TIME: Desert Storm - The War in the Persian Gulf/TIME: Desert Storm - The War in the Persian Gulf.iso/time2_04/cf040104.t12

Text File | 1991-06-27 | 3.5 KB | 79 lines

DATE: JAN. 25, 1991      16:31               REPORT: 2
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BUREAU: MIDWEST
BY: GAVIN SCOTT
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SLUG: TOUGH OPTIONS

 There is in fact a clear difference between
carpetbombing the Republican Guard and Iraqi conscripts,
notes Ethicist Robin Lovin, an associate professor at the
University of Chicago Divinity School. "While it's
arguable that anybody in Iraq has been subjected to
propaganda and coercion," says Lovin, "members of the
Republican Guard have in effect endorsed the regime with
their lives in the way a conscript has not. I'm not sure
that carpetbombing conscripts is morally different than
bombing civilians. It would be a terror tactic aimed to
destroy resistance before taking them on militarily. The
difference between combattants and non-combattants is
that combattants have made the choice to put their lives
on the line and reflects their committment. That is why
we praise our own volunteer army."

 Lovin says that he has of late been reviewing the
history of Christian thought and how it relates to Saddam
himself. The literature suggests that there is a morality
of tyranicide, "a legitimacy of a citizen acting against
his own ruler but not coming from the outside world. You
could make a case that Saddam was responsible for
bringing on all this on an unwilling populace, so one of
his own people would be justified in tyranicide. But the
wisdom of it is to say that even when tyranicide is
invoked, it cannot be taken lightly and one must look at
the result of the action: even if it is justified, is it
not a precedent we should be very wary of establishing?"
Morally, says Lovin, there can be a case for tyranicide
but not for the U.S. government to be the instrument.
"Even if it saves some Iraqi lives, you'd be weighing the
costs and the consequences for the future which are
unclear," he says. "It could open up a pattern of
assassination of heads of state, and you can make a case
that the effects might be much worse for more people in
the long run."

 Assuredly the Iraqi people did not choose Saddam. Nor
did the conscripts choose to serve in his military. "So
if there is a strong sense that they were performing
against their will, then the allies should show
constraint," says Lovin. He notes that during World War
II the allies tried to avoid bombing targets where slave
labor was harnessed by the Nazis. "On the whole," he
adds, "we appear now to have behaved very responsibly. We
have made it clear to troop concentrations that they can
desert and shown them ways they can indicate their
willingness to do that."

 Lovin believes that the nuclear fire-break argument of
the Cold War continues to be a good one as it applies to
the use of weapons of mass destruction. "It holds that
one ought not to take the initiative to legitimatize that
kind of weapon, be it nuclear, poison gas, chemical. War
is awful. But you don't take to this recourse first."

 Although Sasddam may argue that it's no contest -- his
World War II firepoweer vs. the technology of war
developed since by the West -- from a moral point of
view, Lovin says, one must remembr who started the
fracas. "Saddam is the aggressor in this situation. I'm
very cautious in my support of the war, but you can't
doubt that he is the aggressor."

 Overall justification for the war itself, he adds,
"depends on arriving at the moral identification of the
objectives. Unfortunately these are not clear, so it is
difficult to make a moral evaluation."