The president wanted to kill somebody.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, as quoted by Bob Woodward, Bush at War
A defining moment
On September 11, 2001, watching the television footage of the collapsing World Trade Center and seeing the grief of the families of the victims, it was easy to agree with Bush when he said:‘Today, our nation saw evil.’243 In his brief speech to the nation that evening he used the word ‘evil’ four times, setting the tone for the months and years to come. That the President of the United States would become the leader of a global struggle against terrorism was inevitable, given the target of the attack. A different president might not, however, have jumped to the conclusion that America was attacked because it is ‘the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world’. That statement ignored America’s role in global politics, and especially in the Middle East. It therefore struck many people in other countries as a painful example of just how self-satisfied America is.
Another president might also have made different moral choices about how best to prevent future terrorist attacks. Here the decisions Bush made will define his presidency and have an impact on the peace and security of the world for a long time to come. About these decisions, there are many questions to ask. We have already seen that Bush’s actions are inconsistent with his professed belief that all innocent human life is precious and must be protected. Other equally significant questions about Bush’s decisions include whether they are based solely on the principle of doing what is in the best interests of Americans, or can be justified in terms of the interests of everyone affected by them. Do they prove that America is a nation that ‘loves peace’, as Bush has claimed?244 Are they applied consistently in different situations? Are they likely to lead to a world in which peace and justice, for Americans and others, are more secure, or less secure?
The Bush doctrine and the decision to attack Afghanistan
The first important policy decision was taken very quickly. On the evening of September 11, when Bush spoke to the nation for just seven minutes, he said that the United States would, in responding to the attack, ‘make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them’.245 The decision to say this was made by Bush, in discussion with Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser. No one else—not Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, nor Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—was consulted beforehand.246 Nine days later, Bush repeated what soon became known as the ‘Bush doctrine’ to a special joint session of Congress: ‘from this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.’
This Bush doctrine—perhaps better described as the ‘first Bush doctrine’, since his later assertion of America’s right to make pre-emptive strikes has also been referred to as the Bush doctrine—significantly changed previous understandings of national sovereignty and support for terrorism. Before September 11, the United States government would surely have resisted the application of such a doctrine by another nation. Take Cuba, for example. America harbours Cuban exiles who have used Miami as a base from which to carry out terrorist attacks in Cuba. In 1998 a former senior federal prosecutor told the Miami Herald there was a policy of avoiding prosecution of those plotting terrorist acts against Cuba. So, when a boat loaded with explosives and registered in the name of Tony Bryant, an anti-Castro militant, turned up near Havana, the FBI simply told Bryant not to do it again. The Herald article provided that as one of many examples showing what it described as ‘the weakness of US laws that bar violent acts against foreign governments’.247
The most momentous example of a country going to war against another nation for harbouring and supporting terrorism is still Austria-Hungary’s attack on Serbia in 1914 which triggered a world war that cost nine million lives. Austria-Hungary’s case for going to war rested on Serbian involvement in the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince and his wife in Sarajevo. The conspirators admitted that they had been trained, armed, supported and given safe passage across the border by Serbian government officials. Austria-Hungary handed the Serbian government an ultimatum, demanding that it bring the conspirators to justice and allow Austro-Hungarian officials to supervise the prosecution to ensure that the trail of guilt was pursued to the end. This ultimatum was widely seen as a violation of the principle of national sovereignty. The British Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, called it ‘The most formidable document I have ever seen addressed by one State to another that was independent.’248 The American Legion’s official history of the Great War denounced it as a ‘vicious document of unproven accusation and tyrannical demand’.249 Many historians studying the origins of World War I have condemned the ultimatum as failing to respect Serbia’s sovereignty. They are especially critical of the fact that after the Serbian government accepted many, but not all, of the demands in the ultimatum, Austria-Hungary refused to enter into negotiations, instead declaring war.
Although the United States administration—unlike the Austro-Hungarian government in respect of Serbia—had no evidence of the involvement of Afghan government officials in the events of September 11, Bush’s ultimatum to Afghanistan was no less threatening to that country’s sovereignty than Austria-Hungary’s was to Serbia. He demanded the closure of all terrorist training camps, and access for US officials to ensure that they were no longer operating. In one important respect, he went further than Austria-Hungary, which was content for Serbia to put those who had aided the terrorists on trial. Bush insisted that Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan be handed over to the US—where one might suspect that it would be difficult for them to get a fair trial. (The subsequent history of American procedures for dealing with those captured in Afghanistan has shown this suspicion to be reasonable.)250
When, on 7 October 2001 the United States began bombing Afghanistan, there was very little opposition within the US or in the international community to the war against the Taliban. On behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Joseph Fiorenza wrote to Bush that the use of force against Afghanistan was ‘regrettable but necessary’ and Cardinal Francis George of Chicago said flatly: ‘This is a just war.’251 At Princeton University I organised a forum on whether a war on Afghanistan would be a just response to terrorism. I invited four distinguished speakers, covering the range of opinion from left to right: Richard Falk, Michael Walzer, James Johnson and Gideon Rose. I was surprised—and from the perspective of an organiser seeking vigorous debate, disappointed—to find that all four thought that an attack on Afghanistan would be a just war in the light of the events of September 11. For Falk, who had opposed the Vietnam War and the 1991 Gulf War, and subsequently opposed the 2003 war with Iraq, it was the first time that he had supported America going to war.
It is possible that the near-unanimity of support for an attack on Afghanistan was a sign of nothing more than that people were calmly and impartially considering whether such an attack was the right thing to do, and deciding that it was, because the facts were such that no rational person could come to a different conclusion. But it is also possible that the horrendous nature of the attacks of September 11, still fresh in everyone’s memory, swayed people’s judgment and prevented the kind of calm reasoning that is desirable before making a momentous decision that puts at risk the lives of many people, including innocents.
The just-war theory to which Bishop Joseph Fiorenza appealed in his letter to Bush has wide acceptance beyond religious circles and provides a convenient framework for assessing whether America’s war on the Taliban government of Afghanistan was ethically defensible. As set out in The Challenge of Peace, the much-praised statement on when it is just to go to war adopted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, lethal force may only be used when all of the following seven conditions are fulfilled:
The Cause is Just
The most obvious ‘just cause’ is defence against aggression; another would be to stop grave violations of the basic rights of whole populations.
Competent Authority
War can only be waged by a legitimate government, with responsibility for keeping order.
Comparative Justice
The values at stake must be sufficiently critical to override the presumption against killing, and when right is not all on one side, the injustice suffered by one party must significantly outweigh that suffered by the other.
Right Intention
Force may only be used for just reasons, such as to achieve peace and reconciliation.
Probability of Success
No matter how just the cause may be, if resorting to arms will be futile, it is wrong to go to war.
Proportionality
The expected costs of going to war, in terms of loss of life and destruction, must be outweighed by the good expected to be achieved.
Last Resort
Force may be used only after all peaceful alternatives have been tried and exhausted.252
In the case of the US attack on Afghanistan, the first four criteria seem to pose little difficulty. If the cause was to bring those behind the outrage of September 11, 2001 to justice, and to prevent further terrorism then it was undoubtedly just. The war was undertaken by the American government, the proper authority for the use of force to defend American civilians. The values at stake—protecting people from further acts of terrorism like those carried out on September 11—were of critical importance. The government’s intentions were, we can assume, primarily to stop such acts, and secondarily to bring a less oppressive, more democratic government to Afghanistan. The US government was not intending to annex Afghan territory.
On the fifth criterion, the probability of success, much depends on how the objectives of the war are seen. If they were to destroy Al Qaeda’s training camps and disrupt its operations, the war was successful. Bringing those behind the September 11 attacks to justice has proved more difficult. Only a few Al Qaeda leaders have been captured or confirmed killed, and at the time of writing, Osama bin Laden is not among them. Nevertheless, there might have been reasonable expectations that this could be achieved.
Destroying the training camps, bringing its leaders to justice, and temporarily interfering with Al Qaeda’s operations, however, were merely the means to the only justifiable goal of the ‘war on terrorism’: to stop, or sharply reduce, terrorist attacks. Was a war on Afghanistan likely to achieve that? The camps were primarily training fighters to support the Taliban in consolidating its hold over Afghanistan, rather than training terrorists to operate against America or other Western nations. Destroying them could not be expected to stop such terrorism. Al Qaeda already had cells in Western nations, and it was from these that further terrorist attacks were likely to come. Indeed, as one study has said,‘the 11 September terrorist cells were less dependent functionally on Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan than on flight schools in Florida’.253 A senior FBI counter-terrorism official has estimated that the war on Afghanistan reduced Al Qaeda’s capacity to commit ‘horrific acts’ by 30 per cent. Even the capture of bin Laden, he said, would cause only a ‘stuttering’ in Al Qaeda operations.254 The bombings in Bali and the Philippines in October 2002, in Riyadh and Casablanca in May 2003, in Jakarta and Baghdad in August 2003, and in Riyadh, Nasiriya and Istanbul in November 2003 showed only too vividly that the war in Afghanistan did not succeed in preventing major terrorist attacks. Since we can’t re-run history without that war, we really don’t know whether it reduced the number of such attacks by 30 per cent, by 70 per cent, or by any other figure. It may have been reasonable to expect that overthrowing the government that had harboured the terrorists would be a warning to other governments that might consider supporting terrorists or allowing them to use their territory as a base. But as the IRA showed for many years, terrorist organisations do not need the support of a state to carry out their atrocities. It also needs to be asked whether going to war with the government of an Islamic nation would not give rise to more hatred of America among Muslims than a more narrowly focused attack on Al Qaeda. If that is so, in the long run the war may turn out to have contributed to increasing terrorism, rather than reducing it.
Given a proper reading of the objectives of the war on terrorism, then, it is not clear that the requirement of having a reasonable probability of success was fulfilled. Of course, this judgment must be made against a background of other possible actions, and the probability that they would be as successful or more successful in reducing terrorism.
The sixth criterion is proportionality: was the end or goal of the war proportional to the means used or the costs incurred? Even if the cause of a war is inherently just, the costs of achieving justice may be so high that it would be wrong to go to war. In the conflict between the people of Hungary and the Soviet Union in 1956, for example, justice clearly lay on the side of the Hungarians. But if the only way of defending the Hungarians was to start a global nuclear war, then the cost of achieving a just outcome was simply out of proportion to the goal of freedom for Hungary. In the case of the war on Afghanistan, there was no real risk of bringing about a catastrophe on that scale, but there was a serious risk of killing substantial numbers of civilians—and this did happen. Since the proportionality principle involves a weighing of costs and benefits, much depends on the uncertain nature of the benefits. If a successful war prevented Al Qaeda from mounting more operations on the scale of September 11, or from killing even larger numbers with nuclear or biological weapons, then the proportionality criterion was satisfied even if a significant number of civilians were killed.
Finally, there is the criterion of last resort, and it is here that the Bush administration’s actions are most difficult to defend. This criterion requires that a nation go to war only when it has tried and exhausted all peaceful alternatives. Bush, however, showed little interest in exploring any option short of war. Already on 13 September, according to Bob Woodward’s account in Bush at War, Powell noticed that ‘Bush was tired of rhetoric. The president wanted to kill somebody’. From then on, although there is occasional talk of the need for patience, Bush frequently pushes for quick action, saying things like:‘Time is of the essence’, ‘It’s very important to move fast’, and ‘We’ve got to start showing results’.255
On 17 September, Bush told Powell to issue an ultimatum to the Taliban, ordering them to turn over bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and adding that if they did not comply, ‘We’ll attack them with missiles, bombers and boots on the ground.’ Then, as Woodward recounts, Bush added: ‘Let’s hit them hard. We want to signal this is a change from the past. We want to cause other countries like Syria and Iran to change their views. We want to hit as soon as possible.’ Powell was ‘slightly taken aback’ that Bush wanted to give the Taliban an immediate ultimatum. In the end, Bush issued the ultimatum himself, in his speech to Congress—and to eighty million Americans watching on television— on 20 September. Shortly before he gave that speech he had privately told British Prime Minister Tony Blair that his plan was to use the ‘full force of the US military’ with ‘bombers coming from all directions’.256
Remarkably, as far as we can tell from Woodward’s account, after giving the Taliban the ultimatum, Bush never discussed, with Rice, with Powell, with the National Security Council, nor with any other advisers, the Taliban’s response. The reader of Bush at War might assume that the Taliban never responded at all. But in reality Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, asked the US government to provide evidence of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in the events of September 11, and indicated that if this was done, he would be willing to hand bin Laden over to an Islamic court in another Muslim country. (This proposal was later softened to a requirement that the court have at least one Muslim judge.) There was also a suggestion that the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of more than fifty Muslim countries, should be consulted. Finally, there was an offer to meet with US officials.257 The request for evidence of bin Laden’s involvement—no such evidence had been made public at the time—was surely a reasonable one, in accord with normal requests for extradition. The US would itself insist on evidence before handing someone within its borders over to another nation wishing to put him on trial for a capital offence. Yet the request, and the proposal for a meeting, appear to have been totally ignored, just as Austria-Hungary ignored Serbia’s counter-offer in 1914. In both cases, such treatment of a response to an ultimatum indicates that the intention behind the ultimatum was not to find a satisfactory solution to the problem, but to provide an excuse for going to war. War was not the last resort.
The problem for the impatient president was what kind of action he could take. The original plan was to send in American ground troops simultaneously with the commencement of bombing, but the military did not have the necessary infrastructure in place for getting troops into Afghanistan quickly. Even once it had been decided to bomb first and get troops in later, Bush was impatient with the delay required to prepare the bombing campaign. On 27 September, when Rice told Bush that the military was not ready to begin bombing, the president replied:‘That’s unacceptable!’ Bush himself told Woodward that he was ‘ready to go’,‘growing a little impatient’,‘fiery’. And he also said: ‘I rely on my instincts. I just knew that at some point in time, the American people were going to say, Where is he? What are you doing? Where’s your leadership? Where is the United States? You’re all-powerful, do something.’258
Since getting American ground troops into Afghanistan was going to take more time than Bush was prepared to accept, bombs and missiles were the obvious alternative. They could be ordered up more quickly, but Al Qaeda was an elusive target. The Bush war cabinet knew that the training camps were already empty, and Bush was determined to avoid ‘pounding sand’—a derisive term that he and Rumsfeld used to refer to what they saw as Clinton’s tactic of responding to bin Laden’s earlier attacks on American embassies by sending a million-dollar Cruise missile into an empty tent.259 The Taliban government, on the other hand, offered more substantial targets. So the goal slid from attacking Al Qaeda to toppling the Taliban regime. In Woodward’s account, by 29 September, just nine days after the ultimatum had been issued, ousting the Taliban was already the assumed goal of the military operation.260
If Woodward’s account is accurate—and it is based on extensive interviews with those who were present, including Bush himself, and on notes made at the time by those who were there—the war on Afghanistan fails to meet the criteria for being a just war because it was not a war of last resort. Moreover, because the form that the war actually took—a war to overthrow the Taliban government—arguably went beyond what was necessary to achieve the goal of bringing those behind the outrage of September 11, 2001 to justice, and preventing further terrorism, it is not even clear that the war was fought for a just cause. It was an option chosen by a leader who was in a hurry to act, to show the American public that he was a leader, and to make an example of Afghanistan, in order to send a signal to other nations. But impatience is not an ethical justification for going to war, and the signal could have been sent in other ways, less costly in human life.
The tone of the discussions Woodward reports gives little sense that Bush was pondering the deaths that the war was bound to bring to many, including children and other innocent civilians. Rumsfeld has acknowledged, as we have seen, that war makes ‘misery and suffering and death’ commonplace. The inevitability of a major loss of innocent human life in the war Bush was contemplating makes it an ethical imperative to search very hard for an alternative to war. If, on the other hand, a major loss of innocent life was not inevitable, then there is all the more reason to blame Bush for the more than a thousand civilian deaths that did occur as a result of the means by which the war was fought. The ethics of inflicting civilian casualties, even unintentionally, feeds back into the ethics of the decision to go to war. A peace-loving president would have been more convincing in trying all other options. That would have been emotionally and politically difficult in the days immediately following September 11, but it was what Bush ought to have done. Then, if those options had failed, when America went to war, it would have been beyond doubt the last resort.261