“Just war,” Sanctions, Punishment masked as “Peace”

In siege warfare, armies surround cities. With sanctions, international powers prohibit migration and sale or purchase of goods. Both are types of war that destabilize and fail states, inflict and exacerbate injustice: human rights abuse, hunger and homelessness, sickness, disease and perpetual poverty. Warfare and sanctions do what they purport to undo. The current administration in Washington carries on its predecessors’ legacy of punishment and hegemony.
Re-reporting, editing, commentary by Carolyn Bennett

Describing sanctions as a means of ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘enforcing human rights’ is counterfactual
Sanctions are bureaucratized, internationally organized siege warfare. 
Gordon

Punishment for its own sake

 Punishment is the deliberate infliction of harm to the punished party (and thus stands in clear contravention of anything like a Hippocratic Oath, writes journalist Helena Cobban in “Economic sanctions, just war doctrine, and the ‘fearful spectacle of the civilian dead.’” She was writing during the previous regime in Washington. Two central problems with the punishment constituted by the present bombing campaign are the dimension of the harm being caused,” she writes, “and to whom this harm is happening. The infliction of harm ─ or at the very least, a severe curtailment of rights ─ is not a by-product of punishment. It is intrinsic to it.

“Many theorists of punishment have tried to predicate the right to punish on a claimed right to undertake actions of self-defense but the right to self-defense is not a license to inflict any amount of harm on another person or persons. If it were, then the effect of repeated iterations of people acting in self-defense would be to fuel a rapidly escalating cycle of violence such as we have seen over the past year in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.… Bombings of Afghanistan… and the massive military preparations that preceded bombings are seriously problematic at a number of levels.

“They have not abided by the jus in bello [“just war”] constraints of proportionality and discrimination. In particular, they have resulted in the infliction of widespread harm on Afghan civilians who bore no relationship to the Bin Laden networks ─ harm, even if it was not directly intended, was still fairly easily foreseeable and was indeed foreseen by many international aid agencies.”

Sanctions: punishment, acts of war
Fairfield University Professor Joy Gordon also takes punishment in warfare to punishment in economic sanctions. “Economic sanctions violate ‘just war’ principles of both jus ad bellum and jus in bello,” she says. “Jus ad bellum requires that a belligerent party have valid grounds for engaging in warfare, whereas jus in bello requires that the war be fought in accordance with certain standards of conduct. To engage in warfare at all, the belligerent party must have a just cause.

“‘Just cause’ requires ‘a real and certain danger’ such as protecting innocent life, preserving conditions necessary for decent human existence, and securing basic human rights. Under the requirement of proportionality, the damage inflicted ‘must not be greater than the damage prevented or the offense being avenged.’ There must also be a probability of success. The ‘probability of success’ criterion prohibits resort to force when the outcome will be futile.”

Sanctions serve hegemony and serve the punisher. They are raw acts of aggression cloaked in a “peace” mask, but aggression nevertheless ─ aggression for its own sake (U.S. v. Iran or Iraq or Haiti or Somalia; Israel v. Palestinians or Gazans); acts of war crafted by entrenched power perpetuating itself.

Sanctions of the kind imposed by the United States and Israel, Cobban writes, “have usually had the effect [a seeming irrational or unintentional opposite effect] of … strengthening regimes these states do not favor.” [The] primal urge to punish, punish, punish is so strong in these countries [the United States and Israel],” Cobban says, that simple rationality is set aside. The main aim is the sanctions themselves ─ often seen, “over the past 17 years [in the character of] Martin Indyk [the Clinton administration’s Secretary of State], as an important way of weakening the regime prior to overthrowing it ─ rather than resolving the questions and uncertainties around Iran’s avowedly civilian nuclear program.”

Gordon reinforces the thought that “in certain respects, sanctions are obviously the modern version of siege warfare. Each [war and sanctions] involves the systematic deprivation of a whole city or nation of economic resources. Although in siege warfare this is accomplished by surrounding the city with an army, the same effect can be achieved by using international institutions and international pressure to prevent the sale or purchase of goods, and to prevent migration.

“To the extent that we see sanctions as a means of peacekeeping and international governance, sanctions effectively escape ethical analysis ─ we do not judge them by the same standards we judge other kinds of harm done to innocents. Yet, concretely, the hunger, sickness, and poverty, which are ostensibly inflicted for benign purposes, affect individuals no differently than hunger, sickness, and poverty inflicted out of malevolence. [Therefore] to describe sanctions as a means of ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘enforcing human rights’ is an ideological move, which, from the perspective of concrete personal experiences, is simply counterfactual.

“Sanctions are, at bottom, a bureaucratized, internationally organized form of siege warfare.

They should be seen and judged as such.”

Sources and notes
“Economic sanctions, just war doctrine, and the ‘fearful spectacle of the civilian dead’ (Joy Gordon): “Sanctions like siege intend harm to civilians and therefore cannot be justified as a tool of warfare,” (Cross Currents), http://www.crosscurrents.org/gordon.htm

Dr. Joy Gordon is Professor in Philosophy, Director of Legal Studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut, http://www.fairfield.edu/about/about_contact.html

“Having an effect on vulnerable others: Two aspects of the present U.S. actions toward Afghanistan” Digest of remarks by Helena Cobban, columnist, The Christian Science Monitor [from Teach-in panel discussion on ethical dimensions of crisis held at the University of Virginia, October 9, 2001], http://helenacobban.org/

Helena Cobban is a veteran writer, researcher, and program organizer on global affairs. She is author of Re-engage! America and the World after Bush (2008); and publishes the blog “Just World News” centered on international issues.

Martin Sean Indyk
Vice President for Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., Martin Sean Indyk (b. 1951 - ) was the Clinton administration’s U.S. ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. Indyk was a lead U.S. negotiator at the Camp David talks and framer of the U.S. policy of dual containment [U.S. policy of ‘dual containment’ (isolating both Iran and Iraq) sought to depict Iran as a ‘rogue’ state that supported terrorism.]. Iraq and Iran were viewed as Israel’s two most important strategic adversaries [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Indyk] and Britannica

Camp David [Maryland] Accord
Agreements between Israel and Egypt signed on September 17, 1978, which led in the following year to a peace treaty between those two countries, the first such treaty between Israel and any of its Arab neighbors. The accord was brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar el-Sādāt. The accord was officially titled ‘Framework for Peace in the Middle East’ and the agreements became known as the Camp David Accords because the negotiations took place at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland. Britannica

Britannica:
Concept from the Middle Ages
Just war (jus ad bellum) is a notion, rising from Classical Roman and biblical Hebraic culture containing religious and secular elements, which first coalesced as a coherent body of thought and practice during the Middle Ages.

The idea is that the resort to armed force (jus ad bellum) is justified under certain conditions; and the notion that the use of such force (jus in bello) should be limited in certain ways.

In the Western context, “just war” is a by-product of canon law and theology: the ideas of jus naturale (Latin: ‘natural law’) and jus gentium (Latin: ‘law of nations’) from Roman law that established practices of statecraft, and the chivalric code.

A “just war” most scholars agree must meet several jus ad bellum requirements. Four most important ones are:

• The war must be openly declared by a proper sovereign authority ─ the governing authority of the political community in question
• The war must have a just cause ─ e.g., defense of the common good or a response to grave injustice
• The warring state must have just intentions ─ i.e., it must wage the war for justice rather than for self-interest
• The aim of the war must be the establishment of a just peace

“Just war” conditions added at the end of World War II:

• There must be a reasonable chance of success
• Force must be used as a last resort
• The expected benefits of war must outweigh its anticipated costs

Western thought distinguishes the “just war” concept from the Islamic concept “jihad” (Arabic: ‘striving’ or holy war) which is, in Muslim legal theory, the only type of “just war.”