Spring 2008

“The Iraq War has, or bids to, become a litmus test of political identity of the sort that Americans associate with the Vietnam War. We should all be troubled by this. Those of us who opposed the Vietnam War may have called it correctly—I believe we did—but it is important to recall the fates of the Vietnamese who signed on with the United States, tens of thousands of whom we abandoned, either to prisons or flimsy rafts or refugee camps. All the more so, because American elites have not been overly burdened with complexity and nuance where Iraq and the fate of Iraqis are concerned. Ethical considerations, in particular, have barely figured in the debate over what to do next in that benighted country.

Taking seriously these considerations requires historical knowledge, a framework of evaluation, and a sober willingness to consider facts (not a given in this political season). There are, to begin with, 160,000 American soldiers in Iraq. There are also 90,000 contract workers that the United States would be responsible for evacuating. There are 40,000 armored vehicles. There are huge military bases. Michael Walzer insists—and he is right—that it will be impossible to extract these troops and equipment in the timeframe put forward by advocates of a rapid withdrawal.

There are other facts to keep in mind. We remain in Europe sixty years after the conclusion of World War II. We are still in the Korean Peninsula fifty years on from the truce that ended that conflict. Although there are real questions about whether we have at present a political culture that can sustain such a long-term effort, the notion that we would just turn about and head home, without condition and regardless of consequence, runs counter to historical precedent (Vietnam being the dishonorable exception).

Most of all, there is the imperative to forestall mass murder. Writing in the Washington Post, John Podesta and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress glibly dismiss the “doomsday scenario” of mass killings that experts fear in the event of a U.S. departure. That the distinguished New York Times war correspondent John Burns opines that up to a million Iraqis might fall prey to violence if the U.S. withdraws precipitously should give even these partisans pause. It should also raise a parallel: having gotten things so wrong during the evacuation of South Vietnam, will the United States get things any more right this time? If so, America’s exit ought to proceed from an ethics of responsibility, an ethics infused with and built upon the just war tradition and guided by Washington’s responsibility for the fates of Iraqis who, by the hundreds of thousands, have been conscripted into the U.S. effort.

An ethics of responsibility arose from the postwar recognition of the universality of human rights, the shared revulsion of genocide, and the recently articulated norm of a “responsibility to protect.” This responsibility, cultivated under the aegis of the United Nations, holds that, should a nation or a group within a nation be the victim of systematic, egregious, and continuing violence, the international community has a responsibility to guard it against further depredations. If the United Nations declines to act, a member state or group of states may, given a shared consensus on the nature of the horrors being perpetrated, act legitimately to interdict the violence and to contain the bloodshed.

To this underlying norm of responsibility, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the genocide convention as its backdrop, one must add the just war tradition. Just war isn’t just about war. It is an ethical framework for politics that eschews the bloodless calculations embodied in the words and deeds of the Athenian generals (“The mighty do what they will and the weak suffer what they must”), on the one hand, and offers an alternative to the claims embodied in traditional pacifism, on the other. Just war thinkers agree with Martin Luther that, on this earth, “if the lion lies down with the lamb, the lamb must be replaced frequently.”

Over the centuries, the just or justified war tradition was elaborated and refined in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Spanish jurists and political theorists such as Francisco Suarez, a plethora of natural law and natural rights thinkers, and seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius. Just war consists of two major parts: jus ad bellum, or the justifiability of a resort to force, such as self-defense, and jus in bello, designed to assess the means employed to fight a war with reference to an ethical concern for a good or “right order” of things. Other vital criteria to be considered as one evaluates whether a resort to force is justifiable include whether a war is declared openly by legitimate authority, whether it is begun with a right intention, whether the use of force comes as a last rather than a first resort, and whether it honors the principles of proportionality and immunity.

Less developed—indeed often omitted from the discussion altogether—is jus post bellum, justice or right order as it pertains to a postwar situation. Classic just war teaching insisted on a non-vindictive peace as one criterion of just war. Aggressors are rightly punished in the course of fighting. But when they have laid down their arms, further punishment tends toward the gratuitous and prevents the restoration of “right relations.” This requires further elaboration, to be sure. If one takes jus post bellum seriously, one is obliged to assess postwar probabilities—always a tricky enterprise. Is civic unrest in the defeated country likely or not? What commitment of military personnel and material will be necessary to stabilize the postwar situation? Are the elements in place for reconciliation in a defeated or occupied territory or, alternatively, are there powerful divisions that might blight the postwar environment? If such divisions exist, how might one curb and ameliorate these internal hatreds and hostilities? What ongoing responsibilities does a nation incur in relation to the state it has defeated militarily?

Putting such questions into play inevitably reminds us of the postwar situation in Western Europe. True, self-interested considerations were at stake, but the restraint demonstrated by the Americans was remarkable given the provocation of Nazism. After all, there were some in the Roosevelt administration who wanted to raze Germany, among them the president’s wife. FDR and the majority of his advisors would have none of it: Looking back, just war thinkers assess postwar Germany as the beneficiary, in the territory occupied by the victorious Western allies at least, of a jus post bellum ethic.

The tragedy of the Iraq War is that this cluster of concerns was not thought through rigorously, if at all. There was too much optimism about how the Iraqi people would react once the grip of the Baathist regime was loosened. Given the wounds sustained by particular communities under Saddam Hussein, especially the Shiites and the Kurds, it is altogether unsurprising, in retrospect, that these grievances would erupt—especially given inadequate provision for how to sustain right order. This is a familiar story by now. But it is far better to attend to jus post bellum imperatives even at this late date than not to attend to them at all.

I believe one can make the case that the Iraq War was justified under jus ad bellum norms. There are just war thinkers who, employing the same criteria, disagree. Yet there is great unanimity among just war thinkers concerning the U.S. commitment to jus post bellum criteria—namely, the obligation to leave Iraq with something better, or at least not worse, than what went before. How, then, might the just war tradition bear on an ethics of exit? The end of a war must be consistent with the initial argument for conflict as couched in just war criteria—that is, to repair or to remedy a major injustice or act of aggression. Another just cause might be to prevent nigh-certain and massive harm from occurring before it has occurred. But, again, the basic aim of jus post bellum is a more just situation than that which pertained before the armed conflict.



In the classical theological accounts that inaugurated the just war tradition, this more ideal state of things is called a “tranquility of order”—a decent civic peace. Accordingly, one is never permitted to make a bad situation worse—or, perhaps better said, one is obliged to do everything one can to avert that sort of unhappy outcome. Given this rough and ready framework of evaluation, what does an ethics of exit require if one adheres to just war norms and the “responsibility to protect”? One might call this the ethics of a just occupation and eventual withdrawal. Here, then, are four criteria.

First, America’s responsibilities for the postwar situation could hardly be more direct and considerable. If a country’s role is minor, its responsibility is correlatively reduced. That is not the case here. At the same time, if the aim of a justified intervention is a just peace—that is, a situation better than the one that pertained prior to military action—this would seem to set the bar fairly low if one’s contrast model is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Yet a postwar situation of endemic violence is no bargain, either, and it surely does not count as “sustained stability” or a “minimally decent state.” Thus, the major role Americans have played and are playing ought to continue until events persuade us that massive slaughter will not accompany any diminution of that role.

This is made doubly difficult because we are no longer in an era when the United States can muster the will and resources to reorder and garrison entire societies. If America has in the past, together with its allies, created new political orders, the international climate and America’s own political culture would hinder the prospect today, even if, as in Japan and Germany, the desired end is a stable, constitutional order. Instead we say that the primary responsibility lies with the Iraqis themselves—hence, the voting, the laborious infighting attendant upon writing a constitution, and the endless struggling with sectarian divisions. There are far more cross-cutting entanglements, and obviously the Iraqi leadership has stumbled badly. That does not mean the Americans can fire everybody and take over themselves.

Neither, however, does it mean the Americans have earned the right to walk away. There is a delicate balancing act involved in repairing the political infrastructure of a state that has been the victim of decades of misrule and military invasion. The aim is to restore legitimate authority. If you played a major role in military operations, your degree of responsibility for this goal is enormous. It follows that to abandon the occupied state before this aim has been accomplished would be an act of moral dereliction of the most egregious kind. That is the bottom line of any ethics of exit from Iraq.

A second criterion to be borne in mind is that, if a country has played a major military role, it also bears a substantial burden in repairing the infrastructural and environmental harm that resulted as a consequence of military operations. Ideally, civil-affairs teams would have concentrated on the basic necessities of life first, such as water and electricity. Then attention would have been paid to schools, hospitals, and other institutions necessary to a decent civic order. In a rather lumbering way, we have followed this scenario, but with many frustrations and blunders along the way. All flow from the fact that one cannot tend to the civilian infrastructure unless or until the security issue has been dealt with.

To that end, American treasure will be expended for years to come. This is a burden borne by all Americans, and that is as it should be. It is the collective responsibility of all members of an occupying state (especially a democracy), whether one supported a war or did not. That commitment has not taken such dramatic form in Iraq as the Marshall Plan but, on a smaller scale, something of that nature is consistent with an ethics of responsibility. Political and infrastructural repair are of a piece.

There is a third criterion that presents a daunting and ongoing challenge, namely, the continued provision of defense and security. If a country has been disarmed, the occupying power has assumed responsibility for its security and its protection from enemies both internal and external. How long this provision will last, and how extensive it should be, depends on a reasonable assessment of likely threats and the haste with which the occupied country reassembles its own defense and internal security capabilities.

The building of a new Iraqi army and a police force dedicated to protecting all the citizens of Iraq, rather than making war on groups despised by the government, has been a U.S. goal from the beginning. It has proved to be an elusive and inordinately difficult one. There are always dangers involved in enabling a disarmed country to rearm itself. The possibilities of backsliding are always present, thereby undermining the goal of creating and being able to promulgate a stable and secure political environment. The major role the United States assumed in providing for Europe’s defense is not in the offing in an analogous way in postwar Iraq for many reasons, not the least of these being the fact that were the Americans to be seen as hindering the Iraqis from providing for their own defense, it would constitute fuel and fodder for those determined to keep that country in a violent spiral.

Is it possible that regional entities, like the Arab League or the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, or the United Nations might step in as the U.S. steps out and play a major role in heading off matters from degenerating into a horror show? At least to judge by recent history, the answer is no. There will be, for the next decade and possibly the one after that, no substitute for America’s presence and role in regenerating Iraq’s capacity to defend itself. An ethics of exit, with this recognition in mind, points ineluctably in the direction of a careful, long-range, and measured withdrawal of major combat forces from Iraq, rather than any withdrawal in line with the pre-fixed timetables offered on America’s campaign trails.

This leads directly to a fourth and final consideration for an ethics of exit, that is, America’s major deterrent obligation should a future horror along the lines of the deposed regime threaten to emerge. The complexity in this instance is that deterrence bears both an internal as well as an external aspect. Even as the United States guarded Western Europe, including a new German democratic state, it also guarded the inner workings of Germany. So the United States must, as one feature of exiting ethically, remain tied to a new Iraq in ways that are “thick.” Just as the Allies would never have permitted a Nazi state to reemerge in Germany, so they have an obligation, should internal forces of stability and decency falter and collapse, to do the same in Iraq, lest its citizens be victimized many times over.



It is altogether a good thing that we have available to us the just war tradition. But taking it seriously means taking all of its parts seriously, not just the parts that comfort the sensibilities of the moment. Jus post bellum, justice in a postwar situation, must now be added to the traditional criteria of jus ad bellum, assessing whether or not there is a cause that justifies the use of armed force and jus in bello, the justifiability of the means deployed in the interest of a just cause.

For as far as our images of postwar and post-occupation situations are concerned, Iraq counts as something entirely new. Previously, consideration of post-war justice largely revolved around the restoration of some form of status quo ante. The model is a familiar one: State A has invaded state B. State B calls for a restoration of violated borders and, hence, status quo ante. That, for the most part, is not what contemporary jus post bellum is about, and certainly not in the case of Iraq.

Even the model with which we are most familiar in this sort of circumstance—the postwar occupation of Germany—was marred by the fact that one of the occupying powers was a totalitarian state accountable for the deaths of at least as many people as were murdered by Hitler’s Reich. It is a bit difficult to speak of “just occupation” in such circumstances. On the Western side, the aim was of course very different. But even the German model is no longer applicable tout court. For one, the popular consensus that sustained total war and unconditional surrender (and postwar justice) in World War II no longer exists—whether for the Iraq War or, in all likelihood, any future conflict. When a country commits itself to war, but only by so much because its leaders fear total war and all that it summons, the conflict inevitably will be disputed. And so will its aftermath.

This highlights the necessity to make clear and coherent arguments about the reasons to go to war, the means deployed to fight a war, and the responsibility to assure a more just and peaceful situation than that which pertained beforehand. The United States failed these tests initially, but that hardly absolves it of its continued obligations to the Iraqi people. The jus post bellum model most consistent with the war in Iraq is one in which we do not indulge in a hasty trade-off by forfeiting the essential features of a workable, minimally decent state merely in the interest of getting the conflict off of our television screens. What we do as we prepare to consider an exit from Iraq cannot simply be divorced from humanitarian—and humane—considerations. A self-serving abdication that ignores the solemn likelihood of huge losses of life would cast a pall over American foreign policy for decades to come. There is nothing ethical about that. 

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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