Just War Theory

Taking Sovereignty by the Horn

So after a couple of lame warm-up posts where I take on really important tasks like calling John McCain names and writing about the best show on Television, I suppose that it’s time to return to Serious Blogging.

Via Matt Yglesias, I came across John Judis’ article at TNR Online (free registration required) about American involvement in the Horn of Africa. For those of you who were too busy scarfing down turkey to notice, on Christmas day, the supposedly-Christian Ethiopia (though how abstract entities like states are supposed to be Christian…or Muslim…or anything else really…I’m not quite sure) invaded the tropical paradise that is the Islamic (help, I’m doing it again) nation of Somalia. In and of itself, that wouldn’t really be all that newsworthy, I suppose (unless, of course, you happen to live somewhere around the Horn of Africa, in which case it’s probably pretty damn noteworthy). What makes the news hit somewhat closer to home is that the Ethiopians were — allegedly — aided in their attack by American Special Forces.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of that allegation, other than to say that it’s not being made by a bunch of lefty anti-war types, but by the right-wing blogger/reporter Daveed Garstenstein-Ross. What seems beyond dispute is that an American gunship attacked a target that may or may not have housed some al-Qaeda terrorists, but which did, whether by coincidence or design, happen to be the location of a high-level Somali military official. A cynic might well conclude that Americans were actually supporting an Ethiopian invasion of a sovereign state. I’m not actually making such a claim myself. Personally, I would need some evidence before I would believe that the United States would ever participate in an unprovoked and ill-advised invasion of a sovereign state whose military was staying within its own borders.

Yglesias and Judis both denounce American involvement as unjust, even possibly criminal. Without knowing more, I prefer to withhold judgment, but if pressed, I would likely be inclined to agree with their assessment. What I don’t much buy are their arguments; Judis’ claims, in particular, read like a good conclusion desperately in search of an argument. This particular passage very much gets at my worry:

Meanwhile, in Somalia, the Islamic Courts replaced a weak transitional regime that was unable to control the warlords, who, since 1991, have turned the countryside into a Hobbesian jungle. The new government had brought a harsh Islamic justice and order to Somalia, which, for all its own injustice, was preferable to the chaos that had prevailed.

Judis’ argument here is surprisingly conservative — indeed, it’s actually very similar to the one that Hobbes himself offers for accepting the supremacy of the Leviathan. Hobbes reasons that, since life in the state of nature really, really sucks, then pretty much anything that the Leviathan could demand of us would be better than that. Thus, for Hobbes, rebellion against the Leviathan is never going to be justified. Hume takes a fairly similar line in the Treatise. The problem here is that this sort of reasoning would seem to prohibit internal revolution, too. After all, if the orderliness of “harsh Islamic justice” is good enough reason to prevent Ethiopia from invading, why isn’t it a good enough reason to prevent Somalis from rebelling, too?

One might attempt to argue here, as Michael Walzer does, that a set of reasons might sufficiently provide a justification for a nation’s citizens to rebel while not counting as sufficient justification for external interference. Perhaps, then, Judis’ argument really is something more like:

1. The Islamic Courts Movement (i.e., the group that had wrested control of Somalia from the warlords) has instituted order across the majority of Somalia.
2. Any entity that institutes order across most of the area within a particular state counts as the government of that state.
3. States with a functioning government are entitled to sovereignty.
4. Thus the ICU is entitled to sovereignty.

That is perhaps a better (or at least a more charitable) reading of Judis’ argument. It has the advantage of not coming across as quite so anti-revolutionary. Unfortunately, it has the disadvantage of being false.

I would argue that premise (3) is just flatly false. Plenty of states have functioning governments that very much ought to be interfered with. Cambodia under Pol Pot. East Pakistan back in the early 1970s. Bosnia and Kosovo in the early 1990s. Or Afghanistan back in 2000. You know, the sorts of places that have governments that very efficiently and very thoroughly abuse and often kill their own citizens. Places whose governments systematically violate their citizens’ most fundamental rights.

Does the ICU fall into that category? To be honest, I don’t know enough about Somalia to say. I can tell you that phrases like “harsh Islamic justice” give me some pause. The last time we saw a group of religious extremists take over a nation ravaged by better than 15 years of Hobbesian anarchy, the results weren’t all that great. Is the ICU another al-Qaeda proxy state? I dunno. Is there some evidence that it might be? Again, I dunno. An unfortunate byproduct of the whole Iraq WMD fiasco is that it’s a bit difficulty to know whether or not the Executive Branch is, well, making shit up.

What is clear right now is that (a) Somalia hadn’t invaded anyone, and (b) that Ethiopia did. If the U.S. did in fact support Ethiopia’s invasion, then that’s probably a bad thing. The badness of the act, though, turns on just how bad the ICU really is and on how bad it would have to be to justify humanitarian intervention. Drawing that line is way beyond the scope of a blog post, though. Good thing I’m currently writing a book on it, eh?

For Profit Armed Humanitarian Intervention

by Joe Miller

It’s not uncommon in the philosophical literature to find at least a few snarky comments about the tensions inherent in the notion of armed humanitarian intervention. The comments are even snarkier (is that a word?) in some of the referee’s comments that I’ve received from various journals. (Interesting aside: the snarkiest of these comments came from journals that accepted my articles. Go figure.) And all of the above sorts of comments pale in comparison to the comments that I’ve received at various conferences at which I’ve presented papers defending a (limited) return to something like colonialism. For the record, presenting a paper defending colonialism in the spring of 2003 at a conference in Europe while employed by the United States Military Academy is not the best way to win friends and influence people.

At any rate, I must confess that even I did something of a doubletake when I read Matt Yglesias’ recent defense of the use of private military contractors to combat genocide in various regions of Africa. Armed humanitarian intervention I can live with. For-profit AHI? How many contradictions can we cram into a single phrase?

Okay, I know the arguments. The market. Competition. Matt lays several of these arguments out quite nicely (he got the idea at a CATO seminar, you you’d expect the marketist arguments to be fully on display). I’m sure that my ancap readers (you know who you are) will find Matt’s suggestion to be a rare display of good sense.

I have little to add that isn’t already stated in the comments on Matt’s article. Two points in particular strike me as relevant. First, does anyone really think that the problems in Africa stem from having too few mercenaries running around? Yes, I know, most of those mercenaries are not accountable to anyone at all, or where they are accountable, their paymasters are themselves really bad people. Mercenaries that get their pay from, I don’t know, the Red Cross or Amnesty International or some such group are likely to have a lot more incentive to behave themselves. Besides, private military contractors (or PMCs) are usually staffed with former American soldiers who are, by and large, well-trained and well-disciplined. Highly trained, disciplined troops are not usually the type who run around committing atrocities.

The more serious objection, as I see it, is cost. One of Matt’s readers points out that the Defense Department has a budget of about $400B and employs about 4 million folks. That means that it costs about $100,000 per employee. Yes, this includes all sorts of exotica–few PMCs will need or want a stealth bomber and I’m sure that no PMC would ever need an aircraft carrier. Still, part of the reason that the Pentagon can get away with such a low number is that national militaries do not pay soldiers their market value. The Army, for instance, makes a big deal of the fact that soldiers are not paid according to their value, claiming that soldiers who are paid what they are worth are mercenaries (and thereby implying that being a mercenary is somehow bad). Rather, soldiers are supposed to fight for duty, honor and country…or something like that. That allows the Army to get away with paying a married E1 a wage that would qualify him for food stamps. Entry-level positions with PMCs, however, reportedly start at $100,000 per year. That’s just pay. You’d still have to equip, feed, and transport said soldier and then continue to provide him support in the field.

So we’re looking at a pretty substantial chunk of change to put a single soldier on the ground. Then consider that the United Nations Protection Force deployed in Bosnia consisted of 39,000 soldiers. And that Bosnia is about 20K sq. miles. Darfur, to take one random example, is about 197K sq. miles. I suspect that 39,000 soldiers would be hard-pressed to bring any sort of serious order to a region that large, particularly when those same soldiers–as members of a PMC–are unsupported by a navy or an air force or armor or artillery. Even if they could manage to secure all of Darfur, however, we are looking at a price tag of at least $3.9B just for salaries for a single year. For the record, the U.S. still has soldiers deployed in Bosnia…14 years later.

The point here is that we’re talking a pretty hefty price tag. That leaves us with three options, as far as I can tell.

  1. Hope that private individuals will kick in enough to make this option work.
  2. Keep AHI the province of nation-states.
  3. Tell all the poor buggers that they’ll just have to go it alone.

Personally, I think that (1) is pretty unlikely. That’s hardly surprising, I suppose, since that’s the same answer I give to my libertarian friends who claim that private charity will be sufficient to alleviate poverty. Option (3) strikes me as pretty much immoral. I have difficulty seeing why it is that the mere fact that I happen to live in this country while you happen to live in another is at all morally relevant. So that leaves us with (2). Unless someone else can think of a (4).