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Preface
This book has its origins in a workshop I attended at Saint Andrews University several years ago. The workshop, which was a very enjoyable occasion, involved several just war theorists working onjus post bellum issues. When the conversation got bogged down in definitional disputes over how to define the ‘end’ or ‘endings’ of war, I suggested that we, as just war scholars, should perhaps think about using the more direct language of victory/defeat in its stead. While I will be the first to admit that my proposal, naïve as it was, was not especially interesting in its own right, the response it elicited surprised me. As I recall it, all the just war scholars in the room were convinced—emphatically so—that it was a verybad idea. I am accustomed to people disagreeing with me, but the unusual occurrence of so many academics agreeing with one another tweaked my curiosity. Why did they think it would be such a bad idea to connect just war theorizing to the discourse of victory, which is, after all, integral to how people think about warfare? What reasons might just war theorists have for their scepticism via-à-vis victory, and do they withstand scrutiny? Finally, what, if anything, might an analysis of these reasons tell us about victory, but also about the idea of just war itself? This book evolved as an attempt to address these questions.
I have gone back and forth over the past few years with respect to how to position myself in the resulting text. Specifically, I have agonized over whether I should write in the first person or adopt a more detached tone. While I saw no reason to interject myself into the discussion too strongly, I also believed it would be disingenuous to adopt a pretence of scientific objectivity. In the end, I settled on what I hope is a happy middle-ground. Following Michael Walzer’s lead, I decided to use the terms ‘we’ and ‘our’ throughout the text in a bid to suggest that I am writing as a scholar interested in the ethics of war, an interest that I presume the reader shares with me.
My use of ‘we’ and ‘our’ also indicates the extent to which I was reliant on the help and support of others in the writing of this book. The book has taken nearly ten years to write, and I have leaned heavily on friends and colleagues during this time. As is customary, I will take this opportunity to express my gratitude. I must begin with Nick Rengger, who sadly passed away this year. It was Nick’s invitation that brought me to St Andrews for the workshop mentioned above, and he has been a kind and supportive friend and colleague ever since I first met him all those years ago, when I was still a doctoral student. Nick’s work on the just war tradition has been a source of inspiration for me, and, like many others, I take
some comfort in the fact that I can still hear his voice whenever I read his books and essays.
Toni Erskine and Ian Clark supervised my PhD and have continued supervising me ever since. I could not have asked for better mentors than Toni and Ian, and I am happy to think that the ties of friendship bind us now. I admire them both, not just as scholars, but as people. I have known Chris Brown and Tony Lang almost as long as I have known Toni and Ian. Both have been extraordinarily generous with their time and advice over the past few years. I wish I could write with as much humour as Chris, and I wish Tony hadn’t voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.
I have also been boosted by the support of my fellow just war scholars. James Turner Johnson has also been exceptionally kind to me down the years, and I am so grateful for his interest in my work. I especially enjoyed the praise he bestowed on an earlier draft of this book: ‘You know, Cian, I initially thought this victory stuff wasbull, but you might just be onto something.’ This meant a lot. John Kelsay, ‘Flash’ to his friends, is a kind and thoughtful man to whom I’ve often turned for advice. It helps that we share a passion for sports teams that have seen better days. Daniel Brunstetter is a dear friend, a great travel-companion, and a scholar I look up to. Amy Eckert and Valerie Morkevius make ISA panels more fun than they really ought to be. Their recent books on (respectively) private military companies and realist ethics set a high bar for the rest of us. Daniel Schwartz was a source of advice on all things Neo-Scholastic. Larry May took the time to read a very early draft of this work, and Stephen Neff offered me encouragement just when I needed it most.
Several people went the extra mile in terms of helping me prepare this book. Luke Glanville, Gregory Reichberg, Rory Cox, Chris Finlay, and James Pattison commented on full drafts of the text. Greg, James, and Chris have all recently published excellent monographs of their own, and I am excited for the forthcoming books that Luke and Rory are currently completing. Brent Steele has been a great source of support, good humour, hugs, and beer since my graduate days. Ken Booth has been a great source of grudge and critique—this book is in many ways a response to his ideas on just war. Eric Heinze, Seb Kaempf, Neil Renic, and David Karp have joined me on numerous panels devoted to contemporary just war theory and I have learned a great deal from them. I am grateful to Elke Schwartz, Janina Dill, and Rhiannon Neilsen for their advice on the tone and structure of the book, and to Harry Gould for detailed (and prudent!) commentary on early drafts of several chapters. Dan Bulley deserves a special mention for helping me pull together the proposal for this book at a time when I had my doubts. His encouragement meant a lot to me—it’s just a shame that it was too rude to repeat here. Jim Brassett assisted with comedy, Mathias Thaler with violence. Nick Vaughan-Williams was encouraging of this project from the start, and Liane Hartnett helped me finish it. She generously read multiple drafts of every chapter. I look forward to doing the same for her own forthcoming book.
I owe my colleagues at Glasgow an apology for gloating about how much I was enjoying my study-leave while they were busy teaching. As well as being great friends, Kelly Kollman and Andy Judge made that period of study-leave possible for me by arranging my cover. I am very grateful for this. Ty Solomon, Sophia Dingli, and Beatrice Heuser commented on full drafts of this book. Going above and beyond what I would expect of departmental colleagues, their friendship has been a real boon for me. Other colleagues at Glasgow have offered feedback on specific chapters. Some have even endured me reading tricky paragraphs at them. Karen Wright, Georgios Karyotis, Chris Claassen, Mo Hume, Naomi Head, Alvise Favotto, Chris Berry, Craig Smith, Carl Knight, Ana Langer, Philip Habel, and Myrto Tsakatika all deserve special mention. Brian Girvin has taken time out of ‘retirement’ to help me fix the wonkier parts of my argument. I also benefited from the expert mentoring of Lauren McLaren and Jane Duckett and the supportive management of Chris Carman. Additionally, I have benefited greatly down the years from the vibrant (and collegial) research culture fostered by our IR and Political Theory research groups and also by the Glasgow Global Security Network. I feel lucky to have landed in such a great department. It would be remiss of me not to mention Alasdair Young. Alasdair left Glasgow for Georgia Tech some years back, but his influence is still discernible in Glasgow, most notably in the high standards he set for professionalism and integrity.
Andy Hom, another former colleague, has also contributed greatly to this book. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Glasgow when I was just starting out on this project. His critical questioning, willingness to talk an idea out, eagerness to tell me how wrong I am, and enduring interest in all things ‘theory’ have been a source of both pain and pleasure for me. He wouldn’t have it any other way. He has read several drafts of this book and it is better for his input. Phil O’Brien, whose contribution to War Studies at Glasgow was immense, is a great friend, and the first person I call when I need advice on how to approach a chapter and what brand of lounge-pants to buy. Working closely with Andy, Phil, and Kurt Mills, I was fortunate to receive an ESRC grant (ES/L013363/1) which provided me the time to eke out the hard yards on this book. This grant afforded me the opportunity to chat about long-bows with Matthew Strickland, Peter Jackson, and Stuart Airlie, and to work with the hugely talented Andee Wallace, Louis Bujnoch, and Gavin Stewart. Later in the life of the project, I received generous support from the Independent Social Research Foundation. The ISRF mid-career fellowship programme granted me the break from teaching and e-mail that I needed to finish this book.
I also benefited from the opportunity to present elements of this book at different universities. I received helpful feedback from colleagues at: Warwick University, Edinburgh University, the University of Limerick, the University of Southern Denmark, CalTech, Florida State University, Johns Hopkins SAIS at Bologna, Georgetown University, the University of Dundee, the University of Bath, the
University of California at Irvine, Oxford University, Utah State University, Kiel University, and St Andrews University.
Dominic Byatt at OUP has been fantastic to work with. Not only has he shown belief in this project from the very beginning, he has also become a trusted source of music tips. I am in his debt on both counts. I am also very appreciative of the care that Olivia Wells and her team at OUP have put into making this book a reality. Céline Louasli was especially helpful. She showed great patience in guiding me through the permissions process and preparing the manuscript for production. Together, Dominic, Olivia, and Céline have made what might have been a stressful process an enjoyable experience.
I am also very thankful to the following publishers for granting me permission to reproduce material from the following texts. An excerpt from Hans-Georg Gadamer’sTruth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004) is used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. Cambridge University Press granted me permission to reproduce excerpts from: Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Taylor & Francis granted me permission to reproduce excerpts from: Ken Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just Wars’, International Journal of Human Rights 4:3–4 (2000): 314–24. Elements of the argument presented here have appeared in an essay I published in the European Journal of International Relations. I am grateful to the editors of both the journal and this press for permitting me to revisit this material.
I am very grateful for the support of my friends, several of whom have taken an interest in this book. Alex Allen, Tom Bowser, and Steven Rice have a welcome way of getting me to think about things other than work—chiefly: rugby, red kites, and the relative merits of AC Jimbo and Barry Glendenning. Halle O’Neal has a filthy mouth and never ceases to make me laugh. As well as introducing me to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Jen Bagelman helped me work out what the book was all about and helped me find the confidence to pursue it. I can’t thank her enough. Billy and Aileen Chapman, Ammon Cheskin, Steve Paterson, Dave Featherstone, and Lorenzo Ranalli have helped make Glasgow home for me. Fred Cartmel did more than anybody else to help me settle into working life at the university. We became firm friends when I arrived in Glasgow and I am so saddened by his passing earlier this year. ‘What time’s lunch, mate?’ Kieran and Julie Curran, Jon and Talia Dudley, Kieran McGourty, Karen Dolphin, Andrew O’Malley, and Bernadette Sexton are always on hand for a catch-up, a pint, an adventure, a protracted WhatsApp chat, and the occasional rave on a family farm.
My greatest debt is of course to my family. My sister, Aoife, my brother, Cormac, and their partners, Eamon and Janet, make sure that I look forward to every trip I make back to Limerick. I hope they know how much I appreciate them. I also hope that someday Cormac will let me beat him at football, and that Aoife will do her fair share of the washing-up. Hope springs eternal. My nephews
Tom and Felix are always on hand to remind me that I look silly, have an outsized head, and smell bad. They are growing up so fast that the day is swiftly approaching when I will no longer fancy wrestling them. It is, however, my parents, Peter and Jacinta, to whom I owe the most. They have worked hard to ensure that, alongside Aoife and Cormac, I have always had the opportunity to do whatever makes me happy. They have supported me in everything I’ve done, encouraged me every step of the way, and always been on hand to keep me updated with the latest scores in Munster matches. The pride they take in what I do is humbling. They light the way for me. This book is dedicated to them.
Just War
The idea of just war rests on the dual claim that war may sometimes be justified and that it is possible to discern between just and unjust uses of force. This way of thinking about war has a long history. Scholars usually trace its origins to early Christian political theology, though there is evidence to suggest that its roots extend deeper, into antiquity.3 Over time it coalesced around three discrete but interlocking sets of principles bearing on the conditions that justify the recourse to war (jus ad bellum), the limits that constrain the conduct of war (jus in bello), and the desiderata that should guide its conclusion (jus post bellum). Scholars sometimes quibble over the relative weighting assigned to different principles, but this should not obscure the fact that there is considerable consensus regarding the identity of these principles. Most scholars agree that jus ad bellum inquiries necessarily revolve around the principles of just cause, proper authority, right intention, aim of peace, last resort, and reasonable chance of success; that jus in bello concerns pivot on the principles of discrimination (i.e., non-combatant immunity) and proportionality; and that the task of jus post bellum analysis is to parse the responsibilities of both the victors and the vanquished in the aftermath of armed conflict. There is, I trust, no need to gloss these principles here, save to note that they are best understood, not as criteria for a checklist, but as openended questions that may be usefully employed to structure and guide our ethical evaluation of warfare.4
The central proposition of just war theory is, therefore, that war can and should be subjected to moral scrutiny. The aim of this scrutiny is not to identify which wars are just and which are unjust. As Oliver O’Donovan has argued, ‘Major historical events cannot be justified or criticised in one mouthful; they are concatenations and agglomerations of many separate actions and many varied results.’5
3 The key texts on the history of the tradition are: James Turner Johnson, Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War: Religious and Secular Concepts, 1200–1740 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Alex J. Bellamy, Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); and Frederick H. Russell, Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). On the move to look beyond the tradition’s putative roots in Christian thought: Rory Cox, ‘Expanding the History of Just War: The Ethics of War in Ancient Egypt’, International Studies Quarterly 61:2 (2017): 371–84; Gregory A. Raymond, ‘The Greco-Roman Roots of the Just War Tradition’, in Howard M. Hensel (ed.), The Prism of Just War: Asian and Western Perspectives on the Legitimate Use of Military Force (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010): 7–29; Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Rewriting the Just War Tradition: Just War in Classical Greek Political Thought and Practice’, International Studies Quarterly 29:1 (2015): 1–10; and Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Keeping Tradition Alive: Just War and Historical Imagination’, Journal of Global Security Studies 3:2 (2018): 234–47.
4 Chris Brown calls them ‘aids to judgement’. Chris Brown, ‘Just War and Political Judgement’, in Anthony F. Lang, Jr., Cian O’Driscoll, and John Williams (eds.), Just War: Authority, Tradition, and Practice (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), p. 46. For a primer on the principles of the just war tradition: Charles Guthrie and Michael Quinlan, Just War: Ethics in Modern Warfare (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).
5 Oliver O’Donovan, The Just War Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 13.
Rather, the purpose of just war theory is to guide our efforts to examine how the actions and results that wars entail might be interrogated in ethical terms. Within this, an issue that requires further attention is the question of how one should understand the relationship between the jus ad bellum and jus in bello judgements. Should a belligerent party’s jus ad bellum basis for resorting to war in the first instance be taken into account when considering what counts as permissible conduct in the course of that war? Michael Walzer, whose 1977 text Just and Unjust Wars has swiftly become a modern classic, has argued that, all things being equal, jus ad bellum and jus in bello considerations should be treated independently of one another.6 This opens up the possibility of judging an otherwise justified war to have been waged unjustly, and vice versa. Recent years have seen this proposition become the focus of a fierce debate between Walzer and his critics.7 Scholars such as Jeff McMahan have claimed that it reflects faulty reasoning.8 Their argument is that the strict separation of jus ad bellum and jus in bello considerations leads to wrongheaded thinking, such as, for instance, the belief that so long as he or she adheres to jus in bello norms, a soldier does no wrong by fighting for an unjust cause. I will have more to say about this debate, and its implications for the argument I seek to develop in this book, in Chapter 7.
In the meantime, it is important to say something about why the idea of just war matters. Although the discussion has focused thus far on Latinate categories of analysis and abstract scholarly debates, one should not underestimate the practical edge of just war thinking and its significance for international politics. While it was possible in the past to discount the idea of just war as an obscure, recondite hobby pursued by Catholic theologians cloistered in ivy towers, its recent prominence in the discourse of political and military leaders suggests a very different story.9 As numerous scholars have shown, just war has become the predominant frame through which western military and policy elites discuss matters of war and peace.10 Walzer has famously dubbed this development the ‘triumph of just war
6 ‘War is always judged twice, first with reference to the reasons states have for fighting, secondly with reference to the means they adopt.’ Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations—Fifth Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2015), p. 21.
7 There is a wealth of material available on this debate, which is often (misleadingly) cast as a clash between ‘revisionist’ and ‘traditionalist’ approaches to just war theory. For an overview: Seth Lazar, ‘Evaluating the Revisionist Critique of Just War Theory’, Daedalus 146:1 (2017): 113–24; and James Pattison, ‘The Case for the Non-Ideal Morality of War: Beyond Revisionism Versus Traditionalism in Just War Theory’, Political Theory 46:2 (2018): 242–68.
8 Jeff McMahan, ‘Innocence, Self-Defence and Killing in War’, Journal of Political Philosophy 2:3 (1994): 193–221.
9 President Barack Obama famously framed his Nobel Peace Prize address in the language of just war. Barack Obama, ‘Nobel Lecture’, 10 December 2009. Available at: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ peace/2009/obama/26183-nobel-lecture-2009/. Accessed: 18 January 2019. Obama was not alone in invoking just war, however. Other leaders have also made extensive reference to it. See: Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Talking about Just War: Obama in Oslo, Bush at War’, Politics 31:2 (2011): 82–90.
10 For example: Mark Totten, First Strike: America, Terrorism, and Moral Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 80–3; and Daniel Brunstetter and Scott Brunstetter, ‘Shades of Green: Engaged Pacifism, the Just War Tradition, and the German Greens’, International Relations 25:1
theory’.11 He argues that since the Vietnam War just war discourse has emerged as the lingua franca of those in power. This, he notes, is a significant development. It indicates how deeply just war norms and concepts have become embedded in contemporary international relations. It is not merely that generals and presidents exploit the just war idiom for rhetorical purposes, it is that it has also been internalized by them and incorporated into military planning and operations at all levels. It is not going too far to suggest that the just war tradition has become the pre-eminent framework for examining the rights and wrongs of the use of force in international society.12
Victory
Victory is integral to how we understand war. Aristotle and Cicero called it the ‘telos’ of military science, Sun Tzu hailed it as ‘the main object in war’, while General Douglas Macarthur proclaimed that it knows ‘no substitute’.13 But what is it? Victory is one of those concepts that, like time, appears simple to grasp until you actually start to examine it.14 The issue is that victory is simultaneously a rhetorically powerful concept but also a hopelessly vague one.15 On the one hand, it is a very resonant term. It conjures up images of soldiers driving enemies from the battlefield, planting a flag on a captured hill, seizing the enemy’s capital, and vanquishing their foes.16 In each case, victory is represented as something that is emphatic, decisive, conclusive. It stands for the termination of hostilities, the
(2011): 65–84. It is also important to note the work being done by the adjective ‘western’. In terms of its provenance, just war theory is usually regarded as a western tradition. It does, however, have analogues in other cultures. My focus will be on western just war theory. On the comparative ethics of war: Gregory M. Reichberg, Henrick Syse, and Nicole M. Hartwell (eds.), Religion, War, and Ethics: A Sourcebook of Textual Traditions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Vesselin Popovski, Gregory M. Reichberg, and Nicholas Turner (eds.), World Religions and Norms of War (New York: United Nations University Press, 2009); and Richard Sorabji and David Rodin (eds.), The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
11 Michael Walzer, Arguing About War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 3–22.
12 For a different take which emphasizes legalistic discourse: Fernando G. Nunez-Mietz, ‘Legalization and the Legitimation of the Use of Force: Revisiting Kosovo’, International Organization 72:3 (2018): 725–57.
13 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by Harry Rackham (London: Wordsworth, 1996), p. 3 [1.i.3]. Marcus Tullius Cicero, ‘The Republic’, in The Republic and the Laws, trans. by Niall Rudd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 83 [V.8]. Mark R. McNeilly, Sun Tzu and the Art of Modern Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 16. General Douglas MacArthur, ‘Farewell Address to Congress’. Available at: www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurfarewelladdress.htm. Accessed: 18 January 2019.
14 ‘What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know.’ Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 230 [XI.xiv.17].
15 Robert Mandel describes victory as a ‘fuzzy, contentious, and emotionally charged’ idea. Robert Mandel, The Meaning of Military Victory (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2006), p. 13.
16 Dominic P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 5–6. Also: Paul
settlement of a dispute, the end of ‘war-time’, and the resumption of peacetime.17 On the other hand, it can be hard to pin down exactly what victory means in practical terms.18 Although we know it stands for winning, what this means in practice is often anyone’s guess. Victory has historically been indexed to, among other things, body-counts, the occupation of enemy territory, and the winning of hearts and minds.19 Yet the fog of war is such that these indicators seldom give us little more than a very rough idea of what victory looks like in war.
The tensions inherent in victory are observable in the wars of the post-9/11 era. President George W. Bush placed the goal of victory at the forefront of US war aims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the so-called War on Terror more generally. Delivering an address on the Iraq War in 2005, for example, ‘Bush used the word “victory” fifteen times while standing in front of a sign that read “Plan for Victory” and pitching a document called “Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” .’20 Despite this, neither Bush nor his generals had, in Andrew Bacevich’s words, ‘the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost’.21 This was due in part to the nature of the struggle itself: waged over amorphous battlespaces against shadowy foes rather than on clearly demarcated battlefields against ranked and massed enemy armies, the wars the US waged in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere were not configured to generate readily identifiable victories. As General Petraeus put it, these were not the sort of struggles ‘where you take a hill, plant the flag, and go home with a victory parade’.22 President Obama subsequently sought to shift US strategic discourse away from any association with victory. The term ‘victory’ was unhelpful, he explained, because
Kekcskemeti, Strategic Surrender: The Politics of Victory and Defeat (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958).
17 Andrew R. Hom, ‘Conclusion’, in Andrew R. Hom, Cian O’Driscoll, and Kurt Mills (eds.), Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 235.
18 Richard Hobbs, The Myth of Victory: What is Victory in War? (Boulder: Westview, 1979), pp. xvi–2; Tommy Franks, ‘What is Victory? A Conversation with General Tommy Franks’, The National Interest 86 (2006), p. 8.
19 Philip Caputo’s remarks are indicative: ‘Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low killratio, war a matter of arithmetic.’ Philip Caputo, A Rumour of War (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1996), p. xix. On the metrics of winning: Leo J. Blanken, Hy Rothstein, and Jason J. Lepore (eds.), Assessing War: The Challenge of Success and Failure (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015); Gregory A. Daddis, ‘The Problem of Metrics: Assessing Progress and Effectiveness in the Vietnam War’, War in History 19:1 (2012): 73–98.
20 Dominic Tierney, The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2015), p. 145.
21 Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2010), p. 10.
22 Mark Tran, ‘General David Petraeus Wars of Long Struggle Ahead for U.S. in Iraq’, Guardian, 11 September 2008. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/sep/11/iraq.usa. Accessed: 18 January 2019. Donald Rumsfeld went further, complaining that there was no ‘metrics to know if we are winning or losing the Global War on Terror’. Quoted in: Mandel, The Meaning of Military Victory, p. 135. For more on this: Jeffrey Record, Bounding the Global War on Terrorism (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2003), pp. 5–6.
‘it invokes the notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur’.23 Obama’s efforts to excise victory from the lexicon have since been reversed by President Donald Trump, in whose rhetoric ‘winning’ occupies pride of place.24
The wars of the post-9/11 era also illuminate the degree to which victory remains essential to how people think and talk about war. This underlines the need for a clear definition of victory. This is easier said than done. Victory defies parsimonious formulae. This is a reflection of its multivalence and historical mutability. Victory can denote a wide variety of outcomes and has been understood in very different ways at different times. As William C. Martel has observed, ‘victory describes in general terms a wide range of favourable or successful political, economic, and military outcomes that routinely occur in war’.25 It is, in this sense, a very baggy or ‘imprecise’ term which only loosely captures a vast range of phenomena.26 Strategists and military historians have tended to respond to this problem (if that is indeed what it is) by elaborating complex typologies that are intended to reflect the different categories of victory that can be achieved through the use of force. Thus, for example, Colin Gray parses victory along operational, strategic, and political dimensions while the aforementioned Martel refers to the tactical, strategic, and grand-strategic levels of victory.27
The famous Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz furnishes us with another way of approaching the task of defining victory. Instead of accounting for its vicissitudes, he attempted to reduce it to its core essence. According to Clausewitz, victory is best understood in terms of the imposition of one’s will upon the enemy.28 As such, and unlike other similar terms such as ‘success’, it denotes a fundamentally zero-sum outcome. For one side to win, the other must lose, and for every victor there must be a vanquished.29 Victory, on this account, is a matter
23 Quoted in: Gabriella Blum, ‘The Fog of Victory’, European Journal of International Law 24:1 (2013), p. 421. On Obama’s efforts to excise victory from US discourse: William C. Martel, Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Strategy—Revised and Expanded Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 17–18.
24 It would be a missed opportunity not to include at least one quote evoking victory from President Trump: ‘You’re going to be so proud of your country. [. .] We’re going to turn it around. We’re going to start winning again: we’re going to win at every level, we’re going to win economically [. .] we’re going to win militarily, we’re going to win with healthcare for our veterans, we’re going to win with every single facet, we’re going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning, and you’ll say “Please, please, it’s too much winning, we can’t take it anymore”, and I’ll say “No it isn’t”, we have to keep winning, we have to win more, we’re going to win more!’ Quoted in: Cian O’Driscoll and Andrew R. Hom, ‘Introduction’, in Andrew R. Hom, Cian O’Driscoll, and Kurt Mills (eds.), Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 3.
25 Martel, Victory in War, p. 19. 26 Ibid.
27 Colin S. Gray, Defining and Achieving Victory (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2002), p. 11. Martel, Victory in War, pp. 34–9.
28 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 77 [I.I]; 142–3 [II.II]. Clausewitz is discussed further in Chapter 6.
29 Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 71. Also: Michael Howard, ‘When Are Wars Decisive?’, Survival 41:1 (1999), p. 130.
of prevailing over one’s adversaries and of forcing them to taste defeat. This way of approaching victory emphasizes its antagonistic, conflictual character. This is very much in line with the synonyms people habitually substitute for it: conquest, triumph, vanquish, subdue, subjugate, and overcome.30 Each of these terms highlights the notion that victory is something that is achieved over others and at their expense through means of domination and/or violence. Furthermore, while the practice of characterizing a victory by reference to its degree of comprehensiveness (i.e., tactical, strategic, or grand-strategic) serves a practical purpose, it is predicated upon the fact that victory, unqualified, ordinarily carries connotations of decisiveness and totality.31
The Victory of Just War
Having introduced the fundaments of just war and victory, the next challenge is to consider how they go together. This issue has not received much attention in recent just war scholarship. While books and essays have appeared on almost every conceivable issue relating to the ethics of war—from long-standing concerns regarding sovereignty and intervention to novel worries arising from the emergence of new military technologies—since the publication of Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, the relation between just war and victory has been largely overlooked.32 To put it more accurately, just war scholars have tended to avoid using the language of victory and winning. This is not to say that the concept of victory has been entirely absent from the current literature on just war. It does make an occasional appearance. The issue is that it is seldom handled with any care or concern for its full depth of meaning. Scholars evoke it but do not engage it. This is especially apparent in three domains of contemporary just war scholarship.
Reasonable Chance of Success
We might expect to find a thoughtful discussion of victory and its relation to the idea of just war in analyses of the jus ad bellum principle of reasonable chance of success. This principle may be taken to suggest that a war that satisfies all the
30 These synonyms are listed in: Martel, Victory in War, p. 22.
31 Ibid.
32 There are several honourable exceptions. Janina Dill (ed.), ‘Symposium on Ending Wars’, Ethics 125:3 (2015): 627–80; Beatrice Heuser, ‘Victory, Peace, and Justice: The Neglected Trinity’, Joint Forces Quarterly 69 (2013): 1–7; Blum, ‘The Fog of Victory’; James Q. Whitman, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). There is also the collection of essays that I co-edited with Andy Hom and Kurt Mills: Andrew R. Hom, Cian O’Driscoll, and Kurt Mills (eds.), Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
relevant jus ad bellum requirements would nevertheless only be justified if it is also a war that one is likely to win. It can in this form be traced back to the Neoscholastic writings of Francisco Suarez. As Suarez framed it, ‘For a war to be just, the sovereign ought to be so sure of the degree of his power that he is morally certain of victory.’33 The reason for this, he explained, is that ‘otherwise the prince would incur the evident peril of inflicting on his state losses greater than the advantages involved’.34 This is exactly how the principle is stipulated in contemporary just war theory. Consider for example the following exposition in Guthrie and Quinlan’s 2007 primer on the principles of just war:
The ‘success’ criterion reflects the truth that, whatever may be thought of an individual’s entitlement to hazard or lose his or her life . . . it cannot be right for a national leader, responsible for the good of all the people, to undertake—or prolong—armed conflict, with all the loss of life and other harm that entails, if there is no reasonable likelihood that this would achieve a better outcome for the people than would result from rejecting or ending combat and simply doing whatever is possible by other means.35
Thus framed, the principle of reasonable chance of success does not demand the prospect of a certain victory as a condition for waging war. It merely rules out, or at least creates a prima facie case against, the recourse to force in cases where there is reason to believe it would be futile. In essence, it sounds a cautionary note against throwing soldiers’ lives after lost causes.
This may appear a promising place to find a thoughtful discussion of victory and its relation to the idea of just war. The reality, however, is disappointing. The first hint of this arrives courtesy of the shift in vocabulary it introduces, from victory to success. We might suppose that this is just a matter of nomenclature, the significance of which should not be overstated. Yet this is not quite right. There is something lost when one substitutes success for victory in discussions bearing on the rights and wrongs warfare. The use of success nudges the tone of just war inquiry onto a euphemistic register by obfuscating the fact that, where war is concerned, anything resembling a ‘positive’ outcomes must always necessarily have been achieved at someone else’s expense. Put simply, it obscures the agonistic logic of warfare that victory captures. This lends the misleading impression that prevailing in war has nothing to do with the brutish, zero-sum realities of defeating the other party, when in fact it is grounded in them. Beyond this, the principle of reasonable chance of success is prone to dissolve upon contact into a mushy
33 Francisco Suarez, ‘A Work on the Three Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity: Disputation XIII: On War’, in Selections from Three Works, ed. by Thomas Pink, trans. by Gwladys L. Williams, Ammi Brown, and John Waldron (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2015), p. 937 [IV.10].
34 Ibid. 35 Guthrie and Quinlan, Just War, p. 31.
form of proportionality calculation. This is evident in the emphasis Guthrie and Quinlan place upon the balancing of costs and benefits in their account of reasonable chance of success.36 Others, like James Turner Johnson, define it in a way that highlights its overlap with the principle of proportionality. In Johnson’s words, the reasonable chance of success principle enjoins ‘Prudential calculation of the likelihood that the means used will bring the justified ends sought.’37 Thus configured, it functions as a kind of rump utilitarian backstop designed to guard against feckless military adventurism. As such, it assumes rather than interrogates the concept of success, and is thereby symptomatic of the general failure of today’s just war theorists to acknowledge, let alone problematize, the relation between victory and just war.
Jus Post Bellum
The other area of contemporary just war scholarship that purportedly addresses the relation between just war and victory is the jus post bellum. Jus post bellum analysis purports to address the ethical and legal questions that arise specifically when a war is in the process of being concluded. Approached as a discreet field of inquiry, jus post bellum analysis can be traced back to a 1994 essay by Michael Schuck in the Christian Century.38 Appalled by the triumphalism displayed by the US in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, and in particular the attendance of military top brass at a victory parade hosted by a Disney theme park, Schuck lamented what he saw as his country’s lack of remorse for the losses that the war had occasioned on both sides.39 More deeply, he claimed, it exposed the general lack of thought devoted to the question of how states ought to comport themselves in the aftermath of war. As a remedy, Schuck coined the phrase jus post bellum and proffered it as the missing element of just war theory. Latterly, Brian Orend, Gary Bass, Larry May, Eric Patterson, Mark Allman and Tobias Winright, Louis Iasiello, Robert Williams and Dan Caldwell, and Alex Bellamy, among others, have endorsed the case for jus post bellum and argued that, rather than concentrating
36 Ibid.
37 James Turner Johnson, Morality and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 29. Some scholars, Nicholas Fotion and A. J. Coates among them, have even gone so far as to identify reasonable chance of success as a subcategory of proportionality. Nicholas Fotion, War and Ethics: A New Just War Theory (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 15; A. J. Coates, The Ethics of War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 179. Also: Frances V. Harbour, ‘Reasonable Chance of Success as a Moral Criterion in the Western Just War Tradition’, Journal of Military Ethics 10:3 (2011): 230–41.
38 Michael J. Schuck, ‘When the Shooting Stops: Missing Elements in Just War Theory’, Christian Century (26 October 1994), pp. 982–3.
39 I discuss this elsewhere: Cian O’Driscoll, ‘After Disneyland: The (Hollow) Victory of Just War’, in Daniel R. Brunstetter and Jean-Vincent Holeindre (eds.), The Ethics of War and Peace Revisited (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018): 287–302.
all their efforts on the initial resort to war and its subsequent conduct, theorists should devote more time to the ethical challenges that arise at war’s end.40
Jus post bellum scholars present victory as pivotal to their enterprise.
Louis V. Iasiello equates jus post bellum analysis with parsing the liabilities and responsibilities that victors incur with respect to the societies whose armies they have defeated in combat. He writes that the task of the jus post bellum theorist is to devise ‘moral precepts to guide the post bellum activities of victors’.41
Alex J. Bellamy submits that the key division in the jus post bellum field is between minimalist and maximalist approaches, a distinction that turns on whether one apportions minor or extensive responsibilities to victorious parties for those societies that they have defeated in war.42 Finally, Larry May claims that the central jus post bellum question is ‘what difference should there be between victors and vanquished in terms of post war responsibilities?’43
Yet even though the concept of victory pervades jus post bellum analysis, it is not developed with any precision. This is because, despite its prominence in the literature, victory is not actually the central concern of conventional jus post bellum scholarship. Rather, as David Rodin has pointed out, the majority of jus post bellum scholars are actually less interested in what victory might mean than they are in discerning what principles should obtain after victory has already been achieved.44 Viewed in this light, jus post bellum analysis is not designed to shed any light on the concept of victory or its relation with just war. Instead, it treats victory as a point of departure or threshold condition for a schematic examination of what former belligerents owe one another after the war between them has been won.45
40 Brian Orend, ‘Jus Post Bellum’, Journal of Social Philosophy 31:1 (2000): 117–37; Brian Orend, ‘Jus Post Bellum: The Perspective of a Just-War Theorist’, Leiden Journal of International Law 20 (2007): 571–91; Gary Bass, ‘Jus Post Bellum’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 32:4 (2004): 384–412; Larry May, After War Ends: A Philosophical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Eric Patterson, Ending Wars Well: Order, Justice, and Conciliation in Contemporary Post-Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Eric Patterson (ed.), Ethics Beyond War’s End (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012); Mark J. Allman and Tobias L. Winwright, After the Smoke Clears: The Just War Tradition and Post-War Justice (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2010); Louis V. Iasiello, ‘Jus Post Bellum: The Moral Responsibilities of Victors in War’, Naval War College Review 57:3/4 (2004); Robert E. Williams and Dan Caldwell, ‘Jus Post Bellum: Just War Theory and the Principles of Just Peace’, International Studies Perspectives 7:4 (2006): 309–20; and Alex J. Bellamy, ‘The Responsibilities of Victory: Jus Post Bellum and the Just War’, Review of International Studies 34 (2008): 601–25.
41 Iasiello, ‘Jus Post Bellum: The Moral Responsibilities of Victors in War’, p. 40.
42 Bellamy, ‘The Responsibilities of Victory’, p. 602.
43 May, After War Ends, p. 1.
44 David Rodin, ‘Two Emerging Issues of Jus Post Bellum: War Termination and the Liability of Soldiers for Crimes of Aggression’, in Carsten Stahn and Jann K. Kleffner (eds), Jus Post Bellum: Towards a Law of Transition from Conflict to Peace (The Hague: TMC Asser Press, 2008): 53–77.
45 This is neatly summed up by Walzer’s statement of purpose in a 2012 essay he wrote on jus post bellum. ‘I am going to assume the victory of the just warriors and ask what their responsibilities are after victory.’ Michael Walzer, ‘The Aftermath of War: Reflections on Jus Post Bellum’, in Eric Patterson (ed), Ethics Beyond War’s End (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012), p. 37.
Jus Ex Bello
Rodin used the essay referred to above as a springboard to propose a new pole of just war theorizing, jus terminatio, which would focus on the ethics of how wars are brought to an end. Independently but around the same time, Darrel Moellendorf issued a call for the development of what he called a jus ex bello pole of just war theory, devoted to the same purpose identified by Rodin.46 ‘Although there is a discussion of the morality of ending wars that goes back at least as far as early modern philosophy, in recent debates on just war theory, the questions of whether and how to end a war have received comparatively little attention.’47 This, he contended, urgently requires correction. These calls have since inspired a profusion of work.48 The key argument that this body of work advances is that just war theory would benefit from greater attention being paid to how we judge whether and when to end our wars.49 This would necessarily involve more systematic thinking about the coherence between the jus ad bellum basis of a war, the jus in bello restrictions that bear upon it, and the morally appropriate way to terminate it.50 Scholars interested in jus ex bello matters have set for themselves the task of examining whether belligerents waging a just war should always press on for victory, no matter how arduous and costly a task that might be, while also considering the possibility that there might be some point or threshold beyond which they ought to sue for peace.51
Though the authors involved generally steer clear of the idiom of victory, the premise of their work is that we as just war scholars need to pay more attention to the relation between just war and victory. This book seeks to build on this insight.
Triumph, Tragedy, Irony
The purpose of this book is to examine the relation between just war and victory, and to use this focus as a prism through which to shed new light on the idea of just war, and in particular to highlight its tragic limitations. It will proceed by interrogating what I consider to be the seven major problems that victory raises for just war theorists. The aim in each case is to identify the parameters of the problem, establish why just war theorists regard it as a reason for avoiding the
46 Darrel Moellendorf, ‘Jus Ex Bello’, Journal of Political Philosophy 16:2 (2009): 123–36.
47 Darrel Moellendorf, ‘Ending Wars’, in Seth Lazar and Helen Frowe (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
48 Most notably: Dill (ed.), ‘Symposium on Ending Just Wars’.
49 Darrel Moellendorf, ‘Jus Ex Bello in Afghanistan’, Ethics & International Affairs 25:2 (2011), p. 156.
50 Janina Dill, ‘Ending Wars: The Jus ad Bellum Principles Suspended, Repeated, or Adjusted?’, Ethics 125:3 (2015), p. 627.
51 Cecile Fabre, ‘War Exit’, Ethics 125:3 (2015), pp. 631–2.
concept of victory, show why this reason is actually a basis for engaging it, and consider what this tells us about how just war is understood. We will discover the same pattern at work across all seven problems.
It will be demonstrated that the reason just war theorists are so circumspect about victory is because of what it reveals about just war: namely, that ‘just war is just war’.52 The claim that ‘just war is just war’ is usually asserted to undermine the idea of just war. It affects to lay bare the truth that even the wars that one might regard as justified are nasty affairs, no different from any other war. It thus suggests that just war theory both distracts from and sanitizes the horrors of modern warfare by dressing it up in the garb of moral principles. Ken Booth furnishes its classic formulation. ‘The idea of just war is beguiling’, he writes, ‘because it ennobles the profession of violence, and offers a set of conditions that seem to suggest rational control and restraint.’53 Yet it is susceptible to being ‘misused and manipulated’.54 The result is that it provides a source of legitimation for practices that should be condemned.
When I suggest, then, that viewing it through the prism of victory will reveal just war to be just war, what I mean is that it will prick the pretensions of just war theory. Instead of imbuing the idea of just war with triumphalism, interrogating it through the lens of victory compels scholars to keep in mind that all wars, even just ones, are brutish affairs that involve armies doing their utmost to defeat one another. It follows that reflecting on just war in light of the kind of questions that victory raises—What does victory in a just war look like, and can it ever be worth the cost?—undercuts the impression that it is a rational, civilized, carefully calibrated, and orderly enterprise. Instead, it reveals it to be a wretched and bloody business that trades in death and devastation—no different, in other words, from any other kind of war. So far as thinking about victory obliges us to take this into account, this helps us to think more realistically and therefore also more prudently about just war—which can only be a good thing. This, then, is a reason for engaging victory, not ignoring it.
At the same time, revealing just war to be just war might be taken as a damning critique of the idea of just war. Indeed, some scholars—most notably Booth, but also Andrew Fiala and Maja Zehfuss—have made exactly this case.55 They have suggested that it furnishes us with good grounds for dismissing the whole idea of just war as so much dangerous hot air. Just war theory, they argue, should be rejected as ‘the continuation of war by other rhetoric’.56 I draw the opposite conclusion, however. I contend that it is precisely because ‘just war is just war’, with all that this implies, that we must not shy away from just war theory, but should
52 Ken Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just Wars’, International Journal of Human Rights 4:3–4 (2000), pp. 316–17.
53 Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just Wars’, pp. 316–17. 54 Ibid.
55 Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just Wars’; Andrew Fiala, The Just War Myth: The Moral Illusion of War (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield: 2008); and Maja Zehfuss, War and the Politics of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). I will discuss these scholars in depth in Chapter 7.
56 Booth, ‘Ten Flaws of Just Wars’, p. 317.
instead renew our commitment to thinking carefully and judiciously about it. Put differently, instead of treating the realization that ‘just war is just war’ as grounds for abandoning the task of just war thinking, we should take it as a spur to approach it with the intellectual honesty and seriousness it demands. I say this despite believing that the critics are correct when they say that just war is as much a part of the problem as the solution when it comes to limiting the scourge of war. Yet, unless we are willing to give up on the idea of subjecting war to moral judgement, which I am not, I see no other option than to persevere with the idea of just war, even as we—viewing it through the prism of victory—recognize the dangers it presents.
Bringing all of this together, then, this book illuminates the tragedy of just war. By asking what victory means in relation to just war, it invites us to consider the limited return that can be expected from any use of force, regardless of whether it is intended to serve a just cause or not. Just war, it submits, cannot fix our problems for us; the best it can do is defer, allay, or contain them for a period, while producing others in their place. This book thus frames just war, not as a means of resolving the ills of the world, but as a symptom of them. Yet this does not mean we should wash our hands of it. On the contrary, acquiring a deeper awareness of its limitations is a reason for approaching just war with a renewed sense of purpose. This will involve acknowledging that the problems that just war is symptomatic of are also what render it necessary in the first place. At the same time, it will also require us to be both more circumspect with respect to what we expect just wars to deliver, and more honest about the fact that, as Erasmus put it, ‘even the most just of wars brings with it a train of evils’.57 This, as we shall see, is itself a hard task, for the nature of the just war idea is such that it encourages those of us who engage it to forget that it is implicated in the problems it is intended to ameliorate.58
The aim of this book, therefore, might be described as ironic in the sense described by Paul Fussell. For Fussell, the ironic disposition stands in opposition to that brand of inquiry that ‘solves problems and cleans up the place, leaving you feeling tidy and satisfied’. Rather, it accentuates the intractability of the problems we face by complicating them and ‘leaving them messier than before’.59 The value of this approach is that it forces us to confront the tragic dimension of our politics where we might otherwise prefer to overlook.
57 Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. by Lisa Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 103. The argument that there is a need for more realism in just war theory is the centrepiece of an excellent recent book: Valerie Morkevicius, Realist Ethics: Just War Traditions as Power Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
58 I am minded of what Niebuhr called ‘the ironic tendency of virtues to turn into vices when too complacently relied upon: and of power to become too vexatious if the wisdom which directs it is trusted too confidently’. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 133.
59 Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit Books, 1988), p. 42.
