In the July issue of The Critic Peter Hitchens had an article on the second world war called “Don’t mention the war”. Its main purpose seemed to be to revive sales of his book A Phoney Victory and to complain of neglect. (Neglect! What Hitchens has ever known neglect?) But, whether or not Hitchens himself is neglected, his article did contain a neglected truth, and one which perhaps not many are likely to speak up for. The article contained two remarks which most people will, probably, think incompatible: one condemning the deliberate bombing of German civilians in the second world war as a violation of “Just War principles”, the other condemning wars that are “idealistic”, not engaged in for the national interest. Most people will probably think a just war is—perhaps tautologically—idealistic and that a self-interested one can’t be just. But Hitchens is right: a nation can’t fight a war that is just without doing so for a vital interest of its own.
That long-cancelled man, Enoch Powell thought so. When Mrs Thatcher said the Falklands war was fought (in a canting phrase that is now everywhere) “for our values”, he corrected her: “We do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.” In the same spirit he wouldn’t hear of that war being justified on the grounds that Argentina was a military dictatorship. Would the invaders have been welcome, he asked with beautiful sarcasm, if only they’d been sent by a quinquennial Parliament? And at the time of the first Gulf war, he said that war is of such a nature that, if the phrase ‘a just war’ means anything at all, one thing it cannot mean is a war fought for the sake of justice. (An unusual man, whose mind didn’t need clearing of cant.)
The opposite—and, of course, much more respectable, much more acceptable—view was put, with wonderful clarity, by (as you might expect) Tony Blair, who was reported as wanting a left-wing “international convention” he was attending to declare, “Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.” He was also quoted as saying in private, “They ask why we don’t get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot? Yes, let’s get rid of them all. I don’t because I can’t, but when you can you should.” (Telegraph 14 and 17 July, 2003)
Let’s get rid of them all! That’s what making war for the sake of justice is, a doctrine that makes war virtuous and … endless. And we have seen its direct consequences throughout the middle east and its indirect ones here at home in the impetus it has given to mass immigration. The first great merit of only going to war for your own sake is that it implicitly acknowledges that war is so great an evil that it must always be a very unreliable means of doing good. The second great merit is that it greatly reduces the occasion for going to war at all.
Not so long ago we had a spell of making war idealistically. We made war on the Iraqis for the sake of the Kuwaitis, on the Serbs for the sake of the Kosovo Moslems, in Libya for the Libyans, in Afghanistan for the Afghans as well as ourselves and in Iraq for ourselves as well as the Iraqis. But the will of the ‘International Community’ to do good by war was tested and found to be a will-o’-th’-wisp compared with the wills of living men. So in Syria we drew back and from Afghanistan got out.
This new version of the white man’s burden proved only too easy to put down. Whether or not we are born in sin, as Christians are required to believe, we are certainly born selfish, self-centred, self-interested; and we ought therefore to be decently sceptical of our own pretensions to virtue. It is no slight objection to those wars undertaken for virtue’s sake that they gave as much scope for the workings of self-interest as the old kind but, unlike the old kind, in disguise.
There are things about which we can do and even ought to do nothing, times when the best thing we can do is mind our own business. Our soldiers in Bosnia were very plausibly reported at the time as saying such things as, “If these people want to kill each other, that’s up to them,” “None of us wants to die for Bosnians,” “They are all as bad as each other” and “Let them get on with it.” That doesn’t strike the right note of caring indignation, of course, but it does show a compunction about monopolising responsibility to oneself from which Tony Blair still perhaps has something to learn. The world can be made a more dangerous place not just by terrorism and rogue states but also by virtue and the pillars of the international community.
The notion that the just war is one fought for the sake of justice—as necessarily true as it sounds—is false because, firstly, justice, in its dominant or most ordinary sense, can be only loosely or doubtfully attached to conflicts between states and tribes. Justice, as it is available to the citizens of a just society, isn’t available to the parties to a war. The very grammar of the word—including its connections with other words like ‘law’, ‘trial’, ‘courts’, ‘jurisdiction’, ‘verdict’, ‘police’ and so on—presupposes membership of a just society. For parties outside one, like nations or tribes—with no body of law, statute or case, to appeal to, no court to go to whose authority both parties acknowledge, and no police force to enforce its verdicts—justice, in its ordinary and familiar sense, doesn’t exist. For states, justice isn’t there to be had in the way it is for individuals living under the law. Rights that derives from sharing in the common life of a just society simply don't exist for those not similarly sharing such a life.
Then, because courts, typically, dispense justice in the form of verdicts, for one side and against the other—and also because in both colonial wars and the second world war all the Right seems to have been on one side and all the Wrong on the other—it is tempting to think that, if there is any such thing as a just war, it must be just on one side only. Elizabeth Anscombe thought so: “no doubt if two nations are at war at least one is unjust” (“Mr Truman’s Degree”). But that seems to me not so. Typically conflicts involve not only rival armies but rival claims to justice, without any way of choosing between them. A war can be ‘just’, it seems, for both sides: Israelis and Palestinians, Kurds and Turks, Serbs and Kosovo Moslems, the British claiming the Falklands and the Argentinians claiming the Malvinas or the Russians and the Ukrainians both claiming Crimea. The war in Ukraine is undoubtedly a just war for the Ukrainians fighting for their land and independence but (perhaps it should be allowed?) the Russians too are not without some claim to be fighting justly, to recover lost ancestral lands containing many inhabitants who don’t just speak but are Russian and want legally to be so.
And as for what would be a ‘just’ outcome for the Israelis and Palestinians—as opposed to either an agreement between the two or an outright and conclusive victory for one over the other—who can say? Even asking whether the way the Israelis are conducting the war in Gaza is just or not draws one into puzzles it is hard to get out of.
To be ‘just’, a war has to be so both in its cause and its conduct. And, although Israel’s cause in its war with Hamas could hardly be more just, its conduct in waging war by bombing Gazan towns is only doubtfully so. After all, the thousands of Palestinian civilians being killed by Israeli bombs are fully as innocent as the Israeli civilians murdered by Hamas. The Israelis may not be killing the innocent deliberately, but they are killing them knowingly. And, if knowingly, how much of an excuse that not deliberately? (For the Oxford philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe’s answer, see below.)
There are two distinct criticisms made of Israel’s actions in Gaza, often presented as if they are the same. One is that they are criminal because contrary to international law, the other is that they are criminal because they are murderous. The first can be discounted. Official, respectable opinion, from Biden downwards, is that Israel has the right, even—for the sake of its own safety—the duty, to defend itself, but only while acting according to international law. But firstly, there is no international law in the sense that there are national laws. International law exists (as Jonathan Sumption says) only in the form of treaties, which can be broken, abrogated, denounced. But your relation and my relation with the British state and its laws aren’t quite like that. The state didn’t make a treaty with us, and there isn’t one for us to abrogate. We have no choice but to obey the law. That’s what law is. ‘International law’ is a fiction, a useful or even benign fiction, sometimes, perhaps, but a fiction all the same.
And then the ‘rule’ that is to be followed in order to comply with it, since at least 1908, is, as Jonathan Sumption also says, that states “may not conduct operations in a way that will inevitably produce casualties among civilians disproportionate to those among actual fighters.” But that’s what Dickens would have called “all gammon”. What—as long as casualties amongst civilians are ‘proportionate’ to those amongst soldiers—war may then “inevitably” cause them? What sort of rule is that? Who could know how to follow it even if he wanted to? How could ‘proportionate’ possibly be measured and whom by, in the crises of war? Given modern methods of waging war, how could any state make war on another’s towns and cities without producing ‘disproportionate’ civilian casualties? The allies didn’t try it in the second world war, thirty-five years and more after 1908.
The other criticism, that Israel is committing the crime of mass murder in Gaza is worth looking at though. The principle by which Peter Hitchens condemns the allied carpet bombing of German cities and Elizabeth Anscombe condemned the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is clear and indisputable. As Anscombe puts it, “For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder;” and she meant always, for she accepted that dropping the atomic bombs almost certainly saved more lives--probably even amongst the Japanese--than it destroyed. But she was no pacifist and didn’t believe that the innocent had to be protected at all costs either:
“killing the innocent, even if you know as a matter of statistical certainty that the things you do involve it, is not necessarily murder. I mean that if you attack a lot of military targets, such as munitions factories and naval dockyards, as carefully as you can, you will be certain to kill a number of innocent people; but that is not murder.”
And that is still clear but it puts an emphasis on ‘choose’ and ‘carefully’ and ‘statistical’ that does open the way to more puzzling considerations—puzzling when you come to apply it to a case as hard as the present war in Gaza. For she thought that statistically certain but unintended deaths of the innocent could become murder if the attackers were “unscrupulous in considering the possibilities”—something which she illustrates with the following:
“It may be impossible to take the thing (or people) you want to destroy as your target; it may be possible to attack it only by taking as the object of your attack what includes large numbers of innocent people. Then you cannot very well say they die by accident. Here, your action is murder.”
And she gives as an example the English bombing Zeeland dykes to trap fleeing German soldiers and inevitably drowning the whole population, children, women, farmworkers, cattle, everything. There was nothing careful about those attacks and the certainty of innocent deaths was more than statistical: so, murder.
How might this apply to Israeli bombing in Gaza? On the one hand, the IDF is killing civilians by the thousand and with more, I think we have to say, than a statistical certainty. The deaths of civilians in Gaza look very like the deaths of those civilians in Zeeland, not just a foreseeable but unintended consequence but—in densely populated towns in which enemy soldiers and civilians are side by side—a necessary consequence. There is no taking enough care to kill the one while avoiding killing the other. How can it be possible to bomb the one scrupulously?
On the other hand, the Israelis may, in the circumstances, very well be taking as much care—however effectively or ineffectively—as they can. John Spencer, a retired military officer and chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point says in a post of X that in his opinion, “Israel has implemented more measure to prevent civilian casualties in urban warfare than any other military in the history of war.” And if that is true then the Israelis, by Anscombe’s standard, are behaving scrupulously and therefore justly.
Moreover, I have no doubt that Hamas—which not only committed those atrocities against the Israelis but did so in the certain knowledge of the retaliation that would follow—quite deliberately embeds itself amongst civilians, using women and children, hospitals and ambulances as shields. The IDF claims—with more than plausibility—that, to deter its attacks, Hamas uses children to move its bombs around (a possibility I don’t suppose Elizabeth Anscombe imagined). I have no doubt that it not only foresaw the consequence of October 7th for the population of Gaza but, in the spirit of that good old Bolshevik saying, ‘Worse means better,’ welcomed it. What could be better than that the whole world witnesses every night on its television screens pictures of the women and children killed and injured by Israeli bombs? (Perhaps there are even people in Hamas who foresaw that the BBC would deploy the richly compassionate voice of Fergal Keane on its behalf’.)
If Hamas were anything better than indifferent to the suffering of its fellow Palestinians, it would either never have committed those atrocities or surrender. But ‘worse’ for the people does mean ‘better’ for the cause. And when this ‘worse’, at worst, is martyrdom, even if involuntary … what is not permitted?
Is it possible to doubt that Hamas and many Hamas supporters would be glad enough to see what was done to the victims of the October 7th massacre done to the entire population of Israel? With only the Israeli state to protect its citizens from genocide (something that no state had to fear in the second world war) what else can Israel do but what it is doing? With such an enemy to fight, pitiless towards not only its enemies but its own people, what else?
Of course, the Israelis could do what, in the second world war and Iraq, the allies didn’t, protect as many enemy civilians as possible by renouncing bombing and leaving the fighting to ground troops. That would ensure many more Israeli deaths, and risk defeat, and genocide with it but no onlooker could then high-mindedly call their war unlawful. Or they could—to occupy moral ground that’s higher still—just lick their wounds and turn the other cheek … but … to such an enemy?
So, as hard a case as it is, my own verdict would be not murder, only a terrible necessity, when fighting an unscrupulous and unjust enemy. But I wonder what Elizabeth Anscombe would have said, and I’d like to know what Peter Hitchens does.
With no body of law to consult, no courts to interpret it and no one (except the winning side) to enforce verdicts, it is not just battles that are confused but our judgements of right and wrong. Much of the killing in war—even when not murder—must have, at best, too doubtful a character for it to be thought of as serving justice. Shakespeare, as so often, illustrates the essential point. At the crisis of the battle of Agincourt (that English Thermopylae in which the weak party is both the aggressor and victorious), our Leonidas, the royal hero and ideal soldier, Henry V (Harry or even Hal as well as Henry) orders his soldiers to kill their prisoners. The order is difficult to judge confidently, one way or the other. Perhaps Henry, out of fear that the prisoners will re-join the battle, thinks it necessary—in which case, it is severe but not murder. But perhaps it is done in angry retaliation for the murder of the English boys in the baggage train—in which case it is murder. Then, at the end of the battle, Henry asks what prisoners there are who will fetch a ransom. So, perhaps, the order was not—or not conscientiously—obeyed; but, if so, that was probably not because it was unjust but because it was unprofitable; and if so, Henry—the battle victoriously over—doesn’t care. The case illustrates not the confusion of war only but the confusion of judgement it brings with it.
And what state and people wouldn’t rather have as a war-leader someone like Henry V than someone like Hector in Troilus and Cressida? Hector has Achilles at his mercy but (because he is tired!) chivalrously lets him go. Later Achilles and his band of Myrmidons, having kept out of the battle to save themselves for Hector, hunt him down and, finding him alone and disarmed, kill him most unchivalrously; and, with him dead, Achilles leads the Greeks to victory. Troy is not just beaten but obliterated. (As, conceivably, Israel might be.)
Our Hector of the second world war, Churchill, thankfully may well have had more of the Achilles about him. He wouldn’t have been fit to be a war-leader if he hadn’t. He is sometimes “accused” of knowing that the attack on Pearl Harbour was coming but of not warning the Americans because he wanted them drawn into the war. I don’t know whether the story is true or not. But if it is, it is hardly something the British could ever accuse Churchill of. If he had had the opportunity to draw America into the war, whether by fair means or Pearl-Harbour-foul, and had passed it up, for honour’s or morality’s sake, that would make an accusation. That wasn’t what our parents and grandparents had followed him into war for, to neglect the best means of bringing them through it safely, the one means with which safety was assured, come what may, and without which might be lost, do what they might. If, very similarly, he thought he had to sacrifice Coventry for the sake of keeping Enigma secret, so be it. Such can be the necessities of war; and such the unreliability of war as an instrument of justice.
A government can have at best only a very slight right to require its citizens to risk their lives for something of such doubtful or contested meaning, and so remotely connected with their own safety and interest, as justice—not least because there is something self-contradictory in the idea of making war for justice’s sake. How can war (in which we inevitably subordinate justice to victory, and in which we may come to do things we would never have thought ourselves capable of, things which really may be—and in 1945, over Japan and Germany, were and in Gaza now are—the terrors of the earth) be a reliable means of bringing about justice? No war can be just that isn’t necessary, for those engaging in it. The just war, if such a thing may be, is fought not for justice but survival or some other great national interest. It needs to be something you have to do—as Israel has to do now
It, surely, is a truth which national leaders, whatever their enthusiasm for justice, should never lose sight of, that in pursuit of the safety in war, which only victory can bring, even the just will do terrible and unjust things. Whose cause has ever been juster than ours was in 1939? And how many, able to bomb Dresden in 1945 and able to think there was an advantage in it, would have been able to hold back from doing it, however just his cause? Would have been able to hold back from that and from everything similar and for no better reason than that it didn’t serve justice?
The atomic bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki certainly defeated the aggressor, but it can hardly be pretended that they served or were meant to serve justice. But, given what may have been the choice at the time, between murdering tens of thousands of the innocent amongst the enemy or losing tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers in battle, how many war-leaders wouldn’t choose as Truman did? Making war isn’t criminal but what are the chances of making war without committing crimes? So little that we had better not make war for the sake of justice.
Once such a war of national survival begins, everyone has a clear and uncomplicated idea of the part he plays in it. If not a soldier or commander of soldiers, he provides the means by which others may be soldiers. And the mark of soldiership, everyone understands, is killing—or, at least, the willingness to kill (and be killed)—in the circumstances necessary, legal, justified perhaps, but still the very emblem of wrong-doing.
With the restraints of peacetime removed, the soldier’s position resembles that of Conrad’s Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness. Marlow, the narrator, is contrasting Kurtz’s position, a solitary white man in an African jungle, with that of his own listeners:
“You can’t understand. How could you?—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums— . . . without a policeman . . . where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion?”
Of course, public opinion and policemen—in the form of military discipline—are there for a soldier as they are not for Kurtz, but hardly, first and foremost, for the sake of restraining him.
War may not be murder but, human nature and its circumstances being what they are, it certainly makes a home for it. What is more likely to bring people to kill unlawfully than that, when in danger of being killed themselves, they become accustomed to killing lawfully? In war, not only will people with a just cause commit murder on a mass scale if it is in their interest but they will even murder against their own interest. There’s an interesting first world war autobiography called A Private in the Guards (Macmillan, 1919). The author, Stephen Graham, was not only an educated man but, in his day, a well-known writer. In a chapter called “War the Brutaliser”, he describes the murder of prisoners as commonplace:
“The regimental tone absolutely forbade admiration of anything in connection with Germans. “Killing Huns” was our cheerful task, as one of our leaders once told us. The idea of taking prisoners had become very unpopular among the men. A good soldier was one who would not take a prisoner. If called on to escort prisoners to the cage, it would always be justifiable to kill them on the way and say they tried to escape. Did not So-and-so get a D.C.M. for shooting prisoners? “Thank God, this battalion’s always been blessed with a C.O. who didn’t believe in taking prisoners,” says a sergeant. Captain C—, who at Festubert shot two German officer-prisoners with whom he had an altercation, was always a hero, and when one man told the story, “That’s the stuff to gi’ ’em,” said the delighted listeners. That this preyed on C—’s mind, and that as a sort of expiation he lavished care and kindness on German prisoners ever after, till he was killed at Cambrai, was not so popular a story. (p. 217)”
Graham describes such behaviour not only as atrocity but as self-defeating, making it worse for English prisoners in German hands and deterring Germans from surrendering: “by ferocious habits . . . making this war into a mutual torture and destruction society for all men between eighteen and forty-five.”
There can be no more uncertain way, I should think, of doing good and dispensing justice than going to war (even with a licence obtained from the Security Council). Making war is nothing like punishing or preventing crime, not even when the country made war on is run by criminals. It is difficult to imagine a more clearly just war than that against Hitler’s Germany but what made it just, if anything did, was not that it was undertaken for the sake of justice or, self-sacrificingly, for the sake of others but that it was necessary, for Britain’s own sake. Nothing less could have justified it and anything else would have been less.
Elizabeth Anscombe says "the plight of the Jews under Hitler would have been a reasonable cause of war" but I think she’s wrong. The threat to Europe’s Jews would not, of itself, in my opinion, have justified Britain and France declaring war on Germany in 1939. For one thing, it was foreseeable that Germany at war would be unconstrained in its treatment of Jews in a way it wouldn’t be while it remained at peace; and so the fate of the Jews might have been different, might have been less purely terrible; for another, had it been, they, in turn, might not have felt driven to treat Palestinians unjustly; and then, of course, they, in turn, might not . . . and Hamas and Hizbollah might not . . . and even Saddam Hussain himself and al Qa’eda and Isis might not . . . und so weiter. When we make war—even for the sake of justice—we abandon justice, for we-don’t-know-how-many generations. This is what it is for the sins of the fathers to be visited upon the sons.
It’s a merit in an old-fashioned national war of self-defence (or aggression) like the Falklands or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that no one is confused about its moral character. No one thinks it virtuous, or its motive disinterested. We fought for the Falklands not because it was best that they were ours (“for our values”) but because they were ours, not for the general but for our own good. And it is the same at the moment in Ukraine. The Russian state and no doubt many Russian people think Crimea and Donbas theirs (and rightly think them much more important to Russia than any Briton can have thought the Falklands to Britain). For them, the war is as just a war as it is for the Ukrainians.
And the purpose of the war and the measure of its success are simple, victory, or, if that proves impossible, avoidance of defeat. It is a trial of strength and will in which fineness of civilisation counts for nothing, power—including as one of its forms the willingness to suffer—for everything. Whether its participants undertake it enthusiastically or reluctantly, more in expectation of victory or fear of defeat, whether with right or wrong on their side, none can have any reason for doubting they are undertaking something terrible, suffering and inflicting a terrible dislocation of ordinary life and a terrible suspension of the common rules of life. Nobody deceives themselves that what they are about is furthering the cause of justice. And nobody ought to deceive themselves that, with modern forms of warfare, war can be waged while at the same time protecting the innocent.
But—as Peter Hitchens says—the most characteristically modern part of the modern world finds such an idea of war intolerable. It doesn’t fit our idea of ourselves as creatures of progressive instincts and universal good will. You can scarcely continue to make war in the old-fashioned spirit, from national self-interest, and want to ban fox-hunting and verbal hate-non-crime. So, our idea of war has had to be modernised or—perhaps the word is—feminised. War has had to be re-interpreted as a branch of Overseas Development and something the Guardian can approve.
But human nature is not capable of making war as if its end were justice or the good. Fine intentions conceived in peace—even if genuine—are soon abandoned for the more authentic and terrible necessities of war, abandoned as quickly and as completely as only shams can be. At war! And our eyes are opened to the truth of our own natures, to the truth of our own desires. Now we know what we want, not justice, for heathen, Turk and Jew but, like them, victory, for ourselves. And at not too great a cost either.