Panel Discusses Response to U.S. Attacks

Three Harvard professors spoke of the need to reconcile the interests and rights of the international community with U.S. foreign policy at a panel discussion on the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks yesterday night.

The panel members, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign and Comparative Law at the Law School, Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center of Human Rights Policy and a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, and Bryan Hehir, chair of the Executive Committee of the Divinity School, spoke to a group of about 40 in the Strauss common room.

The discussion was a part of the Woodbridge Speaker series.

Slaughter led off the discussion by looking at the international laws governing responses to terrorism.

She said that international law has never dealt with the issue of attacking a country for an individual’s actions—what the U.S. is currently doing in Afghanistan.

“It’s terrorism on such a scale and in which the suspected perpetrators had declared war on the United States,” she said.

Although the United States is using Article 51 of the United Nations’ charter, which says that states have the right of self-defense, to justify its attacks on Afghanistan, Slaughter said Article 39 implies that the U.N. Security Council must approve the use of force.

Currently, a Security Council resolution has asked member nations to participate in the United States’ non-violent actions against the terrorists, such as freezing assets, but has not specifically endorsed the bombings, she said.

“What’s really going on is that neither [the U.S. nor the U.N.] wants a showdown,” she said.

Slaughter also considered the question of punishing suspected terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. She suggested the formation of an international tribunal including both American and Islamic jurists to try the terrorists, a move she said would help ensure the international legitimacy of any court decisions.

Ignatieff, who spoke after Slaughter, cautioned that U.S. officials should remember past foreign policy mistakes in which the government’s support of corrupt regimes like the Taliban had come back to haunt it.

“We can’t keep repeating the stupidity of putting national interest considerations in one box and human rights considerations in another box,” he said.

Both Ignatieff and Hehir spoke of the need to reevaluate government procedures to avoid civilian casualties.

Ignatieff said traditional rules of warfare may not be sufficient to guide U.S. actions in covert operations.

“We’re going into a new moral landscape of warfare,” he said.

Hehir said he believed the terrorism presented a just cause for war as long as the United States limited itself to targeting only the guilty.

“The question is to remember the civilian society that is neither the state nor the terrorists,” he said. “In Afghanistan, it’s the refugees.”

Asked what number of accidental civilian casualties would be acceptable, he said there was no “magic number” but that one should use a “sense of moral judgment.”

“It may be there are targets you have to forgo because it’s highly likely you will kill civilians,” Hehir said.

The panel concluded the discussion by looking at what U.S. responsibilities would be in the aftermath of war with Afghanistan, a consideration which Ignatieff said most American citizens had not yet faced.

“We have an obligation to rebuild, to create a governing structure, and I don’t think that can be discharged unless you have a temporary U.N. administration,” he said.

Hehir said the job might be harder than it looks.

“The moral mandate is there, but I do not want to entrust the world to American knowledge of Afhani politics,” he said.