Introduction: Thinking about War

In the preface to Just and Unjust Wars, which he wrote in 1977, Michael Walzer makes the following observation about how he came to think about just and unjust wars:

I did not begin by thinking about war in general, but about particular wars and above all about the American intervention in Vietnam. Nor did I begin as a philosopher, but as a political activist and a partisan. . . . We are not usually philosophical in moment of crisis; most often there is no time. War especially imposes an urgency that is probably incompatible with philosophy as a serious enterprise. The philosopher . . . reflects in tranquility . . . thinking about political and moral choices already made. And yet, these choices are made in philosophical terms, available because of previous reflection. It was, for example, a matter of great importance to all of us in the American antiwar movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s that we found a moral doctrine ready at hand, a connected set of names and concepts that we all knew—and that everyone else knew. When we talked about aggression and neutrality, the rights of prisoners of war and civilians, atrocities and war crimes, we were drawing upon the work of many generations of men and women, most of whom we had never heard of. We would be better off if we did not need a vocabulary like that, but given that we need it, we must be grateful that we have it. Without this vocabulary, we could not have thought about the Vietnam war as we did, let alone have communicated our thoughts to other people.

(xi)

I cite Walzer at length because the current conjecture may seem quite similar to the one Walzer describes. In the past six years alone there have been several dramatic terrorist attacks by fundamentalist Islamic groups that are loosely networked, including the September 11, 2001, bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the March 11, 2004, Madrid train bombings, and the July 7, 2005, London bombings. Starting in 2001, the United States declared and has been engaged in a "war on terror," which began with the war in Afghanistan that, despite achieving certain victories, is still ongoing and shows no signs of abatement. In 2003, the United States mounted its war on Iraq. This war has become a nightmarish quagmire since the U.S. military, after realizing its initial military objectives in Spring 2003, has been unable to do much more. As of this writing, Iraq has not been stabilized and is embroiled in a civil war with a daily average of fifty to one hundred casualties. Since 2004, the threat and implications of Iran's nuclear capabilities and the possibility of a U.S. war with Iran have been ominous. In summer 2006, Hezbollah and Israel engaged in a conflict that had the signs of a proxy war between the United States and Iran. Both sides intentionally targeted civilian populations. Meanwhile, Hamas continued the bombings of Israeli civilians from the Gaza Strip and Israel retaliated. This was one of many episodes in a long but undeclared war between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians have also been fighting with each other. A Palestinian civil war that has led to Hamas control of the Gaza Strip broke in June 2007.¹

These and other events create a sense of urgency that motivates focused thought on the immediate situation. As Walzer points out, thinking of this kind benefits from normative theoretical analyses and discussions of war that happen when the demands created by an immediately present conflict subside—at present from those that took place after the Vietnam War, resembling those Walzer offered in Just and Unjust Wars (2004). However, unlike Walzer, who has been reaffirming his beliefs about the doctrine of just war, I believe there is a way in which the current conjecture is not analogous to the one that Walzer dealt with in the 1970s—the 1970s were marked by cold-war bipolarity while the present is an era of post-cold-war capitalist globalization²—and I am moved by the dissimilarity in question to consider the...