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.Those opponents of the Gulf War who advocated aprolonged blockade of Iraq seem not to have realized that whatthey were advocating was a radically indiscriminate act of war,with predictably harsh consequences.Just war theory as I under-stand it would require that food and medical supplies be letthrough but in that case it is unlikely that the blockade wouldserve its purpose.In any case, we have no reason to think thatjudgments of this sort are any more difficult now than they werehundreds or thousands of years ago.There never was a golden ageof warfare when just war categories were easy to apply and there-fore regularly applied.If anything, modern technology makes itpossible to fight with greater discrimination now than in the past,if there is a political will to do so.Nonetheless, it is possible to construe the theory so that dis-crimination between military and civilian targets becomes ir-relevant.And then, as we will see, another distinction is alsolost: between just war theory and pacifism.Some of the bishops,though still formally committed to the just war, seem to me tohave moved in this direction.The move involves a new stressupon two maxims of the theory: first, that war must be a   last re-sort,  and second, that its anticipated costs to soldiers and civil-ians alike must not be disproportionate to (greater than) thevalue of its ends.I do not think that either maxim helps usmuch in making the moral distinctions that we need to make.And the Gulf War provides a useful illustration of the inadequacyof the two.I will begin with the sequence of events.Iraq invaded Kuwaitin early August 1990; Kuwaiti resistance was brief and ineffec-tive, and the country was occupied in a matter of days.That was86J U S T I C E A ND I NJ U S T I C E I N T H E GU L F WA Rthe beginning, and might have been the end, of the war.Thereensued a brief flurry of diplomatic activity, against a backgroundof American mobilization and the arrival of U.S.troops in SaudiArabia.The diplomacy produced an economic blockade of Iraq,sanctioned by the United Nations and militarily enforced bya coalition of states led and dominated by the United States.Though the blockade required very little military enforcement, itwas technically and practically an act of war.But the commonperception during those months (August 1990 January 1991)was that the Gulf was at peace, while the coalition tried to reversethe Iraqi aggression without violence and debated, in slow mo-tion and cold blood, whether or not to begin the war.It was in thecontext of this debate that the question of   last resort  was posed.Had the Kuwaiti army, against all the odds, succeeded in hold-ing off the invaders for a few weeks or months, the questionwould never have arisen.War would have been the first resort ofthe Kuwaitis, acceptably so given the immediacy and violence ofthe invasion, and any allied or friendly state could legitimatelyhave joined in their defense.The failure of the resistance openeda kind of temporal and moral hiatus during which it was possibleto seek alternative resolutions of the conflict.The blockade wasmerely one of many alternatives, which included United Nationscondemnation of Iraq, its diplomatic and political isolation, vari-ous degrees of economic sanction, and a negotiated settlementinvolving small or large concessions to the aggressor.The actualblockade might have taken different forms, adapted to differentends; the coalition might, for example, have aimed at the con-tainment rather than the reversal of Iraqi aggression.I assume that it was morally obligatory to canvass these possi-bilities and to weigh their likely consequences.But it is hard to see87C A S E Show it could have been obligatory to adopt one of them, or asequence of them, simply so that war would be a   last resort.  Ifthe allies, weighing the consequences of the alternatives, one ofwhich was the continued occupation of Kuwait, had decided onan early (September, say) ultimatum withdraw or face a coun-terattack the decision would not have been unjust.They wouldhave had to allow a decent interval for the withdrawal to be con-sidered and its modalities negotiated, and we would want someassurance that they had good reasons to think that other strat-egies would not work or would work only at great cost to thepeople of Kuwait.Given the interval and the reasons, the doc-trine of   last resort  doesn t seem to play any important role here.Taken literally, which is exactly the way many people took itduring the months of the blockade,   last resort  would make warmorally impossible.For we can never reach lastness, or we cannever know that we have reached it.There is always somethingelse to do: another diplomatic note, another United Nations res-olution, another meeting.Once something like a blockade is inplace, it is always possible to wait a little longer and hope for thesuccess of (what looks like but isn t quite) nonviolence.Assum-ing, however, that war was justified in the first instance, at themoment of the invasion, then it is justifiable at any subsequentpoint when its costs and benefits seem on balance better thanthose of the available alternatives.But sending troops into battle commonly brings with it somany unanticipated costs that it has come to represent a moralthreshold: political leaders must cross this threshold only withgreat reluctance and trepidation.This is the truth contained inthe   last resort  maxim.If there are potentially effective ways ofavoiding actual fighting while still confronting the aggressor,88J U S T I C E A ND I NJ U S T I C E I N T H E GU L F WA Rthey should be tried.In the hiatus months of the Gulf crisis, itseems to me that they were tried.The combination of economicblockade, military threat, and diplomatic deadline was a strategyplausibly designed to bring about an Iraqi withdrawal.Politicsand war commonly work on timetables of this sort.Our blockadeof Iraq was not a conventional siege, to be maintained until massstarvation forced Saddam Hussein s surrender.We were com-mitted and, as I have already said, should have been committedto let food and medical supplies through before people starteddying in the streets though many people would have died any-way from the longer-term effects of malnutrition and disease.The blockade was aimed above all at Iraq s military-industrialcapacity.But Saddam could have let this capacity run down over aperiod of months or even years, so long as he was sure that hewouldn t be attacked [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]