The trouble with mixed motives: debating the political, legal, and moral dimensions of intervention

Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2004 by Susan D. Fink

In the aftermath of the Iraq war and the transfer to Iraqi authority, a bitter debate persists the motives for the war and the reasons for the transatlantic antipathy thy it engendered. There are those who argue that moral talk coming out of the White House represents a fig leaf for realpolitik, a change in tactics after the failure to find evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Why had President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, both known for their moral personal philosophies and foreign policies, relied primarily on legal and threat-based justifications? (1) Why did they leave until the eleventh hour the moral argument about Saddam's brutish behavior toward the Iraqi people? Does the timing of various justifications belie their validity?

The Iraq war, like the 1999 Kosovo campaign, was launched without a United Nations Security Council resolution explicitly authorizing it. Some say this unhinged the international legal order, that all moral talk must be expunged from intervention discourse to pave the way for a new legal order, based solely on power and law. (2) But the moral dimension of the Iraq debate is far more pervasive than these critics care to admit. In fact, it was integral to the political and legal cases each nation made, whether or not that nation supported the war. What is more, the prominence of the moral dimension in policy is on the rise, for better and for worse.

The transatlantic relationship is straining under the disagreement about the authorization and justification for the Iraq war, and those wishing to promote anti-American and anti-Western sentiment take advantage of the dispute. The national motivations, indeed, were fundamentally mixed, and skeptics and supporters alike see that as a problem. Yet motives in international politics are invariably mixed. Why then the rancor?

The reason is that there has been a shift in the normative landscape, a radicalization of moral, legal, and political arguments for and against war. What happened in the Iraq case cannot be fully explained by any one of these dimensions alone. (3) It is better to look at the way states authorize and justify the use of force, satisfying domestic and international political requirements--how in this instance Washington, London, Paris, and Bonn chose to justify their behavior leading up to the Iraq war--using all three dimensions, and then test the accusations against them. By examining three contending imperatives within each state's thinking about intervention--imperatives of power, cooperation, and human solidarity--it is possible to understand the decision each government made.

Again, the truth about motives is not to be found in any one of these ways of thinking--moral, legal, or political--but rather in the debate among them. This approach denies us the ability to make satisfying judgments against one side or the other in the Iraq debate. Yet a complete picture of what happened is not possible without it.

POWER, COOPERATION, AND MORAL SOLIDARITY

The "triptych" approach to understanding international behavior, and the same set of three categories, by whatever names, have proven advantageous in the past. Lecturing at the London School of Economics in the 1950s, Martin Wight identified three traditions of international thought evident since the Renaissance: the Realists, Rationalists, and Revolutionists. (4) Others have also found that tracing the debate among the three traditions is essential to understanding the most important questions of international politics. Hedley Bull called their respective advocates Hobbesians, Grotians, and Kantians, and more recently Stewart Patrick analyzed the way unilateral and multilateral means are used to achieve nationalist, internationalist and collective objectives. (5) Hereafter, we will call the three traditions the "power," "cooperative," and "solidarity" approaches.

The power tradition sees the world as a system of states organized only by the relative power they can wield. Force is the dominant mode of international interaction, since no authority higher than the state exists to enforce national will, laws, or norms. Its adherents take a positivist approach to international law, emphasizing what is rather than what ought to be. The power approach has both aggressive and defensive forms. On the aggressive side, it is willing to impose interests, or in some cases norms, through the use of force. Its more defensive variant favors the promotion of interest by noncoercive means, such as multilateralism and international law.

The cooperative tradition, in contrast, sees an international society--more than a system but not quite a state--underpinned by law and institutions, its parts increasingly interdependent. From this perspective, international politics are shaped less by international anarchy than by custom arising from habitual interaction. Cooperation rather than conflict is the dominant mode of international relations in this tradition. This approach recognizes the existence of international anarchy, on the one hand, but appreciates the value of universal norms on the other. It seeks to reconcile the two by finding the "lesser evil" in policy debates; it concerns itself with matters of law and justice, employs the just war doctrine, looks for the "law behind the law," and seeks multilateral approaches to diplomacy. There are realist and idealist variants of the cooperative approach; the realist aspect tends to employ multilateral approaches for coercive purposes, while its idealist counterpart sees multilateralism as a way of fostering shared norms.