Collateral Damage

In his The Just War Revisited (Current Issues in Theology) , Oliver O’Donovan distinguishes between collateral damage and indiscrimination (a violation of just war criteria) by pointing to the intention. How can intention be determined? He offers this analysis: “One can test the intention to harm non-combatants by putting a simple hypothetical question: if it were to chance that by some unexpected intervention of Providence the predicted harm to non-combatants did not ensue, would the point of the attack have been frustrated? If on 6 August 1945 all the citizens of Hiroshima, frightened by a rumor of what was to occur, had fled the city, would the attack have lost its point? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then there was an intention to harm them, and their deaths were not collateral . . . . The truly collateral damage in war is that which, if it could have been avoided, would have left the intended attack on a combatant object uncompromised. That is what is mean by calling it a ‘side effect.’”

On this analysis, a scorched-earth campaign is legitimate since “burning of a crop does nothing to harm productivity, and may even improve it.” Thus burning a crop interrupts the supplies for an opposing army but does not permanently disable the economic basis of the society. On the other hand, “Poisoning the land or its water-supplies . . . was categorically prohibited; for that would attack the very possibility of future cultural life in the region.”

Vinoth Ramachandra ( Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping Our World ) finds the distinction compelling, but chides O’Donovan for limiting his examples to “nongovernmental military (or military-style) organizations.” He suggests that the same distinction needs to be applied to what the Allies called “strategic airwar” during WW II.

Citing Robert McNamara, Ramachandra notes that the Allies “sought to maximize Japanese civilian casualties at minimal cost. Having little in the way of air defenses, Japanese cities provided soft targets to U.S. bombers. Four months before the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of Tokyo was razed to the ground in a hellish firestorm generated by sustained American bombing. More than one hundred thousand people lost their lives. Tokyo was selected as a target precisely because it was very densely populated and made mostly of wood.” The policy has continued to the present: “Operation Shock and Awe . . . was intended to frighten the Iraqi population into turning against Saddam Hussein and supporting the invading ground troops.” The missiles and bombs that rained on Iraq in one week or injured thousands of civilians just as innocent as those who died in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, or in London on the July 7, 2005.”

He offers this hypothetical: “Supposing, on July 7, 2005, instead of the four bombs that went off in buses and the London underground, which killed fifty-two civilians, an airplane had flown over the city and dropped bombs that killed the same number of people. Would it be morally less intolerable if the perpetrators argued that the intention was to attack police stations and key logistical centers, and that the civilians who died were simply ‘collateral damage’?” O’Donovan’s distinction applies here, I think: Since the strategic aim would have been achieved even without civilians killed, their deaths would have been a “side effect” of an act that intended something else. But the more important point is that traditional just war criteria place strict limits on what might be attempted by aerial bombing. No matter how smart the bomb, it’s almost unimaginable that cities could be bombed without killed innocents. Just war theory implies that, for that very reason, cities ought not be bombed.

But, as Ramachandra notes, this isn’t the issue with most of the city-bombing of the past century. Killing civilians and destroying cities was not an accidental by-product of another strategic aim. It was the strategic aim.