International Law: the Best Bad Case for Syrian Intervention

Last updated on: April 16, 2018 at 3:47 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

International Law: the Best Bad Case for Syrian Intervention 2018-04-16T15:47:01-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Attacking Syria is not just. Why? As Lindsey Graham put it: “Unless something changes, we don’t care if you kill people, we only care how you kill them, which is a long way from where Ronald Reagan was.” Just so.

Mr. Graham wants to replace the Assad regime with something better and use the full force of the US military to do so. That might be a just war, since the outcome would be better. Of course given our present experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, one might be dubious about the chances of our success. A war cannot be just if it is likely to fail. None of this matters, however, because the United States lacks the political will to start another Middle East war. On top of this, we have no allies in Syria who would govern better than Mr. Assad, as bad as he might be.

I have spelled out why the Syrian strike cannot meet just war criteria. Rather, the US should follow Mr. Reagan’s sage advice that we cannot be the world’s policeman. Over the weekend, I heard from a former student who must care about this issue given his work. He presents the best counter-argument to my case. To protect him at his important job, I will quote his questions without any identifying marks:

Thank you for writing The Christian Case Against the Christian Case for the Strikes on Syria.

I believe you are probably right, but would you please address more fully the role of international Law of War and its enforcement?

Your counter to Mr. Ahmaria’s claims about upholding international order constantly referred to the arbitrary nature of the chemical weapons ban (as opposed to conventional weapons that use complex chemistry). I do not quarrel with your assertion that the ban is arbitrary. Like many international norms, I don’t find it particularly helpful. That said, this doesn’t really answer Mr. Ahmaria’s point.

International order must be upheld, particular Law of War designed to safeguard civilians. Just like a Sheriff enforcing a ban on rifles with a four inch grip but not a three inch grip, not all particular laws make much sense. We do not enforce laws only because the laws themselves are good, but because law and order are good.

If the only power capable of enforcing Law of War publicly declines to do so, all Laws of War become irrelevant, not just the ones banning chemical weapons.

Forgive me if I missed it, but I did not see a cogent argument against this point.

First, my original argument was to show that our role in enforcing “international law” is morally different than our duty to uphold international order. There is a particular set of norms that some of our present great powers have agreed to enforce globally. The US is the greatest of those great powers. We were not elected to fill this role and our particular set of norms are not identical to a moral international order.

Christians always support a moral international order. We need not always support our present “international law.” This is an important point, because for Christians, peace is a very high good in a moral international order. We cannot just follow international law and enforce it anymore than we should simply enforce any particular national order.

This is why your example is not so good. The law about grips on rifles is arbitrary, but enforcing it does not (generally) require bombing the neighborhood that owns guns. There is a minimal amount of violence associated with such laws. As a result, though arbitrary (and maybe even foolish), a Christian would enforce them to maintain order in society. However, if required to use lethal violence continuously to enforce the grip requirement (which as you point out is very arbitrary), I would caution the police about doing so. The law is not worth the cost in human life.

Just as a Christian is both subject to King Jesus and a citizen of the Republic, so he supports a moral international order and also the particular laws of war and the particular international order of our age. They are not the same. The law against chemical weapons is arbitrary. Conventional weapons of mass destruction are also used in Syria in very bad, morally unacceptable ways. Senator Graham is right. We cannot go to war and kill people just so people kill people in “better” ways.

This might be the law of particular time, but (in this case) that law is contradicted by the deeper Christian international law: peace is almost always better than war. We would need a much better outcome than: Aasad will be in power and use very bad weapons to do so, but not those bad weapons.

Finally, it is an error to think that if we do not in a particular case go to war to stop a violation of our particular law of war that the norm will die. Iraq used chemical weapons in the 1980’s against Iran and we did little about it. There is some evidence we knew of it and preferred that bad action to Iran winning the Iran-Iraq war. We made noises (rightly) about barbaric warfare and then let it go. We could do the same in Syria, since we are not going to do much (as we did not do much in Iraq in the 1980’s) to change regimes.

The particular international order can survive some prudence as long as the deeper moral order is maintained. In fact, this is often the only way to balance the real world issues. War with the younger Sadaam in the 1980’s would have been costly and empowered other nations (Iran mostly). This would have been worse.

We can point to a violation as the only power capable of enforcing the law of war, but decline to blow up the neighborhood to stop someone blowing up the neighborhood.

The Assad regime is bad. If as we think, the regime used chemical weapons, that was wrong. The foes of the regime are as bad, however. We can protest the use of chemical weapons, note that we would stop it if we could, and then help build a better set of options than the Obama administration left us in Syria.

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