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3 The Day the World Changed? Reflections on 9/11 and U.S. National Security Strategy In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was a great deal of rhetoric both from within and from without the Bush administration claiming that the nature and scope of those attacks marked a decisive turning point and watershed in U.S. foreign and military policy and perhaps in international law. It is clear that many decisions regarding the use of the U.S. military, the restraints of the Geneva Convention, and the relations of the United States with its allies were indeed based on the belief that such a fundamental change had occurred and that it necessitated considerable modification in the conduct and principles that have historically defined the stance of the United States toward the international community. The belief in such a fundamental shift has been used to justify treatment of prisoners that would, under existing standards, be considered torture. It has underpinned an unprecedented degree of American unilateralism in its conduct of foreign policy and military affairs. And it has been cited as a rationale for fundamentally recasting the justifications for use of military force in terms of the understanding of jus ad bellum as that has evolved in international law in recent centuries. This chapter will critically examine those developments, specifically with reference to the purported justifications for the use of military force ad bellum. It will examine the arguments offered that 9/11 justifies a fundamental rethinking of those criteria. It will attempt to weigh the risks and benefits of accepting the proposed new standards as legitimate in international law and ethics. It will also make some projections beyond the end of the Bush administration to suggest directions in which the United States might profitably modify its stance and serve as a leader of the international system toward some new understandings that attempt to address the global terrorist threat in ways that might be more universally acceptable to our international friends and partners. 19 20 Issues in Military Ethics The Shock of 9/11 For those paying close attention to the threat, the attacks of 9/11 were hardly a bolt from the blue. The first World Trade Center bombing (1993), the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya (1998), and the bombing of the USS Cole (2000) were evidence of a growing and determined group of terrorists seeking to attack U.S. targets. Furthermore, the Clinton administration (in particular National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and counterterrorism advisor on the National Security Council Richard Clarke) was focused specifically on al Qaeda as a significant threat to the United States.1 With the wisdom of hindsight, in fact, the specific method of using commercial airliners to attack domestic targets seemed clear (and was clear at the time to some investigators). Nevertheless, the loss of 2,740 lives in a single morning on U.S. soil, witnessed on live television in the case of the second New York attack, shocked the nation and the administration. Obviously, no one knew at the time if other attacks were imminent. For the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty authorizing a collective security response by the alliance as a whole to the threat.2 Pursuant to Article 5, NATO provided airborne surveillance aircraft to patrol the skies over the United States in the immediate aftermath of those attacks.3 “We’re all Americans now,” proclaimed the French magazine Le Monde in its September 2001 edition. Clearly, the immediate responses suggested a major shift in the routines of the international system was to be expected and was assumed to be required. What followed (in terms of the use of military force—the sole focus of this chapter) is common knowledge. The United States attacked Afghanistan and toppled the de facto Taliban government of Afghanistan, even though no one suggested that the state of Afghanistan itself was in any way responsible for 9/11. Ostensibly, the justification of that aggression was that it was necessary to attack Afghanistan in order to reach the real perpetrators of the attacks: the al Qaeda organization, which stood in a complex relationship to that de facto government. Subsequently, of course, the United States, the UK, and a small coalition of the willing attacked the state and government of Iraq, which (despite a great deal of obfuscation by the administration) clearly bore no responsibility whatsoever for the September...

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