Saudi Arabia confirms ballistic missile attack on Riyadh by Yemen's Houthis
Missiles Over Riyadh and the Limits of Legitimate War
When rulers rain steel toward capitals and cities, the question is not who fires first, but who still remembers that power is held only on trust for the lives and estates of ordinary men.
A ballistic missile launched toward a capital city is a very plain sort of argument. When Yemen’s Houthi forces attempt to strike Riyadh, and then claim to have hit “sensitive sites” and oil facilities, they do not write a treatise; they publish their doctrine in fire over a great town. Saudi authorities answer that they intercepted these attacks, that civilian infrastructure in Yanbu and other places was also threatened, and that they in turn have sought to strike the rebel-held city of Sanaa. One Yemeni resident in Saudi Arabia is already reported dead, not by a direct blow, but by debris from an intercepted drone. So the circle closes: a war between powers, and a corpse that belongs to neither.
When I wrote in the Second Treatise that men are by nature free and equal, I meant that no one is born marked out as another’s prey. Political power is, at best, a remedy for the inconveniences of that natural state, not a warrant to disregard its law. That law of nature is reason, which forbids any man to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. From this it follows, first, that any claim to rule must show that it protects these things better than their absence; and secondly, that war, which is but the state of force without common judge, is justified only as a necessary defense of them, and always bound by the same limits.
I must therefore look at a missile launched at a capital, and drones and rockets sent toward ports and cities, under this rule. If such weapons are directed at civilians as civilians, or at the ordinary fabric by which they live, then they are not instruments of government at all, but of private revenge or dominion. They treat men, the workmanship of one Maker, as expendable means to a political end. This is to set oneself into a state of war with those very people, whether one styles oneself a government, a movement, or a resistance. The cause one pleads may be wrapped in the language of justice; the act, if it knowingly endangers multitudes who have given no particular offense, is mere usurpation against the law of nature.
But the same measure binds their adversaries. Saudi authorities say they have attempted to hit targets in Sanaa, and are accused by their enemies of having carried out hundreds of airstrikes across Yemen. I am not furnished with particulars, and it is a grave thing to judge without them. Yet the rule does not alter because the missile flies one way rather than another. If attacks are designed, or carried out with reckless indifference, so that they fall as readily on markets, homes, and hospitals as on armed men and their engines, then those who command them also abandon the posture of magistrates and assume that of aggressors. Power that cannot distinguish between combatant and bystander ceases to be protection, and becomes a standing danger to property in the broad sense: lives, liberties, and estates together.
In my account of prerogative, I allowed that executives must sometimes act swiftly, even outside the letter of standing law, for the public good. But emergency is a narrow plea. It may justify bending a form; it cannot justify trampling the substance of right. To claim a permanent liberty to hurl force at cities, whenever some wider strategy is invoked, is to erect arbitrary power under the name of necessity. Here each side is tempted to be judge in his own case, pronouncing all his own missiles defensive and all the other’s offensive, as if the dead could read those labels. The true question is simpler and harsher: could any free and equal people, in their wits, consent to be so governed and so defended?
As I argued where I treated of the dissolution of government, when those who hold power invade the property of the people, or reduce them under arbitrary force, they are the first rebels; they rebel against the very trust that created their authority. In this conflict, I see on all hands claims to be protectors—of faith, of territory, of regional security—joined to methods which place the most vulnerable at daily hazard. Hundreds of thousands are said to be displaced; families on both sides lose their dead in places they do not control and for reasons they did not choose. Where this becomes a long train of abuses, ordinary people are not bound, by any law human or divine, to esteem such conduct as rightful government rather than a calamity imposed upon them.
I am, I confess, struck not by the novelty but by the sameness of it. New names, new weapons, the same ancient mistake: to suppose that however wide and indiscriminate one’s power, it is cured by the justice of one’s own cause. Yet cause does not license means that annihilate the very goods for which men enter political society. Until those who command missiles and aircraft submit their conduct to a known law, to impartial judgment, and to an honest restraint for the sake of civilians, they stand in a state of war not only with one another, but with the peoples they claim to serve. A government that forgets that its power is held on trust is already half dissolved, whether it yet perceives it or not.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Dissolution of government and the right of resistance: when legislators invade property or set up arbitrary power, they rebel against the people, not the people against them.