Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for ...

This article was downloaded by: [University Of Pittsburgh] On: 19 December 2014, At: 06:17 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fcpa20

Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars a

Taylor B. Seybolt a

Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Published online: 06 Aug 2014.

Click for updates To cite this article: Taylor B. Seybolt (2014) Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 16:5, 494-495, DOI: 10.1080/13876988.2014.928013 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13876988.2014.928013

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 06:17 19 December 2014

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions


494

Book Reviews

policymaking will miss out on the richness of the examples illuminating theoretical constructs. Nonetheless, this is a wonderful book for undergraduate and graduate instruction. CPB don’t oversell their contributions, nor do they hide the fact that their model is empirically derived. They recognize that economics, technology, elections, social mores and demographics, and other factors influence policy changes. CPB maintain, however, that pathways “help structure the influence of these fundamental exogenous and endogenous forces on the policy process” (p. 194). Pathways shape both policy outcomes and rhetoric, and the authors illustrate how they shift for specific policy areas and can, for example, foreclose expert advice when a policy is dominated by symbolic arguments. Readers of this journal will find little of traditional comparative public policy, as the case comparisons are longitudinal and across policy areas. However, the use of expertise and ideas to enliven explanations of how policy is formed and modified will find resonance for scholars of comparative public policy as well as those studying other political systems. Further, literature reviews and policy examples are from the US. For example, CPB do not include reviews of the rich international relations literature involving ideas and experts in describing the expert pathway, as the volume’s intellectual and substantive scope is US-focused. Students will come away with a nuanced view of how policymaking works, and recognize that “[i]deas and values often trump interests in contemporary policymaking” (p. 10). CPB make a strong case for the descriptive power of their pathways model, one that scholars and students new to public policy alike will profit enormously from reading. Reviewer: John A. Hird © 2014 Professor of Political Science & Public Policy and Interim Dean College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 230 Draper Hall, 40 Campus Center Way, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-9244 [email protected]

Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis (2014) http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13876988.2014.928013 Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars Author: Neta Crawford (Department of Political Science, Boston University, 232 Bay State Road,

Boston, MA 02215 USA. E-mail: [email protected]) New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 486 pp., Cloth $39.95, ISBN 978-0-19-998172-4 Not long ago, it was accepted practice in warfare to attack an enemy’s civilian population in pursuit of military victory. That is no longer true, at least for professional militaries in developed countries. Imagine the United States Air Force dropping incendiary bombs on Bagdad in 2003, as it did on Dresden in 1945, killing over 20,000 noncombatants in three days. Such an action would provoke outrage and calls to hold the responsible parties accountable for committing a war crime, a crime against humanity, or both. Changes in normative beliefs about the practice of military engagement – what was accepted, now is seen to be criminal – raise important ethical and practical questions that Accountability for Killing boldly seeks to answer. Who should be held accountable when militaries kill noncombatants? Is it the individual soldiers and airmen directly involved in the action, their commanding officers, or the civilians in government who send military personnel to war? Should organizations, such as the Air Force or the Department of Defense be held to account? On what grounds should the action be judged? It is not illegal to kill civilians in war if their deaths are unintended and occur as part of an action that is militarily necessary. But what if unintended civilian deaths are foreseeable and, therefore, potentially avoidable? How much risk should military actors accept in an effort to minimize the killing of civilians? Neta Crawford’s excellent book “is about moral reasoning in war at all levels, from individual soldiers, to commanders, to organizations, within political institutions, and among the public, and how moral agency and accountability can be improved” (p. xvi). The author investigates these and similar questions in the context of US military deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. Her purpose is “to help us reason through the problems of killing civilians in war and find ways to diminish foreseeable collateral damage” (p. 33). Toward this end, she employs philosophical reasoning; national and international law; analysis of U.S. military doctrine and field manuals; psychological studies of aggression; and the policies and politics of contemporary events. The broad multi-disciplinary range gives Crawford a strong foundation of knowledge on which to build her argument. For example, she critiques the ethical reasoning that underpins the Just War principle of “double effect” (civilian deaths are allowable if they are incidental to a necessary military operation), then explains the practical impact of different interpretations of the principle (a B-1B bomber could drop a 500 pound bomb or a 2000 pound one). As collateral damage has become strategically counter-productive and


Book Reviews 495 publicly questioned, military organizations have adapted. Integrating organization theory and moral agency, Crawford finds that “the U.S. military works quite hard to protect civilians” but it remains morally accountable for causing civilian deaths “in ways that were foreseeable and were, or should have been, foreseen” (p. 11). Crawford makes her argument in an Introduction and nine chapters. The first chapter defines terms like “collateral damage” and “moral responsibility” while the second chapter establishes the scope of the problem of collateral damage caused by the United States in recent wars. The author acknowledges the many obstacles to getting accurate information on civilian casualties, but is able to show patterns of civilian killing nonetheless. Chapter 3 explores tensions between norms of noncombatant immunity, military necessity and protection of one’s own forces. These normative beliefs lead to three types of collateral damage: genuine accidents, “systematic collateral damage” and “foreseen proportionality/double effect killing”. Crawford holds that collateral damage too often is seen as inevitable when, in fact, it is foreseeable in most situations. Moreover, she writes, responsibility for protecting civilians from foreseen harm is shared among individual and collective moral agents. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 focus on understanding the moral responsibility of soldiers, commanders and military organizations (respectively), that are directly responsible for conducting war. The key argument on individual soldiers is that they are morally culpable for civilian deaths even if the killing is not intentional. This is a departure from the common emphasis on intentionality. Chapter 5 on command responsibility is a necessary piece of the overall argument on collective responsibility but it does not break new ground. The key points in chapter 6 are that war is a collective enterprise and military organizations are “imperfect moral agents”. To hold individual soldiers and commanders solely responsible is to not understand that individual agency is framed by organizational context. Military organizations have the capacity to learn and change – as demonstrated by the issuance of new training manuals and rules of engagement – and therefore should be held accountable for the outcomes they produce.

The last three chapters focus on methods for improving accountability and reducing civilian deaths. In the seventh chapter, Crawford presents guidelines for increasing civilian politicians’ oversight of the military. In chapter 8 she argues, “It is our moral responsibility as citizens in a democracy to monitor and hold to account the actions of governmental leaders and institutions when the state makes war” (p. 432). In chapter 9, she suggests five pragmatic measures that could be taken to reduce collateral damage: systematically record and analyze the deaths of noncombatants; review weapons procurement, deployment and use; review operational instructions and rules of engagement; make public the criteria used in deciding to launch a drone strike; and establish an institutional home for ongoing review and analysis of civilian killing in war (pp. 469–470). Accountability for Killing would have benefited from additional editing to shorten it and to fix a few errors, the most glaring of which are the mislabeled seventh and eighth chapters in the table of contents. Fortunately, these flaws are inconsequential to the substance of the book, which makes several contributions to the literatures on accountability and the changing nature of war. It challenges the common view that collateral damage is inevitable in war. It argues that the principle of double effect, when combined with an expansive interpretation of the principle of military necessity, has had the pernicious effect of excusing a lot of civilian killing. It contends that multiple individual and collective agents on a number of levels are accountable for collateral damage. It demonstrates that military organizations can and do adjust to changes in normative beliefs, including the idea that civilian protection matters in war. And it offers several feasible ideas to diminish foreseeable collateral damage. Neta Cawford’s book is methodologically simple, intellectually rich, meticulously researched, well written and persuasively argued. Reviewer: Taylor B. Seybolt © 2014 Associate Professor Graduate School of Public and International Affairs University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA [email protected]