In the wake of the January 10, 2003 Society of Christian Ethics
plenary session on Iraq, I'd like to follow up some disturbingly
fruitful comments made from the floor by Charles Matthews of the
University of Virginia. If I heard Matthews correctly, the Bush
administration may be bluffing its way towards resolving the crisis
without an actual invasion. The question this risky strategy raises
for me is whether such strategy might not effectively do an end-run
around traditional just-war thinking.
I. A colossal bluff in the making?
[1] Consider the events of the past several months. The
opening salvo, of course, occurred when the Bush administration
threatened a unilateral invasion of Iraq. Capitalizing on the
nervous diplomatic momentum generated by this threat, the Bush
administration rounded up unanimous endorsement from the United
Nations Security Council to pursue a multilateral policy of
aggressive (invasive!) searching for evidence of weapons of mass
destruction. At the same time, the administration reserved its
"right" to carry out the invasion originally threatened. Ostensibly
to that end, it has been assembling a massive force at Iraq's very
borders. But when and how will this force be used? Perhaps never-if
the very presence of this force serves to drive Saddam Hussein into
exile, or into the grave. "Regime change" therefore might be
achieved through bluff-without street fighting in Baghdad, without
U.S. casualties, and even perhaps without an invasion.
[2] If this indeed is the Bush administration strategy, how
might it be evaluated through the traditional canons of just-war
thinking? The suspicion that disturbs me is that it simply may not
fit. Perhaps a case might be made, in support of the
administration, for right intention: perhaps the Bush
administration intends to bring a new and less belligerent regime
to power without inflicting the damages and horrors of combat upon
Iraq. Perhaps a stronger case might be made against the
administration, since the other criteria seem more problematic.
[3] But while such traditional just-war reasoning appears
cogent, it still doesn't cut to the core of the issue. What if Bush
wins his gamble? How relevant can and would ad bellum
considerations be if by chance the bold strategy succeeds? More
pithily: how can we call a war unjust if that war is never actually
fought?
II. Poker, no longer
chess?
[4] The problem, in essence, is how to evaluate a strategy
predicated on bluff. A bluff resists rational calculation not only
because it polarizes outcomes between the desirable and the
abhorrent, but because it veils them in uncertainty to the very
last moment. On the one hand, the bluff promises an enormous
payoff: if Saddam Hussein is assassinated or chooses to flee, the
U.S. may be able to take advantage of the power vacuum to engineer
a less belligerent and dangerous successor. On the other hand, it
is loaded with risk: if Saddam Hussein survives preemptive coups or
assassination attempts by his officers, and decides to stick and
fight, the U.S. likely will carry through and invade. Thus U.S.
strategy might precipitate the very war it seeks to avoid through
bluff.
[5] In this all-or-nothing game, how can we evaluate the justice
of the risk which is taken? I suspect that a new line of just-war
thinking needs to be opened up. The subject of moral evaluation, it
seems to me, needs to be relocated from its traditional home-from
the initiating conditions of war, in all their concreteness, to the
question of risk, in all its contingency and indeterminacy. Risk
invites bluff, and when the stakes are enormously high, the justice
involved becomes difficult to measure.
[6] Here a new game metaphor might help to orient our thinking:
poker, as a successor to chess. Just-war thinking emerged from, and
was refined in, the set-piece wars of antiquity and early
modernity. In the days of limited mobility and limited destructive
capabilities (up until Hiroshima?), war resembled a game of chess.
In chess, the throwweight of individual pieces is limited, the
distribution of forces is above board (literally), and the
intentions of the players can be deciphered by those sufficiently
skilled at the game. While lightning strikes are possible and bluff
is of some use, attacks usually proceed by increment and strategies
reveal themselves on a board where all is visible Chess permits
precise calculations of action and effect, and thus (where human
bodies are concerned) permits a moral inventory of how much
different strategies will cost.
[7] The political terrain of battle today, in contrast, calls
for a new game metaphor. In effect, the technological concentration
of military power, the acceleration of communication, and the
monopolization of final destruction by a single hegemonic power
transforms the terrain of contest from the extended grappling which
characterized war at least through World War II. At the table where
George Bush and Saddam Hussein are now playing, intentions can be
disguised, only to be unveiled with the swift devastation wrought
by a nuclear missile-or now, even with conventional forces.
Conventional forces can be deployed with overwhelming rapidity and
precisely targeted force-witness the stunning denouement of the
Persian Gulf War eleven years ago. Poker measures success or
failure only according to a single dazzling outcome, an outcome
which remains veiled until the very last moment. Bluff becomes the
primary strategy; it overshadows the grinding mechanics of
warfighting as the means through which to destroy the enemy's will
to fight, which after all is a necessary objective of all war.
[8] How are we to assess the moral value of high-risk strategy?
Herewith, an illustration from the recent past will underline the
difficulty. In 1983, the NCCB released an assessment of nuclear
weaponry which remains a widely admired exercise in just-war
reasoning. But the authors of that document encountered
considerable difficulty when attempting to assess the moral value
of nuclear deterrence. They noted the extreme riskiness of the
strategy, and judged it morally acceptable only to the extent that
it served to prevent the use of nuclear arms, as a strictly
defensive bluff. But the bluff was morally hollow, in that they
also concluded that the actual use of nuclear weapons would likely
would fail the in-bello criteria of both proportionality and
discrimination.(The Challenge of Peace, Washington: USCC,
paragraphs 178-91) They did not, and perhaps could not, evaluate
the risky pro-active use of deterrence as an offensive strategy
within traditional just-war categories,. The irony became apparent
as President Ronald Reagan played poker on a whopping scale with
the Soviet Union. He deliberately destabilized the "mutually
assured destruction" that had held both superpowers hostage to a
game of mutual tit-for-tat in arms development. Through a massive
military buildup featuring weapons of offensive capability, Reagan
challenged the Soviet Union to keep up-and effectively bid the
overextended Soviet empire into collapse. How to evaluate the
justice of such risk-taking where the consequences of failure are
all but incalculable?
[9] The current tangent of Bush-administration action towards
Iraq resembles that of Reagan towards the Soviet Union. Both are
characterized by enormous cost, enormous risk-and enormous
potential payoff. Yet no one (to my knowledge) has made the effort
to evaluate Reagan's high-risk strategy retrospectively according
to just-war criteria. The main reason might be that such an
exercise would be pointless because the strategy succeeded. After
all, it is difficult to count the in-bello costs of a war which
never occurred, and success makes ad-bellum qualms evaporate into
the mists of irrelevance. The same irrelevance might attach to the
thoughtful and even elegant assessments being made today, unless
the Bush strategy fails. Then, of course, the war of this coming
February may be judged hopelessly unjust, but I still am not sure
that such a condemnation would capture the heart of the issue.
III. Towards a moral appraisal of risk and
bluffing
[10] Today, just-war analysis must assess the moral value of risk
inherent in a policy of bluff. But how to do so? Risk is an
inherently slippery business, subject to analysis by decision
theorists who have a background in cognitive psychology, economics
and other disciplines. I suspect that insight into the mechanics of
risk-taking could be gained from such cross-disciplinary
perspectives on risk-taking. Still, discussion need not be tabled
entirely until we ethicists are transmuted into experts on the
rationality of risk and bluff. The risky strategy of the Bush
administration calls attention to some immediately ponderable
questions. Let me suggest the following, to help move discussion
into this new area of just-war analysis:
[11] First, the basics. What does the Christian tradition say,
if anything, about the place of risk in the moral life? For
Protestants, Martin Luther emphasized elements of uncontrollable
contingency in human life, and commended a discipleship of
accepting, rather than resisting, such contingency-a life lived
under the cross in all its starkness. Does such a perspective
illuminate the value of deliberate risk-taking? If so, for nations
as well as individuals?
[12] What does the Christian tradition say, if anything, about
the place of bluffing in the moral life? Bluff capitalizes on risk,
all while the tradition commends honesty and transparency within
the life of the community. Should such transparency be projected
into public life as a norm for the instruments of political
governance, particularly in the service of avoiding harm to life?
Roman Catholic moral theologians have spoken to the question of
mental reservation in religious commitment; what about the place of
bluffing in the secular life?
[13] Second, questions might also be raised from the more
rigorous philosophical perspective typical of just-war
reasoning:
[14] Consider the new terrain of contest, where technology,
communications and speed highlight elements of risk and bluff in
military strategy. Does this new environment encourage us to
rethink how we engage in consequential moral reasoning? The
bluffing strategy apparently employed by the Bush administration
drastically magnifies the moral seriousness of consequences and the
either-or indeterminacy of their occurring. When the stakes are so
heightened, how to attach a value to consequences?
[15] What does this new terrain imply for principle-based moral
evaluation? Indeed, what are the main moral issues raised by
high-risk bluffing? Above, I have suggested justice, but whose
justice is compromised or underserved by high-risk ventures by
their president-or (from the vantage point of Iraqis) by the leader
of an opposing power? Do citizens have a right to transparency in
strategy undertaken presumably on their behalf?
[16] Further, should a strategy of high-stakes bluffing be held
accountable to the Kantian norms of reversibility and
universalizability? Regarding reversibility: would we find it
morally tolerable if other nations played high-stakes poker against
us? What about North Korea playing the nuclear card? Regarding
universalizability: would we find it morally tolerable if
high-stakes poker became the norm of international relations? Could
we sit by as India and Pakistan bluffed each other to the brink of
nuclear exchange?
IV. Conclusion
[17] These questions arise because the Bush strategy holds out a
prospect of victory without war, a prospect that is as winsome as
it seems (to me) illusory. I raise these questions not because I
want to see a glitzy successor to, or even a major revision of,
just-war theory. Just-war theory, it seems to me, provides an
august if oft-abused bulwark of rationality against jingoistic
calls to war-making. Demons of war bide their time in all of us,
and I would never want to relax our accountability to the counsels
of ad-bellum and in-bello reasoning. But neither would I want
just-war reasoning to be left out of the poker game. It is for that
reason that I suggest just-war theorists might want to consider
whether we do not need to develop ways to think about high-risk
bluffing strategies in the evolving arsenals of international
conflict.