A Famous Work: Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars"

One of the books that I'd been trying to acquire had finally come in (although, to my chagrin, I had to purchase it, because it was not available anywhere in the library system). This book, Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, is one of the most heavily-cited works in the entire just war literature, and for good reason: the author is a famous political intellectual by this point (speaking before Congress on several occasions and hosting several TED events), and the book is credited with the revivial of the just war tradition academically. Basically put, Walzer's argument in the book is that we need to re-adopt old notions of justice when we talk about war, and to do so he goes through nearly every aspect of how we talk about war today to show how it contains traces of old just war language.

Of interest here (so far, anyway, given that I'm not done reading it,) is Ch. 2, "The Crime of War," and Ch. 3, "The Rules of War," where we see Walzer discuss the jus ad bellum and jus in bello distinction. In Ch. 2, Walzer describes just war theory as is normally portrayed, which includes describing the two concerns, and in that description he mentions that "The two sorts of judgement [jus ad bellum and jus in bello] are logically independent. It is perfectly possible for a just war to be fought unjustly and for an unjust war to be fought in strict accordance with the rules" (Walzer, 21). A pretty straightforward claim, and one that can be useful to help put people into camps in my paper, but it is in Ch. 3 that we see an interesting defense of his claim of his.

In Ch. 3, Walzer is discussing how soldiers on both sides of a war in modern times-whether their cause be just or unjust-are "morally equal" such that "They can try to kill me, and I can try to kill them, but it is wrong to cut the throats of their wounded, or to shoot them down when they are trying to surrender" (Walzer, 36). This is because modern wars are fought by soldiers who are essentially coerced (in some fashion) into fighting such that they have a sort of special moral status applied to them in a way that, say, a mercenary or a chivalrous knight would not get (Walzer, 34-35). As such, there is a generally agreed-upon distinction between the generals (who, like a chivalrous knight) have essentially "opted-in" to the war and soldiers who have been coerced, with the former being criminals in unjust wars, and the latter being only responsible for in bello considerations (Walzer, 36). He brings up the case of Erwin Rommel (Hitler's famous commander in North Africa), who despite the fact that he was one of Hitler's generals, nevertheless "escaped the moral infamy of the war he fought" because of the fact that "he was an honorable man" for refusing to shoot prisoners and burned the Commando Order, which ordered that "all enemy soldiers encountered behind the German line were to be killed at once" (Walzer, 38). As Walzer mentions, it would not make sense to praise Rommel for his actions if we at the same time held him responsible for Hitler's wars of aggression; Rommel was only concerned with "the soldier's task of fighting" and as such we draw a distinction between the "the war itself, for which soldiers [Rommel] are not responsible, and the conduct of the war, for which they [Rommel] are responsible, at least within their own sphere of activity." (Walzer, 38-39)

This belief is in sharp contrast to the beliefs of General Eisenhower, whom Walzer mentions refused the custom of permitting captured generals to visit the victorious general after the battle was over on the basis that "Daily as it progressed [WWII] there grew within me the conviction that, as never before...the forces that stood for human good and men's rights were...confronted by a completely evil conspiracy with which no compromise could be tolerated" (Walzer, 37). For Eisenhower, it does not matter if German soldiers fight honorably-they've committed a crime by fighting at all (Walzer, 37-38). This gets to the heart of what my paper is about, and I hope that (as I continue reading) that there is more useful stuff to get out of this book.