The Two Richards

The Two Richards
Peter Weiss
TNI Website, 23 October 2001

If proof were needed that September 11 was a watershed, Defining a Just War (The Nation, 29 October 2001), would be it. Its author, Richard Falk, has been one of the great prophetic voices of the last half century, castigating the killers of the dream, elevating morality over expediency, speaking truth to power, inspiring countless activists, with and without legal training, to regard the law as a prime mover for social justice. Now the selfsame Richard Falk has delivered himself of an article so full of internal contradictions that one is led to wonder whether it was written by two different people.

A summary of Falk's position will serve as an introduction to a partial rebuttal. The war in Afghanistan, we are told, is the first just war since World War II. Those who oppose the war are either naïve because they lack "cultural resonance" with American public opinion, or irrelevant because they provide no alternative and because this is not the time to criticize American foreign policy. The "legalists" and advocates of UN action are wide of the mark because their solutions have no chance of being implemented.

This is the new Falk, charging the peace movement and the advocates of international law and UN authority with lack of realism. But there is also the old Falk, recognizing that the United States "is certainly responsible for much global suffering and injustice, giving rise to widespread resentment that at its inner core fuels the terrorist impulse", cautioning against extending the war to terrorists concerned only with their home turf, warning against alliances with governments which see "apocalyptic terrorism" as "an opportunity to proceed with their own repressive policies", and calling on an active citizenry to insure that the justice of the cause not be negated "by the injustice of improper means and excessive ends". The old Falk calls for a policy of "limited means and ends", in which "the role of military force is marginal to the overall conduct of the war".

What are we to make of this grabbag of conflicting views? Let's try to sort them out.

First, with the exception of a small minority of traditional pacifists, the "peace movement", such as it is, is not opposed to every use of force to bring the perpetrators of the 9/11 crime against humanity to justice and to neutralize those who would plan similar apocalyptic crimes. But it is a far cry from there to supporting a bombing campaign of indefinite duration which, official denials to the contrary, appears already to have caused hundreds of civilian casualties and, more significantly, is condemning millions of Afghans, many of whom hate the Taliban as much as we do, to, if not death of starvation, a miserable, degrading, inhuman refugee existence.

Given the precedents of US support for the butchers of Central America and the Southern Cone, the Nato campaign against Serbia, the sanctions campaign against Iraq with its million of civilian deaths, what makes Richard think that this "crusade against evil", like those earlier ones, has any chance of being waged with moral restraint and within the confines of international law?

As for what he critically calls the "legalist/UN approach", it is difficult to accept, from this lifelong advocate of the rule of law and the role of the UN, the notion that the magnitude of the crime committed on September 11 justifies giving up, if only temporarily, on these two paramount principle of a just and peaceful world order. One would have expected Falk to take the opposite view: The more heinous the crime, the greater the need to deal with it in a lawful manner under the auspices of the world community.

There is also a strawman quality to his argument that Bin Laden and his associates cannot be brought to trial because an international tribunal would not impose the death penalty and would therefore be unacceptable to the United States. It would, of course, be splendid if the US did agree that capital punishment could not be imposed on even the most reprehensible criminal of modern times, since that would end the case for capital punishment once and for all. Falk is, of course, right in saying that there is no chance of this happening, but he leaves three questions unanswered: 1) Why not try Bin Laden et al in the United States, since they have surely committed crimes against this country? 2) If they are not to be tried at all, what gives us the right to kill them, except the old eye-for-an-eye paradigm? 3) If Bin Laden and other members of Al Quaeda can be killed without trial, why not other monsters like Milovesic or serial killers? (Let us not, as a preacher might say, do it "to the worst of these", or we won't know where to stop).

As for the impotence of the UN, it is strange to hear Falk saying that "the UN lacks the capability, authority and will to respond to the kind of threat to global security posed by this new form of terrorist world war". Surely he knows, better than most, that the UN has no will of its own, other than that of its member states, and no capability or authority other than that which the member states, particularly those on the Security Council, confer upon it. Perhaps he is saying, indirectly, that the UN cannot act in this situation because the United States will not let it act, but the United States is not the only member of the UN or of the Security Council, and it remains to be seen how many of the other members will go along with the American-British way of fighting this war and for how long.

The most disturbing statement in Falk's article is that the global role of the United States, with the "global suffering and injustice" that it causes, "cannot be addressed so long as this movement of global terrorism is at large". Is this a recognition, by the passionate champion of a just world order, that everything he and his colleagues have fought for all their lives is to be put on the back burner until, in the President's terms, the "crusade against evil" has been fought to final victory?

Those who have raised critical voices about the American response - there is a cacophony of them on the web, although it's hard to find them in the mainstream media - seem united on one point: the coalition against terrorism must also be, or must be accompanied by, a coalition for social and economic justice, else terrorism, which is fed from many sources, will always find willing recruits.

Those of us who have worked with Richard over the years in pursuit of justice, peace and human rights will continue to believe that he shares that view.

Peter Weiss, an international lawyer, is President of IALANA the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms