Military Options: Three Ethical Dilemmas 3

By Lisa Beyer

If replying to Saddam with weapons of mass destruction is unacceptable, an alternative is the old-fashioned method of leveling great swaths of territory with non-nuclear bombs.

The allies are already carpet bombing the more than 100,000 Iraqi Republican Guards massed at the Kuwait-Iraq border. The hope is that if the Guards are hit hard enough, the whole Iraqi military will crumble. If not, it may become necessary to bomb Iraq's frontline troops as well in preparation for an allied ground assault. Whereas the Republican Guards are fiercely loyal to Saddam and have profited from his patronage, the soldiers holding down Kuwait are mainly conscripts, some of them as young as 17. According to defectors, many are anything but gung-ho to fight. War theorists make no distinction between a cynical professional soldier and an innocent, reluctant one. "Anyone in a uniform is a fair target," says Nicholas Fotion, a professor of military ethics at Emory University. But other analysts see a gray area. Says ethicist Robin Lovin, an associate professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School: "I'm not sure that carpet bombing conscripts is morally different from bombing civilians."

And what about retaliating for an Iraqi chemical or biological strike by going after civilians? There are circumstances that military theorists believe justify a breach of the hands-off rule on noncombatants. This would be a situation in which a country faces not just defeat but the destruction of its people, society or culture as, for instance, Britain did at the hands of the Nazis in the early 1940s. But the allied attacks on German cities such as Dresden toward the end of World War II are now widely considered unwarranted because it was clear by then that the allies would win. Likewise, some military ethicists today believe the nuclear strikes on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unjust.

For the U.S. and its Western allies, the stakes in the gulf will never approach what they were for Britain in World War II. And given the vast superiority and variety of weapons the allies have to fight Saddam, it is hard to imagine them finding themselves in a state of desperation. "I can't see any realistic way that Saddam could put us in a position where we would want to fight a dirty war," says Fotion. "Let him abuse prisoners, attack cities, use poison gas. We have plenty of ways to fight him and still hold the high moral ground." That is not only the most pious place to be, but it is also the best vantage point from which to begin to reorder the postwar world.

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame/Washington and Gavin Scott/Chicago