Many years ago, at Bletchley Park near Oxford where the German security code Enigma was deciphered during the second world war, an elderly English gentleman at a security policy conference asked me where I hailed from. Cologne, I said. Oh, I bombed it, he answered.
Trying to change the conversation, I ventured that I was born in the little East German town of Köthen. Oh, I bombed that too, he said. I remember those bombs very well. What did he expect me to say? Thank you for liberating me from Hitler? I will never forget my mothers fear-stricken face during those moments in the basement of our house, as the sounds of explosions moved closer and closer. We survived: others did not.
The bombing of Germany shortened the war. What it did not do was to shift the German peoples allegiance away from Hitler. No doubt he was privately cursed for the prevailing misery, but the immediate blame for the bombings was not transferred to the Nazis until the war was definitively over. The same psychological pattern is becoming evident amongst the bombed citizens of Baghdad and Basra, although they clearly do not identify with Saddam Husseins regime as closely as the Germans did with Hitlers.
An assault on moral sensibility
Has the American war plan gone awry? If American and British forces plan to topple not only Saddam Hussein but also the Iraqi government, they will have to conquer the big cities. To avoid a Stalingrad or Leningrad scenario that is house-to-house combat or a siege leading to numerous deaths by starvation they might resort to selected carpet bombing. This could spread the conflagration beyond the Arab peninsula. Truly then, we could wave good-bye to the days of TV militainment.
Television images of exploding bombs in Baghdad are as horrendous as the film footage of dismembered bodies. Who could ever forget the panic-stricken expressions of those American and Iraqi prisoners on TV, seeming to enquire of distant viewers why their fate has brought them to this end? Most disconcerting of all is the new species of simultaneous media transmission from the military front. It does not represent the realism of war, of killing and death only a mere illusion of immediacy.
Such riveting television images threaten to decimate public moral sensibility on both sides of the Atlantic. The exposure attempts to repress the historical truth of many a fallen soldier who, in the last moments of his life, calls out for his mother. Is it meant to block out the stench of rotting corpses which after only a few days permeates the battlefield and bombarded urban residential areas? Real violence as an aesthetic experience certainly has some future in the media business. Scant time remains for moral reflection: perhaps it is already too late.
Yes, moral reflection. Of course, when states come up against each other, whether as allies, competitors or enemies (or sometimes all three at once) Realpolitik informs the way they conduct their affairs. But without any moral foundation, where does the projection of national interest lead us? You only have to look at the mess brewing in the Gulf to see the dangers which threaten, unless we try at least to base our international affairs on principles which bind us as we wish others to be bound.
The Bush administration did not even try.
Law and morality in the face of war
When it comes to diplomacy, the practical basis for morality is international law. A web of international treaties, alliances, and conventions is aimed at creating and maintaining a peaceful coexistence among nations, based on the acknowledged legal principles of civilisations as stated by the International Court of Justice.
We in Germany have thought hard about this. Article 25 of our constitution declares the general principles of international law to be an integral part of the German constitution. Included among those principles is the prohibition of violence between nations, as promulgated by the Charter of the United Nations. However, ever since Natos intervention in Kosovo, which took place without a United Nations Security Council mandate, the act of war has been judged by the German parliament in the light of basic human rights issues.
Confronted by the threat of impending genocide in Kosovo, the then German defence minister Rudolf Scharping and foreign minister Joschka Fischer couched their appeal to the German parliament to endorse the first military deployment of German troops since 1945, in terms of the highest moral pathos (never again Auschwitz).
This request violated Article 26 of the German constitution, which actually condemns the preparation of war as unconstitutional, threatening those who infringe with a lifelong prison sentence. Yet the intervention was duly supported both by the German parliament and the majority of the German public, thanks to the strong sense that moral responsibility must take precedent both over our constitution and the principles of international law.
Almost no one today feels the same overwhelming clarity and conviction with regard to Iraq. Is this just because Germans are pacifist and self-centred? Surely not, given that the Schröder government has sent forces into Afghanistan as well as Kosovo, with popular backing.
It may well be that this German, and European, anti-war sentiment and morality is coloured by a certain degree of political realism. Numerous government-sanctioned atrocities, similar to the Kosovo massacres (and some much more gruesome), have occurred since 1945. Historians have counted at least fifty genocides since the second world war, amongst them Uganda, Rwanda, and Sudan, where millions of people were murdered without any military intervention by the civilised nations. The practical considerations of Realpolitik in most government administrations in the world take priority over morality and human rights: Why should our soldiers die for Africas rights to life, freedom, and human dignity?
The foundations of law and reason
Between the morally legitimate use of military intervention and the political reality of everyday non-intervention, an immense gap has emerged. This in part reflects the realities of the current Security Council, whose members represent mostly non-democratic nations (often flagrant violators of human rights). What exactly would it mean for a human rights-based military intervention to be legitimised by nations with Security Council veto power, such as China or Russia, which have severely curtailed the human rights of the peoples of Tibet and Chechnya for decades?
It would mean nothing less than the bitter truth, that in the tenuous relationship between interest-driven foreign policy on the one hand and international law-based morals on the other, the latter may be reduced to purely cosmetic status for as long it takes for the world community to become entirely democratic.
And yet any outright rejection of the efforts to base foreign policy, including the use of force, on moral principles, constitutes an intolerable cynicism: an unacceptable departure both from Europes (and Americas) legal traditions. Law is the lowest but necessary denominator of moral principles. Each necessitates the other. Even the most cunning democratic practitioner of Realpolitik cannot forsake them without risking failure. Today, this failure must be observed in Iraq.
None of the essential premises of European natural law as it has evolved down the centuries human dignity, freedom of the individual, equality, the common good are subject to the different forms of raison detat. Neither are they disposable variables in any democratic foreign policy. Rather, they should provide the standard to which foreign policies are held.
As constitutional principles they represent the best goods for export the western world has to offer. Nor did they fall from heaven. They emerged out of the constant struggle of societies since antiquity to limit the power and aggression of nations. Imperium limitatum, limited government, is the better face of political Europe. Since antiquity, political rule has above all meant the rule of law, through which the human potential for aggression is curtailed, civilised, and made subject to jurisdiction.
Anything which one person forces another to do against his will, states Xenophons Memorabilia,whether in writing or not, appears to represent coercion and not law. This is the core premise on which the history of international law is based. It enshrines the aspiration to avoid war and domestic political violence alike.
That this premise was historically and profoundly violated in Germany and by Germans, negates neither its legitimacy nor its beauty; nor does it cancel out now the right of Germans to report how deeply they have learnt the lesson, and insist on it.
And such Germans are not alone. Millions of fellow Europeans as well as Americans citizens across the world have demonstrated against the war in Iraq, similarly defining themselves as the good consciences of their nations, as based on legal tradition. They do not pursue a particular political programme. Asked how they view Saddam Husseins totalitarian regime, they might well share George W. Bushs opinion to the letter. But they hope that their own vision of a legal peace will become the desideratum of the whole world.
From nuclear to terrorist apocalypse
What about the weapons of mass destruction which have ended up in the hands of so called rogue states? Can they not be transferred to terrorists or these nations themselves succumb to terrorists? This prospect is without precedent in history. It could mean the end of humanity. The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington may be the writing on the wall.
International law did not envisage this development, and the world community as represented in the United Nations, has taken far too few measures to prevent it.
All the more justification to insist upon an internationally legitimised and enforced process for disarming regimes such as Baghdads. Instead, Americas Iraq policy is fatally flawed. It decided not to wait for, let alone try to achieve, such an outcome. Instead it pre-emptively waged war. By so doing America is violating not only international law, but also the strategic application of reason in the war against terrorism, which should begin with the renewal of worldwide disarmament negotiations.
The opposite is now the case. The Iraq war is undermining trust throughout the international community that the will of a stronger power will not be imposed through the use of military force. The distrust of those Islamic countries who counterpose to an originally western international law their own revelatory law of the Koran, will continue to feed off every new image from a beleaguered Iraq. Were a clash of civilisations ever to be possible, it has begun now. Every military victory will represent a simultaneous defeat of reason.
Think what a costly victory by the coalition of the willing could serve to trigger: new arms races, civil unrest in the Islamic world, a continuation of the obvious recession of the world economy, a scattering of the European Union, a resurgence of Russian geopolitical aspirations and the sad loss of reputation of a great and democratic country that created a president by hanging chads. This is not to mention the deaths of numerous soldiers and citizens in a country that has been punished long enough by the wealth deposited beneath its feet during the earths diluvian period, Iraq.
No doubt, this war will finally be won by the stronger western forces. As the troops move through the rubble of Baghdad, they will also be treading on the ruins of international law. It is hard to imagine a conversation with a younger Iraqi at Bletchley Park, and an elderly gentleman innocently asking him where he came from. In 1945, the cause for bombing was clear to liberate the world from a war-crazy nation and its Führer. This time around, however brutal Iraqs dictator, his reach was already blunted. Now, the cause is murky, dark and much more unjustifiable than the bombing of Dresden, Cologne, or even my little home-town of Köthen.
