 |
| Volume X, Summer 2003, Number 2 |
| |
| EXCERPT: The War against Iraq: Normative and Strategic Implications |
| |
| Mohammed Ayoob |
| |
Dr. Ayoob is university distinguished professor of international relations at James Madison College, Michigan State University. A draft of this article formed the basis of a presentation in the Sawyer-Mellon seminar series at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, City University of New York.
In the twenty-first century, going to
war entails not merely strategic
calculations but normative ones as
well. Norms of international society have changed sufficiently in the past few decades, and especially in the past decade, to compel states and coalitions to justify decisions to go to war with reference to concerns such as peace, disarmament, justice and, above all, international (as opposed to national) security. Simple raisons d'état calculations, even if the primary driving force behind such decisions, are no longer considered sufficient to justify going to war.
This does not mean that the principal factors determining a decision to go to war have changed radically. At the broadest level, war-making decisions continue to be based on the decision makers' perceptions of how "national interest" will be advanced or retarded by going to war. While this may be true in the abstract, it is widely acknowledged in the decision-making literature in the field of international relations that in actual practice, and when the decision-making process is disaggregated, "national interest" boils down to the relative strength of domestic coalitions for and against war, the level of engagement of important interest groups, the bureaucratic politics surrounding decisions of war and peace, and the top decision makers' concern for their (and their state's) credibility in the eyes of friends and adversaries.
In the current context, however, when international norms do demand that war-making decisions be justified before the bar of international opinion, such essentially realist considerations usually have to be dressed up in moral garb in order to assuage skeptics, silence critics, and provide emotional comfort both to the government decision makers and to the leaders of the international community, who may have to endorse such decisions or at least live with their consequences. Normative justifications of decisions to go to war have, therefore, become routine since the end of the Cold War. |
| |
|
