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Terrorism, Regime Change, and Just War: Reflections
on Michael Walzer
Jean Bethke Elshtain a
a
University of Chicago, USA

Online Publication Date: 01 January 2007

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Just War: Reflections on Michael Walzer', Journal of Military Ethics, 6:2, 131 - 137
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Vol. 6, No. 2, 131
137, 2007

Terrorism, Regime Change, and Just

War: Reflections on Michael Walzer
JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN
University of Chicago, USA

ABSTRACT This article explores the ethics of terrorism and its relation to the problem of regime
change. It begins by broadly endorsing Michael Walzer’s assessment of terrorism in Just and
Unjust Wars and, more recently, Arguing About War, arguing that because terrorism involves
the deliberate killing of noncombatants, it is not just morally problematic, but beyond the pale of
just war thinking. Indeed, in its very randomness, terrorism rejects the very idea of ethics and
violates all codes, laws, and traditions that attempt to limit violent conduct. The final part of the
paper turns to the question of regime change and suggests that tyrannical regimes, like terrorists,
reject the very idea of ethical limits. The article ends by endorsing the ‘responsibility to protect’
and suggesting that criminal or rogue states ought to lose their sovereign rights to non-
intervention.

Terrorism, like just war, is a protean subject. There are many branches, many
tributaries
depending on which metaphors you prefer
and yet there is a
solid core to our understanding of each. Further, an analyst cannot claim to
be working within the just war tradition if he or she abandons certain norms
or standards, e.g., noncombatant immunity, that terrorism by definition
repudiates. It follows that one cannot confront the horrors of terrorism head-
on if one repudiates the more or less agreed upon definition of terrorism as
the killing of innocents
noncombatants
for a political, or allegedly
political, goal. Once one lays down these ‘givens,’ all sorts of caveats pop-up,
of course. How does one think about unintended civilian casualties? Or
whether or not combatants can be victims of a terrorist attack even though
they are not, at that point, in a combat role?
In Walzer’s classic treatment of the just war tradition, one that he ties
correctly to that form of moral argumentation known as casuistry, he takes
up terrorism briefly. In 1977, when Just and Unjust Wars first appeared,
terrorism was not Walzer’s primary concern. But terrorism, together with
regime change and humanitarian intervention, have moved to center stage in
his more recent articles and interpretations, including his published collection
of essays, Arguing About War. I will begin by offering reflections on Walzer’s
original discussion in Just and Unjust Wars before going on to take account

Correspondence Address: Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago, USA. E-mail: jbelshta@uchicago.edu

1502-7570 Print/1502-7589 Online/07/020131
7 # 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/15027570701430885
 132 J. B. Elshtain
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of his more recent writing. I am by no means ‘deconstructing’ Walzer
our

views are too close together for that, and I am not a huge fan of
deconstruction in any case, unless the analyst has first treated the ‘construc-
tion’ seriously and understood it; rather, what follows should be placed within
a framework of dialogue of the sort Walzer assumes and himself exemplifies.

Terrorism in Just and Unjust Wars

Walzer’s discussion of terrorism in his by-now classic work was not the
section of that work that spurred the most controversy. I suspect that his use
of the notion of ‘supreme emergency’ in the context of justifying strategic
bombing on the part of the Allies against German cities in World War II
engendered much critical commentary
that and what he had to say about
preventive and preemptive war. Terrorism, as I have already indicated, wasn’t
on the front burner. The sort of terrorist activity that was going on in the late
1970s was as odd mix. As one looks back on it, one sees, first, the beginnings
of what became a standard feature in the repertoire of extremist activists
associated with various Middle Eastern controversies, most particularly
between Israel and the Palestinians, and as a staple of anti-colonial wars.
Second, we recall attacks undertaken by extremist (and frequently bizarre)
urban terrorist cells in Germany and Italy: here I think of the ‘Red Brigade’
and their ilk. These left-wing groups spun off the radical student activism of
the era and, sadly, often received ideological support from non-terrorist
activists. Because such violent activists were, or claimed to be, ‘left wing,’ they
garnered sympathy in some quarters that would never hold were identical
actions carried out by right-wing groups.
Walzer will have none of the justifications for terrorist violence, including
open support for it on the part of left-wing intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre
who, in his notorious introduction to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the
Earth, called openly for the murder of Europeans, children not exempted, in
the context of the Algerian anti-colonial war. Somehow the slaughter of a
European destroyed both ends of the ‘master
slave’ continuum. For this,
Sartre garnered plaudits; for criticizing this sort of armchair viciousness,
Albert Camus was ostracized and isolated in French intellectual life. It is all
rather sickening in hindsight. Walzer sides with Camus, with the side of
decency and appropriate restraint
even in the context of a justified struggle
against colonial oppression. If freedom means killing without limits, it is the
sort of freedom neither Camus, nor Walzer, nor, I submit, any minimally
decent person will want to sign on with; indeed, Walzer concludes his
discussion of Sartre strongly, using the language of obedience to the ‘moral
law’ rather than mounting overheated justifications for mass murder.
Overall, Walzer accepts the received definition of terrorism as the killing of
innocents in a manner that aims to unleash and spread fear. He calls this
killing ‘random,’ by which he means the terrorist is indifferent as to who
might be in the café or the theater or the market at any given point in time
when his bomb goes off. For Walzer (2006: 198), the ‘increasing use of terror
by far left and ultranationalist movements represents the breakdown of a
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political code first worked out in the second half of the nineteenth century
and roughly analogous to the laws of war worked out at the same time.’
Revolutionaries need not go down the terrorist path, he argues, offering as
exemplary Camus’ famous discussion of limits in revolution in his play, The
Just Assassins, noting that Camus writes of the limits that must pertain even
in destruction. Minimally, this requires distinguishing between those who can
‘justly’ become targets and those who cannot.
These are precisely the sort of ‘niceties’ that revolutionary terrorists then
and Islamist terrorists now cannot and do not accept. Osama bin Laden, for
example, has made it clear in fatwa after fatwa that all infidels
Americans,
Jews, the wrong sorts of Muslims
are targets, including children; moreover,
these infidels can be killed wherever and whenever you find them. This is the
sort of ‘collective identity’ targeting Walzer singles out for criticism, as people
are killed not for anything they have done but ‘indiscriminately, because of
who they are’ (Walzer 2006: 200).
Much has changed in the last thirty years
since Walzer’s book first
appeared
but his definition of terrorism has, if anything, been reinforced by
the terrorism that now disturbs the sleep of the world, coming not from left-
wing revolutionaries (although there are some on the left who are misguidedly
sympathetic, claiming that Islamist terrorists are ‘anti-imperial’) but from the
company of those who wish to establish repressive theocratic regimes, destroy
religious freedom, destroy human rights, destroy any notion of an interna-
tional civil society that makes available the ‘space’ within which a whole range
of sub-state entities may interact peacefully within the bodies of states.
Indeed, they would wipe out the state system itself
as a kind of penultimate
goal
with the full restoration of a triumphant caliphate that spurns state
boundaries as the ultimate earthly aim. These are not recognizable political
goals in the usual sense. They permit no bargaining, no negotiation, no
compromise.
This leads us to another distinction that should be put on the table, namely,
that between terrorist entities of an apocalyptic sort and those ‘movements’
that may deploy terrorism strategically but do have concrete political aims in
mind. That is, terrorism is but one part of their overall repertoire of activities

a contemptible part, to be sure, but nonetheless recognizable as part of a
political project that, on its own terms, isn’t wildly utopian or incoherent. The
IRA might be considered an example of this dynamic.
Walzer sets out his initial views on terrorism, then, with definitional clarity:
terrorism is the ‘deliberate violation’ of ordinary political codes and just war
norms, for ‘ordinary citizens are killed and no defense is offered
none could
be offered
in terms of their individual activities.’ The ‘message’ being sent is
a brutal one, ‘directed against entire peoples or classes,’ namely, that the
‘population under attack’ is subject to ‘tyrannical repression, removal, or
mass murder’ (Walzer 2006: 203). This seems to me exactly right. So, to
summarize thus far: in his original discussion of terrorism, truncated as it was
by comparison to other portions of his classic work, Walzer offers a definition
of terrorism he has elaborated further in later works but has not changed. It is
possible that if I knew in greater detail and specificity the historic backdrops
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and contexts of Walzer’s illustrative material in the discussion of terrorism, I

might
at least hypothetically
cavil with this or that presentation of facts
and the conclusions he draws from them. I am in no position to do that so,
suffice to say, the definition of terrorism Walzer proffered in 1977 is
compelling as is his articulation of the many ways in which terrorism flies
in the face of just war thinking.

Terrorism and Just War, II

Terrorists are those who kill unarmed people they consider their ‘objective
enemies,’ no matter what these people may or may not have done. According
to the logic of terrorism, ‘enemies’ are a despised group or collective. It
suffices for them to be Jews, or ‘bourgeois deviationists,’ or ‘infidels.’ The
purpose of terrorism is to sow terror, to subject its victims to paralyzing fear.
In a recent collection of essays, Walzer develops this theme further:
In a sense, indeed, terrorism is worse than rape or murder commonly are, for in the latter
cases the victim has been chosen for a purpose; he or she is the direct object of attack,
and the attack has some reason, however twisted or ugly it may be. The victims of a
terrorist attack are third parties, innocent bystanders: there is no special reason for
attacking them: anyone else within a large class of (unrelated) people will do as well. The
attack is directed indiscriminately against the entire class. Terrorists are like killers on a
rampage, except that their rampage is not just expressive or rage or madness; the rage is
purposeful and programmatic. It aims at a general vulnerability: Kill these people in
order to justify those . . . This, then, is the peculiar evil of terrorism
not only the killing
of innocent people but also the intrusion of fear into everyday life. (2004: 51)

This, of course, underscores Walzer’s earlier formulation, but his language

has become harder hitting and more detailed. One helpful avenue for further
critical evaluation of Walzer’s assertion
a correct one
that you simply
cannot square just war teaching and terrorism, would be to take up his
understanding of the ‘moral equality’ of the battlefield. The enemy soldier is
regarded as blameless as an individual. Soldiers recognize one another as
‘poor sods’ caught in a conflict they themselves did not bring on. He
continues: ‘They can try to kill me, and I can try to kill them. But it is wrong
to cut the throats of their wounded or to shoot them down when they are
trying to surrender’ (2006: 36). He goes on in this vein. The reader, surely,
takes the point. Soldiers qua soldiers do not as a matter of course radically
devalue one another as human beings, and there are rights and obligations
attached to their role. We are rightly horrified, therefore, when unarmed
prisoners of war, as one possible example, are massacred: this violates
centuries of ethical reflection on war fighting.
War, then, is a political situation, a legal condition, and a moral context.
Now, how does this illumine why terrorism is so objectionable? Consider just
how difficult it is to figure out how to recognize a combatant in struggles
against terrorism. Terrorists do not identify themselves with uniforms or
other standard insignia. They fight by not doing that so they can blend in
with the general population and commit their heinous deeds by stealth. They
do not care how many civilians from ‘their own side’ die
in fact, the more
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the better, as they can then denounce those fighting them as murderers of
civilians. One thinks here of Saddam Hussein’s use of noncombatants as
shields put in harm’s way so that the UN coalition in the Persian Gulf War
were put in the position of standing down from attacking a legitimate military
target or, alternatively, harming noncombatants in order to get at that target.
Terrorists delight in blurring the combatant and noncombatant distinction.
By developing a discussion within the framework of Walzer’s ‘moral equality’
of the battlefield, one could strengthen even further the ethical condemnation
of terrorism that lies at the heart of Walzer’s work. We need to explain in the
most powerful ways that we are horrified at the throat-slitting and beheading
of unarmed soldiers or noncombatants, and how this violates every norm of
decency and signals that terrorists have put themselves outside the protection
and restraints of the law. And yet Walzer insists that they may put themselves
there but we cannot. We may deny them the ‘moral equality’ of the soldier
translated into legal norms, but we cannot negate their humanness and the
rights and obligations that flow from that simple but profound fact.
Through it all, one must insist that what terrorist justifiers offer is not an
alternative moral framework but, rather, an abandonment of all moral
reasoning that turns, among other things, on setting forth the legitimate and
illegitimate use of force. Terrorism represents the abandonment of a moral
point of view. There may be a rigid and horrifying moralism at work, to be
sure, but it is of a sort that has taken leave of all of the restraints identified
over millennia as central to ethical thinking. One of Walzer’s signal
contributions was his demonstration of the many ways the codes of soldiers
and laws of war intersect with the just war tradition and, indeed, have served
to mutually constitute one another. Terrorism violates all such codes, laws,
and traditions.

Walzer on Regime Change and Just War

Walzer begins his discussion of regime change, in the preface to the fourth
edition, by noting the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The
war against Nazism in the West and Japanese militarism in the East
culminated in regime change and democratization. At first blush, these
examples would seem to suggest that regime change may be a legitimate war
aim in a justified war. But this isn’t the tack that Walzer takes. Can regime
change be a just cause of war? No, Walzer insists, regime change may be a
consequence of war but cannot serve as one of its justifications. I differ
somewhat from the direction he moves here. No, regime change cannot in and
of itself as an abstract proposition
as a hypothetical case, say
serve as a
casus belli. But
and it is a rather major ‘but’
in a given case and in light of
other factors and additional information, regime change may well be one
central feature of the deployment of justifiable force.
It is true that regime change was not a stipulated goal at the outset of
World War II. As the war went forward, regime change came into focus as a
compelling and legitimate war aim. (Even as bringing an end to chattel
slavery gained momentum as a war aim during the American Civil War,
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although it wasn’t the stipulated casus belli at the outset.) It would be odd for
someone to claim that ‘just cause’ in World War II was besmirched because
regime change wasn’t articulated from the get-go as a sine qua non for the use
of force. The fact that regime change is not articulated as overriding at the
outset may not be surprising and does not invalidate an otherwise strong case.
Whatever one thinks of regime change in Iraq, the argument that the use of
force in such matters is illegitimate
or highly questionable
should regime
change be articulated as a war aim, doesn’t strike me as quite right. It was,
after all, under President Clinton and then Secretary of State, Madeleine
Albright, that regime change in Iraq was articulated explicitly as a legitimate
goal of US foreign policy.
So can this ever be squared with just war thinking? Here, I dissent
somewhat from Walzer’s insistence that, in the classical formulations of just
war, aggression is regarded as ‘the criminal policy of a government, not as the
policy of a criminal government.’ This gets very tricky, very fast. It may not
be a rule, but there is a very strong probability, as history teaches us, that a
criminal regime
whether fascist, communist, or Baathist
will engage in
criminal policies externally and internally. It is the nature of the beast. Such
regimes ‘bear watching.’ This invites us to ask what criteria are deployed to
determine whether the internal abuses of a regime are of an egregious,
systematic, and continuing sort that may
at least this is worth entertaining

trigger intervention if other factors are present.1 If, Walzer continues, an
authoritarian regime isn’t mass murdering people at a given moment, outside
powers cannot legitimately attack.
This segues into a problem of the moment, namely, humanitarian
intervention, as we now call it. For Walzer, humanitarian intervention may
be triggered by ‘murderousness,’ not simply or only ‘aggression.’ The reason
for an intervention is to stop the killing. Replacing a government may be a
byproduct. This means that an ‘authoritarian regime that is capable of mass
murder but not engaged in mass murder is not liable to military attack and
political reconstruction’ (Walzer 2006: x). But suppose an outside state or
group of states has strong evidence that the regime in question is preparing
for mass murder. By the time that state or group of states gears itself up to do
something, the murdering may have stopped. Must one then demur? Given
that one aim of the classic just war tradition was ‘just punishment’ for
massive acts of aggression, the answer seems to me to be ‘not necessarily.’
I say this not only with reference to what I am calling the classical tradition
but also in light of the international norms called RTP
‘responsibility to
protect.’ Whose responsibility is it? RTP derives from a report issued under
the auspices of the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty that declares that a UN member state or group of states may
be justified in intervening in the internal affairs of a criminal or rogue state
engaged in systematic and egregious crimes against its own people or an
identifiable portion of its people. For some of us, RTP was important in
evaluating Iraq under Saddam, and the use of force.
Walzer is, of course, correct that there has to be a trigger for humanitarian
intervention and some important discriminations must be made. I have long
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understood his position as one of minimalist universalism. For example, a

state or group of states may have just cause to deploy force to stop genocide,
but the same cannot be said for certain horrible customs
like genital sexual
mutilation
that violate contemporary human rights norms. Such disturbing
customs and their modification are best left in the hands of a given country
which finds itself under growing pressure from international human rights
groups from the outside and dissenting groups from the inside. There is, of
course, no bright line here. Each case must be evaluated along the entire menu
of just war considerations.
Let’s suppose that a state has engaged in genocidal activity in the past; that
its leaders have not foresworn such activity; and that the regime in question
has perpetrated other forms of culpable mass killing. A case can surely be
made that a regime’s political culture, its documented past brutalities that
have not been renounced, and its possession of the means to inflict massive
harm on others, even if, at that moment, such activities are not going on
en masse, makes it culpable under just war and humanitarian law.
In the earliest formulations of the just war tradition
I think here of St.
Augustine
preventing certain harm to the innocent, even though they may
not be your innocent, might be an occasion for the justifiable use of force.
This connects early just war thinking to contemporary discussion of
humanitarian intervention and RTP. It remains the case, as it should
I
agree with Walzer on this
that a heavy burden of proof rests on those who
would undertake regime change to forestall probable future harms of an
egregious nature. This should never be an easy case to make. Can it be made
within just war thinking? I think it can.
The hard truth we bump up against is that, in the world as we know it,
many ‘alternatives’ to the use of force cannot be implemented until there is
sufficient surcease from terror and danger that ‘soft power’ can gain a
foothold. I do not share Walzer’s overall hopefulness about the power of
‘indirection’ where criminal regimes are concerned. But I join hands with him
in a commitment to minimal justice for beleaguered peoples, tormented by
the brutal, that we too readily ignore or forget if our own immediate wellbeing
seems not to be at stake. There are times, and this is a tragic recognition, that
justice cannot be served absent of the use of coercive force. This, indeed, is
something Michael Walzer has taught us.

Note
1
I should note that I here borrow from an exchange between Walzer and myself that appeared in Dissent
(Summer, 2006, pp. 109
111.)

References
Walzer, M. (1977) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic
Books).
Walzer, M. (2004) Arguing About War (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Walzer, M. (2006) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations fourth edition.
(New York: Basic Books).