3. Military Perspectives and Costs: War, Occupation, and Intervention

Scott SaganI was pleased to hear mention of the work of two of my former students, Jake Shapiro and Joseph Felter. Joe now is the deputy assistant secretary of defense; he was drafted into that position by Jim Mattis. And Jake is now a tenured professor at Princeton. What they studied, both in a book project and then in a chapter in a volume of Daedalus that I edited, was the idea of courageous restraint. Courageous restraint was the idea of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who said that we are killing too many civilians in Afghanistan. And that is understandable, because a soldier comes under duress. Soldiers are facing fire from somewhere, and they will call in air support as quickly as possible. Or they will call for an artillery barrage. And yet, ultimately, if we are killing a lot of civilians, we are going to lose this war. So he hired a young Stanford PhD, Joe Felter, to study what could happen if you reduce collateral damage. He had this idea that we could actually incentivize soldiers to take some personal risk in order to avoid killing civilians. This was a very controversial decision. He actually gave, not medals, but little certificates to soldiers if they personally took risks. Because the Geneva Convention, in article 57 of the Additional Protocol, calls for taking all feasible precautions to avoid civilian death as collateral damage. We have been mostly talking about cultural heritage damage as a deliberate act by people, but it is also often collateral damage. How can we discourage people from engaging in acts that cause damage, say, if there is a sniper in a mosque? This idea of courageous restraint could do so. What was so brilliant about the article cited in our paper was the argument that you should limit civilian casualties not just because it is the right thing to do ethically, not just because it is the law, but because it will help you win.

I want to report very quickly on a study that Ben Valentino at Dartmouth and I did that tried to get at the question, would the public support U.S. troops taking risks to avoid killing foreign civilians? We had a representative sample of the American public read a story that argues that the United States has a very strong incentive to attack a chemical storage site in an Afghan village and could use Special Forces to go door to door until they found out exactly where it is. In this experiment there will be no Afghan civilian fatalities, but there will be five American soldiers estimated to be killed. The alternative is to have an artillery strike that will not kill any Americans but will kill two hundred Afghans. And then we polled a representative sample of the public on what they would prefer.

We varied the number of Americans killed to find out if people would support a Special Forces operation if 5, 50, or 200, or even more American lives were lost to save that number of civilian lives. Here are the results. What was interesting in this finding, which was published in International Studies Quarterly last year, what we called the “due care” experiment after one of the references to the principle of precaution, is that just half, just over 50 percent, of Americans said that they would be willing to risk 5 lives in order to avoid killing 200 Afghan civilians. They would be willing to protect civilians but only at limited cost to Americans. When asked, “Was this ethical?,” a significant number of people said, “Well, I would do it, but I don’t think it’s really ethical.” So they had a sense that it was wrong to kill 200 people to save 5 Americans, but they would be willing to do it anyway. Could you do this kind of experiment with a sniper-in-a-mosque scenario and have people try to figure out if it is worth risking troops to avoid killing and destroying cultural heritage? I think you could. I do not know what the answer would be, and I do not know if it would be different in different countries. But what I do believe is that you could change the conversation to saying, “You’re taking this risk to produce a better peace when this is all over, because cultural heritage is really important after wars, not just before wars or during wars.” If so, you would get a positive response.

Helen FroweI am a philosopher, and I specialize in the ethics of self-defense and harming. At the moment, Derek [Matravers] and I are running a project called Heritage in War, which is funded by the British government. One of the central goals of the project is to try to understand how the value of cultural heritage compares to the other values that are at stake in war. In particular, we are interested in how the harm to the heritage should be weighed against harms to life and limb. Unless we can weigh these harms, it seems like we cannot really have any principled way of resolving conflicts between them. And in our view, these kinds of conflicts between heritage and people are common.

It is quite common in the heritage field for people to deny that you can have these kinds of conflicts between people and heritage and also to deny that you can compare these kinds of values. For example, Tom Weiss and Nina Connelly write in their Occasional Paper, “People and culture are inseparable. There is no need for a hierarchy of protection because the choice between the two is false, just as the choice between people and the natural environment is false. Air, water, and culture are essential for life.” This is a quote from the website of the U.K. Committee of the Blue Shield: “The Hague Convention does not place cultural property above people, as it exists within a wider framework of laws designed to protect civilians and their property in a conflict situation.” This is from Irina Bokova: “There is no need to choose between saving lives and preserving cultural heritage. The two are inseparable.” And this is a quote we had in our funding application for the project, from an anonymous reviewer: “These research issues have not been addressed within just war theories in part because weighing the value of human life against cultural property is not deemed an appropriate question within this area of research. The suggested comparison of the value of cultural property with the value of human life as something to be investigated strikes me as deeply problematic.” So this should have given us some warning about what we were in for.

Here are some conflicts that seem to challenge the inseparability thesis. If we just start with the Hague Convention, it requires combatants to refrain from any use of cultural property or its immediate surroundings in support of military action. Now, insofar as combatants would have otherwise used a site, presumably they would have done so because it afforded them some kind of military advantage. So to prohibit their use of the site and tell them to use another site that otherwise they would not have chosen is to require combatants to operate at increased risk to themselves for the sake of heritage. The Hague Convention, for example, demands that combatants do, that they take on risks—that is, risks to their lives—for the sake of protecting heritage. Article 12 also implies that combatants can be required to impose greater risks on civilians in order to avoid damaging heritage. So again, even if making use of a cultural site would, for example, draw fire away from a civilian population, it requires that they not use the site. The alternative imposes comparatively increased risks on civilians. So the question here is not whether we think it is permissible to ask combatants to do these things. This is just a conceptual point about the fact that protecting heritage can come at the cost of increased risk to people. It is a separate question from what we ought to do. It simply shows that it is not the case that protecting heritage cannot conflict with protecting people.

Finally, an obvious way in which we have a conflict between people and heritage is, as Tom and Nina propose in their paper, if we deployed combatants in order to protect heritage. This would clearly be a case of imposing risks on our combatants or asking them to incur risks in order to defend heritage. And yet Tom and Nina say that attempting to establish a hierarchy for protecting people and heritage is counterproductive. What I want to suggest, actually, is that it is essential.

I want to look a bit more closely at this proposal that Tom and Nina have made—that we ought to consider having heritage as a just cause for force. And this is the view that they develop in the paper for the Getty series, in which they suggest that we need to develop a framework that parallels the R2P doctrine. They explicitly say that this includes the use of military force to defend heritage. This is heritage for its own sake. This is not a claim that you can only use force in order, say, to prevent genocide, that you should intervene to defend heritage when it will prevent genocide or other very serious harms to people. It is a claim that is distinctive, namely that it is permissible to use force to defend heritage for itself.

Military intervention typically involves imposing serious harms or serious risks of harm such as death. And so the question that is really before us, if we are going to take this kind of proposal seriously, is whether it is permissible to kill or impose high risks of killing people for the sake of defending heritage. Now, Tom and Nina think that we can answer this question without needing to compare harms to humans with harms to heritage. Heritage and people are the same thing. Heritage and people are inseparable. Heritage or people is a false dichotomy. One implication of this is that whatever is justified to defend people’s lives is, therefore, justified to defend heritage because they are the same thing.

This is clearly a mistaken way of reasoning. The fact that defending heritage sometimes protects life, and that we can use lethal force in those cases, does not mean that heritage itself warrants lethal defense. Nor, I think, does it mean that defending heritage always saves lives.

The proposal that we might use force to defend heritage requires showing that defending heritage is sometimes more important than not killing people. That is just what the proposal is. So I do not see how you could show this without having some kind of ranking of harms to humans and harms to heritage. I just want to sketch very briefly here a kind of very basic case you would need to make in order to justify the use of military force. You need to show specifically that it is permissible to intentionally harm somebody to prevent them from damaging heritage. We need to show that it is permissible to foreseeably harm somebody as a side effect of preventing damage to heritage. Essentially, what you need to show is that the intentional harms that you would impose during the intervention would be permissible but also that your collateral damage is permissible as well, because it is pretty much impossible to wage a military campaign without risking collateral damage to civilians.

Now, supporting either of these claims requires an account of how to compare harms to people to damage to heritage. And this is just for the straightforward reason that force is only ever permissible if it is proportionate. This is the standard constraint on the use of force. It must be necessary and proportionate. And proportionality just is a comparison of the harms at stake. Now, proportionality, in turn, demands that we have some way, therefore, of assessing the value of heritage sites, because we need to know what is going into the calculation that we then weigh against the other goods that are at stake.

So unless you can show, by way of comparing harms, that protecting heritage warrants both killing wrongdoers—people who are targeting heritage—and imposing significant risks of killing bystanders, I do not see how one could support the permissibility of forcefully intervening for the sake of heritage.

Benjamin Isakhan I have been doing a pilot study, the very first, I think, of this precise problem. How do the people in these conflict contexts view what is going on? I am going to present some very preliminary observations that come out of this set of data. We have done fifty in-depth, semistructured interviews. They represent a broad geographic spread from across both Iraq and Syria and, of course, different ethnic and religious groups, as well as gender. We strived for gender balance, but in the end we did not manage, so far at least in the interviews, to get complete balance; but we have some representation of both genders. So, obviously, with these kinds of qualitative interviews, we have gotten an enormous amount of data that I simply do not have time to go into. Much of the data deal with their experiences of the Islamic State, of having been eyewitnesses to moments of heritage destruction, their own very personal stories of trauma, their memories, and so on. But what I want to focus on is the small portion that comes out of that data set in which they talk about how they perceive what the international community ought to do in response to this heritage destruction.

So let me run through a handful of quotes. Again, I have just plucked them out of a very, very broad data set.

The international community just shouldn’t get involved in our heritage. We don’t want you here. Iraqis can do it. We have the money, we have the knowledge, we have the experience. We don’t need any help. We don’t want anyone reconstructing anything.

The international community didn’t do anything for people or for heritage.

The international community, unfortunately, failed in really fulfilling its responsibility toward the whole of humanity and history. The international community failed to safeguard the culture in Yemen, failed to preserve culture in Palmyra, failed in protecting the heritage in Afghanistan.

This will return really negative outcomes and impacts for the international society, because people who have lost everything have nothing to live for, and therefore, they are not going to work toward social cohesion into the future.

And I think that this is a very interesting quote:

So again, I think in engaging in the region, in terms of heritage protection, we have to be really cognizant, really sensitive, about where we are engaging, who we are engaging, and the fact that we are not perceived to be privileging heritage over human life, because that will only create resentment. And arguably, it might create more threats to the heritage sites because you have a population that resents things being rebuilt.

Another point that sometimes flies in the face of consensus in the West, which came out quite strongly, was that some people really wanted religious sites to be restored, their own local religious sites, over archaeological ruins. One person said, “I don’t think we can rebuild the archaeological sites like Hatra or Nimrud. Perhaps we can gather the pieces destroyed and build a museum at each site, telling the stories of these sites and the way they were destroyed. This can be done through cooperation between international organizations and the local communities.” But then this person goes on to say, “But all heritage sites of Yazidis and Christians, they should be rebuilt. They should be the focus. All mosques should be rebuilt. We need to build a society where each ethnic and religious community’s heritage sites and traditions are respected and embraced.” So people thought that that was much more important than the overwhelming emphasis on archaeology and ancient archaeological sites.

Another thing that came up was the politics of who pays for the reconstruction of heritage sites. This was a very sensitive issue. Specifically, people talked about the UAE and backing the UNESCO Revive the Spirit of Mosul project. So I refer to one quote that reflects on that:

So I think that is also very important when we are talking about the ethics of who funds reconstruction projects.

This brings us to the final quote that I want to discuss today. And that is the idea that for some people heritage just simply is not a priority and that they are very concerned about the global effort and the global concern and the global outrage over heritage when there are so many other priorities in their lives and in their own day-to-day existence.

I think it’s a strange idea to reconstruct places, for example the Mosque of al-Nuri and the minaret. Perhaps in a few years, when Mosul is being rebuilt and people have returned. But what about other cities? I’m from Kirkuk, and there is a huge need there. We have tensions with Kurds and Arabs, we have sectarian violence, we have people starving, we have ladies who have been raped, we have kids with no school. All they have seen is violence and terror. Children raised on death and destruction. They need help. Hospitals, schools, roads, psychology, jobs, food, water, electricity, education. We need hygiene and security and work. We don’t need an old minaret. It was useless anyway. Heritage is just not a priority for us.

Again, I just want to be clear that I am not putting all these ideas out there because I agree explicitly with all of them. But to have a meaningful impact in the region, we need to be really cognizant of the diversity of opinions, even when these opinions are very difficult, when they are divergent. Perhaps the only way that international efforts to protect and restore heritage can have a meaningful long-term impact in the region is if we engage with these different ideas, even when we do not like them. Failing to listen and to heed these opinions ultimately undermines the broader mission to foster stability and promote peace in the region.

Thomas G. Weiss Before I open the floor to what is going to be, I’m sure, a spirited discussion, I just want to pick up on a couple of things that I think link back to the project. We have all been talking about the local populations, so Ben is forcing us to try to figure out how to get our hands on that information. But from a macro point of view, I think we have spent perhaps too much time thinking about heritage sites, World Heritage Sites. And we clearly have in mind, also, cemeteries, churches, mosques, and so on, at a much more mundane level. It is not just the most famous sites. One of the reasons that one organizes such a meeting as this is to rethink some of the things that we have started with. And this session certainly does that for me. I think what is perhaps the most beneficial way to approach this topic is that both this morning and this afternoon, we are being asked to specify the difference between the inherent value of heritage, however you want to measure that, and the destruction of heritage as a trigger, a threshold, for something worse, the destruction of life. And so there have been lots of suggestions, which I think we will come back to tomorrow, about the intrinsic value to people as they move ahead and try to rebuild their lives. Paul [Wise] talked about resilience. If you are going to turn a page on a conflict, and you really care about the lives of the people there, there is a resilience factor. And this is essential. Scott [Sagan] mentioned the rather consequentialist notion that protecting heritage in Mali or elsewhere can be useful for militaries because, in fact, it helps them pursue their tactical aims. And we have not really mentioned it, except briefly this morning, Luis [Monreal], in terms of an investment down the line, after one moves beyond conflict, as a way to generate employment and income. So there are a whole series of things that need to have costs and benefits associated with them.

We also said this morning that the extrinsic value of heritage destruction is important, as this is the best indicator, always, of worse things to come. And that, too, I think we need to look at very closely. And the kind of number crunching you were pointing to this morning, Paul, as to our intuitive notion that virtually in all the contemporary conflicts this has been an integral part of what is going on in every conflict that we have mentioned here today. But we need to put some numbers on that as well.

Ismail Serageldin I want to say, first of all, I really appreciate your presentation. But it is inherent in something that we have always done in cost-benefit analysis. There is an enormous resistance—political, cultural, otherwise—to put a dollar value on human life. People don’t want to do it, although it exists in everything that we do, and we can calculate this. I can sit down and calculate it for you and tell you that you value this life at a million dollars, this one at $50,000, this one at $30,000. There is no consistency whatsoever. Legislation is undertaken without ever looking at the question of the dollar value that you are putting on a human life. For example, if you have an airplane and you say, “I can’t have the single system; I want a redundant system,” what if the redundant system fails? Do I put in place a third one? Well, why not a fourth one? Somewhere when you stop you can calculate the implicit cost by the probability functions of human life. And then you can compare it to other values as well, in cost-benefit calculations or value calculations. But there is a cultural resistance, a political resistance, for people to say, “I am going to assign a value.” So that is almost never discussed. But it does not mean that it is not right, just that it is not discussed. But there are alternative ways of doing these calculations. And tomorrow I will present some of that. Because we can calculate the intrinsic value of heritage to people, both locally and outside of the country and internationally. We have done that for the environment. And believe it or not, the methodology that we have done has stood up in American courts, even when it took a billion dollars from Exxon. And I can cite that as well.

Jennifer Welsh I want to make two sets of comments that I hope will be helpful for thinking about the project. One is on the use of military force for the protection of heritage, as one very specific thing that Helen [Frowe] spoke about. And the other is the notion of cultural heritage as part of peace building. So, on the first, the very specific point about whether this project would want to continue to speak so directly about the use of force for the protection of heritage, I think what was challenging about Helen’s presentation is that so much of the discussion about the use of force in this realm is about harm to civilians. And what Helen puts on the table is that we cannot think about cost solely in terms of civilian cost. We also have to think about the cost we are placing on combatants. That has been the big move in thinking about the ethics of war. But it was also part of the debate on humanitarian intervention. Could you ask soldiers to intervene for a humanitarian cause that was not a direct threat to the national security of their own state? I think by elevating this notion of whether we need to be thinking about the lives of combatants, it is a very challenging but important issue.

The other piece that comes out—and it is probably something that philosophers do not like, but it is something that political scientists have to live with—is that it is one thing to debate the rightness of whether or not you should do something; the second question is, who does it? If I think back to the evolution of the Responsibility to Protect as a debate, the initial stage was not so much about whether military force is legitimate. It was addressing the question of who would be the legitimate ones to use force. The debate that came out of at least two presentations is that who acts to protect cultural heritage is an absolutely critical question—the legitimacy of different actors. And philosophers, I think, would not necessarily accept that that affects the intrinsic quality of an action itself, but it does in the real world, in the political world. Maybe Helen and I would debate this, this question of who acts. It is seen as more legitimate if one actor does it versus another actor—a Western versus a non-Western actor—which I think is just a reality. It is something that has come through really strongly from the discussion this afternoon.

Moreover, increasingly as we go through the day, I think this question of protection of cultural heritage is also a forward way of thinking about what is required to sustain peace. This is super important. And I say that partly pragmatically, in that if we look at the direction of the United Nations system right now, the big theme that has wind behind it is “sustaining peace.” How is it, in a world that will have armed conflict, that will have destruction, that we can actually make peace more sustainable? And it has a prevention function. So how do you get societies ready to be more cohesive and resilient? But it is also a matter of afterward. And so increasingly, I am thinking that Paul [Wise]’s discussion this morning, but also things that have come out already this afternoon, the association with cultural heritage and peace building, is going to be positive. My bets are on that as a potentially promising frame.

FroweSo I was not suggesting that anyone was saying that we ought to intentionally kill civilians. My point was just, I think, the fairly uncontroversial point that you cannot wage military intervention using force without thereby increasing the risk of collateral harm to civilians. And as I also said, whatever you think we ought to do when there are these conflicts between civilians’ lives and heritage, that is a separate question. My point is simply that there can be these clashes. Jennifer, I think we disagree about what philosophers think about authority.

Welsh I was painting it in too purist a way, perhaps.

FroweI do think that there is a difference between what private actors and individuals can do for the sake of heritage and what states can do. So I think this comes down to a question. I actually think that states have more restrictive permissions in these cases. I think that individuals and private organizations have greater latitude with what they do with their resources, compared to states.

SaganI will just make one basic point, which is that it is important to consider very carefully how you think about the principle of proportionality in the context of heritage. I disagree with something that Helen said: “Well, proportionality is a way of different harms.” Because I think of proportionality as a measure of the benefit, the military advantage, of taking out a target compared to the negative quality of collateral damage. And that is what you’re trying to weigh, right? And it cannot be disproportionate. The collateral damage cannot be more than the military benefit. So when you are talking about, say, shooting a sniper in a mosque, in a minaret, then the question is, how important is that sniper? How much damage is that sniper going to do versus the collateral damage to the minaret? So that is one thing. But the second, if you are talking about the act of protecting it, then I think you have to say, “Well, the protection is a military advantage in itself.” And that is the interesting, novel way of thinking about this, which is that it is important to protect the minaret or mosque because of its contributions to postwar reconstruction or sustainability of peace afterward. And that is a different way of doing it. You still have to take into account if protecting it will create a lot of collateral damage. But that would be a different way of putting this goal in a different context, a different framework.

Mounir BouchenakiI was very much interested in the presentation of the philosopher Benjamin Isakhan about the comparison of the value between cultural heritage and human beings. My only fear is that in the middle of battle, when you are into the wars, I do not think people have the time to make proper evaluations and the right decisions. And this is how we see many of the crises in our life now, how many casualties were inflicted on the population and, at the same time, on the cultural heritage.

One example during the first Gulf War was a bombing of a telecommunications position near the Iraqi Museum. It had an effect on the museum because it stopped the entire air-conditioning system. Even we, as UNESCO, were not allowed to go to Iraq because it was embargoed and the UN in New York was telling us, “No. We receive only humanitarian missions.” When finally I insisted that I should go to Baghdad, in September 1998, I saw termites eating the walls of the museum, not only the objects. So my only fear is that, of course, we need to have proper education of the military—and we started doing it with the Americans before the U.S. ratified the 1954 Convention—because I think it is up to the military, who are engaged in what we can call classical war, not the terrorist attacks or the bombings, to know what the military obligations are and also what constitutes respect for the population and cultural heritage. This is my first point.

The second point is about the very interesting presentation by Benjamin Isakhan, because I was in Mosul last week. I spent the whole day in this martyrized city. I talked with local people. I entered the houses near the mosque, accompanied by both the Muslims and the Christians, as well as the head of the Christian community of Mosul. And then I spent two hours with Father Najeeb, who is now archbishop of the Mosul church. I think that we have to be careful about the so-called negative reactions and see also the positive ones. I know that Father Najeeb is having a very important influence in asking the international community to help Christians to return in their city. Not only with UNESCO, but he is in contact with the Vatican and with a number of churches. He saved thousands of manuscripts that were deposited in monasteries and the churches in Mosul.

And finally, I want to talk about a very positive experience we had in Cambodia. I was in Cambodia with the UN troops in 1992, when we were not able to enter the temples because they were full of mines. We were visiting the Angkor sites with Buddhist monks and with the local communities. The rehabilitation and restoration projects are now in their twenty-fifth year. We have an international coordination committee working in Cambodia, in Angkor Archaeological Park. I can say that thanks to this project, which is an international one with public and private entities like the World Monuments Fund, for example, the economy of the small village, Siem Reap, near Angkor now has about 150 hotels. And I saw how the well-being of the population is visible because of this project. They have no oil, they have no gas; they have only cultural heritage in this area of Cambodia. And the village now is becoming a town. Another difficulty we encounter is too much tourism, so we have to find a plan for diverting people, as the Louvre does in directing traffic around the Mona Lisa. All visitors want to go to Angkor Wat, and they ignore, more or less, all the other temples.

Isakhan Thank you for these comments. They are very useful. I did want to be deliberately provocative and to emphasize the side of the story that is not told, because overwhelmingly, when we talk about the international community, particularly in heritage sites, or the international community reconstructing sites out of conflict, it is purely the positive side of the story that is told. I think that we very rarely hear the other side of the story—that people are critical of these efforts, that people have concerns about these efforts, that people have other, very deep-seated problems and reservations about these efforts. I think that if these efforts are to be successful, we have to get better at listening to those criticisms, even when we do not like them, even when they are not the majority, even if we could statistically show that that is not the majority opinion. Because ultimately, rebuilding heritage sites, for example, or reconstructing places without broad consensus or without broad engagement from stakeholders only brings the opportunity for those sites to come under threat again, and it only brings the opportunity for local populations to come under threat again. That has happened before. It certainly happened in Mali, where sites are being targeted and populations are being targeted again in the wake of these things, in part because there is a resistance, a pushback, to some of this stuff. So I think we need to be open to these different things. And we need to recognize that there really are no data on this; we do have this kind of consensus that it is a good thing, and only always a good thing, if we go in and do this stuff. It is very rare—I do not think I have ever seen anything really credible—that we have actually gone in and done a heap of interviews and a heap of surveys about how people feel about and engage with their heritage, about how they feel about international engagement.