THE ASPEN INSTITUTE ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL 2012 THE ETHICS OF WAR. Kresge Building, Hines Room, 845 Meadows Road, Aspen, Colorado

Transcription

1 THE ASPEN INSTITUTE ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL 2012 THE ETHICS OF WAR Kresge Building, Hines Room, 845 Meadows Road, Aspen, Colorado 11

2 Monday, July 2,

3 LIST OF PARTICIPANTS LEIGH G. HAFREY Senior Lecturer in the Behavioral and Policy Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, Author of The Story of Success STEPHEN L. CARTER William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, Author of The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama and The Emperor of Ocean Park * * * * * 33

4 P R O C E E D I N G S (1:15 p.m.) MR. HAFREY: So the long biography should go to Stephen Carter who is our speaker, our interviewee for the afternoon. Stephen spoke this morning about the impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, which is his latest novel, the release of which has been key to the festival. So for those of you who are interested in the fictional side of Stephen Carter, you have an opportunity to pick up his absolute latest book this afternoon. This afternoon, for this session, we're talking about this book, The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama, which is a 2001 release, non-fictional as the title might suggest, Stephen has -- if you've seen his biography, if you've read the back of his books, has written a lot. So he's got, what, half a dozen novels at this point? MR. CARTER: Five novels. 44

5 MR. HAFREY: Five novels and seven to eight nonfiction? MR. CARTER: Nine. Nine non-fiction books. MR. HAFREY: Nine. My favorite by title is Civility: the Manners, Morals and Etiquette of Democracy. MR. CARTER: Mine too. MR. HAFREY: It seems to me to get to the heart of a lot of what we're talking about at this Ideas Festival and is a very good book as you might expect. When he's not writing, Stephen is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught for 30 years -- MR. CARTER: You remember all that? MR. HAFREY: -- and has been a moderator, as I currently am, but has moved on to less focused Aspen activity except for what the board offers you. MR. CARTER: Less strenuous activities. (Laughter) 55

6 MR. HAFREY: Less strenuous activities. So we're going to talk this afternoon about the ethics of war. It is as part of the values track, and raises questions that we have touched on in other moments over the past three, four days, but I think it doesn't take much imagination to understand the immediate relevance of some of the conversation we'll have here now. My proposal is that I ask Stephen questions for maybe 30 minutes and then turn the floor over to you. We'll have a microphone set up in the aisle. You'll be able to come up and ask. I should tell you that there's a double concern here. One, this morning, for logistical reasons, Stephen moderated himself. There was no interviewer. So he played -- SPEAKER: Perfect. MR. HAFREY: -- very well, the interviewer of Stephen Carter, addressing himself as Carter, which I will not do. It feels just a little too familiar. But I'm going to try to match your level of inside knowledge in 66

7 what we do here. And then when you have your chance to ask questions, I would only encourage you -- bikes outside aside -- to ask questions rather than make statements. We'll be touching on topics on which I think everyone in this room has views, but we're here, of course, to hear our guest's views. All right, shall we start? MR. CARTER: Sure. MR. HAFREY: So subtitle, America's Wars in the Age of Obama suggest two things to me. One, that Americans make war pretty routinely, and two, that there may be different about the way we make war in the, which you refer to as, the age of Obama, which I assume is during our current president's presidency. MR. CARTER: Well, I chose the subtitle America's Wars in the Age of Obama in part because to scroll back 3 years, Obama takes off in January 2009, the United States is involved in three wars; the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and the war that the Bush administration describes as the global war on terror. The 77

8 Obama administration has tried various names for that. They don't like that one, but they can't think of one they like. So they call it different things at different times. There's three wars going on. It's not by any means the only time in American history there have been three wars going on. That's happened with some frequency. America has been involved in a lot of wars over the years. But what struck me, what really interested me was this, that when Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009, in his acceptance speech, he said, I'm president of the United States. There are things that I have to do to protect our country, but I believe that whatever America does, whatever any other great power does in the world, he said, we should be held not only to a standard of legality, but to a standard of morality. That is that it shouldn't just be enough to ask do we have the right to do what we're doing; it also should be asked are we right to be doing what we're doing and are we going about it in the right way. 88

9 Obama invited his critics and critics of America generally and fans to use the language of the Western just war tradition, which is a tradition really from Christian theology, but it's a tradition that undergirds modern international law actually, and to use that tradition as a way of criticizing or at least commenting upon what America does. And this book in part accept that invitation first by looking at President Obama, both his arguments and his words and then some of his actions. This book came out at the midpoint of his presidency when he'd been at the White House for exactly 2 years, it came out January of And then second, I then spent time looking further back in American history looking at some other wars, and I do develop this thesis which some of my academic colleagues have been unhappy with, I should add, that there is a particular way that America makes war and it has a couple of characteristics. One of them is captured by the British historian Paul Johnson who wrote 99

10 that Americans are the only people in the world who whenever they start a war they think they are going to win. They assume, they take it for granted, that they're going to win. Most countries, they may hope they'll win. They may think they have a chance, but they also recognize there's a nontrivial chance to lose. And if they do lose, it's not end of the world because you win some and you lose some. But in America, you only win. He said that makes Americans unique in their outlook. He said no country has had that outlook in the world since Rome is his basic point. And that does actually color our wars going back to when we were a very young country. So it's not only that we always think we're going to win, but that we should win. And because we should win, we often recognize relatively few restrains, what we're willing to do to win. I don't mean that we make war in highly immoral ways. I don't mean that. But it is the case that historically, all through history, we've brushed aside various 1010

11 inconvenient restraints in particular moments if we thought we saw a way to shorten a conflict or have a better chance to win. So those two things together represent the American way of making war. MR. HAFREY: Do you want to give us a couple of examples? MR. CARTER: Sure. So here are some data points. So one of the examples I have in the book, during the Civil War, the following events occurred. As many of you I'm sure know, one of their controversial decisions Lincoln administration made was to raise black regiments. First they raised black regiments of people already free. Then they began to free slaves and enroll them in the Army. So in response to this, the Southern congress, that's congress of the Confederate States of America, adopted a law -- well, I can't remember now if it was a law or an administrative order from the office of the president of the Confederate States. Whichever it was, I think it was a law, the statute said that any former slave 1111

12 who was caught in a Union uniform was subject to imprisonment, and if he was an officer, he was subject to summary execution if he'd formerly been a slave, was now an officer. And there were a lot of officers who had formerly been slaves. So Lincoln, how do you respond as the president of the United States? What do you do? Well, this is how Lincoln responded. Lincoln said, for every former slave executed by the South, I will summarily execute one Confederate officer in U.S. custody. Now, I'd say that doesn't seem right, but that's an example of what I mean. And it's not, especially in the 19th century, an unusual thing for an American leader to do. That's one kind of example. And there are a lot more, but that's sort of things that I'm talking about. MR. HAFREY: The just war tradition you invoke in the book goes back well before the American Civil War. Could you talk a little bit about the fundamentals of that tradition? 1212

13 MR. CARTER: The just war tradition, as I mentioned, it actually, it has roots that go way back into early Christianity interestingly, but didn't really take off until the discovery of the new world, especially after the Spanish began to come to America and the Spaniards were so vicious in the treatment of the native peoples, and that didn't turn a lot of heads in Europe. But there were a group of theologians and philosophers at the University of Madrid who began to wonder whether we shouldn't try to find some moral limits on how you treat people in time of war. And it was that search for moral limits how you treat people -- it's hard to believe that until the 15th century, it was a perfectly accepted part of warfare that if you won, you had the right to slaughter all the people you just beaten in the war. That was just accepted. That was one reason they fought so hard because you might get slaughtered otherwise. That was just part of war, was what happened. 1313

14 So the notion that there might be limits to what you can do began with the consideration of how you treated other people and grew into this larger moral structure that then generated a body of international law. But the part President Obama was talking about in his speech, his argument was roughly as follows, that quite apart from whether something is legal or not for a country to do, whether while it's domestic of international law, let's ask the following moral questions he said. Is there -- and these are the questions that the just war tradition asks. Is there a just cause for the war, something that's worth killing over in a moral sense? Even if there is a just cause, is there a reasonable hope for success? Can this violence actually accomplish a purpose of the greater good? And then once you've gone down that road, do you exercise your whatever military authority you're exercising with -- under the rules that are called in just war period and in international proportionality and discrimination. 1414

15 Proportionality has a lot of different definitions. When the president used it, he meant using no more military force than is strictly necessary to achieve a just objective. Discrimination means you cannot target civilians. Civilians may die, but they can never be the target. Only combatant can ever be the target. And you see the -- even today you see the battle over that. So if you take, for example, something today like the arguments over drone warfare, something like that, so the Obama administration takes the position that the drone attacks are entirely legal. Let's just assume for a moment that they are, but President Obama himself has said, well, let's ask about that from a just war perspective. So then you'd still want to know are -- is the use -- is that force proportional. If one is a justified, two is a proportional, and three doesn't successfully discriminate between civilians and combatants. The Obama administration says the people legal rational is that it 1515

16 does discriminate because it kills so few civilians compared to say the bigger bombs you could otherwise use. But that's the sort of point I think we should be arguing about. MR. HAFREY: To the second of the three criteria you've laid out, that is do we have any likelihood of -- MR. CARTER: Reasonableness, yes. MR. HAFREY: A reason -- okay. That rules out a whole lot of gallant combat in the name of principle regardless of the cost. MR. CARTER: I agree with that. That to me is -- the weakest part of the just war tradition, although the president mentioned it in the speech, the weakest part of the tradition is the notion you have to have a reasonable hope of success. And so you think it's something like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But that wasn't a reasonable hope of success, but there's a power to doing it. It's hard to argue since you're going to lose, you shouldn't have taken up arms. That doesn't seem to make any sense. 1616

17 I think the way to understand the reasonable hope of success criterion is this. It was really aimed at the notion of big country versus big country, not people defending themselves to the last man. If you big country are going to start a war over a big issue and kill lots of people with lots of destruction in the name of the good, are you even going to win this thing? Because if you're not going to win after all that, all the more reason not to get engaged in it in the first place. I think that's the idea. It goes back to the notion of the sacredness of human life and that you cannot even indirectly take human life except for the highest of causes. MR. HAFREY: But when did we agree on the sacredness of human life, again, 16th century or --? MR. CARTER: That's harder because even you have clerics, you have someone like say Calvin who wrote about the sacredness of life and also was going to have Servetus burned to the stakes. So, you know, it's not -- it's hard to figure out exactly what that means. So we don't have 1717

18 to use word sacred to make the model word. Just think of it as simply this, that maybe we could agree on is that we should kill as rarely as possible, and war kills a lot of people and lot of them aren't combatants, a lot of them are innocents and civilians. And what President Obama asks us to do is before we get into that, to think about the -- to think morally about the cause. Not just to think legally, well, did the U.N. agree or something like that, but to ask ourselves, even if all the legal ducks are in a row, whether we're doing the right thing. And you don't have to agree that the just -- the president can be wrong. The just war tradition doesn't have to be the right moral framework. I think the exciting and important thing about the president's invitation is to accept the invitation to come up with a moral framework. And we really need one because in America we're really, really good at screaming that some thing is illegal, something is against the law, there ought to be a special prosecutor appointed. But 1818

19 we're not very good at just -- at saying if anything, not just war, but things generally, you have the right to do that, but you shouldn't do it. It's wrong to do it. Words like, right and wrong, are increasingly slipping from our vocabularies. But if we're talking about war, we can't let that slip away. And, you know, so much of American life is so hyper-partisan, so endsgoverned, so much, well, make this argument if it helps my side, but not if it helps the other side and so on. War is not the place to let that happen. When we're talking about war, we're talking about sending our own young people off to kill and possibly be killed. That is something you should never be partisan. If we think of war, if a war is wrong when a Republican does it, the same war is wrong if a Democrat does it and vice versa. If a tactic is wrong when one party does it, the tactic is wrong if the other party does it. To play politics -- and if it's right when one party does it, it's right when the other one does it. To play 1919

20 politics with something like that I think is outrageous and just a terrible, terrible thing. And one of the good things about President Obama's invitation is that by inviting us to think about these things in moral terms, he's also inviting us to think about in terms that go beyond party. That is you can be, say, I'm a Democrat but this is wrong. And it'd be wrong for my party or the other party. I'm Republican and this wrong for my party or the other party. And to think that way instead of thinking about, well, but if I object to this, that's going to hurt by guy and so on and so on, that's what the president I think was suggesting we try not to do to avoid the partisanship that is. I think that's a good thing. I think it would be good to be able to at least free war from the shackles of partisanship that tie down almost everything else we talked about. MR. HAFREY: The way you frame it though, Stephen, also takes this beyond the borders of this country. So it's not just about Democrats versus 2020

21 Republican or Democrat together with the Republican, but you know, you argue that the president articulated his position in the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, you just referred, to the U.N. So it sounds like within limits, at least America's wars do now get judged against international standards. MR. CARTER: Well, I think that's fair. That is to say it is true that in the end presidents of the United States were expected to make policies that is of interest to the United States. But we are the most powerful nation in the world by a gigantic margin. There's no one else close. There was a recent estimate a couple of years ago in one of the military journals that the United States Air Force and Navy could beat off the combined air forces and navies of the rest of the world. Not the ground forces, but the navies and the air forces probably. We spend, the estimates vary, between $0.42 and $0.48 of every defense dollar. That's with dollar equivalents spend in the world. 2121

22 And what we do with our military affects people. And so there is -- in the sense President Obama was inviting other people in the world into the moral conversation. He's saying, if you think we're wrong, say we're -- if you think we're wrong for moral reasons, then tell us what we're doing is immoral and tell us why. If I could just mention, so think of two recent data points, two recent hard cases. One is the drone attacks that I mentioned a moment ago and one is Libya, the Libya intervention. Each of those, it seems to me, raise very profound moral questions that we can talk about here. In Libya, among the questions are the President Obama when he gave the speech about why we were going to Libya, he said we shouldn't have to wait until there are mass graves before we intervene. That puts a lot of pressure on being sure you're right if there are going to be mass graves. And it strike me that's a question where we can ask the point -- the question about the point in which you 2222

23 intervene raises profound moral question that we should talk about in a moral way rather than simply getting into an argument of, well, the Congress declared war, is this legal or that legal, which strikes me as kind of trivializing of the deep moral questions that are stirred. And then the drone attacks. The Obama administration has taken a position that for the foreseeable future, they expect this to be the principle type of warfare in which we're likely to be engaged with the Iraq drawdown complete and with a continuing drawdown in Afghanistan, although the administration will gauge you about when exactly when that's supposed to end. And for understandable strategic reasons, they're (inaudible) about it. But it looks like the future, the near future belongs to the drones, that is belongs to remote piloted drone aircrafts usually guarded by spotters in the ground, but not necessarily that when they -- when high value targets are spotted and we have a high degree of 2323

24 (inaudible) it's the right guy, we'll loose off a couple of hell fire missiles or some other kind of missile at them and blow them up. That raise a lot of interesting questions. And let me just mention two of the moral questions. Some of you may think of others. Some of the question is if that's the future, if that's what we're going to be doing, think about are we going to really be following it as close. When there's a war in Iraq, we follow, but we know our troops are engaged, we think about it, it's a presence in the front of our minds. When there's a war in Afghanistan, it's in front of our minds. We think about it, we think about the military. If most ever warfare in the near term turns out to be drone attacks, it's likely we will -- we as a public will loose track of them. And if we loose track of them, then we're putting an enormous amount of trust in those we elect to represent us and those they appoint to do that in a way that's wise and thoughtful. 2424

25 And one could make the argument that it makes a little morally uneasy about delegating that much authority that then becomes practically uncheckable because we don't follow on. And it will fall of the evening news after a while as being this occasional drone warfare. So that's one kind of question that it raises. Some people call them the boots-on-the-ground question although I think that's probably a too fictitious way of putting it. That's not the question drone attack raises. The Obama administration says that the drone attacks are more moral than bombing with some sort of other standoff weapon because if you drop say, you know, a 1,000 pound Paveway bomb on a house that was a high-valuing target, you would bring down all the houses around with it, kill lots and lots of innocent people. With a drone attack, you can fire the missile into his bedroom window and you can limit the damage to a few floors of his house, and, yes, there will be some civilian casualties, but they will be limited. 2525

26 Let's accept that that part is true. Does the fact that we know exactly what the civilian casualties will be make it better or worse? Let us think about that. You drop a bomb, you're going to kill a lot of people, but you fire the missile and you're counting the people. Simply saying, while there are six noncombatants in there right now, should we go ahead or not? In a way as a logical problem, you're going to make sense to use the missile instead, but it feels more cold-blooded somehow. At least that's the way a lot of critics put it, at least raises questions that I think are worth talking about. Again, not in the legal terms, although it has legal arguments, but in moral terms. And those -- the moral argument is one the whole world complain. Anyone, it seems to me, can make a serious moral argument about what one should or shouldn't do. The one thing that Americans can do with their military power is we should weight. You can't pretend it's not there. And Paul Ramsey, one of the great just 2626

27 war thinkers wrote during the Vietnam war that he thought it is a moral responsibility of every American to have a positive view of what it is they think the military ought to do. It's not to say, well, I don't want you to do this. Since they're not going away, since they are part of the projection of American power and influence around the world, what exactly is it do you think the military should be doing? MR. HAFREY: Why could our military not go away? MR. CARTER: I'm not saying it couldn't. I am saying it won't. It's a matter of being politically realistic. It is going to be here for a period of time. And right now the truth is we do a lot of things in the world that nobody else can do. Think of keeping up on the shipping lanes. The American Navy with its several fleets by keeping up on the shipping lanes greatly reduces the cost of shipping and trade and therefore consumer goods not only here but around the world. And that's something that -- one thing that we do. 2727

28 Our going to the aide of vessels that are threatened by pirates, not just the famous ones that mounts around Somalia, but elsewhere as well. That's one tiny piece of a mission. What my larger point is that realistically you can imagine 75 years in X, Y and Z, but in the near term they are going to be here and the question is what are they to do. MR. HAFREY: Right. So now this is the U.S. as policeman to the world. MR. CARTER: Well, you and I talked about this yesterday, and I'm like Michael Walzer who says you're not policeman, a firefighter. (Laughter) MR. CARTER: Walter says the policemen you expect to be everywhere. Think of yourself, you're a firefighter and you have only one bucket, right, one bucket of water and there's a bunch of fires the guy is having to fight. You can't fight all of them, but should you decide -- if you're the guy with the bucket, should 2828

29 decide I can't fight all of them, I won't fight any of them. I'll just sit here with my bucket and let the world burn. Walzer, who is the great Princeton philosopher, thinks that's immoral if you have -- he doesn't say you have to go and buy a bucket. He's very clear. If you don't have a bucket, you don't have to buy one, you don't have to fill it. But if you've got a bucket and it's full of water and there's a bunch of fires, you can't just sit there and say, well, you know, I've got other stuffs to worry about, my bucket is going to sit there and I'm going to go off and do whatever -- MR. HAFREY: Does he address how you pick which fire to put out? MR. CARTER: Well, he does at some length and one doesn't have to agree with his view. He just thinks we ought to make a choice and -- as opposed to sitting around with a bucket and not using it. And that part I agree with. I think we could have lively conversations 2929

30 about what -- the downside of American power -- well, I'm not a realist you see, as they call themselves, so realist sees the upside of American power. The downside of American power is our tendency to think, well, if we only have one bucket, the place we should use it, what we need to do is, assist our closest allies, a place that we have a particular interest or the places were the bucket needs to be drawn. And my view of the bucket is the 800,000 people in Rwanda was the place where the bucket needed to be brought even though we had no particular strategic interest there and yet a huge portion of the population died. MR. HAFREY: And we -- that should have been one of America's wars? MR. CARTER: I believe that should've been one of America's wars. And I fully accept the wisdom of those who say that it was the bad experience in Somalia that caused the Clinton administration and a number of European administrations as well to decide not even to try in 3030

31 Rwanda, and I'm going to accept that that is as a matter of fact on the ground, that's what happened. But there are things in the world that happened that are sufficiently horrible that if you can have a hope of stopping, I think, you have to try. That strikes me as in our modern history, post-world War II history, is the one that we had the largest obligation to try to stop and did - - and that didn't stop. MR. HAFREY: Do you believe that our failure to intervene in Rwanda has conditioned our response to the wars that we've waged under -- MR. CARTER: Well, that's a fair question. There are a lot of people who think that one reason that President Obama was keen to intervene in Libya was he had very firmly in mind the experience of the Clinton administration not intervening in Rwanda and didn't want to have that on his conscience. I understand that that may be true. On the other hand, the Americans are quickly exhausted by adventures abroad, and there's a theory out 3131

32 there that if we had intervened in Rwanda, we'd very unlikely have gone to Iraq, for example, because after all this you get -- there are only so many wars that people can sustain over a period of time and political leaders tend to be sensitive to how many they are going to get. MR. HAFREY: You just said I'm not a realist. MR. CARTER: Yes. MR. HAFREY: Did I quote -- do I quote you correctly? So my understanding of realism in international relation is people will do, countries will do what they need to do in order to achieve their ends. So this is an ends and means argument. MR. CARTER: Yes. MR. HAFREY: And you say for your purposes ends don't necessarily justify the means. What's the alternative there? MR. CARTER: That's right. Well, let me say this. I'm descriptively a realist, but not normatively a realist. That is the reason why people themselves realist 3232

33 in the international relations and political science and elsewhere tend to say, A, the countries will do what they are going to do, and B, that therefore you're either constrain them by various international institutions or you don't constrain them at all. They'll just go out and do their -- they are not amenable to argument and so on although they may be amenable to force and sanctions. My view is that moral argument matters and it matters a great deal in everyday life and it's important in making of policy that right and wrong are often the correct tools with which to measure what we do and the fact that we're willing to bear what's right or what's wrong is beside the point. That's the good thing about having the argument, that we help illuminate for each other what we think is right and what we think is wrong. So one of the reasons that some of my colleagues in the law, in legal academy, get angry at me is I'm not a great fan of international law. And when I say I'm not a great fan, I don't mean I'm against it. But I find the 3333

34 question of morality, what one should or shouldn't do, a more important question. To me legality is a second order question. And to any of you who are satisfied with that question, that is so if they don't like something the United States government is doing, they want to sue or something like that, is the answer. It must be that it's illegal. It could be perfectly legal and still be perfectly wrong. And by the way, it could be illegal and still be right. Let's go back to Rwanda for a minute. So you have Rwanda and 800,000 people are going to die. And while everyone says, yes, it was hard to see it was going to develop that fast, by the end of 10 days it was pretty clear the direction this was taking; order had collapsed, the slaughtered had commenced. Now, what do you do about that? Suppose that what you say is I'm going to go to the United Nations and the United States wants to go to the -- what if the United Nation says no? There are a lot 3434

35 of international scholars who say that you cannot intervene in another country without a United Nation's resolution. Well, suppose that's the case. The united -- so I'm ready to go and I think I can stop it. I've got X number of people. I've got up and I've mapped this out. The United Nations says no. So you say, oh, well, I guess I'll go home. It strikes me, no, you don't. It's then at that point the United Nations ruled simply an unjust law. And it's unjust law, and since it's an unjust law you don't have to obey it. You go in and you stop the slaughter anyway. That's talking about the distinction between the law and morality, which to me is quite important. MR. HAFREY: In what forum would you have the conversation about morality on the international scale that you're offering? MR. CARTER: Well, you're

36 MR. HAFREY: Yeah, but -- so I know there are 40 people in the room. There are, what is it, 8 billion people on the face of the earth at the moment. MR. CARTER: Yes, but these people are purely representative of the people on the planet, wouldn't you say? (Laughter) MR. HAFREY: Absolutely. SPEAKER: I'm glad I'm here. MR. CARTER: That's a reasonable question and I don't entirely have an answer to that. A friend of mine -- a colleague of mine on the Yale Law School faculty and I talked about this and he talked -- very recently he had come back from a trip to -- he went to India and Singapore and somewhere else I don't remember, and he said he talked about war and morality with the intelligentsia of these various countries. And he said that those were countries that -- where the intelligentsia have a great deal of influence over policy and over politics. 3636

37 I don't know if you people agree with that, but that was his view and that therefore he thought in those countries talking to intelligentsia was -- and getting them talking about these things is actually an important way of getting this argument going. For one thing, I'm pretty sure it must have been very hard to have any kind of serious moral conversation of the kind of competitive -- you know, my network likes Republicans, my network likes the Democrats' vision that is so much of television and radio talk is that's too bad. And I say that very timid because these are -- people who have media outlets. I know they have constituencies to please and I know they got money to make. But they -- a lot of them have really big audiences, you know. And to really invite people -- whatever you got to do the rest of the day, just spend part of the time really inviting people in deep and thoughtful conversation. Yeah, all right, maybe I don't make as -- quite as much money in that hours -- in the 3737

38 other hours. But it strikes me that that kind of thing -- all right, it's pie in the sky, I'm being an academic innocent, fair enough -- but it strikes me that that kind of thing would be an enormously valuable public service. And similarly if -- just think if a politician, especially who talked about war, spent less time on applause lines and slogans which I despise -- but that's my innocent academic side again -- and spent more time talking to us like adults, I think -- and again this isn't a partisan thing. You go back you look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates, you know, and these guys would talk for 3 hours. I'm not saying you got to talk for 3 hours -- what's interesting is the audience would listen for 3 hours. And the speeches would be published and you know, collections of political speeches in 19th century were big bestsellers. We're talking about a country that had 30 million people and you could sell 250,000 copies of 3838

39 a book that was just the collected political speeches of William Seward or something like that and try to -- if you envision that day, that's, like, you know -- what is that - - that's like selling 2-1/2 million copies of a book of political speeches today. People were interested in it. They read, they wanted to -- because they -- since the politicians were wont to express themselves at great length. And the -- and there were actual arguments that were -- these books weren't sort of made-up campaign biographies. They were detailed, thoughtful arguments that it used evidence and so on. And I thought -- now, the 1860s would have been a terrible time to live especially for me but that part, the level of argument was really, really good. So you invoked the possibility of conversation in this room. We should make it real. MR. HAFREY: Have a conversation in the room, please. 3939

40 MR. CARTER: We're going to start with you, Amy, because I think you indicated -- SPEAKER: (Off mic)? MR. CARTER: Yeah, exactly. SPEAKER: So usually -- let me use the mic. Usually wars have two sides. MR. CARTER: At least. SPEAKER: Yes. So the drone argument -- how would the drone argument change if all of a sudden we had drones? And I assume the technology -- it's not like getting a nuclear weapon. Technology is fairly easy to obtain. Coming over to the United States and even killing three civilians, what would the Obama administration say then? MR. CARTER: That's a fair question. And let me go back to -- before I said -- let me to go to a earlier point. One of the concerns that some of us have about the Obama administration's assertion of authority in the drone wars generally is -- the argument is that the battlefield 4040

41 is worldwide. And administration has absolutely refused to preclude the possibility of its using drones inside the United States. So the first thing before even the drones come over the mountain they might be American drones coming over the mountain. Now, that would be politically enormously dangerous in the present -- I'm not saying they would do it. But what's interesting -- the continuity between the Bush administration and the Obama administration is that with the single exemption, and it's an important exception, of what the Bush administration -- it's called various things like extreme interrogation and other people call torture -- with that single exception their approach to the war on terror is very similar. And the arguments they make publicly in support of the war -- or the war are very similar. And both of them claim enormously wide authority to be sure the Obama administration has used drone attacks at a far higher 4141

42 rate, more than -- originally twice the rate and now much more than that than the Bush administration ever did. The claim of the worldwide battlefield is one the Bush administration never made. They were very careful about that. That's a new claim from the Obama administration. Now, what you're asking is what if somebody else used them, that is to say, if we can send a drone and kill the leader of al-qaida, can't leader of al- Qaida send a drone and kill us. Well, in just war theory there is something called the doctrine of equivalence which flows into patent law not that kind of equivalence. It's the notion that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Even in every war no more than one side can be fighting justly. They could both be unjust, any one of them can be just. And yet once the war begins, they're both allowed to use exactly the same tactics, they're both at liberty to use exactly the same tactics. So ordinarily you would think in war under that doctrine. And since the 4242

43 President himself said we should use just war theory, if we can use drones, they can use drones. How does the administration escape that? The same with the Bush administration did, by saying that because the terrorists don't actually have a right to fight. And that doctrine only applies to people who have - - who are so-called legitimate combatants, says the terrorists are not legitimate combatants therefore they have no right to engage in these things. Now, the danger of that -- there are some that are attractive -- to say they're not legitimate combatants -- traditional international law meant they'll be socalled enemies of all the world. To be an enemy of all the world means you can be killed summarily wherever found. There's an old international tradition which -- although it isn't used anymore, has never been -- it's a traditional part of international, it's never been revoked by any treaty. 4343

44 Pirates can be executed summarily, for example. Or that -- they don't do it anymore. But actually that goes way back international law, it's still part of customary international law. You can ask me why, because a pirate is the enemy of all the world. If you're the enemy of all the world, you have no legitimate right to fight. If you have no legitimate right to fight, there's no technique you're allowed to use. So if al- Qaida sent missiles over this mountain, say, to get here, they would be illegal for the same reason that every other act that al-qaida takes illegal, because it has no right to fight. So what if it isn't al-qaida? What if it's the Taliban? What if when the war in Afghanistan begins in October of 2001 and you're -- so then you're fighting against a government -- what if that government sends the missiles back? Well, you know what, under both international law and just war theory, you've got every 4444

45 right to do it. And that's why if you're going to do this stuff in the world you have to have military that's strong enough to make sure that they can't. That's really the only solution. It sounds almost counterintuitive, but it's really true. So yes, so under the argument pressed by both the Obama and the Bush administrations, the reason al-qaida can't shoot at us is because they have no right to shoot. The reason that Taliban can't shoot at us is we're too strong not -- but they would certainly have the right under international law to do it. MR. HAFREY: Other questions -- I actually -- ladies first in this case because I think you -- and actually did go first. Remember you're asking a question and tell us who you are. MS. HALLBERG: Okay. Yes. My name is Karen Hallberg. I come from Argentina. Thank you very much for your enlightening talk. I have two short questions regarding three of the issues you posed on discrimination 4545

46 and on the morality of war. And it concerns nuclear weapons. I wanted -- one, the first question concerns the morality of nuclear weapons. They are -- we know that they are not -- that they're indiscriminate destruction and that they -- they're intrinsically immoral. I would like to know what is in your opinion the public perception of that, the public awareness in this movement and how can we convey the message of immorality of the -- of nuclear weapons and what's the discussions in the U.S. The second question concerns proportionality. I'd like to know what is the rationale -- I'm a scientist so I try to understand things basically -- what is the rationale behind the proportionality rule which I think comes from old traditional warfare where one used to count heads or -- what is the point of having 8,000 warheads on each side when -- one -- for retaliation purposes with one or two or five or you name it weapons -- warheads -- nuclear weapons would be enough to retaliate to a thousand 4646

47 when it is costly, it's environmentally very threatening and is not humanitarian? Thank you. MR. CARTER: Well, those are very good questions. Let me answer both briefly. I'll do the second one first. As to proportionality, proportionality gets interpreted in a lot of different ways. But the basic rule of proportionality isn't that you use no more force than the other guy used. It's that you use no more force than is necessary to accomplish whatever your just objective is. That gets very tricky when it's translated into military doctrine. A lot of this is taught to American military commanders and they take this stuff very seriously. But it's hard sometimes to decide exactly what counts as proportional. And so one of the famous conundrums -- you could find this logged in military strategy journals -- and it's not a conundrum for a commander but a -- a moral -- just think about the following. 4747

48 Suppose you're fighting an entirely just war and you have to win the next battle and you have two ways to win it. And one way would end up killing 100 of your own soldiers and 200 of the other side and the other would kill none of your soldiers and 10,000 of the other side, which would be more just? It's hard to imagine a leader choosing the way that -- well, I'll go ahead and have a hundred of my people die, although that was the argument actually at the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was exactly the argument. It was clear the U.S. was going to win the war. The question was whether it was worth it to take the losses of invading the Japanese homeland or not. So that's the right question. My only point is it has a lot of answers. On nuclear weapons, the Catholic bishops in say the U.S. Catholic bishops published a pastoral letter arguing that nuclear deterrence as the means of coming to peace was immoral. It was immoral because they argued it was only -- its only 4848

49 purpose was to threaten someone with annihilation. Since the annihilation was immoral, then threading them with annihilation was immoral. I think that's the sort of the form of argument that you're talking about. Now, whether one thinks they were right or wrong, something really interesting happened. What I really liked about that historical moment was that the Catholic bishops invoked just war theory. The Reagan administration in its response, which was a white paper that was signed by Caspar Weinberger -- I don't know who wrote it -- invoked just war theory. That is, they talked -- they argued in the same terms. They didn't say, oh, you know, you're a religious people, you don't belong a public debate. And they didn't say, well, you've got responsibility, you don't understand. They actually tried to -- now, I'm not saying that their response was driven by just war theory. I'm not saying they set on a defense war and said, well, let's see if they're right. I have no doubt that if -- that 4949

50 their response was driven by the end they wanted to reach. But at least we were having the argument. And I thought that was actually in many ways a fantastic moment -- a brief one but a fantastic moment in American history when at least we're having a moral argument in the same terms. My own view -- I know -- I always get a lot of pushback when I say this and I understand the pushback -- I think that dropping the bomb was a great block on Truman's presidency. I understand the reasons for it. I've read a couple of the biographies. I've read some -- Truman's written about this, including the very strange letter he wrote to the National Council of Churches about it. One of the old arguments by historians was even if you write that you had to find a way to reduce the casualties that were -- that would have occurred, couldn't you have dropped in a demonstration project? The problem was that as far as the U.S. knew, we only had two working bombs. It would take a longer time 5050

51 to make a third one. And the questions raised -- one, a demonstration project. One, if the second one doesn't do the job, then you have no third one to use. And they were -- so I understand the problem. I really do. And if I'd speak, I would not want to sit in that chair and so I am second guessing in a way that's probably unfair many years later, so let's just say it's morally troubling to me after all these years although I think I understand the calculus that led to their decision. MR. HAFREY: Does that answer the first of our -- MS. HALLBERG: It does. There's a second question I asked about the public awareness in the United States. What about nuclear weapons -- MR. CARTER: Oh, I see. Right, right, right. Well, the -- two things -- very, very briefly. The Obama administration has said that it's one of its top -- that nuclear proliferation -- stopping proliferation, let's say, is one of the top priorities as is reducing the size of the American and Russian arsenals which was also goals 5151

52 of the Bush administration and so on. This is all for the good. But I think actually he'll pay a lot less attention toward nuclear arsenal than when I was a kid. When I was a kid in the United States we had air raid drills, you know, we had to hide into the desk literally at -- or as soon as you got to the hall. Wednesday -- the first Wednesday of the month, it (inaudible) was it noon, I remember the sirens would go off. That was in Washington, D.C. Every month when I was growing up, we had these air raid drills. They're -- people know it's there, it's in the background. I think people have less of an awareness of it. When I was a kid, kids talked about do you think there'll be nuclear war this year and things like that. I don't think they talk about that any more. I may be wrong. And I'm thinking my generation thinks better in the way -- the obsessive way we thought about it when I was younger. 5252

53 MR. HAFREY: I think they actually did. So one of our children -- 9/11 -- and so -- MR. CARTER: Well, I think they think about -- they think about the possibility of destruction and maybe nuclear is part of it, I agree with you. We were talking to young people about this. So one theory is that (inaudible) because they're worried that -- MR. HAFREY: Right. MR. CARTER: -- about tomorrow. And so on that - - I find that very sad but very possible. SPEAKER: I have my -- (inaudible). My second question is actually coming first. This is a subject of morality -- MR. CARTER: So naturally, okay. SPEAKER: You led me into it. Morality and war. You did. It was a very interesting comment that you made about who is allowed to shoot a legitimate government against them. So the question is why is the rebels or activists or terrorists whatever you call them allowed to 5353

54 shoot at the government troop and the (inaudible) is not allowed to shoot? And which brings to me the first question, what happens if the fireman turns out to be the arsonist and uses the moral cover and has some perhaps high organizations like Human Rights Watch using the moral argument when the facts may be darker? MR. CARTER: Well, those are -- those I think actually are very important questions. And I think the echo of the question you asked yesterday session as well. Two things very briefly. On the second point, the risk that the firefighter is the arsonist is real, but there's nothing to do about it except keeping our eyes open. I mean, literally there's -- you can't regulate that possibility away. We keep our eyes open, we keep making moral arguments, you can't entirely eliminate all the risk. And that's a fact, I agree. There's the risk is a fact. As to the first point about being allowed to shoot, there's a point of actually some complexity in just 5454

55 war theory and here I think that the Obama administration has not thought it through deeply enough, not talked about it deeply enough, because the Obama administration like the Bush administration basically divided the world into two groups of people. There are people who have the legitimate right to fight, don't have the legitimate right to fight. So one of the big questions -- put al-qaeda out of the equation. Just take a country we may like. Suppose that it's the American south and a group of slaves take up arms against their masters, all right? So under the Obama administration's theory it seems to me as under the Bush administration's theory they have a legitimate right to fight. They're not a government. And even if they -- and even if they organize themselves both administration taking the position that in order to have a legitimate right to fight you have to follow the rule of Geneva convention which means you have to have a chain of command, you have to wear insignia openly, and you have to 5555