"I am a pacifist. I reached this conclusion as a result of a long experience of living and trying to raise a family in a war-torn society (Lebanon), and after much study of strategic affairs. Since 1986 or so, I have been a member of the prestigious, London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. I joined the IISS precisely so I could keep up with latest developments in the thinking of strategic and military planners.

Perhaps only a small proportion of the people with the experience of war and war planning that I have end up being pacifists. But everyone who has such experience understands clearly - unlike, say, President Bush - that war is an extremely serious undertaking in human affairs. Wars always (and by intention) inflict harm on other humans. And even if the "intention" of war planners is-- in line with "just war" theory and with the "international laws of war"-- to reduce to a minimum the amount of that harm that falls on noncombatants, still, war planners know that noncombatants do end up getting harmed, and often disproportionately so. In addition, even the combatants on the other side-- people whom under the "laws of war" it is quite legitimate to kill-- are people too. And many of them are conscripts.

Beyond the harm that wars always inflict on humans, planners of war understand well that wars are always unpredictable. They have ricochet effects that send further, always unpredictable, cascades of violence down into the years ahead. Political forces are unleashed that can overturn even the best-laid plans of war-waging statesmen. (Ask the Israelis about how it was their large-scale invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that itself created and incubated Hizbollah.)

For these two reasons - the harm inflicted by war, and its inherent unpredictability - people who have studied war understand that this is not an activity that any political leader wants to undertake lightly, or for frivolous reasons. Under international law, national leaders are still allowed to wage war (though I think we should start campaigning today to make all wars illegal). But to launch a war, a national leader must be able to provide a convincing explanation of what the existing or antecedent situation is that gives his nation no alternative but to go to war. This is called the "casus belli", the reason for the war.

In providing the casus belli for the still-very-possible war against Iraq, the Bush administration has produced four different arguments; and its use of them has the distinct look of a bait-andswitch technique:
First, we were told that Iraq was probably linked to Al-Qaeda. Back in Fall 2001, there was a lot of speculation about this. People in the U.S. government scoured the world for evidence, but produced not one credible shred of it. So they moved to...
Casus belli #2, namely the rationale that Iraq poses an unacceptable threat to its neighbors. The problem here was that none of the neighbors actually backed up this claim. Even the Israelis, whose Likud-led government has been egging on the administration's hawks in a most unseemly and irresponsible way, don't actually claim that Iraq's much-depleted military poses any threat to their own state-of-the-art military machine. I was in Israel last summer, and the head of the country's premier strategic-studies institute, the Jaffee Center, brushed aside the idea that Iraq posed any military threat to Israel. Since then, the head of Israel's military intelligence has said the same thing. So, not even Israel has been prepared to stand up and state that Iraq poses a military threat to it, that it would like Washington to help deal with-- and certainly, none of the other governments in the Middle East has voiced such a claim. So the administration hawks had to move rapidly to...
Casus belli #3, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose such an imminent threat to world stability that there is no time for any other remedy except to destroy the Baghdad regime through war. This seems to be the casus belli that the administration has pursued with most vigor. But if Iraq's WMD program poses such a great threat, we need to ask two questions: (1) North Korea has openly declared that it has made considerably more progress toward developing nuclear weapons than anything the administration is accusing Iraq of. So why-- if we accept the Bushites' logic-- isn't destroying the Pyongyang regime an even greater priority than destroying the Iraqi regime? And (2) if Iraq's WMDs are so threatening, why wouldn't the combination of containment and deterrence that worked for 50 years against the Soviets work against Saddam's regime as well?

Actually, there's a lot more to be said about the flimsiness of the administration hawks' arguments on the WMD question, and about the unseemly pressure they've been bringing on the U.N. to craft an inspections regime that is calculated not just to fail, but to fail at the precise right time for the Pentagon's war plans to swing into effect, sometime in January. But let's just note here that there is already a majority of American voters-- and there is certainly a predominance of both individual people and governments worldwide-- who would prefer that the U.N. inspections route be given a decent chance of success, and that Washington act in good-faith coordination with the world's other nations, rather than that the Pentagon hawks rush the United States into a unilateral war against Iraq.

So anyway, given the evident flimsiness of the WMDs casus belli, and in the hopes of trying to cobble together whatever additional support they could find for the war effort, the administration also rolled out a fourth argument that it claims provides another good reason to go to war. Strictly speaking, this is not a casus belli as classically conceived: that is, it does not refer to an antecedent or existing situation. It refers, instead, to the possible future goal that through this war, we might be able to help bring democracy to Iraq.

This is a fairly sneaky argument, since it's clearly designed to win around a lot of people who are not in the traditionally pro-military constituency.

Who wouldn't want to see democracy in Iraq?

I have worked for more than ten years on the Middle East Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch; and I've probably spent more time than most people reading detailed and stomach-turning accounts of the truly fiendish tortures, ethnic cleansings, use of poison gas, etc., etc., that this Iraqi dictator has used against his country's 16 million people. I have no illusions whatsoever but that his behavior is of the most vile. I have many good friends in the Iraqi democracy movement (all of them, given the circumstances, in exile.)

But I still can't bring myself to believe that democracy is ever delivered on the tip of a cruise missile. And while some people in the Bush administration may be sincere when they say they'd like to bring democracy to Iraq, I am certain that once a war gets started, those goals and desires will be swamped completely under the ever-pressing "needs" of the Pentagon war planners, for whom the prospect of staying around in Iraq long enough to incubate a stable democracy in that fractured country is one that they view with total distaste.

There is another problem with the "bringing democracy" argument as used to justify Washington's initiation of a war against Iraq. That is, that this is a future-oriented argument of a type that, if sanctioned, would allow any of the world's governments capriciously to initiate war against anyone they wanted. In history, as we know, the conquistadores and other imperial powers would capriciously launch wars all over the world with the "justification" that their only concern was "to bring Christianity to the blighted natives", or whatever. (Lucky natives!) Both the Christian and the Muslim wars of expansion were justified in this way. Hence the limitation, as the "laws of war" developed over the centuries, that any declaration of war should refer to an existing or antecedent condition, rather than to any future goal.

There's a lot more that can, and should be said about this "bringing democracy" argument. Some people cite the cases of Japan or Germany, as being places where, after a massive war, American-led military occupations succeeded in bringing (Japan) or restoring (Germany) democracy to peoples who had previously labored under highly repressive regimes. That is true, and it is admirable that the situation of running a military occupation was used in those two cases (unlike in the areas still occupied by Israel today) to help transform those two polities into democratic, independent countries.

But when they had entered WW2, none of the Allies did so with the prime motivation or justification of fighting in order to help bring democracy to Germany or Japan! Far from it. They entered the war for classic reasons of national self-defense, and in response to blatant and antecedent aggressions by the Axis powers. The democratization of Japan and Germany that ensued many years later were, if you like, collateral benefits of the Allies' engagement in the war (and could be set against the not inconsiderable collateral damage that that engagement brought about, which included the consolidation of the Soviet empire in all of eastern Europe).

More recently, in a situation perhaps more analogous to that of Iraq, the years after 1989 saw the fantastic sight of the Soviet empire itself crumbling before the onward march of democracy. Was that post-1989 democratization "delivered" on the tips of NATO weapons? It was not. It came about because of the hard work of nonviolent community organizing undertaken by Polish trade-unionists, East German Lutherans, and Czech intellectuals in the years leading up to 1989. This kind of organizing-- which, yes, comes with the risk of huge harm to many who undertake it-- is what builds robust democracies. This is true in Europe, in Latin America, in South Africa, or anywhere. And it is this kind of slow, patient, and risky democracy-building work that we should support in Iraq, not war...

Maybe in a future issue of the Newsletter, I can write more about the relationship between war and democratization, and that between war and human rights, another really important subject. (My own view, not yet widespread enough inside the human rights community, is that war itself always and unavoidably constitutes a massive assault on human rights; and that the human rights movement ought to investigate this much more... )

But for now, I'll just pull together the picture of the Bush administration's ever-shifting grounds of justification for this war by concluding that what we seem to have here is not any clearly evident existing problem (the casus belli) in urgent search of a solution, but a given solution (war) in search of a justificatory problem. And that, it seems to me, is a classic bait-and-switch that we should not be taken in by." (Helena Cobham, CCPJ Newsletter, Fall, 2002)