Last week Iargued that the U.S. should stay out of Israel’s war with Iran.  America has now entered the war by bombingthree facilities associated with Iran’s nuclear program.  Is this action morally justifiable in lightof traditional just war doctrine? 

War aims?      

Let us note,first, that much depends on exactly what the U.S. intends to accomplish.  A week ago, before the attack, PresidentTrump warned thatTehran should be evacuated, called forIran’s unconditional surrender, and stated thatthe U.S. would not kill Iran’s Supreme Leader “for now” – thereby insinuatingthat it may yet do so at some future time. Meanwhile, many prominent voices in the president’s party have beencalling for regime change in Iran, and Trump himself this week has joined this chorus.  Ifwe take all of this at face value, it gives the impression that the U.S. intendsor is at least open to an ambitious and open-ended military commitmentcomparable to the American intervention in Iraq under President Bush. 

As I arguedin my previous essay, if this is whatis intended, U.S. action would not be morally justifiable by traditional justwar criteria.  I focused on two points inparticular.  First, the danger such interventionwould pose to civilian lives and infrastructure would violate the just warcondition that a war must be fought usingonly morally acceptable means. Second, given the chaos regime change would likely entail, and thequagmire into which the U.S. would be drawn, such an ambitious interventionwould violate the just war condition that amilitary action must not result in evils that are worse than the one beingredressed.

However, itis likely that we should not take thepresident’s words at face value.  He hasa long-established tendency to engage in “trash talk” and to make off-the-cuffremarks that reflect merely what has popped into his head at the moment ratherthan any well thought out or settled policy decision.  Furthermore, even when he does have in mindsome settled general policy goal, he appears prone to “making it up as he goes”where the details are concerned (as evidenced, for example, by his erraticmoves during the tariffcontroversy earlier this year).  My bestguess is that he does not want an Iraq-style intervention but also does nothave a clear idea of exactly how far he is willing to go if Iran continues toresist his will. 

As I said inmy previous essay, this is itself a serious problem.  An erratic and woolly-minded leader who doesnot intend a wider war is liable nevertheless to be drawn into one by events, and can also cause otherharm, short of that, through reckless statements. 

But so far,at least, the U.S. has in fact only bombed the facilities in question.  Suppose for the sake of argument that this limited“one and done” intervention is all that is intended.  Would this much be justifiable under just wardoctrine?

Preemptive versus preventive war

This bringsus to an issue which I only touched on in my earlier essay but which is obviouslyno less important (indeed, even more important) than the two criteria I focusedon: the justice of the cause forwhich the war is being fought, which is the first criterion of just wardoctrine.  The reason I did not say moreabout it is that the issue is more complex than meets the eye.  I think Israel can make a strong case that itsattack on Iran’s nuclear program meets the just cause condition for a just war.  But it is harder for the U.S. to meet thatcondition, even on a “one and done” scenario.

Tounderstand why, we need to say something about a controversy that arose duringthe Iraq war and is highly relevant to the current situation, but hasn’treceived the attention it ought to.  Irefer to the debate over the morality of preventivewar, which ethicists often distinguish from preemptive war. 

In bothpreemptive war and preventive war, a country takes military action againstanother country that has not attacked it. And in both cases, the country initiating hostilities neverthelessclaims to be acting in self-defense.  Thismight seem like sophistry and a manifest violation of the just cause criterionof just war doctrine.  How can a countrythat begins a war claim self-defense? 

But there isa crucial difference between the two cases. In a preemptive war, country B is preparingto attack country A but has not in fact yet done so.  Country A simply preempts this coming attack by striking first, and can claimself-defense insofar as country B wasindeed going to attack it.  Bycontrast, in a preventive war, country B was not preparing to attack country A. But country A attacks country B anyway, claiming that country B likely would pose a threat to A at some pointin the future.

Now, it isgenerally acknowledged among ethicists that preemptivewar can sometimes be morally justifiable. But preventive war is muchmore problematic and controversial.  Thereare two main traditions of thinking on this subject (a useful overview of whichcan be found in chapter 9 of Gregory Reichberg’s book Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace).  On the one hand, there is the natural lawtradition of thinking about just war criteria, associated with ScholasticCatholic writers like Thomas Aquinas and Francisco de Vitoria, Protestants likeHugo Grotius, and more recent Thomists like the nineteenth-century Catholic theologianLuigi Taparelli.  According to thistradition, preventive war is flatly morally illegitimate.  It violates the principle that a person orcountry cannot be harmed merely for some wrong it might do, but only for some wrong that it has in fact done.

The other mainapproach is the “realist” tradition associated with Protestant thinkers likeAlberico Gentili, Francis Bacon, and (with qualifications, since he also drewon the natural law tradition) Emer de Vattel. As Reichberg notes, whereas the natural law approach takes theinternational order to be governed by the moral law just as relations betweenindividuals are, the tendency of the realist tradition is to look at the internationalarena in something more like Hobbesian terms. And the realist tradition is thus more favorable to preventive war as atool nations might deploy as they negotiate this Hobbesian state ofnature. 

As Reichbergalso notes, Vattel put the following conditions on the justifiability of some countryA’s initiating a preventive war against another country B.  First, country B must actually pose a potential threat to country A.  Second, country B must threaten the very existence of country A.  Third, it must intend to pose such a threat. And fourth, it must somehow have actually shown signs of evildoing inthe past.  Vattel adds the condition thatcountry A must first have tried and failed to secure guarantees from country Bthat it will not attack A.

Much of thecontroversy over the Iraq war had to do with whether a preventive war ismorally justifiable, and the Bush administration did sometimes say things thatimplied that the war was preventive in nature. But as I argued at the time, this particular aspect of the debate was ared herring.  The main rationale for thewar was that Saddam had not complied with the terms of the ceasefire of theGulf War, so that the U.S. and her allies were justified in re-startinghostilities in order to force compliance. Whatever one thinks of this as a rationale, it is not an appeal topreventive war.  Hence any criticism ofthe Iraq war should, in my view, focus on other aspects of it (such as theintelligence failure vis-à-vis WMD and the folly of the nation-buildingenterprise the war led to).

The case of Iran

What mattersfor present purposes, though, is the relevance of all this to the war withIran.  Now, it was Israel rather thanIran that initiated the current hostilities. Was this morally justifiable?

It seemsclear to me that it was justifiable by Vattel’s criteria for preventivewar.  But as a natural law theorist, I don’tthink preventive war can be justified, so that that particular point ismoot.  However, that does not entail thatit was wrong for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear program.  For it can plausibly be seen as a justifiablepreemptive rather than preventive attack.  To be sure, Iran was not preparing a specificnuclear attack operation, since it does not actually have nuclear weapons.  But Israel can make the following argument: Iranhas already been in a state of war with Israel for years; its leadership hasrepeatedly threatened Israel’s destruction; if it acquired nuclear weapons, itwould actually be capable of carrying out this threat; and it has for yearsbeen trying to acquire them.  Destroyingits nuclear program is therefore not merely a preventive action, but in the relevant sense an act of preempting an attack (in its very earlieststages, as it were) that Israel has good reason to think Iran actually intends.

This seemsto me a strong argument, so that I think that Israel can indeed make the casethat it has a just cause, at least insofar as its aim is simply to destroy Iran’snuclear program.  (A more ambitious goalof regime change would be much harder to justify, for the same reason that, asI said in my earlier article, it would not be justifiable for the U.S. toattempt regime change.  But here I amjust addressing the more limited aim of destroying Iran’s nuclear capability.)

However,this does not entail that the U.S. isjustified in attacking Iran.  Note firstthat the recent U.S. bombing was not carried out in response to any act of waron Iran’s part against the United States. True, some have pointed out that U.S. and Iranian-backed forces havebeen involved in various skirmishes in recent decades.  But it would be dishonest to pretend that thathad anything to do with the recent U.S. action. If Iran’s nuclear program had not been in the picture, Trump would nothave ordered the bombing.  Hence, if theU.S. is claiming to be acting in justifiable self-defense, it could plausiblydo so only by the criteria governing preemptive war or preventive war.

But in fact,it cannot plausibly do so.  Note first that the U.S. action does not meeteven Vattel’s criteria for preventive war. For even if Iran already had nuclear weapons, it would not pose a threatto the very existence of the United States (the way it would pose a threat to the very existence of Israel).  For one thing, Iran lacks any plausible meansof getting a nuclear device into the United States; for another, even if itcould do so, it would hardly be able to destroy the country as a whole.  Hence, any “preventive war” case for U.S. self-defense is fanciful.  And if that is true, then it is even moreobvious that the U.S. cannot plausibly meet the more stringent criteria for a preemptive war case.  Iran simply cannot plausibly be said to havebeen in the process of planning a nuclear attack on the U.S., even in thelooser sense in which it might be said to have been planning such an attack onIsrael. 

I concludethat no serious case can be made that the U.S. attack on Iran was a justifiableact of self-defense.  However, there isone further way the attack might seem to be justified.  Couldn’t the U.S. argue that, even though itcouldn’t plausibly hold that it was defending itself, it was justifiably helping its ally Israel to defend itself?

Certainly itcan be justifiable to help an ally to defend itself.  But whether it ought to do so in anyparticular case depends on various circumstances.  For example, suppose Iran actually had a nuclearweapon and it was known that it was about to deploy it against Israel and thatonly the U.S. could stop the attack.  Iwould say that in that sort of scenario, the U.S. not only could intervene to stop such an attack but would be morally obligated to do so.  And it would also be morally justifiable forthe U.S. to intervene in order to help Israel in other, less dire scenarios.

But we arenot now in a situation remotely close to such scenarios.  Thereare various ways Israel could stop Iran’s nuclear program by itself – as,it appears, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged.  Meanwhile, there are serious potentialdownsides to U.S. involvement.  Americantroops could be killed by Iranian retaliatory strikes, the U.S. economy couldbe hit hard if Iran closes off the Strait of Hormuz, and if the Iranian regimewere to collapse the U.S. could be drawn into a quagmire in attempting tomitigate the resulting chaos.  Yes, suchthings might not in fact happen, butthey plausibly could happen, andkeeping one’s fingers crossed is not a serious way to approach the applicationof just war criteria.  If Israel doesn’tstrictly need the U.S. to interveneand intervention poses such potential risks to U.S. interests, then the U.S.should not intervene.

Hence I aminclined to conclude the following about the U.S. attack, even if (as we canhope) it does indeed turn out to be a “one and done” operation.  Was American bombing of Iranian nuclearfacilities intrinsically wrong?  No. But did it meet all theconditions of just war doctrine, all things considered?  No.