[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 101 (Thursday, July 10, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9239-S9240]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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   U.S. INSTITUTE OF PEACE'S 2003 NATIONAL PEACE ESSAY CONTEST WINNER

 Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Madam President, on Wednesday, June 25, 
Granite Bay Student Kevin Kiley visited my office as part of the U.S. 
Institute of Peace's 2003 National Peace Essay Contest, NPEC, Awards 
Week in Washington.
  Mr. Kiley had been selected by the Institute as the California State 
winner as well as the national award winner for his essay, ``Kuwait and 
Kosovo: The Harm Principle and Humanitarian War.'' The U.S. Institute 
of Peace has sponsored the essay contest annually since 1986 in the 
belief that expanding the study of peace, justice, freedom, and 
security is vital to civic education.
  I am proud of Mr. Kiley's exemplary essay, commend his dedication to 
this studies, and congratulate his teachers at Granite Bay High School. 
This young man, who is thoughtful and mature beyond his years, will be 
a leader in his future endeavors in peace studies.
  I would like to bring to my colleaguess' attention a copy of Mr. 
Kiley's first place essay. I ask that it be printed in the Record.
  The essay follows.

       Kuwait and Kosovo: The Harm Principle and Humanitarian War

       War causes harm; of this there is no doubt. In determining 
     the justification of war, the question hence becomes: when is 
     it justified to cause harm? The only morally acceptable 
     answer is that causing harm is justified if it prevents 
     further harm. Thus, in general terms, the only justifiable 
     reason to go to war is to minimize harm--if war is the lesser 
     of two evils.
       Underlying the issue of just and unjust war is the concept 
     of sovereignty, for declaring war on a nation is a direct 
     violation of its right to self-government. This adds another 
     element to the harms calculation involved in justifying war. 
     Even the United Nations accepts the view that sovereignty has 
     inherent value, stating in a 1970 Declaration, ``Every state 
     has an inalienable right to choose its political, economic, 
     social, and cultural system, without interference in any form 
     by another state.'' Waging war against a sovereign nation 
     constitutes a direct violation of this ``inalienable right.''
       In determining what circumstances justify violating a 
     nation's sovereignty, the laws governing the conduct of 
     individuals provide a useful analogy. In On Liberty, John 
     Stuart Mill establishes the Harm Principle, a criterion for 
     when it is justified to violate an individual's sovereignty. 
     Mill writes, ``the only purpose for which power can be 
     rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized 
     community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.'' 
     Mill's aphorism can be taken a step further; it applies with 
     equal force to sovereign nations. Just as an individual's 
     freedom must be restricted if it harms other individuals, so 
     too must a nation's freedom be restricted if it harms other 
     nations. This principle, however, does not simply govern the 
     relationship between two warring nations, for today's complex 
     world is one of political interdependence. With the North 
     Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United Nations, the Arab 
     League, and other alliances, even those wars that are 
     relatively limited in scope are becoming ``world wars.'' 
     Therefore, in applying the Harm Principal to the realm of 
     nation states, any just war standard must specify what 
     circumstances justify intervention by an international 
     coalition. International intervention in Kuwait and Kosovo 
     illustrate the success and failure of meeting just war 
     criteria.
       In 1990, Iraq sent shockwaves around the world by invading 
     Kuwait, its small but wealthy neighbor. Within twelve hours 
     of the invasion, ``all of Kuwait . . . was under Iraqi 
     control.'' Following Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's 
     overwhelming victory, the resolve of U.S. President George 
     Bush quickly became apparent; he immediately declared that 
     the invasion ``will not stand,'' that ``no nation should 
     rape, pillage, and brutalize its

[[Page S9240]]

     neighbor.'' In the five months between Iraq's invasion of 
     Kuwait and the dropping of the first U.S. bomb, Bush tried to 
     convince the American people, along with the international 
     community, that intervention was a moral responsibility.
       At the time of the invasion, the depth of Hussein's motives 
     was unclear. Was he a power-hungry despot--another Hitler--or 
     was he simply trying to claim the territory he felt was 
     rightfully his? Would he stop with Kuwait, or did he have his 
     sights set on hegemony in the Middle East? While Hussein's 
     territorial ambitions remained uncertain, there were more 
     tangible consequences of appeasing Iraq's territorial gains. 
     Western oil interests in the region--and the fate of these 
     interests if Hussein were to gain control of OPEC--were 
     undoubtedly a weight on the scale. Moreover, beyond these 
     utilitarian considerations, the fact remained that 
     Kuwait's sovereignty had been violated, and according to 
     the Harm Principal, a military response was justified on 
     this basis alone.
       When the war was over, the stated objectives of the United 
     States and its allies had been achieved: ``Kuwait was 
     liberated, Saudi sovereignty assured, Persian Gulf oil 
     secure.'' Given these results, the ejection of Iraq from 
     Kuwait was a just end, but a just end is only half of the 
     just war equation. For a war to be justified, the benefits 
     must outweigh the costs--the harm of action must be less than 
     the harm of inaction. Whether this was possible in the 
     Persian Gulf was a matter of much speculation. As with any 
     war, the loss of American lives was a foremost concern. This 
     concern led some--including General Collin Powell--to suggest 
     that economic sanctions might be a viable alternative to war. 
     In late 1990, however, it became increasingly clear that 
     sanctions would do little more than starve the Iraqi people. 
     According to a PBS Frontline report, ``the CIA was telling 
     President Bush it could take years for sanctions to drive 
     Saddam from Kuwait.'' Furthermore, it also became clear that 
     U.S. technology could enable the U.S. to fight a relatively 
     painless war, one with few U.S. lives lost and minimal 
     civilian casualties. And this optimistic outlook became a 
     reality, as the U.S. and its allies waged one of the most 
     flawless military campaigns in history. Thus, the Gulf War 
     meets the criteria of a just war: It achieved a just end and 
     minimized harms.
       While the involvement of the United States in the Gulf War 
     demonstrates the validity of Mill's Harm Principle as a 
     justification for war, a key distinction must be made between 
     the Principle's applicability on an individual level and on a 
     national level. The constituent parts of an individual have 
     no inherent worth; it is only the individual himself that is 
     of value. Nations, conversely, are comprised of individuals. 
     Thus, the constituent parts of the nation are themselves 
     valuable. While Mill holds that morality demands the 
     individual be completely sovereign in his sphere--that no 
     just law could prevent him from harming himself--this is not 
     the case with nation states. For if the actions of a 
     government cause harm to its citizens, the sovereignty of the 
     nation and the sovereignty of the individuals conflict. And 
     on this basis, a case can be made for humanitarian war--
     military intervention that prevents a nation from harming its 
     citizens, its constituent parts.
       In the last decade, the most vivid example of humanitarian 
     intervention was the crisis in Kosovo, a ``paradigmatic 
     instance of humanitarian intervention in the very name of 
     humanity itself.'' There was little doubt, in 1999, that 
     Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing of Albanians 
     constituted a crime against humanity. While Milosevic's 
     actions did not directly harm another sovereign nation, they 
     so egregiously harmed his own people--so ``shocked the 
     conscience of mankind''--that international action was deemed 
     necessary. The end of saving Albanian lives was certainly 
     justified. In fact, the moral responsibility espoused by U.S. 
     President Bill Clinton was perhaps even greater than that 
     Bush spoke of in 1990. And aside from war, there existed no 
     viable option for fulfilling this responsibility. The means 
     employed by the Clinton Administration and NATO, however, 
     were inconsistent with just war principles.
       The history of the Kosovo crisis is replete with 
     ``collateral damage'' to civilians. According to Jean 
     Elshtain, ``once we had exhausted the obvious military 
     targets, we degraded the infrastructure on which civilian 
     life depends.'' Largely as a result of high altitude 
     bombing by NATO forces, 2,000 civilians were killed and 
     6,00 wounded, and countless others would suffer and die 
     because of infrastructure destruction. This ``collateral 
     damage'' can be directly attributed to the ``no-cost'' 
     strategy employed by NATO troops, which refused to risk 
     American and European lives even as the welfare of the 
     Serbian people hung in the balance. In the end, this 
     overemphasis on some lives and devaluation of others 
     undermined the moral authority of NATO's crusade. In ``War 
     and Sacrifice in Kosovo,'' Paul W. Kahn sums up this 
     contradiction well when he writes of the ``incompatibility 
     between the morality of the ends, which are universal, and 
     the morality of the means, which seem to privilege a 
     particular community.''
       The incompatibility Kahn speaks of not only caused 
     unnecessary civilian causalties, but also expedited the very 
     atrocities NATO forces had entered Kosovo to prevent. 
     According to Elshtain, NATO attacked Milosevic to halt ethnic 
     cleansing, but ``our means speeded up the process, as the 
     opening sorties in the bombing campaign gave Milosveic the 
     excuse he needed to declare marital law and move rapidly in 
     order to complete what he had already begun.'' As a tragic 
     consequence, an estimated 20,000 Kosovo Albanians were 
     murdered by Serbs in the first eleven weeks of bombing, 
     compared with some 2,500 people that had died before the 
     bombing campaign. Thus, the just end NATO entered Kosovo to 
     achieve was not merely tainted, but completely undercut by 
     unjust means.
       The United States' crusade to liberate Kuwait, along with 
     NATO's effort to free the Albanians from the torturous grip 
     of Milosevic, demonstrate two separate, but equally 
     justifiable criteria for waging war. In the case of Kuwait, 
     the Harm Principal criterion was met, as one sovereign nation 
     had harmed another, and a successful war minimized costs. But 
     in the case of Kosovo, a righteous cause was rendered unjust 
     by immoral means. The conflicts in Kuwait and Kosovo 
     demonstrate two situations in which sovereignty can be 
     justifiably violated and illustrate the necessity of just 
     means in waging war.

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