By GEORGE A. KENDALL
At the moment, our rulers seem well on the way to getting us into our third Iraq war in a generation, the first two having exhibited, in the short term, the appearance of success (“a piece of cake”), but dismal failure in the longer run, wasting our nation’s resources and lives, accomplishing nothing but to get us even deeper into the Middle Eastern quicksand, while increasing the disorder there.
That means it’s time to do a brief review of the Church’s just war tradition and to reflect on how it is relevant to the present situation.
My own views on all this have, I must acknowledge, changed drastically over the years. I was a pretty rabid hawk during the cold war era, focused strongly on mankind’s struggle against totalitarianism as the central reality of our times and supporting any military action that, in my judgment, might weaken or eradicate totalitarianism, especially in its Communist form. This outlook tended to persist even after the cold war, as it did for so many conservatives.
Readers with long memories may recall the enthusiastic support I gave to the first Gulf War, getting involved in several editorial page controversies with the late Joseph Sobran (requiescat in pace) on the subject. Today I must acknowledge that he was right and I was wrong.
In part, at least, the change followed a clarification of my understanding of evil. While I knew better, I still had a tendency to reflexively identify evil with certain individuals or groups (e.g., Communists, Islamic militants, liberals) who embodied evil and needed to be decisively defeated and no longer in a position to influence events. In other words, if we just get rid of these people or these groups or these ideologies, everything will be fine. This is exactly the thinking of so many of the ideologues who have promoted our ill-fated “war on terror.” Two of them actually co-authored a book titled An End to Evil.
I have learned to be very wary of people who think they can stamp out all evil. Short of exterminating the entire human race, there is no possibility of stamping out evil (and actually, that would still leave the evil spirits). This is so because, as Solzhenitsyn tells us, the war between good and evil doesn’t run between persons, groups, social classes, religions, etc., but right through the human heart. We are all fallen creatures, and good and evil constantly struggle within each of us.
Besides that, we need to think about the parable of the wheat and the tares, in which Jesus tells us that it is God’s plan (a great mystery) to let good and evil continue to grow and develop until the end of time. The people who want to definitively stamp out evil are like the servants in the parable who offer to uproot the tares on the spot and burn them, which means they are rejecting Christ’s plan for human history and substituting their own.
We need to recognize that while there are things that politics and even war can do to contain and limit evil, if we try to use these instruments to definitively end evil, we are committing ourselves to an impious effort to accomplish the impossible and will only increase the level of disorder in the world.
Now, as regards the disastrous situation in Iraq associated with the crumbling of the regime we put in place following our “victory,” a regime utterly incapable of governing the place, more and more of our leaders, on both the right and the left, are beating the war drums, wanting to go back in there, take over the country, get rid of ISIS (and, yes, we are hearing all the rhetoric about putting an end to evil), we need to ask whether such a war can possibly meet the conditions the Church sets for a just war.
The first condition that St. Thomas enumerates is that war must be initiated and carried out by the lawful public authority — i.e., private citizens cannot organize private armies and go to war against another country. For us today this is complicated by two factors:
1) It is questionable whether in America today we have a lawful public authority, given the massive usurpation of power by a central government that has come to look more and more like an illegal regime. But assuming, for the sake of argument, that our Constitution is still in effect, there is the little problem that it clearly gives to Congress, not the executive, the power to declare war, which means that Congress, not the president, is the lawful authority for initiating war. And yet since World War II, all our wars have been initiated by the president, and after the fact there have been congressional resolutions supporting the president’s acts, resolutions which I am certain do not amount to anything resembling what the Founding Fathers meant by a declaration of war.
There is every reason to believe that the war now being contemplated would be carried out in the same way, and hence would be illegal — hence, not a just war.
2) A second requirement is just cause — that is, that there is a serious injustice or disorder that needs to be corrected. I think most of us would grant that just cause exists in the present situation in Iraq. The horror of ISIS going through Iraq murdering anyone who is in the way, suspected of sympathizing with their enemies, even murdering children, and, especially, murdering Christians, is enough to convince anyone that this is an evil which, other things being equal, needs to be suppressed and the evildoers punished.
But other things are often not equal, and just cause cannot stand alone as a justification for war. When atrocities are committed, people instinctively think, “We’ve got to do something!” But what if nothing can be done? Or if the cost of anything we do is just too great to justify it?
Which brings us to still another condition: that there must be a reasonable chance of winning (there is a parable for this, too; see Luke 14:31-33). My first thought is this: Given that we have fought two wars in Iraq, and neither produced results that could exactly be thought of as victory, what is the likelihood that another try at this would produce different results? One thinks here of the adage that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and each time expecting different results.
Do we have the resources for this war? Financially, we have spent astronomical sums for our previous Mideast adventures, creating a national debt that is likewise astronomical. Continuing to grow this debt can only accelerate the dissolution of our economy.
In terms of human resources, the American people may support the war short-term, due to outrage over the crimes of ISIS, but this lacks depth and the support will evaporate more and more as the war goes on. I like to think that a good measure of a society’s support for a war is the extent to which the people support a draft. Right now, if we tried to bring back the draft, there would be rioting in the streets. That does not augur well for success. People will support a war only as long as it is other people’s kids who will get killed or maimed.
Another human resource that is sadly lacking is leadership. Our leaders today are mostly politicians with no interest in anything except getting and keeping public office, or they are spiritually diseased ideologues who live in a dream world, with their heads full of Wilsonian nonsense about imposing democracy on the whole world. Of the two groups, these latter are the more dangerous. People like this really need to be put in a nice home someplace where they will be cared for and not allowed to harm themselves or others. With these people leading the war effort, the chances of a successful outcome would have to be minuscule.
Another condition is that there be a reasonable prospect that the war will not produce evils so great as to outweigh the good, if any, that it achieves. It seems evident to me at least, that our interventions in the Middle East, particularly Iraq, have produced great evils and little if any good. In Iraq we got rid of a dictatorship which, however brutal, kept the various Muslim factions under control and protected Christians from these same factions.
Then, under the influence of the Wilsonian ideology of promoting democracy everywhere, we put in place a weak government which could not keep order, and the result is all-out civil war. There is no doubt at all that the Iraqis would be better off with Saddam Hussein. I realize, of course, that the neocons will say, well, yes, we did it wrong (“mistakes were made”) last time, but now we’ve learned and will get it right. In my experience, these people never learn. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
The fact is, we have the capacity to do great harm in the Middle East and elsewhere, but we lack the capacity to do good there, to fix the problems and overcome militant Islam. Instead of having another go at the failed strategy of a crusade against militant Islam, we need to take a leaf from the late George Kennan’s book and try to form a strategy of containment, something I hope to say more about later. This may well be helped along by the propensity Muslims have for fighting among themselves. Divide and conquer may well be part of the containment strategy.
Of course, no one is going to pay any attention to such obvious common sense. Endless war keeps corrupt and power-hungry leaders in power.
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(© 2014 George A. Kendall.)
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