.  On this view, the war against Iraq foreshadows a time when the use of such weapons may no longer result in collateral damage as understood in the past.  For the destruction of military objectives may then be undertaken without any concurrent death or injury to the civilian population.  Even so, this would not of necessity mean that the requirement of discrimination had been satisfied; it might only mean that the time and manner in which noncombatants were put at mortal risk had changed.  As the Gulf War has demonstrated, provided only that military objectives are given a sufficiently broad definition, the immunity belligerents are obliged to afford noncombatants may be threatened quite as gravely as it was in earlier wars of this century.  The conclusion seems unavoidable that discrimination in war will continue to depend less on the precision of weapons, or, for that matter, on the care with which they are employed against military objectives, than on the scope and meaning that is given to military necessity (and hence to the determination of what constitutes a legitimate military objective).  If this conclusion has merit, it suggests that rather than enabling belligerents to wage clearly discriminate warfare, the principal significance of precision-guided weapons might instead be to permit belligerents to wage indiscriminate warfare while persuading themselves that they are acting in a highly discriminate manner.  The Gulf War indicated that this delusion may already have taken a firm hold.

In the end, the justice of the Gulf War must turn on the test of proportionality--the critical test for judging virtually every major aspect of the war, including whether the requirement of discrimination was met.  If the conduct of the war is considered to have satisfied the requirement of discrimination, it did so largely because it presumably met the requirement of proportionality as well.  It is because the evil represented by the death and injury of noncombatants is not deemed disproportionate to the good otherwise served by the war that the criterion of discrimination is satisfied.

The principle requiring that the values preserved through force must be proportionate to the values sacrificed through force is admittedly little more than a counsel of prudence.  It expresses the common sense of the matter.  When war becomes disproportionately destructive to the good it serves, it must be condemned.  Judgments of proportionality, and its converse, are necessarily very rough and subject to considerable uncertainty.  Still, such judgments are indispensable if war is to be regarded as a rational and moral activity.  They express what may be termed the "logic of justification" and it is quite difficult to imagine how meaningful moral discourse about war could be undertaken without them.

In the conduct of the Gulf War, the issue of proportionality also arose as a result of the huge disparity in combatant casualties suffered by the respective sides.  Is proportionality violated when a belligerent takes a multitude of the enemy's lives in order to save, or simply not to put at risk, a few of his own?  That this was done in the recent war is clear.  In doing so, military commanders invoked the plea of military necessity as justification for their actions.  Given the indeterminate character of military necessity, the appeal to it often appeared plausible.  Even so, there are surely limits, ill-defined though they may be, to the number of enemy lives that may justifiably be taken to avoid risking however small a number of one's own.  At some point, the imperious claims of military necessity must yield to the claims of humanity.  This is so even if it is conceded--a concession the moralist may make only at his peril--that although human lives are human lives, some lives are still more important than others.  That point, it would seem, is above all dependent on quantitative considerations.

Was that point exceeded in the Gulf War?  The question has only seldom been raised.  When it has, more often than not the response has been to shift the meaning of military necessity from its narrower operational sense to its broader political-strategic sense.  In the latter sense, military necessity is above all a function of the objectives sought in war, of the purposes or ends for which a war is fought, rather than simply the immediate requirements of military operations (as well as the means available to belligerents for effectively carrying out these operations).  Partiality in the conduct of war is accordingly transformed into impartiality when judged by the purposes or ends of war.  Once these purposes are endowed with great enough significance, military necessity may serve to justify behavior that is very one-sided in its human consequences.

In the Gulf War, what moral embarrassment was felt at the disproportion in casualties suffered by the respective sides was partially relieved by invoking the larger ends of the war.  Yet it was not so much the ends of the war that thus strained the principle of proportionality to a breaking point as it was the manner in which the nation and its government were determined from the outset to wage war.  That manner would likely have found the expression it did whatever the purposes given the war, for it reflected the conditions upon which public support rested.

The melancholy conclusion to which these considerations lead is not that the manner in which the war was waged made it an unjust war--there is no pretension here of weighing the evil effect of the war against the good preserved or restored by the war, beginning with Kuwait's independence as a sovereign state--but that its conduct resulted in deplorable consequences which cannot be simply shrugged off as the unfortunate though inevitable by-product of war.  These consequences must be seen as seriously tainting the conduct of the war.  Nor can it be said, in mitigation, that they were unforeseen and unintended.  Quite the contrary, to an extent greater than most wars, the consequences of this war were foreseen and intended.  Determined not to have more than the most modest casualties, intent on not getting into a quagmire, enjoying great technological advantages, and persuaded that the adversary was essentially unredeemable, the only reasonable expectation was that the kind of war would be waged that was in fact waged.  Those who led the nation into war left little doubt on this score by the statements they made prior to the war's outbreak.  The generals presiding over the strategy and conduct of the war warned Baghdad that a war, once begun, would be waged with "unprecedented ferocity" and would result in the "killing" of the Iraqi army.  The president broadened the warning to the people of Iraq for whom war, he declared, would be a "calamity."  And so it proved to be.

Essay Types: Essay