Civilians and Innocents

Today's Reading

Read Deuteronomy 20:10-20, the Old Testament's laws of war. Notice the rules about offering peace, the protections for trees and orchards, and — disturbingly to modern readers — the harsher rules for the cities of Canaan. Even in a fallen, ancient law, war is regulated.

Read Proverbs 6:16-17: "There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood..."

Read Matthew 18:6, Jesus's warning about causing "one of these little ones" to stumble. The protection of the small and weak is at the heart of Jesus's teaching.

Read Genesis 18:23-25, where Abraham bargains with God over Sodom: "Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?"

Reflection

Yesterday and the day before, we walked through the just-war tradition's rules for going to war. Today we look at the rules for fighting a war once it has begun — jus in bello — and at the criterion most often broken in the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the protection of noncombatants.

The principle of discrimination, in just-war language, is the requirement to distinguish combatants from noncombatants and to direct force only at the former. The principle of proportionality in bello is the requirement that the harm caused by any specific military action be proportionate to the legitimate military advantage sought. Together, these criteria carry the moral weight of the entire framework. If they collapse, the just-war tradition collapses. A war can be entered for the most just of causes and still be fought wickedly. A war can have legitimate authority and still descend into atrocity in its execution. Augustine knew this. Aquinas knew this. The tradition that follows them has, at its best, said so plainly: the soldier's heart matters, and the soldier's targeting matters.

The problem the modern era poses to the tradition is technological and structural. In the wars of Augustine's day, combatants and noncombatants were physically distinct in ways that made the criterion comparatively legible. The soldier carried a sword. The farmer did not. Cities under siege blurred this — civilians starved alongside garrisons — but the bulk of fighting was between armed forces in the field. The advent of artillery, then aerial bombardment, then nuclear weapons, then drone strikes has made the distinction harder to maintain in practice — and the temptation to abandon it correspondingly stronger.

Strategic bombing in World War II is the most studied case. The doctrine of "morale bombing" — destroying the will of an enemy population by killing enough of them to break their support for the war — was developed by the British and American air forces and applied across Germany and Japan. Dresden, in February 1945, was firebombed in a way that produced a firestorm and killed an estimated 25,000 civilians in two days. Tokyo, in March 1945, was firebombed with incendiaries that killed perhaps 100,000 people in a single night. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August, killed somewhere over 200,000 people, most of them civilians, most of them in the first moments after the blast.

Were these acts compatible with the just-war tradition? The tradition's own criteria say no — clearly, plainly, no. The bombing of cities was not the regrettable side effect of legitimate military targeting; it was the deliberate killing of civilians as a means to an end. The principle of double effect cannot launder this. Civilians were not foreseen casualties of an action aimed at something else; they were the action.

Elizabeth Anscombe, the British Catholic philosopher, made this argument with particular force in 1956 when Oxford proposed an honorary degree for Harry Truman. She objected — publicly — that Truman, who had ordered the atomic bombings, was a man whose hands "shed innocent blood" and that the university was honoring him for an act the just-war tradition forbade. She lost the vote, but her pamphlet Mr Truman's Degree remains one of the clearest Christian condemnations ever written of strategic bombing as a category. "The bombing of cities is the deliberate massacre of civilians," she wrote. "The atomic bombs went farther in the same direction, but they did not begin it."

The case is uncomfortable because most American Christians have inherited the conviction that the Pacific bombings ended the war and saved lives — Japanese as well as American — that an invasion of the home islands would have cost. That conviction is contested by historians; many now think Japan was prepared to surrender on terms close to the eventual settlement before the bombs fell. But even setting the historical question aside, the just-war tradition does not weigh civilian deaths against projected military deaths in a calculus that permits the deliberate killing of one to spare the other. The tradition prohibits the means as a category, not as a contingent matter of consequences. Anscombe was right, on the tradition's own logic, and most American Christians have not wanted to hear it.

The same questions return in every modern war. The Vietnam War's free-fire zones — areas where any moving thing could be killed — failed the discrimination criterion as a doctrine, not just in execution. Drone strikes that kill civilians in the same vehicle as a targeted militant raise the question whether the doctrine of double effect can do what is being asked of it. The conduct of the Russian war in Ukraine, with its strikes on apartment buildings and hospitals, has been condemned widely on these grounds. The conduct of the war in Gaza has been condemned by Christians of many traditions on the same grounds, even by Christians who consider Israel's right to defend itself just. The criterion does not care which side you are on. It applies to everyone who fights.

This is the discipline the just-war tradition is supposed to impose on Christian conscience: that no Christian can support, without remainder, every action of every war that his nation fights. Even when going to war is justified, how it is fought is open to moral judgment. Even the soldier who fights in a just war can fight unjustly. The Christian's job is to keep saying so.

Augustine, in Letter 189 to Boniface and elsewhere, returned over and over to the soldier's heart. The just-war tradition does not authorize cruelty. It does not authorize hatred. The soldier may carry the sword, but the soldier may not enjoy the killing. Augustine was unyielding on this; he held that the soldier who fights from anger or vengeance has, even in a just cause, sinned. The same logic applies to nations. A nation that fights from rage, that delights in its enemy's suffering, that targets civilians because it has lost the patience for distinction — has stepped outside the tradition that supposedly authorizes its war.

There is a doctrine I want to commend to you here, one that the tradition has not always made central but should: the moral standing of the noncombatant in the eye of God. Proverbs 6:17 says God hates "hands that shed innocent blood." The image of God in Genesis 1 is not stripped from a person when their nation goes to war with mine. The child in the cellar in Mariupol, in Khan Younis, in Khartoum, is not less an image-bearer because she happens to live on the other side of the line. Her death is, biblically, an offense before God. To kill her in pursuit of a military objective — even a just one — is to do something the tradition tells us we may not do.

This is also where we see the deepest critique that the Anabaptist and pacifist traditions level against just-war theory. They argue, with reason, that just-war criteria have been honored more in the breach than in the observance — that the framework has functioned, in practice, as a license for the wars Christians wanted to fight rather than as a constraint that stopped them. They point to centuries of Christians blessing every war their nation declared. They have a point. The framework is only as good as the church's willingness to apply it honestly — and to call wars unjust when they are unjust, including the wars our nations fight.

If you are in the just-war tradition, this is your work. Not just to argue for the tradition in theory but to insist on it in practice. To say no to the strategic bombing your nation conducts. To say no to the drone strike that kills children at a wedding. To say no to the operation that punishes a population for what its government did. The tradition is not a sword in your favor. It is a constraint on your favor.

If you are in the pacifist tradition, this is your invitation: to stand alongside just-war Christians who are willing to apply their tradition's own criteria against the wars their nations fight. The two traditions need not agree on the foundational question to agree on the indictment of cruelty. There is more common ground here than either tradition usually claims.

Tomorrow we turn to the temptation that haunts both traditions: the temptation to fuse the cross with the flag.

Going Deeper

Take any war you have an opinion on. Now ask, specifically, about how it is being fought. Are noncombatants protected? Are means proportionate? Are the soldiers fighting from a heart Augustine would recognize? It is far easier to take a position on whether a war should happen than on how it is being conducted day by day. The just-war tradition asks us to do both. So do the prophets.