Property of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; unedited;

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Michael Cromartie: I am very pleased to have you here. I want to tell you that when we picked this date for this discussion, we did not have prior knowledge of Secretary State Powell’s presentation [to the United Nations yesterday, February 5]. I don’t know what that presentation might have done to the state of the argument, but we will find out soon. On your seats, you will notice that there are descriptions of each of our speakers. And I am one who does not like to read to you what you have in your lap. That’s not good use of time. So I call your attention to the biographical descriptions of each of our speakers. In order to keep our time moving right along, you can read those while they speak if you have never heard of these folks, but I am sure that is not the case.

Our first speaker is Christopher Hitchens. Quite apart from what is said in his bio, I would call your attention to an essay written in Commentary <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/> magazine recently by Mark Falcoff about Christopher. I want to read one of the descriptions of Christopher Hitchens by Falco. He says—and he is talking about what he calls "Hitchens’ rapid advance" and reasons for it—"Unlike most journalists, a notoriously indolent race"—and that is no offense to the journalists here. It is not me. It is Mark Falcoff—"He is remarkably industrious and prolific a rough contrast to his American counterparts, he is also widely read in literature, history, and politics. His polemical skills are considerable, and he wields a razor-sharp pen with dexterity…. Hitchens is able to deploy a plummy English accent of the kind that causes garden-variety American liberals to swoon." So, Christopher, we are dying to be swooned, and you have the floor. Please use the podium and when we have our question and answer we will sit here.

Christopher Hitchens: I think it is about four of five years now since I wrote an article for the Nation <http://www.thenation.com/>, for which I was an economist, asking the readers to subscribe money to the Iraqi National Congress to help build up, support, and transmit the ideas of the opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime. I’ve done the same for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan <http://www.puk.org/>for perhaps these ten years now, and I think I would prefer to say that as the fusion of the idea of war, combat—or intervention, I prefer the word intervention—with the idea of justice, that in that sense, the case is morally complete on its own.

I could simple sit down and say that it’s a piece of amazing good fortune that we’ve been matched with this hour. Some might detect what Hegel called the "coming of history" in this noble war. There is a whole series of blunders, crimes, mistakes, errors, and betrayals as the United States has evolved itself into the position where it is on the right side in Iraq. And I think that’s a tremendous thing and I think a case where a regime change is pretty complete on its own.

I would say that in making this statement, I am not making a very utopian claim. We know from the northern sixth of Iraqi soil, territory that has been emancipated for the last decade from Saddam Hussein’s control, that a regime change has been demonstrated. That in a large swathe of Iraq, people are not just free from this horrific tyranny, and fear and terror, but they have evolved something like a civil society, with a modern party arrangement. There are 21 newspapers published in Sulaymaniyyah. I get stuff from Internet cafes in Irbil, from friends and comrades there. People are free to travel. The "oil for food" program has been good for children. They are not as malnourished as they were; roads are being built; achievements of this kind. And I might add—and I say this with no disrespect to my Kurdish friends—that this in some ways, the most unpromising area of Iraq. It’s mountainous. It is in some ways in very backward. It has been riven with feudalism and tribalism and clan loyalties and similar disadvantages to the plural, urban system for a long time. It has also been the area of the most ghastly of tactics of ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and genocidal reprisal by the Saddam Hussein regime as it has been the area that has been the most punitively treated except perhaps of that of Marsh Arabs <http://www.hrw.org/press/2003/01/iraq012503.htm>in the southern stretches.

So the case for regime change, there it is. It’s being done. It can be done and it ought to be done. And it should be again brought out that it is United States and Royal Air Force planes that guarantee the safety and the integrity of these areas. By the way, I would say—and I don’t mean to say "by the way"; I am coming to this point—it seems to me in that sense we are already engaged in a war with Saddam Hussein, and we have been for these ten years. Those no-fly zones don’t have the United Nations mandate; their position in international law is very dubious. The Iraqi ground forces are in fact within their legal rights to try to bring those planes down. They haven’t succeeded in doing that so far. But the fact that we are already in combat, and for this reason, and because it involves the protection of civilians and the evolution of democracy, it seems to me to make the case in a sense before this most recent phase began. Let’s remind ourselves that President Bush came to office willing to discuss both the lifting of sanctions on the Saddam Hussein regime, perhaps in response to a large number of his oleaginous friends. And so he was willing to express considerable doubt about the wisdom of the no-fly zones or the nation-building project itself. So, if that counts as a relentless drive to war, I don’t know what a really hawkish posture would look like.

It’s very obvious from the evidence alone and the eminence of the confrontation that has decided the President in this way. In fact, I’m sure I’m not the only person who wishes that he was bit more driven and more decisive and more determined on finishing this confrontation to our advantage and the advantage of our Iraqi and Kurdish friends who would view it as a deliverance.

There is an illusion, I think, often only half understood and not enough shared, both by a number of paranoid commentators in the Middle East who tend to see the United States as the hidden hand in all that transpires, as the organizing and conspiring power, and by some hubristic intellectuals in Washington, D.C., both of whom I think are really disencumbered. They know decidedly the United States can decide more, can determine more for other countries than it really can. In truth, we are stuck with her; we wouldn’t want to have approached it in this way. I wasn’t kidding when I said that we really got to this point because of a long train of blunders, crimes, and betrayals. I think the whole beauty of the argument presented by Kenneth Pollack in his excellent book with its abysmal title, The Threatening Storm <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375509283/002-4359033-6036818?vi=glance>, the brilliance of his argument is precisely that we are left with the "Least-West" option and we’ve brought this in some ways upon ourselves by previous allegiances with Saddam Hussein which are shameful and disgraceful; by previous promises made and, even more shamefully and disgracefully, not kept to Iraqi and Kurdish forces; and that we are no less forced into this, and have acquired a moral debt as well as political and international responsibility. I think that’s the certain way in which to present the case for an intervention. And of course, the sheer fact that we happen to be on the right side doesn’t license intervention just all by itself.

There are four other headings, I think, under which an intervention in Iraq is justified now and has been justified for some considerable time. The first is the one I think I need to spend the least time on. It’s perfectly evident that the Saddam Hussein regime must care a great deal for the pursuit of weapons of genocide because it is quite plainly willing to state its whole existence, an existence that even at this late date it could probably prolong. It might be able to save itself if it gave them up, if it forswore them. It’s quite evidently a matter of life and death to him to acquire these weapons. And I don’t know if anyone who has studied politics and history, or certainly anyone who has read a short history on projects of the region or of the evolution of the Iraqi Ba’ath party and its leadership, could have any reasonable doubt or any doubt of any kind what it wants those weapons for. And furthermore, in this matter, we are, I mean we would executing an international warrant for the location and destruction of those weapons, and I thought Secretary Powell communicated an absolutely admirable presentation of that case yesterday. I think all doubts on that one must now be stilled.

The second justification arises as much from self-interest and international law as from the encouragement to be morally on the right side in the struggle within Iraqi society. It is obviously the relationship between Saddam Hussein regime and international gangsterism. And here again I think there is very little room for doubt. And there wasn’t really any room for doubt before the al-Qaeda menace was fully disclosed to us. I myself have sat in Baghdad across the table from Abu Nidal who, some of you will remember, was once as well known as much wanted as Osama Bin Laden and others for his atrocious attacks on the civilians of Rome and Vienna airports, and significantly, I think, suggested here in this context for his really lethal and ghastly campaign of assassination against democratic Palestinians. The Abu Nidal Organization[1] <http://library.nps.navy.mil/home/tgp/abu.htm> was basically a revenge killing outfit to attack Palestinians who had an idea of cooperation and internationalism in the Middle East. So the intervention of Iraq on side of deepening and poisoning the Israel/Palestine dispute, is not simply that it is a rejectionist country in itself, but that it merged Palestinians into the ultimatist camp. Now Abu Nidal Organization wasn’t sheltering in Baghdad, in underground Baghdad. It had a telephone number; it had a villa; it was on the official payroll. It was a wing of the Iraqi state.

This wouldn’t be the only example I could give you of the enormous interest shown by the Iraqi Mukhabarat[2] <http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iraq/mukhabarat.htm> in every country where it has any influence in supporting gangsterish, destabilizing organizations. If it had been found that the Iraqi Mukhabarat was not in contact with the al-Qaeda organization, I am very sure that those responsible for not making this contact would have been by now put to death very elaborately for overlooking such an obvious area of responsibility. The chances that they wouldn’t have thought it was done were, in any case, theoretically nil. I must say I was surprised myself to find that we have actually "turf and traffic" from Mr. Zakaria and his associates on the subject. There you are; you don’t expect anything from people that are corrupt.

There are two more international responsibilities that I think warrant a mandate in this case and would make it just as well as prudent. The first is oil. Whenever I’m in a debate, I ask the audience to put their hands up, in front of peacenik audiences, that is, "Can I just ask first who lift no-fly zones?" Generally, people want to do that. So then, I ask "Who here doesn’t think oil is worth fighting over, or for?" Some people think the idea is almost obscene as if it was some ghastly bodily secretion, that the idea of getting in a war for something is unmentionable. But I think they do get the point that the oil resources of the world are, in a sense, common property. They and natural gas are something that is to be shared. We have every right, I think, to say to Saddam Hussein that he will be prevented from doing what he did last time. Remember what he did last time. He blew up the Kuwaiti oil fields after he had agreed to defeat. I’ll repeat it. After defeat had been admitted by the Iraqi armed forces in Kuwait, and they are withdrawing under an international guarantee, Saddam Hussein gave the orders to blow the heads off the oil wells and set them on fire, and flooded the Gulf with burning oil.

It was a very bad deed, and a nasty thing to have done, and irrational. This is the important point. It was an irrational thing to have done. Someone who would do that quite clearly does not understand the logic of deterrence, of self-preservation, as we understand it. So there is a clear and present danger, therefore, to the oil fields and the possibility of that [incident] repeating with a dirty bomb, quite a wide area of oil field production could be irradiated this time, not blown up, but irradiated so that no one could work there for many generations. I think we talk about the cost of a war, and it seems to me we are obliged to realize what the costs would be of allowing this regime to threaten us in that way.

Finally, the genocide convention to which this nation is a signatory, mandates all signatories powers to act without further ado or consultation on the advise of the Charter but in whole or in part to destroy people, to commit ethnicide, and to do so both to prevent this and to punish it. In other words, it would be quite possible to imagine the United States acting in this way and evoking that convention towards many other nations, without any further ado on the clear evidence that Saddam Hussein has more than once not only contemplated but given the order for and begun the operations for the extermination of the Kurdish people of Iraq. It is I think greatly to our shame that some such effort was not made at that time, and it is very much to our shame also at that point, it was voiced conception of Saddam Hussein as possible strategic ally, which prevented that even the prison of that terrible action from being properly voiced.

But one of the many reasons I think why this intervention can and must be properly and morally justified and I will close on this. It gives us the chance not just to do what must be done under the headings of what I mentioned but also to redeem some of our past failings and mistakes and betrayals and come to terms with it to the extent that it is possible and repair to them to sort of thank him. I think the case is made.

Michael Cromartie: Thank you Christopher. Dr. Bill Galston is the Director for the Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy <http://www.puaf.umd.edu/IPPP/>at the University of Maryland and you will see the rest of his bio there on your seats. Bill, thank you for coming.

Bill Galston: My pleasure. I am actually lucky that Christopher Hitchens began on a personal note because I had intended to do the same thing myself, and now I have full warrant to do so. As someone who wore his country’s uniform during the Vietnam era, and as a long time advocate of a more muscular defense foreign policy for the Democratic Party, I am quite surprised to find myself sitting where I am sitting. And I think I owe it to you and perhaps myself to try and explain myself a little bit and then go again. With Pete Wehner in the room I am a little reluctant to utter the next sentence but I guess I will have to. I was driven into opposition by a speech that President Bush gave on June 1, 2002, which seemed to me and not only to me to commit the United States to a policy of unilateral action based on a doctrine of preemption with an aim of regime change. And so it continued through the summer.

Since President Bush’s September 12^{th U.N. speech, there has been a very different argument on offer: multi-lateral action based on the doctrine of enforcement with the aim of disarmament. Those are two fundamentally different lines of argument. I will explore them a little bit as time goes on. I have to say that I know I’m not alone in this—I am a lot more comfortable with the second than I am with the first. I’m also not alone in detecting traces of the first, peeping through the more attractive colors of the second. So, I don’t view the issue of preemption as by any means dead. I think we have to continue to talk about it.}

Continuing on this personal note: full record, I was strongly in favor of the Gulf War when most members of my party weren’t. I was equally strongly in favor or our post–9/11 response to the terrorist in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Indeed, I helped draft a public statement of intellectuals, American intellectuals, stating the moral case for that response. I am not or at least I don’t consider myself to be a member of some ill-defined peace movement. And I firmly believe that American power is in the main of force for good in the world and that is not a principle or even secondary cause of the rise of extremist fundamentalism. I hope I’m under few illusions about the nature of the forces against which we contend today, and which Christopher Hitchens as already described eloquently.

The issue, in my judgment, is not whether to resist them but rather how. I think that there are two basic options before us. One in which the heart of the matter revolves around traditional concepts of defense, deterrence and containment and the other where the long pole in the tent is not just preemption but what I shall describe as prevention.

This is by no coincidence the same choice that the United States faced in the late 1940s and early 1950s when a ragtag band including interalia Bertrand Russell and [General] Curtis LeMay advocated a strategy of preemptive war vis-à-vis the Soviet Union while the forces of sanity prevailed and focused on a policy of containment in terms and defense against aggression with overwhelming historical success.

It seems to me that the burden of proof is on those who advocate change to establish that today’s circumstances require a shift away from model one to model two, from containment, deterrence, and resistance against aggression to a policy of prevention. And we know from here the argument that 21st century circumstances, in particular, the rise of terrorism of global reach renders the traditional doctrine, which I am calling model one obsolete and I cheerfully acknowledge that this argument has considerable merit as applied to non-state or transnational terrorism.

But this argument is not nearly as meritorious as applied to sovereign states. The proponents of the argument that containment and deterrence are obsolete need to make the case that the mere possibility of cooperating with terrorists and deploying and using weapons of mass destruction somehow renders governments with no more addresses and a great deal to loose in cooperating with the traditional incentive structures of deterrence. And here let me just a flag a factual difference that Christopher Hitchens and I will have to argue out. I do not believe that Saddam Hussein is immune to that traditional incentive structure in any way. In my judgment, therefore, neither wise theory nor sound practice is well served by casually collapsing the logic of stateless terrorism into that of sovereign states.

A couple of other preliminary points, from time to time in these remarks, I am going to advert to the language of the law. This isn’t accidental. I believe and will argue that the United States in the long run will be best served by sustaining an international system that is as "law-like" as the nature of the international affairs will permit.

I also believe—and this is my last preliminary note—that whatever the United States says and whatever it does has enormous precedental force in establishing basic norms and patterns of behavior in international affairs. When we act, we may act alone, but we do not act as isolation. What we do and what we say will spill over. We cannot hold ourselves out as an exceptional case warranted in using tactics and strategies that we try to prevent nations and the rest of the world from using. The world doesn’t work that way. So in quasi-Kantian, when we legislate foreign policy for ourselves, we are legislating foreign policy for the world, and so we must think systemically.

There are it seems to me three important kinds of arguments in favor of the justice of intervening in Iraq, arguments of varying weight and merit. The war in Iraq may well be justified as what I will call a war of enforcement. This was the focus of President Bush’s September 12th UN speech and Colin Powell’s testimony yesterday. I don’t think any fair-minded person can discipline the proposition that Iraq has clearly and materially violated numerous resolutions to which it is a party.

I warned you that I would be a little bit legal. Well, here is instance number one. It is not the United States that is the aggrieved party. It is the Security Council of the United Nations; in just war language, it is the United Nations that is the competent authority in this case. It was the United Nations that was the competent authority to issues those resolutions in the first place, and it is the United Nations that is from a legal standpoint a competent authority to determine the enforcement of them. Now we may well believe, indeed, I believe that the United Nations would make a mistake if it did not proceed to the muscular enforcement of its resolutions. But suppose it doesn’t. Let me give you a domestic analogy. There is a perpetuator; the police apprehend the perpetuator and there is a strong case against the perpetuator. But the prosecutor, perhaps because of the nature of the case load, perhaps because the prosecutor thinks that the transaction costs of bringing the case are going to be pretty high decides either not to bring the case or to strike a plea bargain.

Now, would some member of that society be justified in saying that is a rotten, immoral outcome, and therefore I am going to do what the prosecutor and the legal system failed to do. I think the analogy between that and situation we might well face vis-à-vis the Security Council is pretty good.

The second kind of argument that we sometimes hear is one that Christopher Hitchens has just pressed which I will call humanitarian intervention. As he pointed out, we are already engaged in humanitarian intervention—intervention in both the North and the South that is working pretty well. I will have to say though that as a matter of basic credibility, the major abuses of human rights occurred a decade or more ago when we, as Christopher rightly pointed out, repeatedly failed to intervene to stop them. If we invoke humanitarian or anti-genocidal reasons now, are they really credible? Are people really going to believe that’s why we are doing it? I don’t think so and I think that matters.

Which brings me to the third and perhaps the most important point. The most important kind of justification that I would want to consider, because this is the one that I think where the most the urgent problems are. And that is the justification of an intervention in Iraq as what I will call a war of national defense. Now there is an obvious threshold problem and that is that Iraq hasn’t attacked us. And it is not clearly implicated in attacks on us by others. So the national defense argument stands or falls with the case for anticipatory responses to future threats.

Now the category of anticipatory self-defense does have a place in international law and in just war theory. Let me summarize a lot of legal and philosophical argument and suggest that at the heart of the doctrine of justified anticipatory self-defense lie four criteria: the severity of the threat—that’s one. Two, the degree of probability of threat, three the eminence of the threat and four the costs of delay. Testing the Iraq case against these criteria, I think we would have to say that the threat is high, at least in worst case; for example, the acquisition of the transfer of the nukes by terrorists. The probability of such event is contested, and many experts believe that Saddam does not have an incentive to do anything of the sort. In any event, we are not in all probability talking about a threat that is eminent, and the costs of delay at least measured in months rather than years, are rather low.

This led the most eminent student of modernist behavior to suggest war Michael Walzer, hardly a dove, vis-à-vis Iraq to find the following conclusion which he stated this way. In the absence of evidence suggesting not only the existence of Iraqi weapons but also their eminent use, preemption is not an accurate description of what the President is threatening. No one expects an Iraqi attack on the United States tomorrow or next Tuesday so there is nothing to preempt. The war that is being discussed is preventive not preemptive. It is designed to respond to a more distant threat. Walzer goes on to note that international lawyers and just more theorists have never looked on this argument, the argument in favor of preventive war for favor because the danger to which it leads is not only distant but speculative, whereas the costs of a preventive war are near certain and usually terror.

Now there are two arguments in favor of extending the doctrine of preemption to cover what Walzer calls prevention. Argument number one goes as follows: The certain kinds of states, the traditional trichotomy of capabilities, intentions, and actions loses its analytical and moral force. Let me quote another one of today’s symposiasts, suppose he asks George Weigel who wrote in a very illuminating article and I quote, "Can we not say that in the hands of certain kinds of states the mere possession of weapons of mass destruction constitutes an aggression, or at the very least an aggression waiting to happen?" To which I would reply, No, I don’t think we can say that at least not without loss of analytical and moral clarity.

And here is why I think that. Aggression is an action; it is not a capability or even an intention. There are many things that bad people can do and want to do, but none the less refrain from doing out of fear of the consequence. And to me, that is the very issue that divides the proponents of deterrence from the proponents of prevention, and it must not be erased by a redefinition of classic concepts.

The second argument in favor of extending preemption to prevention goes roughly as follows: In current circumstances, the classical criteria of eminence and probability of harm looms their relevance. Rather the appropriate criterion of action is risk defined as the simple possibility that something very bad can happen. The administration’s stance articulated repeatedly by President Bush and restated by Secretary Powell just yesterday is in effect that we do not have to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein intends or is likely to transfer weapons of mass destruction to terrorists for use against the United States. The bare possibility that he might do so is a risk that and I quote "the United States will not and cannot ride."

Now in the fearful post–9/11 climate in the United States, it is easy to understand the political force of this zero tolerance for this policy. With reluctance, because I know this is going to get me into great trouble, I have to pose an unfashionable question. Is zero risk for reasonable and feasible basis for armed national defense? Doesn’t history suggest that the quest for absolute security carries dangers of its own? Isn’t there always a perimeter, as the Romans discovered, beyond which lies danger? Shouldn’t our policy soberly balance costs and benefits, risks and rewards? Security in my judgment is a matter of more and less, not yes or no. We can’t maximize our security unless we are allowed to assess the probability as well as the severity of possible horrors. But the new vocabulary of risk collapses probability into bare possibility. And in so doing, I believe, it impedes pure thinking and honest deliberation about the real choices we face.

And in conclusion let me try to state that choice as cleanly as I can. In my judgment, Iraq is not now and for the foreseeable future, will not be a direct threat to the territory and people of the United States of America. But a nuclear-armed Iraq would be able to threaten its neighbors and alter the balance of power and influence in a region of vast and vital importance to the United States and its allies. Preventing this cascade of events is, or ought to be, the real and I believe the declaratory purpose of our policy. The question then becomes, how much of a price ought we be willing to pay for how long, with what collateral damage to other nations, with what consequences for local terrorism to achieve this purpose? Thank you very much.

Michael Cromartie: Thank you, Bill. George Weigel is a Roman Catholic theologian and author of the definitive biography of Pope John Paul II called Witness to Hope <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006018793X/002-4359033-6036818?vi=glance>. Some of you may not know that George’s first major book was on just war theory entitled Tranquilitatis Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace, published by Oxford in 1987. George gave a William Simon lecture recently for the Center, and that lecture is out in the lobby; and they are free. It is called "Moral Clarity in Time of War <http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0301/articles/weigel.html>". Please help yourself to that. George thank you for coming down the hall.

George Weigel: Thank you Michael. As you all can tell, I have learned something about literary marketing since I named the book Tranquilitas Ordinis in 1987. I’ve learned a few other things as well and I will try to bring them to bear on our conversation today.

I’ve been thinking about just war and the world as it has evolved over the past twenty-five years for that entire period. And it seems to me that new realities of international public life and new weapons technologies have posed new questions for the just war tradition which is an evolving tradition dating back 1500 years to Augustine in the City of God. A tradition refined during the Middle Ages, a tradition which interestingly enough is the intellectual foundation with emergence of the concept of international law through the work of Hugo Grotius and others.

I think it is an interesting commentary on American society and culture that our debate over Iraq has been cast explicitly in just war terms. However much this tradition may have been forgotten by some of our religious leaders, as I suggest it has in the lecture, it is alive in the culture. It’s also alive in the United States government and the United States military, in the service academies where it is a regular part of the curriculum. And it seems to me that over the past several weeks since this debate has come to a particularly urgent point, three issues within the classic structure of the just war tradition and its method of moral reasoning have come to the floor and I would like to say something about them now.

But let me preface that by one other thought. We misunderstand the just war tradition, in its sinewy-ness, in its texture. If we imagine it simply to be a series of means tests that religious leaders, religious intellectuals, and moral philosophers like Bill Galston pose to statesmen, and once they jump over the hurdles, then a benediction comes down and things go on. That’s not what the just war tradition is. The just war tradition is first and foremost a theory of statecraft. It’s a way of thinking about the world. It’s a way of thinking about moral responsibility in the world. It’s a way of asserting the claim that the realm of international public life is not a realm of amorality. Nothing that is genuinely human including international political life is outside the purview of moral reason. Therefore the just war tradition does not begin as so many of our religious today insist that it does with a so-called presumption against violence.

In fact, where it begins is with the moral responsibility of the legitimate public authority to provide for the security of those for whom it has assumed responsibility. So the question of ends comes first, and then we get to the means test afterwards. But that is simply by way of prefacing. There is a much longer discussion in the essay that Mike mentioned available outside.

Let me take up for our common discussion free of the classic ad bellum or war decision law criterion within the just war tradition that has very much framed public debate over the past several months. The first is, of course, the question of just cause. Traditionally within the just war theory, just cause meant over that 1500-year period of development one of three things: response to an aggression under way, the recovery of something wrongfully taken, or third, punishment for evil. In the past fifty years of just war thinking, recovery of something wrongfully taken and punishment for evil seem to have dropped out of the equation, although the whole notion of humanitarian intervention in cases of actual potential genocide may be raising that up again. But for the past fifty years or so, most just war theorists have restricted just cause to response to an aggression underway.

The question that the new realities of both war politics and weapons technologies pose to us is can that notion of aggression underway be limited as it often has been in the past to classic cross border attack. It seems to me, and I argue in the essay, that it cannot. That the fact of rogue states, the lethal equation of rogue states plus weapons of mass destruction plus ballistic missile capability or links to terrorist organizations equals, Bill notwithstanding, aggression underway. The acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by aggressive regimes of this sort which have demonstrated in fact, not simply in Ba-athist theory, but in fact there utter contempt for the minimal warms of international public life has to constitute an action to which a response can be contemplated.

Now within the just cause category, questions have been raised in recent weeks about what are we doing to the post-Westphalian principle of the sovereign immunity of states when we contemplate the kind of action that is likely to unfold in Iraq. I would argue that sovereign immunity assumes at least a minimal acquiescence to minimal norms of international immunity. That immunity is forfeited when rogues basically or blatantly defy their international obligations, and when they work feverishly to acquire weapons of mass destruction that cannot be assumed to be under acquisition for purposes of deterrence at home. To deny rogues the capacity to create lethal disorder in world affairs serves, I suggest, the cause of world order over the law.

Second, the question that Bill Galston raised as well, and that is the question of competent authority. It is one of the most striking things in public rhetoric of the past six months perhaps a year that with very few exceptions, religious leaders throughout the world seem to have decided rather abruptly that the only competent authority legitimating the use of proportionate, discriminating force, is the United Nations, which in practice means the Security Council. Now, it is interesting to note that the UN itself does not claim that right to be its alone, Articles 2 and 51 of the Charter which specifically lay out the right of national self defense would seem to assume that if in the case of a classic cross border attack, you are under assault, you don’t have to wait for the authorization of the Security Council to do something about it.

What I would just like to flag is an interesting moral question here, since I think that is my job in this distinguished gathering is to try to press some moral issues. It seems to me a bit problematic to suggest that the Security Council as presently constituted—which means the Security Council with those five veto powers—de facto constitutes a superior and essential moral authority without which or absent which any resort to the use of proportionate, discriminate armed force is dubious.

Why do I say that? I say that because three of the powers holding the veto on the Security Council, namely France, Russia and China, conduct their affairs in the world according to the crudest of realpolitik calculations, calculations which among other things helped to disassemble the containment regime of Iraq during the 1990s, and it is not clear to me how one can produce out of those kinds of explicitly amoralist calculations a superior and essential moral authority. I don’t know how you can connect those two. So it seems to me whatever it’s prudential utility, whatever it’s political utility, whatever its utility in building barriers against the kind of precedental concerns that Bill noted, the notion that the Security Council as presently constituted is either itself an essential moral authority is a very difficult case.

Third, there has been a lot of discussion recently about the classic ad bellum criterion of last resort. Last resort has never been understood in the history of just war tradition in mathematical terms, as the final point on a line of contingent of possibilities. It couldn’t be that because theoretically one could always imagine one more point along that line, one more initiative, more act of diplomacy, one more summit conference, etc. So we can't think of that mathematically.

Last resort has always been a prudential calculation, a calculation of prudence; and it seems to me that here the question of weapons technologies becomes very, very urgent. We are not in a situation where we can imagine last resort being satisfied because we know that its 6 a.m. the next morning, the red coats are coming over the hill as in The Patriot. That’s not the way this world works anymore with weapons of mass destruction and especially with nuclear ones.

Last resort cannot mean, it seems to me, if it is to have any real moral traction, cannot mean waiting until an aggressor gets his hands on these weapons and then trying to prevent him from using them. Rather, last resort must mean prudentially no real viable option left but taking forceful action to prevent the aggressor from obtaining the weapons in question before he gets them.

And here I suggest that the action at the Osirak nuclear reactor outside Baghdad in 1981 is a useful case to think about.[3] Last resort was not reached in some mathematical sense of last resort in many of these cases. If one goes back and looks at the justifications, which I believe are quite plausible justifications, used by the leadership in the state of Israel in taking that action, it was very much based on the notion that one had to act at the moment before the capability came on line to produce the weapons, because failure after that involved risks to catastrophic to contemplate. So we need obviously a new reflection, a more refined reflection on last resort.

Let me mention two other collateral issues, related issues here that might fuel the discussion. One, I agree with I think all of my colleagues that this phrase "preventive war" is not a helpful one. Preventive war seems to assume that we are living in a kind of temporal vacuum in which the only relevant data is, what are the options to be considered at this moment. And yet we are not living in a temporal vacuum. The conflict with Iraq, as Christopher Hitchens has noted, has been underway for more than twelve years. The record of Iraqi intransigence during that period is manifest to the world, the assumption throughout the past twelve years, the assumption under both UNSCOM and the present inspection regime has been that Iraq has possession of weapons of mass destruction particularly, specifically biologicals and chemicals and is feverishly seeking nuclear capability. In light of that, talk about preventive war as if all of this just started now—and all we are dealing with is this discreet moment in time—seems to me not helpful language.

Finally, the question of who makes the call or who owns the just war tradition is a very urgent one right now. Let me read to you a sentence from the catechism of the Catholic Church, published ten years ago after listing the traditional ad bellum and in bello war decision and moral conduct criteria, the catechism immediately says that "the evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who responsibility for the common good." Now that means that it is not our bishops, priests, stated clerks, rabbis, imans, councils of churches, etc, etc, who make the call. It means that it is responsible public authorities who make the call. And it is, frankly, as I indicate in the lecture and what I am saying even more forcefully today, a form of clericalism to suggest that the clergy own the just war tradition. And within the clergy I will be very medieval here, and include religious intellectuals and more of the philosophers, own the just war tradition in a unique way. No, what their public responsibility and duty is to teach the principle of new tradition and insist that they meet part of the governmental and public debate on what is to be done as they manifestly are.

But the location of the just group tradition: Who is the just war tradition for? It belongs to States. It belongs to those with responsibility for the common good. Why? Two reasons. One because one hopes and believes that there is a particular quality of political discernment that is in the possession of those who have the kind of responsibility that public officials have and that others do not possess. Secondly, there is the question of relevant information. It has been quite bizarre to see religious leaders around the world comment on possible American action in Iraq as if a) the United States government were controlled by moral cretins, and b) as if they had a clearer insight into the risk calculus of continued probabilities and possibilities at end of military action in Iraq.

Now, no one in this room is going to sit here and suggest that American policy in the Middle East and specifically in Iraq has been a model of integrity and good sense for the past fifty years. But what is it in the minds of certain religious leaders that leads them to assume that they have a superior base of knowledge on which to weigh those prudential possibilities? Surely, one has to give some benefit of the doubt, particularly in the case of morally earnest and politically experienced leadership to that civic leadership for having weighed the risk calculus in a serious and prudent way.

Let me just come back at the end to the point I made at the beginning. It says something quite important about the United States of America that our national debate on this very urgent and dangerous matter has been conducted instinctively within just war categories. That does not happen, I dare say, in France and Germany. And it says something important about us, a people given too much moral self-flagellation from time to time, that this tradition still lives as a cultural memory within our country and is a way of informing our public today. That it can be misused at times is obvious. That it has been misused in the present circumstance by some, I think is equally obvious, but that these criteria which emerge from the natural philosophical instincts of the human person to know the true and the good are still alive and well in the United States I think bodes well for the future of the country and for prudent public policy-making.

[1] http://library.nps.navy.mil/home/tgp/abu.htm

[2] Iraqi Intelligence Service; also called the Department of General Intelligence.

[3] Article on Israeli Osirak nuclear reactor attack: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/15/opinion/15KRIS.html