Is War Ever Justified?

  "Does the Concept of Jus en Bello Make a War Truly Justified?" 

    The term jus en bello refers to the terms which define a war as ethical or set the terms in which a war is fought.  In this essay I will provide an answer to the question of whether there is such thing as a “just war” and whether the concept of war itself even fits the description of justice.  The most concise answer to the question is “no.”  I will argue that there are never any terms in which war is justified.   Furthermore, in this essay I will explain why belligerents may go to war, the methods in which wars are fought, the consequences of going to war, and form an overall argument to support that the notion that jus en bello is a false ethical value. 

    To begin, we must identify why belligerent nations go to war.  The most common reason is for resources.  One nation desire to obtain what another nation has, and for its betterment, seeks to breech the sovereignty of a nation for the purpose of taking its resources.  An example of this type of declaration of war can be seen most recently in the Ukraine, in which she was attacked by Russia.  Russia wanted her territory for the purposes of a pipeline that they could use to increase their nations wealth.  This attack violated the sovereignty of the Ukraine and by itself could be viewed as an aggression not in line within the terms of jus en bello.  This could be because Russia was not justified in attacking the Ukraine. 

    We must also now consider whether it is in fact morally sound to attack the nation that breached the sovereignty of the Ukraine.  The question becomes: Is it a just war to attack Russia for invading the Ukraine?  The cost of warfare begs us to wonder what is at stake for the Ukraine.  There are very serious ramifications of engaging in warfare for the sake of the national identity and wellbeing of the citizens of the Ukraine.  Is there a certainty that the quality of life of the average Ukrainian citizen will suffer at the hands of the Russian invaders?  Is there any inherent advantage or disadvantage to the existential presence of the Ukraine as a body politic?  People often assume; yes.  The Ukrainians have a right to remain a country out of an intrinsic need to support the international status quo.   

    Consider this hypothetical example:  Half of the world invades the other half of the world, and half of the world's nations become memories.  However, the quality of life of all people increased by orders of magnitude; would that have been a war of injustice?  Nations have been lost over time which include Rhodesia, Yugoslavia, Palestine, Prussia.  Does the loss of these political entities necessarily imperil the quality of international wellbeing?  I would assert that borders drawn up from the post-World War 2 period, and the post-Cold War period are considered inherently better, but that doesn’t mean that they are better to everyone.  The collapsing of certain world empires, decolonization of European powers, and rise of pan nationalistic movements are the justifications for the nascent features of the modern world map.  The international community has its own reasons for seeing to it that those borders remain as they are, regardless of what parties may find themselves at odds with them. 

    To bring things around the concept of national identity, we return to the original conflict between Russia and the Ukraine.  If it was indeed for resources alone and Russia seeking its own betterment at the cost of human life, then what is the logical response?  It is a frightful prospect to engage in warfare with a major world power as a practical matter.  Now as a matter of wartime ethics, is intervening for the benefit of a neutral country a just cause to go to war?  Should the United States have sent troops and ordinances into Eastern Europe to support the Ukrainian war effort?  Moreover, if the Ukraine was part of NATO (North Atlantic Trade Organization,) should the United States have honored their duty to engage in warfare?  “An attack on one, is an attack on all.”   

    While this seems like an ethical and reasonable stance to a wartime approach; consider the negative consequences of such mentalities.  Those mentalities were the cause of the huge spread of warfare across the world due to the actions of a few Serbian assassins in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914.  The subsequent global conflict that arose from the principle of total warfare led to more bloodshed than the entire world had ever seen.  Not to mention, the blames that resulted from said war were the foundations for a second global conflict, a genocide of unprecedented proportions, and many years of global fear from a massive Cold War nuclear arms race.   This leads me to believe that expanding the scope and magnitude of wars for the sake of preserving alliances to be unethical rather than the opposite.  Friendship at the cost of many lives is not a friendship worth keeping.

    A serious consideration related to warfare pertains to cultural values in each nation or society.  An aggressor nation might be interesting in installing cultural values, protecting a cultural minority or majority in each country, and preserving its own cultural values abroad.  We must ask ourselves if warfare for the sake of cultural preservation is a worthwhile endeavor.  Is it worth risking life and resources for the sole objective of preserving something as artificial as a societal construct?  While it is important to place an emphasis on cultural freedoms and honoring of traditions, we must consider that cultural values are relativistic. While it might seem good to go to war to prevent the abolishing of Christianity in nation, it might not seem good to go to war to preserve national socialism (or the pejorative term, Nazism.)  What cultural values get protected are relative to the dominant cultures currently in place. 

    Historical context and the hegemony of dominant nations seem to determine what cultural values are worth spilling blood over. We cannot be too quick to assume that some belligerent force would or wouldn’t be justified in criticizing the United States for its history of dishonoring treaties with the Native American tribes.  The United States has a known history of trying to assimilate Native American tribes to American political values, religious teachings, and to the supposedly superior nature of American culture.  Were certain tribes that fought the United States' expansion westward justified in doing so to preserve their own cultural identities?  Could not a mutual state of live and let live been adopted?  Some Native Americans fought white America and perished, some joined it and survived, and some were able to hold out into small reservations.  A token of goodwill so the United States might appear more benevolent. 

    While cultural context is significant in determining the justification for war, does it justify the tools in which that war is waged.  Using the example of the Native Americans, does warfare involving the United States industrial advantages constitute the following of jus en bello when facing the Creek who were significantly smaller in population and without the quantity of firearms?  The advance of the white population westward generated smallpox epidemic after smallpox epidemic, decimating the population.  The Creek, Iroquois, and other tribes that battled for their territory were at a massive weapon and population disadvantage, and ergo, were fighting a war that was unfair.   

    This brings us to the significant point that warfare can never really be fought on truly equal footing.  One nation usually has a population, industrial, technological, or military advantage over another.  By regulating the weapons and tactics of warfare, does international agreement really create a level playing field for belligerents to engage in warfare?  It seems that the idea of a truly fair fight is more of an idealized value than something that is achieved by virtue by rules of war.  This might continue to support the argument that jus en bello, is merely an attempt to fabricate a romanticized view about warfare to those involved in its continuance.  Warfare is merely murder with the approval of the political bodies involved. 

    The goal of warfare is the extermination of an enemy and installation of a friendly cause where desired.  Sometimes the victory is obtained by holding and maintaining a conquest.  This is demonstratable true during the period of European colonialism.  Sometimes victory is obtained by retaining political autonomy, such as France remaining a country after the Germans invaded it during World War 2.  While the motivating factors may vary from country to country and war to war, the consequences are always the same, human life. 

    I would argue here that human life is of the most valuable of possessions that humans possess collectively.  Warfare is an abrogation of those values for the purpose of ideals.  When going to war, typically people are trading lives for ideals.  Such a tradeoff is the most persistent of pyrrhic victories.  The desire of one resource for one country, or one cultural or political value, all are not worth measuring in the cost of human life.  Yet somehow, this trade seems to be a willing effort of those in political power.  

    If trading life for ideals is foolish, then it would seem the ultimate cause to go to war would be preservation of life.  If one country were to try to go to war to prevent an ethnic cleansing, such as the case of President William Clinton in Bosnia.   The United States invoked a police action, which is merely a semantic distinction from warfare, to attempt to stop a country from ethnic cleansing.  In doing so, a nation utilizes lethal force on military and/or civilian targets for the purpose of preventing killing.  While wartime propaganda might rationalize this, it remains hypocrisy.  Killing a killer does not cease to end all killing, it merely controls which political body has the right to authorize it.   

    Popular historical narratives might indulge the notion that warfare was used for the good of stopping genocidal rampages throughout the course of history.  For instance, the United States’ intervention on the behalf of the Allied Powers in World War 2 would be used as an example.  People today might argue the heroic nature of the war on the misguided notion that Jewish people were liberated from concentration camps due to the invasion of American soldiers into Germany.  This was not the case, as the Soviet Union was the nation that occupied the locations of the most heinous death camps and concentration camps.  Even though it was a joint allied effort, both nations dragged their feet in aiding those that were designated “displaced persons” after the war ended in Europe. 

    This gets into acts of war that never get considered genocide because they were against an ethnically homogenous group.  Was it genocide that the United States heavily bombed and eventually used nuclear weapons on the Japanese?  President Harry Truman caused more Asian deaths than people want to acknowledge as part of the historical record.   Given the fact that the Japanese were all Asian, was the attack simply warfare?  This begs the question of intention on part of the political party in question.  If it is the intention of the nation in question to exterminate a given race, then it becomes genocide.  If an entire race is acting as a belligerent force, then their extermination as a race becomes incidental.   

    This makes warfare complicated with more cosmopolitan empires like the United States and nations like Mozambique.  This is completely different from the United States which houses significant populations of all races.  Since language, culture, ethnicity, and political ideologies can span wildly, the value of the cultural integrity of each nation is weighted differently.  The preservation of one nation’s culture can vary depending on what region it is; therefore, the cost of cultural preservation is disproportionate depending which nations are in question.   Is it fair to go to war with an ethnically homogenous nation if exterminating them meant that ethnicity would be gone forever?   

    We should have established three premises by this point:  first, that war for the sake of saving lives is hypocrisy, and that war to save culture is muddled with obfuscation, and third, that warfare for ideological purposes is wasteful.  It is fair to say that no cause to go to war justifies the loses in manufactured items, resources, and human life.  Despite this fact, humans have and continue to engage in the practice of warfare.  This is because the desire for the advancement of the ideology (nationalism) and fear of annihilation have provoked people to arm themselves against another.  To advance a political philosophy and to satisfy a need for security, people agree to make the quality of life significantly worse for all involved.  There must be an upshot! 

    Modernity, which is so often linked to warfare is one of the most observed historical trends is that upshot.  If one looks at a period like the Great Depression in United States history and then looks at the effects of wartime mobilization had on the country, they might determine that World War 2 brought the United States greatness in the 20th century.  This is correct to a degree, but we would be myopic to see war as a certain requirement for the improvement of economic and technological standards.  I would argue that it is international collaboration and trade that brought about these changes to the global market.  Not so much Omaha Beach riddled with the bodies of dead American GIs.   

    International cooperation occurred on a large scale between the United States and the Allied Powers out of a mutual fear of the Axis Powers.  This spurred on academics, politicians, business innovators, bureaucrats, workers, and so many others to feel they had a duty to contribute to the common good.  I would argue that this feeling of fear and dread could be pointed to entropy and stagnation as direct oppositions to the progress of mankind.  This may show the cleverer aspects of ideological wars, such as the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, etc.  

    The rise of technological breakthroughs during war has led to weapons that certain countries would agree or disagree about using.  The term jus en bello, often describes what weapons might be considered illicit during “civilized” engagements.  I will take a moment to reflect on the peculiar nature of picking and choosing weapons with the end game of death as fair or just.  There simply is no good way to die, considering it is against our nature, as humans, to endure the end of our existence.  While some forms of death sound more gruesome and horrible than others, the end game is the same, and it is still extreme. 

    Let us take chemical weapons such as mustard or phosgene gas as an example of a wartime weapon.  It was decided during the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1908 that the use of lethal chemical gasses was forbidden in warfare.  The parlance of those times was that the weapons were "ghastly" and "cowardly."  The notion that you should look your opponent in the eyes before you snuff them, apparently carried some kind of valor.  Warfare was conducted with a great deal of melee weapons for millennia, and many modern weapons signify a turning from those values.  Land mines were also controversial for the same reason.  Deciding on the tools of warfare based on romanticized notions of the personal nature of warfare creates a very bizarre picture of why people are running around a field murdering each other.  It was kind of unusual that they wanted the fighting to be so personal yet there existed no personal animosity between the combatants.

    The drawback gas based chemical weapons was the fact that they were incredibly unreliable.  A sudden burst of wind could turn a cloud of devastating gas weapons against the very army that unleashed them.  This begs us to consider the fact that the weapons were shelved out of efficacy rather than humanitarian concerns.  In 1917, the United States manufactured quite a great deal of mustard gas that never saw use in battle.   Where do you suppose those gas containers went?  The need for them never came up, and it became a matter of waste disposal rather than disarmament.  One source I read suggested dumping it into the Chesapeake Bay.  If humanitarian concerns were behind the shelving of chemical weapons, then nuclear weapons probably wouldn’t be most nations preferred super arsenal.  

    For the sake of argument, we shall ignore the fact that valuable energy, labor, and resources went into ordinance manufacturing.  We will now consider the fact that agreements such as the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions all set up the practices of fairness in wartime.  A fair analogy would be to compare the conventions to rules committees associated with major world sports.  War ceases to be a matter of life and death and becomes like an international sporting event like the World Cup.  Instead of scoring goals and winning prestige, there is carnage and the acquisition of territories or resources.  The big prize might be Poland, and the ability to determine the fate of its citizens.   It seems surreal when you consider international cooperation for the sake of international devastation. 

    In this strange comparison of war to sports, one might consider the humanitarian organizations as referees, trying to keep things from becoming too grewsome. Perhaps they are there to make sure the fans (civilians) don’t get hurt during the event.  It is usually seen as poor sportsmanship to attack the referee, which might take the form of something like Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders.  These organizations try to remain neutral from the two teams but hand out red cards for poor behavior.  If international outrage is raised enough, more nations may come out in support of one nation or another.  These are the consequences of playing dirty so to speak.  I will discuss the “fans,” as I depart from this sport analogy. 

    The role of the civilian in wartime is a very tricky problem facing both belligerents.  The people working in those societies are often producing resources and manufacturing products for a war effort, thus making them directly involved in the war.  The problem becomes a matter of whether a person is actively fighting.  Given that the civilians are typically unarmed; should it be expected that they are spared their lives during an invasion?  What about in the case of a country like the United States, where a huge portion of the civilian population is armed but not part of the military?  Does their status as civilian disappear due to the practical realities of their ability to fight?  There exist major issues when determining combatants versus noncombatants.  Then it becomes active combatants versus inactive combatants.  These distinctions are fragile because of their ability to change.  Does training have any effect on how they should be grouped or considered?  Does it matter if they are militant as a part of their personality in general? 

    The trouble with determining what civilians are or are not, is that there needs to be an international consensus of what people are actually civilians.  Any consensus of what constitutes a civilian during a combat period would need to fall on some kind of independent arbitrator.  Given that war is so divisive and effects are so interconnected, biases will undoubtedly develop.  If civilians are killed during battle, there would need to be some way for a neutral party (if one is even possible) to act on their behalf.  This could throw off the entire tempo of the war and make war more and more of a controlled burn than a conflagration.  While this sounds preferable, it still defies the nature of a program where death is the goal.  Why do people have the ability to mitigate the lives lost in war but not avert the event entirely?

    What of the prisoners?  War has a cost to people beyond their immediate life.  There becomes a danger in leaving damaged people around to cause no end of problems.  There is no good or fair way to release or destroy a person that cannot function, desires to continue fighting, or can’t let go of their national identity.  It might simply be impossible to ask a citizen or soldier of Norway to stop adopting that identity even if the country were rightly conquered.  How a nation fairly treats its conquered people or soldiers is considered heavily in what is called jus en bello.  POW camps themselves make a huge statement about what kind of liberties a nation takes in dealing with its subjugated people. The conquerors and the conquered will almost always have a relationship based on resentment.  But even if the people are throwing flowers at the feet of the coming army, does that mean they are really following the rules of war?  How are those people supposed to know how their new sovereign will treat them? 

    Within a protocol of jus en bello, there falls on people to create some form of arbitration to determine the guilt of those who violate these codes.  The term “war criminal” describes political leaders who used unscrupulous tactics while pursuing the betterment of their nation against other nations.  There needs to be some kind of unbiased adjudicator that could oversee the details of the conflict and render a judgement about what unfolded during the periods of combat.  This doesn’t even begin to factor in the actions of individual soldiers or civilians who acted in a manner not fitting with so-called wartime fairness.  It is usually the losing nation that has its leaders held accountable.  There were no Allied generals who were found guilty during the Nuremburg Trials.  Who would prosecute the winning nations in such a case?  It seems a bit absurd. 

    War does not seem like a thing that fairness or justice really should be factored into.  It is a sad and painful state of humanity that it cannot resolve its problems on a more unified front.  However, war is only a word, and that word is only based on the condition of nationalism.  Without a world of nations war wouldn’t exist, however, that does not mean that people would stop taking from one another, hurting one another, and teaming up against one another.  In a world void of government, there would be no war, only a perpetual fight with everyone to survive.  In a world of one government, there would be no war, only a constant cycle of insurrection and repression.  This leads me to wonder if warfare is just one phenomenon possible of the same problem that people have and will always have. 

    Do rules and justice have a place in warfare, when the very existence of war defies them?  The conclusion I have reached is that in no way does any war fall into the category of a just war.  There are no rules in warfare that give a clear moral compass to someone in political leadership, or the people they rule over.  Making rules for war adds a false sense of chivalry to a practice as old and barbaric as life itself.  Often those rules degenerate when the need for victory outweighs the value of perceived moral superiority.  If one wins a war through unscrupulous means, they still have the power to control the narrative.  Even when a country admits wrongdoing, it doesn’t change that the outcome of the war changed the world forever. 

(In War:) If you break the rules and win, who is going to stop you?