SOME CHRISTIANS seeking moral guidance about drone
warfare find enough clear teaching in Jesus’ command to love our enemies and
respond to conflict with principled, active nonviolence. [I would really like a Bible quote on that. Does this mean
that Christians must never fight back against any attack that they must accept
defeat, despoliation and slavery at all times? I don’t remember Jesus saying
that back when I went to Sunday school. And what is a tactic of principled,
active non-violence? It was very useful on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma
Alabama in 1965, to make Americans see the error of their ways in the context
of segregation. Not so useful at the lip of the mass grave at Babi Yar in the
Ukraine in 1942.] Other Christian traditions, seeking to restrict and
limit warfare, have developed principles of “just war,” which deem certain acts
of war immoral and illegitimate.
The Principles of Just War
A
just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be
exhausted before the use of force can be justified.
A war is just only if it is waged by a
legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by
individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever
the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.
A just war can only be fought to redress a
wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always
considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not
sufficient--see point #4). Further, a just war can only be fought with
"right" intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is
to redress the injury.
A war can only be just if it is fought
with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless
cause are not morally justifiable.
The ultimate goal of a just war is to
re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must
be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been
fought.
The violence used in the war must be
proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not
necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
The weapons used in war must discriminate
between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets
of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths
of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate
attack on a military target.
Targeted killings by drones, which have become key
elements of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism strategy, fail the test
of morality on a number of grounds:
1. Targeted
assassinations outside of legally declared wars violate international law,
which prohibits a country from carrying out military attacks in or against the
territory of countries with which it is not at war. Drone attacks in Pakistan,
Yemen, and Somalia violate this prohibition.
We are not at
war with Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia as nation states; we are at war with
transnational groups (the various iterations of al-Queada for example) that say
they represent the Islamic Ummah and make war on us in its name. This Jihad is
meant to spread the House of Islam to the entire world, and it is the duty of
all Muslims to support it in any way they can, either by fighting or donating
money so the jihadis can get on with their work. Thus the transnational aspect
of this war is presented by the jihadis and not by us. Since it is impossible
for the jihadis to give up the duty to pursue holy war the war has and will
continue. As it says in the Holy Koran (9.29): “Oh you believers, fight the
unbelievers, namely the People of the Book (the Bible) who do not accept the
Resurrection and the Recompense (heaven, hell) in the true way, and do not
require stopping what God and his Emissary ordered stopped (the drinking of
wine, or the eating of pork); they do not embrace the True Religion, i. e.
Islam. Fight until they believe, or force them to pay the jizya (the poll tax levied on all non-Muslim men in lieu of
military service) humbly and obediently, not grudgingly, so they contribute to
the Islamic budget.”
2. They
violate the sovereignty of other countries. The government of Pakistan has
repeatedly objected to drone strikes on its territory, calling them a “clear
violation of our sovereignty and a violation of international law,” but its
concerns have been repeatedly ignored.
The government of Pakistan is truly
bi-polar on this question, they allow safe haven to Jihadi groups on their
territory so they may take on attacks against India and Afghanistan, and they
seemed not to notice OBL in his safe house in Abbottabad for years. They only
attack these groups, the “Red Mosque” is a good example, when their own power
is under attack.
3. There is
little transparency or accountability. CIA drones are remotely controlled,
primarily from Air Force bases in the United States, with no clear
accountability, and with the targeting sometimes based on dubious intelligence.
The accountability
obviously is in the lap of the CIA and the Air Force which commands the drone
force and has nothing to do with the physical placement of the pilots, if their
command post were at Bagram Airbase how would that differ. As for dubious intelligence
how does the author know this and how does she judge the quality of said intelligence.
Since the Taliban and the Haqquani Network often tell about the death of a high
ranking official in a drone strike maybe the intelligence is not as dubious as
our author thinks.
4. They
set a dangerous precedent. More than 70 countries now possess drone
aircraft. While most of these drones are not armed, that is clearly the next
step. The covert use of combat drones by the U.S. and the rapid expansion of
the U.S. armed drone program represent escalations into a new kind of arms
race.
As opposed to
what previous kind of arms race, add to that the 100% of nations possessing
fighter aircraft has that condition led to random aerial dogfights?
5. They
foster a perpetual state of war. Without the risk to troops on the ground, it
becomes too easy to use violent force to respond to conflict. “Force
protection” has been one incentive to make war a choice of last resort. The use
of unpiloted aircraft eliminates that consideration.
See the first note on a perpetual state of
war as defined by the doctrine of jihad in Islam. But this is truly a curious concept;
the US is to send an expeditionary force into Waziristan to rout out the
Taliban forces rather than killing their leaders, by “remote control”? We sat
on our asses throughout the nineties as we were attacked again and again, but
since it was overseas we could live with it, 9/11 changed all that. If the
author cannot see that drone war is a form of force protection there is little
hope for her.
6. They kill
innocents. Much is made of the alleged precision of drone strikes. Yet whether
through faulty intelligence, mistakes, or a willingness to accept “collateral
damage,” hundreds of innocent people, including children, have been killed in
drone attacks.
Well that’s a new concept, civilians get
killed in wars, who’d have thunk it! If you Google the bombing of Hamburg you
will see human shaped piles of ash similar to the entombed of Pompey, in all
likely hood they were civilians, raised from their beds at night before they
went to the war production factories in the morning. War sucks, but there is no
way to make it not suck, and as long as the concept of jihad exists this war
will go on as it has for the last 1600 years.
7. They
promote the concept of a global battlefield. The decision to define Sept. 11 as
a “war on terror” rather than as law enforcement against criminals creates an
endless and virtually unrestrained war across national boundaries. In a
borderless battlefield, “just war” limits become meaningless and exit
strategies impossible.
The Jihadis
promote the concept of a global battlefield, if you have a problem with that
talk to them, though I don’t advise it if you want to keep our head attached to
your body. This has nothing to do with crime, this is an ideological, and may I
say a theological fight at the deepest level. Of course just war limits are
impossible, jihad makes it so!
8. Drones
undermine U.S. security. Some have called them “al Qaeda’s best recruiting
tool,” as drone attacks anger targeted populations and are a factor in
fostering violent actions against the U.S.
This is the final level of nonsense,
targeted populations, and these populations are nowhere near as targeted as the
populations of Nazi held Europe during WWII. Muslims have only to give up the
doctrine of jihad and we would have no problem with them. Till then the war
will go on as it has for the last 1600 years.
Drone warfare—conducted by pilots thousands of miles
away, disregarding national borders, unregulated by law, and lacking
accountability by transparency or oversight—is a neither just nor moral way for
the U.S. to respond to terrorist threats.
Duane Shank is
senior policy adviser for Sojourners. A version of this appeared on the God’s
Politics blog. Funny,
I didn’t know God had a politics outside of Islam.
Links:
[1] http://sojo.net/magazine/2013/07
[2] http://sojo.net/biography/duane-shank
[3]
http://sojo.net/magazine/2013/07/whats-wrong-drones#comment-covenant
[4] http://sojo.net/letter-to-the-editor?post=What%27s%20Wrong%20with%20Drones%3F
[5] http://sojo.net/donate
[6]
http://sojo.net/sites/default/files/article/image/shutterstock_116570707.jpg
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