A war without a plan

Having watched his "price of the club" and "family" arguments for going to war in Iraq crash and burn, John Key used his pre-Waitangi day speech on Te Tii Marae to monger for war again, this time on the basis of human rights. But while many kiwis, including myself, are sympathetic to that reason, a just cause isn't enough. In order to be justified, war must not only be fought for a just cause, it must (among other things) actually have some chance of success. And that has been the problem all along - because we only have to look at ISIS's origins in the US's failed invasion and occupation of Iraq and its failed attempts to intervene by proxy in Syria to recognise that such wars are doomed to failure and only make things worse.

But don't take it from me - take it from the UK House of Commons Defence Committee which found last week that Iraq was a war without a plan:

Here, in one of the most dangerous places on earth, Britain has once again become militarily involved – if only to the extent of launching one air strike a day – without knowing what it wants to do. The report says: “The committee was shocked by the inability or unwillingness of any of the service chiefs to provide a clear, and articulate statement of the UK’s objectives or strategic plan in Iraq. There was a lack of clarity over who owns the policy – and indeed whether or not such a policy exists.”

The service chiefs in question responded to queries about what they thought they were up to in Iraq with some splendid pieces of waffle and mandarin-speak. Asked who was responsible for determining future British actions, Air Chief Marshal Sir Andrew Pulford, said: “Well, the answer is that there are probably about 20 different players who own different elements of the comprehensive approach that needs to be applied in Iraq, in Syria and right around the region, because of the multifaceted and multi-natured nature [sic] of the ultimate solution, and all the moving parts that need to go into place.”

Such stuff is impossible to parody. Of course, there is a simple and humiliating answer to the question about who determines policy: the US. The report states baldly: “Many questions of the ‘mission’, or strategy, appear to have been left either in a vacuum between government departments or left to the international coalition (which appears to mean the US). We saw no evidence of the UK Government as a whole seeking to analyse, question, or change the coalition strategy, to which it is committed.”

Except the US also has a "strategy-free" approach, not knowing what they want, clinging to the fantasy that there are vast hordes of hidden moderates who will save them from both ISIS and Assad, while also in denial about Saudi Arabia's role in supporting this mess. And yet despite all this, they're throwing billions of dollars at a bombing campaign, the only beneficiaries of which are ISIS and US weapons manufacturers.

This is the war Key wants us to get involved in: a war without a plan, whose best outcome appears to be supporting one group of monsters against another. This is what he wants kiwi troops (and civilians, because by waging war he risks all our lives) to die for: for Iraq's corrupt, torturing government, who are busy waging their own sectarian cleansing campaigns against Sunnis. And for Assad.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is no good to be done there. The best thing we can do about Iraq and ISIS is to stay the hell out of it, and focus on helping the victims rather than making more of them.

Bombing is not the answer

Last week the Syrian regime used chemical weapons to massacre civilians. It was a crime against humanity and a violation of international law. And now the US and its vassals are gearing up for their response: bombing. So, their response to the indiscriminate murder of civilians is going to be - in practice, because bombs miss, and Americans aren't too fussy about their targets anyway when the victims aren't white - to indiscriminately murder some more. Fantastic.

While I want to see the perpetrators of this atrocity brought to justice before an international court, the idea of military intervention utterly unconnected with that is deeply morally queasy. Iraq and Libya have utterly discredited the concept of humanitarian intervention, exposing them as a sick joke to mask US power politics. But even if we took such claims seriously, there'd still be problems. The basic criteria for humanitarian intervention to be justified were laid out a decade ago by Human Rights Watch. Firstly, because wars impose high human costs, the trigger is high: intervention is justified

only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life.

While the suffering in Syria is terrible, it simply does not meet that level. But even if it did, there are other barriers to overcome. Military action for humanitarian motives must:

• be a last resort;
  
• be "guided primarily by a humanitarian purpose" (this does not preclude other motives, but they must be subsidiary);
  
• comply with international human rights standards (the means must be concordant with the ends);
  
• be reasonably likely to actually make things better; and
  
• ideally should be endorsed by the UN or other appropriate multilateral institutions, except in extremis.
  

Looking at this list, its hard to see how a US campaign of random airstrikes in Syria, not endorsed by the UN, would satisfy the criteria. There are huge problems of motive, and even if we granted that the US was acting for a humanitarian purpose, it is very difficult to see how airstrikes would serve that purpose, because airstrikes do not protect people. Its also difficult to see how they would be compliant with international human rights standards. Iraq, Israel and Libya have shown us for decades what "surgical strikes" do: kill children. There is no such thing as a "humanitarian airstrike". They are just another means of indiscriminate murder.

But beyond that, there's the bigger problem: airstrikes won't work. They won't stop the Syrian regime from murdering people. They won't even stop it from using chemical weapons, because those weapons have clearly already been dispersed to individual units. To the extent that they destabilise the Syrian regime, Libyan style, then they will encourage those weapons to be used. And if somehow they topple the Syrian regime without a general bloodbath, that simply means that something equally repugnant takes its place (see also: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya).

If we can't do any good, then we can at least do no harm. Leaving the Syrian civil war to fester is not a pleasant solution (it means ~50,000 dead a year). But given the hideous uncertainties involved in military action and regime change, it is almost certainly the least worst we can do.

(Meanwhile, times like these, I'm awfully glad New Zealand got rid of its air combat wing, otherwise John Key would be signing us up for this latest exercise in barbarism)

War and consequences

GreyShade has responded to the call for the left to develop a clear position on when intervention is justified and why with a typically thoughtful piece examining some of the key models and applying them to Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the models he considers is a consequentialist approach of "justification by outcome" - that a war is justified "whenever the outcome after the war is better than it would have been without the war". He points out that this very quickly runs into problems with countries being judges in their own case, and suggests the UN is a less partial judge (but also a far from perfect one). But there's a bigger problem, shared by consequentialism in general, of what Dan Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea called "computational intractability": in many cases, we don't know what weight to assign to particular outcomes in our calculations of consequences - or even what sign we should give them - not because of uncertainty about possible consequences, but because of uncertainty about how those consequences should be morally interpreted. Dennett illustrates this with the example of Three Mile Island:

How could Three Mile Island have been a good thing? By being the near-catastrophe that sounded the alarm that led us away from paths that would encounter much worse misadventures - Chernobyls, for instance. Surely many people were fervently hoping for just such an event to happen, and might well have taken steps to ensure it, had they been in a position to act. The same moral reasoning that led Jane Fonda to create the film The China Syndrome (a fictional near-catastrophe at a nuclear plant) might lead someone rather differently situated to create Three Mile Island

If we are to use a consequentialist analysis, we need to know at minimum which column to put things in. But even with hindsight we just don't know yet whether Three Mile Island has had good or bad consequences. And foresight is much more difficult.

I think this significantly counts against consequentialism as a war of determining whether a war is justified (and against consequentialism in general). Fortunately, we have other options.