Location : Talks : Book excerpt

When the Smoke Clears: the Morality of Murdering a Terrorist

Duncan Campbell AM

Excerpt of A Fair Go in an Age of Terror, Patty Fawkner (ed.), David Lovell Publishing, Melbourne, 2004, 148 pp paperback, ISBN 1 86355 107 7, RRP $18.95 (incl GST)

Preface by Patty Fawkner
Letter to the Herald Editor re: Duncan Campbell's contribution
Brochure and order form
David Lovell Media release

The attack on Iraq by the probably illegal international minority calling itself the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ was only ever publicly justified, rationalised, or even opposed in failed and misleading communications within and between most of the world's democracies. Put mildly, the cases made for the war lacked rigour and candour. But then those against it were scarcely more responsible or relevant.

Such a breakdown of process at the beginning of a new century – when the world community faces the atavism of renewal of suspicion and hostility between irresponsible elements in Islam and Christendom and resort by one side to terror inflicted by suicide bombers, and by the other to mass destruction mounted coldly by computer – demands of us a willingness to look again at our options for avoiding violence, and especially at the ‘inherent right of individual or collective self-defence’, and at what moral restraints we should accept on our actions.

The ‘inherent right’ is specified in Article 51 of the Security Council Chapters of the UN Charter. As for the great post-September 11 debate about whether or not a pre-emptive attack can be justified, I believe there is no authoritative guidance available to us beyond that provided in Article 1 of Chapter I of the Charter dealing with the UN's ‘Purposes and Principles’. These are, ‘to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace...’ and, in the same sentence, ‘to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.’ In other words the Charter contemplates both pro-active and re-active measures, armed or otherwise, in the face of ‘any threat to the peace’. It leaves the decisions up to the Security Council. And that's all the in-principle, let alone moral, guidance afforded by the Charter and to which nations subscribe when they join the UN. It's pretty simple isn't it? Provided there's no veto cast, it's as acceptable to make a first strike as to respond, and as unobjectionable to resort to combat as to conciliation.

The Charter path through these issues is thus simply what could be agreed in June 1945. To handle any contemporary conflict it offers us only a couple of pre-negotiated options covering, in modern sports terms, both the offense and the defense – American spelling deliberate. In respect at least of security issues, the Charter (but not all basic UN documents, e.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) is not a document enshrining principles, and as a moral monument it's clearly an emperor without clothes. The imperial metaphor is significant. It sends a clear warning to the Church that war should be left to Caesar. In this one important respect I can side personally with Cardinal Pell's position. Which is not, however, to deny that the response by the Howard Government, and in particular by its flatulent foreign minister, to criticism from an Anglican leader was, as Frank Brennan's paper demonstrates, anything other than a gross lapse in responsible democratic leadership, not to mention civilised communication between State and Church.

The significance to me of the Charter provisions is precisely their open-endedness. They scarcely provide a basis on which the Church could teach with much legitimacy that aggressive military activity may be undertaken only under the auspices of the international community. And yet this appears to be the view of that teaching held by the Australian Jesuits.[1]

As for the antiquated provisions of the doctrine of ‘just war’, or jus ad bellum (right to make war) they may help historians come to conclusions, but they could scarcely provide the framework for a Cabinet submission recommending the commitment of Australian forces to hostilities overseas. And don't they, as philosophy, simply embark us on a course of infinite refinement to the point of paralysis of action? (1) What is a just cause? (2) What is the legitimate authority, even domestically? (3) Which alternative course is morally superior, and judged over what time scale? (4) Who can tell, and how, whether or not more harm will be done than good? (5) Will the war meet its aims? A modern manager might ask usefully for periodic ‘performance indicators’ about progress towards target objectives – and Donald Rumsfeld would probably have been prepared to present them. Indeed as Hardt and Negri argued in their startling book ‘Empire’, the just war doctrine is in contemporary vogue in American hands, far removed, for instance, from its Augustinian tradition as a concept of defence or resistance.[2]

In any event, of these five sets of issues (2) and (5) above can assist the present discussion, and let's begin with the latter.

The ingredient most appallingly missing from the justification for war given by George Bush, Tony Blair, or John Howard was an assessment, even a set of assumptions, concerning the political and constitutional situation they expected to have produced when the dust settled in Iraq, not to mention the state of play in the wider Arab region. Where was the advice of the renowned Arabists in the British Foreign Office? How did they envisage handling the inevitable communal conflicts in Iraq after the Baathist lid was blown off there? Where was the assessment of our own Office of National Assessments (ONA) about future developments in Iraq? John Howard quoted the ONA often enough on the issue of WMD. Was that all they assessed and briefed him on? Where was George Bush's assessment of the impact of his actions on Israel? (Bill Clinton has said on ABC television that he believes Bush would have had one.) If the real objective was, as revealed in the rationalisation, not the removal of the undiscovered WMD but of Saddam Hussein, then where were the plans for his replacement? If the US plans were to destroy Iraq's public utilities (except oil production) rather than engage and account for the Iraqi ground forces, and thus to paralyse Baghdad without much Coalition loss, how was it intended to prevent the first flush of welcome turning into resentment and then rebellion against the daily hardships of occupation? And how can Bush deny gaps in planning in the plain face of the significant under-estimation of the number of troops it would be necessary to maintain in-country, not to mention the substituted private security personnel who now provide the unfortunate targets and leverage available to the terrorists?

The most important pre-condition for entering into warfare is to know how and with what follow-up to end it. In Australia early in World War II we knew and responded successfully to the need to plan for ‘post-war reconstruction and development’ even for domestic purposes. It was all part of the intellectual process of knowing your war aims and planning to deliver them. By contrast, we and the rest of the Western world, and in particular the United States, utterly failed to plan for the ending of the Cold War. Not only that, the ‘cold warriors’ in most of our intelligence and defence services, Australia not excluded, declined even to recognise all the signs that the then Soviet Union had had enough and that Gorbachev was saying so. When suddenly the Soviet Union collapsed, the restraints on minor conflict, national ambition, covert armament and arms sales, liberation movements, the final round of self-determination, that had been imposed by the disciplines of deterrence, mutually assured destruction, and compulsory membership within the three camps of the West, Sino-Soviet, and Non-Aligned, were removed. In Europe the stories of Chechnya and the Balkans epitomise the problems that ensued.

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War President George Bush senior enunciated his hope for ‘a new world order’ and for the purposes of the first Gulf War he built a wide international coalition that was largely financed by Germany and Japan. The father's internationalist approach was in marked contrast to the initially isolationist and then arrogantly imperial persuasion of son President George W. But father and son both went to war against Saddam Hussein with what now seems to be a fatal Bush family flaw in planning: neither apparently knew or cared to define how far they aimed to prosecute their campaigns. The lessons from the Cold War were not applied. So much for ‘neo-conservative’ leadership!

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and when he was not blundering intractably into proclaiming a ‘crusade’, George W seems to have been guided as much as anything by celluloid images of the Wild West and the posse bringing outlaws to justice. Nor was he averse to demagoguery, leading disturbing war chants of ‘USA! USA!’ at Ground Zero in New York as he launched the War on Terror against an undefined and virtually incorporeal enemy. His targets were those of opportunity – Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and WMD. He appeared repeatedly on TV before disciplined crowds of serving defense personnel on their bases and aircraft carriers. His language was always about getting at the enemy and his WMD, never about what was foreseen and intended when the smoke cleared. Those who cautioned against setting the elusive WMD as primary targets were belittled by the Bush Administration.[3]

Fixation on WMD was at the centre of the great failure, both within and between the democracies, to insist that the war objectives be properly and publicly established. For months before and after the main hostilities, almost without exception, oppositions and the media and hostile democratic governments like the German and French, and those less democratic like the Russians, pursued the WMD issues down hundreds of holes like ferrets after rabbits. But what needs to be recognised is that governments and oppositions nominally opposed to the Bush/Blair campaign, attacked the WMD issues, the weak intelligence and the inflated presentations by the British and American (and pathetically the Australian) Governments, to disguise their reluctance to oppose the war against Iraq more frontally, and to question where it was travelling. France, Germany, and Russia had their own private thoughts about the shape of the post-war outcome. Their focus was not so much on the future of Iraqi oil production as such as on the revenues to be generated when production recovered and increased, and enormously lucrative contracts for reconstruction and development could begin to be awarded. Who wanted to be off-side with the new Iraqi leadership when contract time came around? Similarly who in opposition in the countries of the Coalition of the Willing, such as Australia, wanted to challenge the obscurantism and bravado about waging war on terrorism? Who in Australia after the Bali disaster, and given the sensitivity of the position of the Muslim communities in this country, wanted to question the patriotism and high-mindedness of opposing terrorists, to open themselves to the inevitable charge of being soft on the subject and sending wrong messages? Every time he declares war on something such as drugs or terrorists, John Howard, Salem style, is on the outlook for the senders of wrong messages. Unfortunately the Labor opposition, (like the Church, to this limited extent) preferred to pin its faith on the Security Council than produce a policy of substance. Look at some of the questions that might have been pursued. For instance, once it was thought that our truly distinguished SAS force was early if not first on the ground in Iraq, and that its mission had been to ensure there were no unknown, advance Iraqi Scud missile sites menacing Israel, why not ask about the process of consultation with the US that might have established this tasking of Australian forces in support of a country that most definitely does possess nuclear WMD, and that in the early 1980's bombed a nuclear facility in Iraq? Or precisely when, and in what context, did the prospect of the US-Australian Free trade Agreement arise at political level? As I write, the US Senate has approved the FTA and now the Opposition has to settle its position in the Australian Senate. Was there ever a taint of blood money about this deal?

As for the democratic media, its role almost to a word was abysmal. The WMD issue was editorially perfect for it. WMD was a self-programming serial, it ranged from Doomsday to Dad's army, it was sustained by an almost universal desire to prefer it to the exclusion of the harder questions that needed asking about the war, and it had for the journos the fascination of the snake. Have you ever noticed that they cannot resist mention of security, secrets or spies? You can almost hear the hissing at editorial conferences. So intelligence officers, no matter how clerical or academic their work, always end up being called spies by the time you reach the second paragraph of the latest breathless instalment. Even the longest and best essays in the serious journals and magazines remained riveted to WMD. Did any really acknowledge that the issue was not how the war began, or how it was presented as beginning, but how it would end, and whether the Coalition of the Willing actually had a view on that?

Where then does that leave matters between the Church and the democratic state?
What should the Bishops be doing? It seems to me they can have little role in substance although the ground may be shifting. It is difficult to see that they are equipped to divine independently a contribution to the social debate or to solving Caesar's dilemmas. But perhaps they could have some community role in relieving the stress caused by simultaneous new threats of global terrorism, the deliberate destruction of the international security system, however imperfect, and the belligerent anti-terrorist posture of the Australian Government. Could the bishops not occasionally produce, in consultation with relevant experts from the laity, some call for more responsible leadership by Caesar in terms that would be recognisably more informed than indignant?

There was a second question thrown up by the criteria for a ‘just war’, about the legitimacy of authority, including domestic authority, to wage war.

War in this century is already in an altered state. Not 100 years ago, kings, kaisers, emperors and czars sent millions to be slain on the battlefields of Europe with a signature and a seal that summarily ordered or assented to legal mayhem. Now the suiciding soldier-terrorist makes of himself or herself a weapon against which there is little reassuring defence. It's a deadly new weapon more personal even than hand-to-hand fighting, but it provokes a mechanical response delivered impersonally from space or a hunting helicopter. For one side the human casualty and the weapon are synonymous. For the other the loss of life by the combatant is avoided almost entirely. The suicider seldom fights for a state but for a shadowy non-state organisation driven by lust for vengeance. Nevertheless our presidents and prime ministers have been declaring war on they know not what, as if it were an enemy state. Has this established a legitimate source of authority to kill one or thousands of the enemy? In Australia we no longer execute criminals. President Bush does and has, but even then the legal process to set up just one execution is exhaustive. How absurd it is that by the short political step of saying we are at war and despatching our forces overseas for combat operations we issue, unsigned and unspecific, limitless death warrants for citizens of other nations and members of other organisations outside our jurisdiction. But we have done so, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the process have almost certainly made ourselves higher priority targets for the future. After all Osama bin Laden singled Australia out for attention during the Timor crisis, when he sought to portray us as persecuting Muslims.

Beyond any reasonable doubt Australia faces its own threats from terrorists organising in the neighbouring regions of South-east Asia. In some cases, especially after the Bali bombing, the organisations and individuals hostile towards us are known and some of their fingerprints have already been found here. When your enemy is known in this way is it responsible or morally acceptable to leave your own people less than fully protected to the limits available? Why should not a known organiser of terrorist cells and of the massacre of innocents not be mercifully removed when there are covert and controlled means available to us to do so? Why should we wait for a murderous fanatic such as Bashir in Java to strike against us first?

The response ought not to be couched in terms equating it with the vicious spiral of violence and reprisal between Israelis and Palestinians, where cause and effect have long been lost to sight. We stand at the beginning of a new problem for Australia and for moral leadership here. What we once accepted as moral, or simply passed over as we hung battle flags in churches and declared death on hundreds of thousands including our own as well as enemy (for the time being) forces must be recognised for the enormity it was. And it must not blind us to the possibility of making a moral case for inflicting death, deniably, on those individuals or small groups planning to terrorise our community.

There is surely no basis for denying that one or two soldiers may be authorised to act overseas against one or two pre-determined terrorists when we are prepared to provide the services of hundreds for the purpose of killing numerous opponents, most of whom we will never even identify or confirm to have been valid targets. Moral issues are raised to which the Church might well contribute in today's new circumstances and while policies for combating terrorism are still at a formative stage on Caesar's desk. Indeed for the philosopher, politician, or theologian to decline to work through the option of the just assassination would in itself be to fail an urgent new moral test.

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[1] See for instance the excellent short summary of moral issues provided in the Comment ‘Costly Conflict’ by Andrew Hamilton SJ, in ‘Eureka Street’ November 2003. Andrew Hamilton like Frank Brennan SJ has commented frequently on these issues.
[2] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001)
[3] I know well, worked closely with for a number of years, and greatly admire, the last UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix. His book, Disarming Iraq (Bloomsbury, 2004), repays reading.

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