Well, now, is Lebanon a 'just' war? (St Augustine started this whole debate, another ancient old fart who can still bend our ears)

The ethics of war
Mind those proportions
As the war in Lebanon shows, there are several ways to make a moral judgment
(From The Economist, where they don’t let their writers sign their pieces, which sucks – I’d love to know who this writer is)

“YES, Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, but bombing houses, roads and utilities and killing hundreds of civilians is surely far out of proportion to the offence it suffered.” “But doesn't it make a difference that our enemy in Lebanon, with its arsenal of rockets standing at 12,000, wants to destroy our state? Consider all that, and surely our response (which falls well short of our potential and tries to minimise civilian deaths) is restrained: proportionate, in fact, to the threat we face.”

An argument on just those lines is going on between Israel and its detractors in the world. Both sides in the argument presume that proportionality in war has some broadly accepted meaning which rational people can discuss, refine and apply to real situations. Are they right?

If it is a question about the state of philosophical debate on the morals of war, the answer is yes. Most Western thinking about military ethics has its roots in Augustine, the sainted Christian writer from North Africa whose elaborate theory of “just warfare” has provided a framework for debate over the 16 centuries since his death. And for philosophers in the Augustinian tradition, proportionality is one of the things you should consider when contemplating war. Others are the probability of success and whether warfare is a last resort: have all the other options been tried? In this context, the proportionality question is judged by the destruction which the war will cause, weighed against the good it may do.

Put like that, proportionality is a concept that most Israelis can live with. They would argue that the good which might be achieved by smashing Hizbullah (and the threat it poses not only to Israel but also to Lebanon and other states) does outweigh the travails of Lebanon's civilians.

But proportionality in that Augustinian sense covers only half of the modern debate about military force. What today's Augustinians are talking about is jus ad bellum , in other words whether it is right to be fighting at all. Since 1945, there has been a new emphasis in diplomacy and jurisprudence, and in the language of human-rights lobbies, on the other big dilemma in military ethics: jus in bello —literally, law in war. The question here is this: once the bullets are flying and you are a belligerent, by what methods and weaponry is it legitimate to wage your war? How careful must you be to spare civilians and non-combatants, such as prisoners and wounded?

That is what the four Geneva Conventions (extensively revised in 1949, though born of a process that began 80 years earlier) and their three “additional protocols” are all about. The Hague war-crimes tribunal, which was set up to punish the enormities of the Balkan wars, has a similar emphasis; it has little remit to consider the cause in which atrocious acts were committed. And Human Rights Watch ( HRW ), a New York-based group that monitors wars and other abuses all over the world, is even blunter about its area of concern: it consciously blocks out questions about jus ad bellum and concentrates its efforts entirely on jus in bello.

Using these narrow criteria, HRW did an extensive audit of the American-led campaigns against Serbia in 1999 and against Iraq in 2003—and found that both times the attacking coalition infringed humanitarian law by failing to take enough care to distinguish between military and civilian targets. These rebukes stopped short of denouncing the campaigns in general; from HRW 's point of view, that was for others to decide.

But in the case of Iraq, in particular, certain specific misdeeds were identified: using cluster munitions in populated areas, and attacking electric-power facilities in the city of Nasiriya, which, though of some military use, were also vital to civilian welfare. In other respects, HRW found, the coalition tried quite hard to spare civilians.

One of the tests that human-rights analysts use to make these judgments is that of proportionality, albeit in a slightly different sense from the one Augustinians use. For those who monitor human rights, a key piece of language is Article 51 of the first additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions. This outlaws attacks that “may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life” which would be “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage”. Even in situations such as Lebanon today, where most of the 1949 Conventions are technically inapplicable because Hizbullah is not a state, the Geneva language is seen as a guide to the spirit of customary humanitarian law.

The trouble is that measuring civilian woes against military gain is a tall order, especially in a densely populated place like Lebanon. For one thing, they are hard to separate: almost any piece of “infrastructure”—a road, a power plant, a reservoir—can serve some military purpose but also helps keep civilians alive.

Critics of Israel's campaign in Lebanon (and Gaza) have been framing their attack in the language of jus in bello. Indeed, HRW has already deplored Israel's use of anti-personnel cluster bombs—as well as Hizbullah's firing into Israeli towns of Katyusha rockets, “dirty” weapons that are too crude to discriminate between soldiers and civilians. The lobby group says other aspects of the campaign need more time to assess. Others are saying that there is no military advantage that could outweigh the harm caused to Lebanese innocents who have been killed or forced to flee their homes in terrifying conditions and seen their livelihoods destroyed.

Indeed, it is not clear, judging by the latest reports, that the Israeli army is achieving its declared aim of removing Hizbullah's military threat to Israel's security. So the killing of some 400 civilians and the displacement of perhaps 800,000 of them cannot even be weighed in the moral balance. By this criterion, Israel's actions will surely be adjudged disproportionate in effect, if not by intention.

But the calculus of military advantage versus human cost, suggested in the Geneva formula, could still be used to justify some of Israel's recent tactics. For example, using large bombs to assassinate terrorist leaders, in the knowledge that civilian bystanders will also be killed. When the military gain is so big, Israeli hawks argue, some “breaking of eggs” may be inevitable. That, of course, is no comfort to the families thus bereaved.

In the end, some philosophers think, debate about the ethics of war will have to reintegrate two ancient questions—about the right to go to war, and the methods that may be used—which have become artificially separated in modern times. To put it more simply, nobody will be impressed with a line that goes: “We didn't start this war, so our cause is just—but now that it's begun, we'll fight as dirty as we like.” Augustine saw the questions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello as intertwined—and so, probably, should modern man.