Crime not War (Re: Arguments for ground war - forget it)

Kendall Clark kendall at monkeyfist.com
Wed Nov 21 10:55:10 PST 2001


On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 06:06:18PM +0000, Justin Schwartz wrote:


> I ran into Peter Railton, my old dissertation advisor, and he suggested the
> following point, invoking Rawls (_his_ old teacher) since we were talking
> about Rawls the other day. He said that in deciding what would be the
> ethical thing to do in the wake pf the 9/11 attack, we should imagine that
> wea re Luxenbourg, and lack B-52s, Army Rangers, aircraft carriers, "daisy
> cutters," and force projection abilities generally. Luxembourg would have to
> invoke international cooperation and treat the attack as a subject for
> criminal investigation. The fact that we have the military might doesn't
> mean that it's right to use it.

Which is precisely what I took Chomsky's point to be when he invoked, in his talk at MIT after 9-11, the case of Nicaragua and the US aggression there in the 80s. I.e., we could have chosen to pursue ordinary methods of recourse, for which there are existing institutions, laws, international agreements, and the like.

Talking about bourgeois proceduralism, my flirtation with it came when I realized that UN-commanded mixed (even largely made up of US) forces attacking al-Qaida strongholds in Afghanistan seems far preferable to unilateral US command-and-control.

There is a certain indisputable folk wisdom -- which I suspect is *very* old in human civilization -- to not letting a daughter, say, serve as the cop who searches for and apprehends the miscreant who slew her father.

Likewise, it would have been civilized and sane to have put some State other than the US in charge of whatever military action, if any, eventuated from UN Security Council resolution authorizing international use of force. Of course, politically in the US, this invokes all the paranoid fantasies about black helos, but nothing is w/out cost.

In addition to whatever imperial or oil or real politik motivations one may wish to impute to Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney and the Congress, there is a not inconsiderable psychological point to be made: maybe pissed, angry, hurt, emotionally damaged people (or even their coldly cynical political representatives) should *not* lead the charge to justice.

Of course, States != families but the point stands, I think.


> Btw, the defect with the argument goes to the heart of what I think is wrong
> with Rawls' original position approach. The fact is, that them as has got
> the force, will use it. Until it is taken away from them.

Hmm, you lose me here, Justin. Is the 'force gets used' objection supposed to show a *moral* or political defect in Rawls's position? I suspect, to make an obvious analogy, I am sufficiently physically powerful to do all manner of nasty things to (some of the) people I encounter. Is the mere fact of power asymmetry per se a defect in a moral or political argument the point of which is that I oughtn't to do such nasty things? Or is it my, ex hypothesi, inclination or history of using physical force to do such nasty things that's the defect?

Best, Kendall Clark -- There's no such thing as magic, only science and jazz.



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