Answer questions in paragraphs

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Michael Walzer

ow is postwar justice related to the justice of the war itself and the conduct of its battles? Iraq poses

this question in an especially urgent way, but the question would be compelling even with- out Iraq. It seems clear that you can fight a just war, and fight it justly, and still make a moral mess of the aftermath—by establishing a satellite regime, for example, or by seeking revenge against the citizens of the defeated (aggressor) state, or by failing, after a humani- tarian intervention, to help the people you have rescued rebuild their lives. But is the opposite case also possible: to fight an unjust war and then produce a decent postwar political order? That possibility is harder to imagine, since wars of conquest are unjust ad bellum and post bellum, before and after, and so, presumably, are wars of economic aggrandizement. These two are acts of theft—of sovereignty, territory, or resources—and so they end with critically important goods in the wrong hands. But a mis- guided military intervention or a preventive war fought before its time might nonetheless end with the displacement of a brutal regime and the construction of a decent one. Or a war un- just on both sides might result in a settlement, negotiated or imposed, that is fair to both and makes for a stable peace between them. I doubt that a settlement of this sort would ret- rospectively justify the war (in the second case, whose war would it justify?), but it might still be just in itself.

If this argument is right, then we need cri- teria for jus post bellum that are distinct from (though not wholly independent of) those that we use to judge the war and its conduct. We have to be able to argue about aftermaths as if this were a new argument—because, though

Just and Unjust Occupations

it often isn’t, it might be. The Iraq War is a case in point: the American debate about whether to fight doesn’t seem particularly rel- evant to the debate about the occupation: how long to stay, how much to spend, when to be- gin the transfer of power—and, finally, who should answer these questions. The positions we took before the war don’t determine the positions we take, or should take, on the oc- cupation. Some people who opposed the war demand that we immediately “bring the troops home.” But others argue, rightly, it seems to me, that having fought the war, we are now responsible for the well-being of the Iraqi people; we have to provide the resources—sol- diers and dollars—necessary to guarantee their security and begin the political and economic reconstruction of their country. Still others ar- gue that the aftermath of the war has to be managed by international agencies like the UN Security Council—with contributions from many countries that were not part of the war at all. And then the leaders of those countries ask, Why are we responsible for its costs?

Whatever one thinks about these different views, the debate about them requires an ac- count of postwar justice. Democratic political theory, which plays a relatively small part in our arguments about jus ad bellum and in bello, provides the central principles of this account. They include self-determination, popular legiti- macy, civil rights, and the idea of a common good. We want wars to end with governments in power in the defeated states that are cho- sen by the people they rule—or, at least, rec- ognized by them as legitimate—and that are visibly committed to the welfare of those same people (all of them). We want minorities pro- tected against persecution, neighboring states protected against aggression, the poorest of the people protected against destitution and star- vation. In Iraq, we have (officially) set our sights even higher than this, on a fully demo-

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cratic and federalist regime, but postwar jus- tice is probably best understood in a minimalist way. It is not as if victors in war have been all that successful at achieving the minimum.

The timetable for self-determination de- pends heavily on the character of the previous regime and the extent of its defeat. After the defeat of Germany in World War II, there was a four-year military occupation, during which many Nazi leaders were brought to trial and a general “denazification” was instituted. I don’t believe that any of the allied powers called for an early transfer of sovereignty to the German people. It was widely accepted that the neigh- boring states and all the internal and external victims of Nazism had this entitlement: that the new German regime be definitively post- Nazi. We can argue for a much quicker trans- fer of power in Iraq since the large majority of the population, Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, were not complicit in Baathist tyranny, which seems to have had a narrowly regional and sectarian base. But the tyranni- cal regime is still being defended from that base, which means that “debaathification” is still a necessary political/military process, so that Iraqis participating in (what we hope will be) an open society, forming civil associations, joining parties and movements, making choices, don’t do so in fear of a restoration.

We don’t seem to have thought much about this process in advance of the war or to have carried it out, thus far, with anything like the necessary understanding of Iraqi politics or his- tory. What is the relation of planned and un- planned occupations to just and unjust occu- pations? Surely occupying powers are morally bound to think seriously about what they are going to do in someone else’s country. That moral test we have obviously failed to meet.

But what determines the overall justice of a military occupation is less its planning or its length than its political direction and the dis- tribution of the benefits it provides. If its steady tendency is to empower the locals and if its benefits are widely distributed, the occupying power can plausibly be called just. If power is tightly held and the procedures and motives of decision-making are concealed, if resources accumulated for the occupation end up in the hands of foreign companies and local favorites,

then the occupation is unjust. These post- bellum judgments are probably easier than the ones we are forced to make in the heat of battle; still, I want to make them explicit.

just occupation costs money; it doesn’t make money. Of course, the occupying army, like every army, will

attract camp followers; these are the scaven- gers of war, profiteering at the margins. In the Iraqi case, however, President Bush and his ad- visers seem committed to profiteering at the center. They claim to be bringing democracy to Iraq, and we all have to hope that they suc- ceed. But with much greater speed and effec- tiveness, they have brought to Iraq the crony capitalism that now prevails in Washington. And this undercuts the legitimacy of the oc- cupation and puts its putative democratic goals in jeopardy.

The distribution of contracts to politically connected American companies is a scandal. But would it make any difference if the United Nations were distributing contracts to politi- cally connected French, German, or Russian companies? In both cases, there has to be someone regulating the conduct of the com- panies—not only their honesty and efficiency but also their readiness to employ, and gradu- ally yield authority to, competent Iraqi man- agers and technicians. An international agency of proven impartiality would be best, but even American regulators, under congressional man- date, would be an improvement over no regu- lators at all. The combination of unilateralism and laissez-faire is a recipe for disaster.

A multilateral occupation would be better than the unilateralist regime we have estab- lished—for legitimacy, certainly, and probably for efficiency—but at this writing that does not seem a lively prospect. It is easy and right to argue for an authoritative role for the UN, but the argument is plausible only if the UN can mobilize the resources to take charge of Iraq as it is today. The countries that would have to provide the resources insist, however, that since this was an American war, America must bear the costs of the occupation—and also of po- litical and economic reconstruction. This was a war of choice, they say, politically and mor- ally unnecessary, and what one chooses in such

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a case is the whole thing: the war and its af- termath, with all their attendant burdens. This is a good argument; many critics of the war made it even before the fighting began. Jus post bellum can’t be entirely independent of jus ad bellum. The distribution of the costs of the post bellum settlement is necessarily related to the moral character of the war. But there is still a case to be made for the partial independence of the two and then for a wider distribution of the burdens of Iraq’s reconstruction.

Whatever the prehistory of its achievement, a stable and democratic Iraq, even a relatively stable and more or less democratic Iraq, would be a good thing for the Middle East generally, for Europe and Japan, and (if it was involved in the achievement) for the UN. Given the likely benefits, why shouldn’t the international community contribute to the costs of an occu- pation whose justice it could then guarantee? If the European Union had a larger sense of its global responsibilities, if its constituent states were really interested in modifying American behavior (rather than just complain- ing about it), they would make the contribu- tion. But that is not going to happen. The Eu- ropeans want to share authority without shar-

ing costs; the Bush administration wants to share costs without sharing authority. It is pos- sible to imagine a makeshift compromise be- tween them but not a serious cooperation. These are opposed but equally untenable po- sitions, and the result of the opposition is sim- ply to confirm American unilateralism.

o the justice of the occupation is up to the citizens of the United States. These are the tests that the Bush ad-

ministration has to meet, and that we should insist on: first, the administration must be pre- pared to spend the money necessary for re- construction; second, it must be committed to debaathification and to the equal protec- tion of Iraq’s different ethnic and religious groups; third, it must be prepared to cede power to a legitimate and genuinely indepen- dent Iraqi government—which could even, if the bidding went that way, give its oil con- tracts to European rather than American com- panies.

It sometimes turns out that occupying is harder than fighting.

Michael Walzer is co-editor of Dissent.

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OCCUPATIONS

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