Military Review English Edition September-October 2014 | Page 107

IRREGULAR WARFARE

Decision making under Walzer’s revisions to
the legalist paradigm. These kinds of cases for
intervention are consistent with the core principles
of The Responsibility to Protect as laid out by the
International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (2001)24. Depicted graphically, the scale
might look something like figure 2. The decision
point becomes less absolute. While intervention
may be morally justified and legal, national interests
will determine whether or not intervention may be
deemed prudent.
When a guerrilla war is considered just for reasons such as government tyranny, oppression, and
deliberate harm to citizens, and when considering
state-sponsored intervention in support of such a
revolt, even with Walzer’s revisions the moral decision point comes too late. I propose a sixth revision
that would establish a new decision point: Should
one nation find it morally just, legal, and prudent
(in that order) to intervene by coming to the aid of a
violent resistance movement or guerrilla war in another nation, intervention may tip the scales towards
that political community’s achievement of self-help
status, thereby earning its legitimate political community rights.
A temporal decision-making model under the
proposed sixth revision to the legalist paradigm.
Wars of self-determination, civil wars, and guerrilla
wars pose especially complex moral issues. From
Walzer’s point of view, guerrilla war might only be
considered justified if it passed a high threshold.
Walzer refers to this as a “continuum of increasing
difficulty.”25 Within this continuum, at some point

guerrillas may acquire war rights. Conversely, at a
later point, the government attempting to counter
them may ultimately lose its war rights. Moreover,
Walzer says that some of these endeavors will reach
a tipping point, specifically when they garner the
overwhelming majority of popular support and
achieve the condition of levée en masse, or mass
mobilization.26 He asserts that when guerrilla war
achieves that degree of backing, an antiguerrilla war
can no longer be won; therefore, waging war against
the guerrillas can no longer be morally justified.27
Logically, Walzer’s tipping point appears synonymous with an insurgency or gue rrilla war passing
the self-help test. When insurgencies, resistance
movements, and guerrilla activities emerge in
response to government oppression and deliberate
harm of its subjects, an outside state-sponsored
intervention in support of these activities enables Walzer’s tipping point to be reached earlier.
Therefore, should U.S. policy makers believe an
intervention on behalf of an internal community
waging war against a tyrant is morally just and in
the U.S. national interest, deciding when to intervene may differ from deciding to intervene under
Walzer’s first four revisions, primarily due to the
requirements of the self-help test.
The proposed sixth revision accounts for the gap.
Moreover, it seems consonant with Walzer’s “continuum of increasing difficulty.” The sixth revision also
provides a moral basis for responding to an internal community’s suffering due to “deliberate state
action” when there is not a “large scale loss of life” to
trigger “the just cause threshold” described in The

Figure 2.
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