Abstract
My reaction to the excellent papers presented today is quite simple: I agree with much of what was said. Since Ivan Shearer has helpfully summarized Glen Plant's classifications of the various positions on the issue, I let me say that the views I expressed to the United States Senate in 1991 place me mainly in the first camp.2 But I am willing to find practical ways to accommodate the objectives of those in the second camp. And I am ready to be persuaded by partisans of the third camp on specific points. That, I suppose, makes me a partisan of what Lucius Caflisch called the "Goldblat Doctrine," namely "to build upon what exists already and ... show a certain realism in doing so.,,3 We should bear in mind that almost 20 years ago, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute study already warned that military disruption of the environment is exceedingly difficult to limit or control by legal instruments.4 In this regard, I am not sure that all of the speakers on the panel would attach as much significance as I do to three points: 1) Because armed conflict is always bad for the environment, any text attempting to deal with the full problem of environmental restraints on armed conflict in a simple and sweeping peremptory fashion is likely to force a choice between the obvious and the fanciful. 2) We must be cautious about perverse effects. The practical impact of a particular protective legal rule may be to increase the likelihood of undesirable damage, for example by encouraging the militarization of a site that would not otherwise have been a profitable object of attack. 3) We should not confuse thejus in bello with thejus ad bellum. Whatever the intent, I believe the fourth camp cannot easily satisfy these criteria. For example, let me quote from Sebia Hawkins' comments on behalf of the Greenpeace position before the American Society of International Law in 1991: