Just peace and the asymmetric threat: national self-defense in uncharted waters.

• Author: Novak, Michael

1. PROBLEMS CONCERNING JUST WAR A. Waging War B. Waging War Against Non-State Actors C. Preemptive Strikes 1. Timing of Preemptive Strikes 2. Rational Decisions Leading to Preemption D. Applying Just War to the Current Problem of Terrorism II. THE PROBLEM OF LEGITIMACY A. Legitimacy in Fighting the Iraq War B. Legitimacy of Post-War Government in Iraq III. CONCLUSION On September 11, 2001, the United States awoke sleepily on a warm, bright blue late-summer day; by 9:30 a.m., it was violently thrown into a new era of history. A non-state actor, a loosely unified yet tightly disciplined terrorist network, operating in some four-score nations around the world, had just put an exclamation point on the war it had declared some years earlier, a war that everyone else had simply tried to ignore. This lethal reminder of the war, through a set of "sneak attacks" that made the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor seem positively conventional, threw into disarray some of our classical conceptions about war. It forced us to rethink our notions of just war theory, on the one hand, and the legitimacy of various phases of subsequent acts of war (Afghanistan, Iraq) in addition to the legitimacy of turning to the United Nations, or going it alone, on the other. It has presented us with two new challenges we must face: making necessary revisions to just war theory and formulating new arguments about legitimacy in war and in peace.

   Barely one hundred years after Mohammed founded the expanding faith of Islam in what is today Saudi Arabia, his armies had conquered all of the Middle East, all of North Africa, all of Spain, and were soon marching into southern France. There, in AD 732, they were hurled back. In 1095, after 300 years of suffering retreat, harassment, raids, kidnappings, and the enslavement of captives, the Christians of Europe began the counterattack, the First Crusade. They regained the Holy Land and much of the Eastern Mediterranean coast by 1099, and held these for some generations. By 1200, however, Muslim armies began pushing the Christian forces back toward Europe, and gradually reclaimed the Eastern Mediterranean as a Muslim sea.

   Then in 1571, threatening Europe on its eastern flank, and aiming first at Italy's Adriatic coast, an enormous Muslim fleet under the Ottomans gathered in major ports in Greece. In August, a smaller Muslim fleet had taken Famagusta, the Venetian port on Cyprus, and brutally tortured its inhabitants. In October, the Muslim commanders expected their new assault on all of Italy to be just as easy. They believed it would open tip for them a major base in the total conquest of Europe.

   Rather than heed the urgent calls of Pope Pius V to take to arms to prevent the loss of all of Europe to Islam, the Christian monarchs of Europe, now divided by the Reformation and many internal rivalries, dithered, dallied, and yakked.

   The cold queen of England is looking in the glass:

   The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;

   From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun ... (1)

   In that vacuum, the young Prince Don Juan of Austria struggled virtually alone to put together a presentable European fleet, composed of squadrons from the Knights of Malta, from the Kingdom of Genoa and the Republic of Venice, from Spain and the papal states, plus a few stray ships from France and Britain. By September of that year, he managed to set this small armada to sea in order to make a preemptive strike on the Muslim fleet before it could come near to Italy.

   By early October, Don Juan had lured the Muslim fleet out from its safe haven in the Greek Isles to sail into the Bay of Lepanto. So it was that on October 7, the Saracen fleet loomed into sight on the horizon in all its confident magnificence. So certain of victory was the Sultan that he had his treasure ships follow close up in the rear, for he intended to cut the smaller Christian fleet to shreds, and then sail on unimpeded for the conquest of Italy. But things didn't work out that way when the two fleets sailed directly into one another on that lair October day.

   Splendid new technology and tactics gave the European fleet a surprising advantage, and they were also powerfully assisted by a timely rebellion of Christian slaves below the Muslim decks, who worked their chains free from their oars and emerged into the bright daylight, chains swinging, to engage the Muslim sailors from their rear. With these advantages, the Christian center, led by Don Juan's own flagship, split the Muslim line. The Venetian fleet on the Christian left, fighting with a fury ignited by the previous August's barbarities in Cyprus, made short work of the Muslim right. Altogether the Christians destroyed the backbone of the Caliph's navy for decades to come. (2)

   Of course, that defeat did not make the Muslims give up their dream--their mission of conquering Europe. Within a generation, they were marching overland from their bases in Greece and the Balkans, and up through Budapest, to assemble an enormous army on the plains of Vienna. Their aim was to cut off Italy from the north; to divide Europe, and defeat it part by part. There on September 12, 1683, a Polish army led by Jan Sobieski's cavalry charged forward at full speed, to the eerie sound of its whistling feather headgear, and panicked the Muslim center. Sobieski's brave cavalry drove straight through the Muslim ranks to capture the headquarters and even the green harem tent of the esteemed Sultan himself. (That tent, faded from its early glory, is displayed today with other booty from that day in Czartoryski Museum in Krakow.

   From that high water mark, the Muslim world has receded for more than three hundred years, and fallen into sullen impotence. In recent generations, trying to cope with the collapse of secular versions of Islamic power such as Nasser's socialist pan-Arabism, Ba'athist repression in Iraq and Syria, the secularism of the Shah of Iran, and the shabby secular remnant of the glories of the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey, the world of Islam has in effect split into two. To capture this split we must distinguish between the religion of Islam and the political sect of Islamicism. By far the larger of the two groups, the religion of Islam consists of those who pursue prosperity and personal dignity, while cherishing their religion as an especially pure and intense source of transcendence in their lives. A significantly smaller but intensely energetic group, composed chiefly of the hostile young men of the Muslim world, best described as Islamicists, have developed a new politico-religious idea. These Islamicists are a minority within Islam, and their passion is far more political than religious, although they are quite willing to use a distorted, antiintellectual, and narrow version of religion to achieve their political purposes. Their leaders have studied intensely the organizational methods and the political uses of terror perfected during twentieth-century political movements, such as those led by Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, and fused these into a distorted, secular version of primitive Islam. (3)

   These Islamicists are followers of the doctrine of the Wahhabis, the spiritual descendants of the founder of militant Islamicism, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab (1699-1792), who have been the official spiritual mentors of the Saudi Kingdom since 1750. (4) (Since the Wahhabi doctrine dates back before the United States or Israel yet existed, neither Israel nor the United States can be said to lie at the core of the Wahhabi hostility toward the West.) The murderous passions that now confront us burn from a deep and abiding resentment at centuries of weakness, which long antedate recent episodes.

   These new Islamicists argue that Islam has endured this humiliation of weakness and inferiority for two main reasons. First, the people who follow the Koran have not been faithful to the laws and habits of the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, when Islam was ascendant and Islamic power grew almost unimpeded and unrivaled. Second, its leadership cadres have heretofore lacked organizational discipline. They have failed to master techniques of clandestine organization, precise concentrated action by small cells, and rigorous training in the dark arts of terror. It is these skills, the Islamicists have concluded, which could make of their current asymmetric weakness a future asymmetric strength. They have set out to become masters of terror.

   Islamicist leaders concede that "the Crusader powers" of the West have overwhelming military and economic power. But the complexity of the West's technical organization makes the West vulnerable, they have observed. In their eyes, the West's lack of transcendent belief weakens the West's willpower, and its reluctance to shed blood discloses a spiritual emptiness. Under the proper pressure, they have concluded, the West habitually surrenders. Appeasement has become its modus operandi.

   That the Islamicists are putting this pressure on the West is borne out by several sobering facts. In a recent article, Samuel Huntington notes that Muslim states account for five out of seven on the State Department's list of states supporting terrorism. Islamic extremists perpetrated at least eleven of the sixteen major terrorist acts between 1983 and 2000. In the year 2000, of 32 major wars underway, 23 involved Muslims. The roots of this violence, writes Huntington, are not inherent in Islam as a religion, but in "a great sense of grievance, resentment, envy and hostility towards the West." (5) Moreover, "Islam is less unified than any other civilization," riven by "[t]ribal, religious, ethnic, political, and cultural divisions...." (6) Finally, we are witnessing world-leading birthrates among Muslims, with a great but temporary "youth bulge" between the ages of 16 and 30. (7) "Young males are the principal perpetrators of violence in all societies: they exist in over-abundant numbers...