Introduction: The State of Ethics of War

Abstract

There has been a resurgence of interest in the ethics of war at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The obvious reason for this is that the September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon Building in Washington, D.C., were followed by the declaration of a “Global War on Terror (GWOT)” by the United States administration of President George W. Bush. The GWOT began with the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan where Al-Qaeda was based. Under the Bush Doctrine that was officially formulated in 2002,¹ the United States invaded Iraq, a country halfway around the globe that had not attacked America. In neither case were the leaders of the countries attacked directly responsible for the terrorist acts carried out by a non-state terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden and based in the remote mountains on the Afghan border with Pakistan. Critics of the GWOT have argued that the distraction of the Iraq occupation, and the resentment among Muslims who saw the war as an attack on Islam, had reinforced bin Laden’s claim to legitimacy as a defender of the Muslim world against Western aggression and afforded him time to regroup and plan further attacks on Western targets.²