1 The Liberal and Non-liberal Justification of Violence against Civilians Jonathan Leader Maynard In the public consciousness of liberal states, and in the works of many academics, it is commonly assumed that a fundamental contrast – even a vast and unbridgeable gulf – exists between the forms of violence deployed by liberal and non-liberal states. A well-established tradition of writing presents liberalism as an ideology of quasi-pacifistic inclinations: troubled by violence, or at least by certain forms of violence such as the killing of civilians, and therefore reluctant to engage in it. Such a belief is visible in Alex Bellamy’s claim that the ‘the idea that it is wrong to deliberately kill non-combatants in war is a pre-commitment of liberal politics, one that cannot be traded away with exceptions in times of emergency’ (Bellamy 2008: 43). Such assumptions are perhaps most clearly present in the extensive literature suggesting that the present Western- dominated world order can and should endure because America and other liberal states are essentially benevolent (Ikenberry 2012; Mallaby 2002; Kagan 1998; Kristol and Kagan 1996; Fukuyama 1992). More subtly, they are also found in the work of those theorists, like John Owen or Fareed Zakaria, who wish to explain the ‘democratic peace’ by reference to the effects of liberal ideology (Owen 1997; Zakaria 1997; Doyle 2005). But at all events, a confidence in their own benevolent and rights-respecting nature is a central component of the self- understanding of liberal societies . Those who share these assumptions acknowledge that liberal states wage war and often commit large-scale violence. But they suggest that liberal states do so with greater reluctance and difficulty than non-liberal states, for quite different and more morally palatable reasons, or because of interference by rogue non-liberal elements. This sense of contrast is heightened in discussion of the most morally troubling or abhorrent forms of violence, such as the killing of civilians. Even if they accept that liberal states often fight wars of a dubious character, few scholars, and few citizens of Western liberal states, believe that liberal polities engage in the intentional and systematic destruction of civilian life. In consequence most liberal writers will confidently assert that there is a radical difference between liberal states’ behaviour towards civilians and the murderous policies of non-liberal regimes. At its core, this chapter represents a challenge to this liberal consensus. The belief that liberal states have not directly, intentionally and extensively targeted civilians is empirically false. They have done so in individual abuses that were encouraged by overarching policy, like the famous My Lai massacre in Vietnam (an event less exceptional in that war than its particular infamy suggests) or the Abu Ghraib abuses in Iraq (Glover 1999: 58-63; Bellamy 2012: 186). They have done so in imperial adventures and efforts to suppress colonial rebellions, for example in French Algeria and British Kenya, and against the Native Americans (Blakely 2009: 22; Bellamy 2012: 81-91). Primarily, however, liberal states have intentionally killed civilians by campaigns of aerial bombardment – in much larger numbers than is generally appreciated. During the Korean War, allied forces killed at least one million and perhaps as many as three million Korean civilians (Bellamy 2012: 166), whilst US bombing as part of the Vietnam War is widely accepted to have killed around 600,000 in Cambodia and 350,000 in Laos (deaths in Vietnam itself, more heavily in the glare of the international media, were much lower) (Bellamy 2012: 173). Most notably of all, Allied aerial bombing in World War II killed between 300,000 and 600,000 German civilians and between 268,000 and 900,000 Japanese civilians (Bellamy 2012: 132; Schaffer 1988: 148). Today many continue to believe that these German and Japanese deaths were the collateral or accidental result of bombing targeted exclusively against industrial and military targets. But as Richard Overy’s chapter in this volume makes clear, this is a myth – a lingering product of dissimulating Allied propaganda (see also: Davis Biddle 2002; Schaffer 1988; Overy 2005b; Overy 2012; Overy 2005a; Tanaka and Young 2009; Bellamy 2012: 132-59; Hastings 2010). In internal government discussions, the leading co-ordinators of allied bombing