On Selective Pacifism & other Oddities

Kendall Clark kendall at monkeyfist.com
Thu Nov 29 14:21:29 PST 2001


On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 09:31:18PM +0000, Justin Schwartz wrote:
> > > The failure of the Taliban government to fulfill its obligation was a
> > > casus belli.
>
> That's totally contrary to anything I have ever thought of as just war
> theory. A causus belli is first of all an affirmative act, not an omission.
> Omissions may be culpable, but they are not acts of war, which is what a
> causus belli requyires, an act. Besides, you can't even say the T regime had
> any special relation or responsibility to the US, which refused to recognize
> it, put it under sanctions, and generally treated it like an enemy.

In addition, as I understand things, there is no general obligation to extradite. Further, every extradition treaty I've read, as well as every text on international law, only recognizes an obligation to extradite after some offer of proof of guilt has been made.

Near as I can tell, Washington refused to provide evidence of guilt to the Taliban on principle.


> I think Seth's wquestion, derived from Noam Chomsky's, is a good one. There
> are a lot of people in the world who have excellent reason to be really
> ticked at the US for overthrowing their governments, attacking their
> leaders, supporting invading contra armies, and the like.

Yeah, and it has several other variations, including some focusing on Cuba, extreme anti-castro Cubans in Miami, the CIA, Jorge Mas Canosa, Luis Posada Carilles, and so on. (See http://www.zpub.com/un/bc-terr.html for example.)

As for resolving the tension between pacifism and just war theory, at least informally, one should recall that just war theory talks about both the resort *to* war (the ius ad bellum) and the waging *of* war (ius in bello), and a pacifist, faced with the unavoidable onset of a real war, can clearly say that the best world is one in which conflict is not resolved by resort to war, but given that war has been undertaken it ought to be waged justly (i.e., according to principles of proportionality, discrimination, and necessity).

But see

James P. Sterba, Reconciling Just War Theory and Pacifism Revisited, in

Social Theory and Practice, v.20, no.2 1994, pp 135-142

Best, Kendall Clark



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