Just and unjust wars: a diplomat's perspective - International Justice, War Crimes, and Terrorism: The U.S. Record

Social Research, Winter, 2002 by Richard Holbrooke

I AM not a philosopher, a scholar, or even a journalist; I am a practitioner of diplomacy who holds great respect for the academy and for the work of the conference at which this collection of papers was presented.

I would comment at the outset about the paper in this volume by Michael Walzer, which he ended by pointing out that we have to deal with a world where members of the military think, or at least talk, like theoreticians. And, we might add, where theoreticians think and talk like generals. It is no accident that some of the most aggressive and belligerent people in the United States government, in the 40 years that I have been in and out of it, are people who have never seen combat. Let me therefore offer a few thoughts of perspective from the battlefield itself, if you will allow that--some random observations based on the issue addressed in these papers.

The kind of discussion held at this conference is all too rarely, if ever, heard in Washington. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brookings, the American Enterprise Institute, the United States Senate and House of Representatives--they do not usually hold seminars, symposiums, and hearings on issues like just versus unjust wars. The subject has never been raised in any meeting I attended at the State Department, the Defense Department, or the White House. By saying this, I do not wish to discourage the contributors to and readers of this volume from continuing the discussion. On the contrary, in some intangible way it will ultimately reach the minds of policymakers.

A rare exception to my generalization was a series of public Millennium Lectures that President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hilary Clinton held at the White House between 1999 and 2000. I remember especially Elie Wiesel's talk in the East Wing before the president, the Cabinet, and invited officials that was broadcast on C-SPAN. In such moments the issues we are addressing here momentarily penetrate into the so-called corridors of power. But such moments are rare.

It is particularly appropriate that we discuss this issue today, with American troops in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Georgia, the Philippines, Colombia, and perhaps elsewhere in the world, including Yemen and the countries in the Horn of Africa. Each one of these must be approached on a case-by-case basis, but absent some logical, coherent framework and a case-by-case analysis, we could stumble into mistakes. There is little evidence that this has been done in most of our engagements over the last half-century.

It needs to be stressed that one person's "just war" can be another's terror campaign or genocide. One person's terrorist may be another's freedom fighter. Bosnia, Kosovo, the intifada--even Osama bin Laden's murderous activities--have this in common: that those committing the most barbarous acts invoke religion, God, or a sense of thwarted nationalism to justify the most evil actions.

The acts themselves--the murder of innocent civilians, premeditated rape, the destruction of entire communities--are, without doubt, evil. Yet the people committing them do not consider them evil. They believe that, since their war is "just," the means they used are justified. We disagree with them strongly, and, for that matter, so does international law, but they do not see it the same way.

I wish, therefore, to underscore my deliberate use of the word evil. When I was starting out in Washington this word was never used, except in reference to events long over, especially the Holocaust. I spent three and a half years in Vietnam as a civilian member of the war effort. As others can attest, particularly the president of the New School University, my friend Bob Kerrey, we never heard the word evil used with regard to the people we were fighting.

A relativism had settled over American foreign policy. By the time we got to Bosnia in 1991-1992, it was very hard for most of my colleagues in government to recognize that one side was, by our standards, truly evil. Martin Peretz's magazine, The New Republic, worked hard to make that point, as did other brave and impassioned observers and journalists, some of whom are contributors to this volume. Samantha Power particularly comes to mind as someone who saw this instantly, at a young age. We should have recognized, as I wrote in To End a War (1998), that evil really does exist in the world.

Relativism is not always applicable, as we saw on September 11. But we should have seen this earlier. Stalin and his regime were evil, as President Ronald Reagan pointed out. The theory that everyone has an equally valid point of view and you just have to sit down and figure it out may apply to a lawyer trying to settle a civil suit, or a divorce, or a case between a plaintiff and a defendant, but there are times in the world when it just does not apply. This was the case in Bosnia.

Because the essay by Michael Walzer deals with conventional wars, I want to stress that what we think of as traditional war rarely exists in the world today. There are still armies, they still use weaponry, the weaponry has changed--but it is rarely a war between two countries. Recent exceptions--the United States and Iraq, Iran and Iraq, India and Pakistan, the United Kingdom and Argentina over the Falklands--are dramatic, but relatively rare. Most modern conflicts are quite different.