Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars by Neta C. Crawford (review)

Michael Walzer warned in 2004 that the growing use of humanitarian rhetoric by military officials threatened a

certain softening of the critical mind, a truce between theorists and soldiers. If intellectuals are often awed and silenced by political leaders who invite them to dinner, how much more so by generals who talk their language? And if the generals are actually fighting just wars, if inter arma the laws speak, what point is there in anything we can say?¹

Neta Crawford’s exhaustive study of accountability for the collateral killing of civilians in America’s post-9/11 wars rises to Walzer’s challenge. The book is an extended reflection on the ethics of war at a time when the US military seems genuinely committed—as a matter of pragmatism, if perhaps not principle—to minimizing the number of innocent people it kills or maims.

Crawford makes three core arguments. The first has to do with the norms and laws that govern the conduct of war. Peeling back the layers of responsibility—of soldiers, commanders, military organizations, the US Congress, and the American public—she finds a gap between “moral grammar and military vocabulary.”² The problem is that the terms of restraint are also instrumental terms of engagement: “military necessity,” “discrimination,” “proportionality,” “collateral damage.” In place of fixed rules, we see a permissive process of weighing and judging which allows a great deal of violence as long as it is deemed necessary, discriminant, and proportionate. This framework of moral reasoning constitutes harm to noncombatants as the tragic but inevitable result of normal military conduct.

The second argument is that the emphasis in Western law on individual responsibility promotes a “bad apple” theory of atrocity. We tend to define atrocities as those instances when soldiers go off the rails and deliberately massacre civilians. This kind of carnage commands media headlines and is investigated and often prosecuted. But focusing on the bad apples obscures the moral reality of war as a bureaucratic enterprise. Crawford instead wants us to “add up” individual cases of killing and injury in order to see the patterns of “systemic atrocities” or “systemic collateral damage.” These tragedies are prefigured in policy. They stem from bureaucratic choices and normal procedures: operational law manuals, rules of engagement (ROE), command culture, risk apportionment, intelligence information, and so forth. These “ordinary” killings far outnumber deliberate massacres, but they often go unrecognized because their origins seem so bureaucratically benign. As one soldier put it: “It’s just the nature of the situation you’re in. That’s what’s wrong. It’s not individual atrocity. It’s the fact that the entire war is the atrocity.”³

The third argument deals with responsibility for unintended but nevertheless foreseen killing. Crawford tackles the philosophical concept known as the doctrine of double effect. Double effect permits foreseen harm as long as it is the unintended side effect of a good act. In a war the good act is the gaining of military advantage. The harm that results is incidental but not accidental in the normal use of the word. Double effect is subject to proportionality, but, as Crawford shows, a fixation on intent makes it sophistical and ripe for abuse. She argues that the standard is too low. If we can foresee harm, then we have a duty to find ways to mitigate it. This critique of double effect is not new: the idea has been widely censured in philosophical circles as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. But rarely has double effect been condemned in such devastating empirical detail.

Accountability for Killing is the most authoritative account to date of the systemic underpinning of civilian harm. Of course, the risk of highlighting the structural causes of killing is that it can let individual soldiers off the hook. “Individual agency is constituted and...