Limits of the just war
Baumann, Paul
ably never will learn of it all. The conduct of the war has rendered the initial UN terms of engagement null. We have made waste of Iraq to save Kuwait. And the overriding concern has become only...
...Like the church's prohibition against contraception, it may not always be the moral tool that effects the most moral result...
...frees us, as it does our enemies...
...If anything, Saddam Hussein's actions have confirmed the worst fears about his ambitions and capacity for evil...
...We have yet to understand the significance of it all...
...Thus, we as a people are likely to repeat our folly...
...In Iraq, over half the population is below the age of fifteen...
...In essence I was willing to tolerate the sacrifice of Kuwaifis to a vicious foe to spare American lives and presumably prevent greater regional turmoil and bloodshed...
...That rules out nuclear deterrence, for there can be no deterrence without the projection of a credible threat--namely a willingness to do the unthinkable...
...When that changes, I'll change...
...Yet his blood freed them, as it did his torturers...
...Indeed, questions of nuclear war offer only tragic or absurd alternatives and utterly 8 March 1991:149 ambiguous moral choices...
...Ask the Czechoslovakians whether we should have pressured the Russians...
...GBU27s are two-thousand-pound bombs which are able to penetrate more than six feet of reinforced concrete...
...intervention demanded UN approval and a congressional declaration, and when they got both seemed to dismiss such authority as ultimately irrelevant...
...Similarly, pertinent questions about a war against a regime like Iraq's are slighted by a rigorous application of just-war theory...
...By any reasonable interpretation, the war has met--to the degree any prior evaluation can--the criteria of just cause, proper authority, last resort, likely outcome, and proportional means...
...Such abstract distinctions are little more than efforts to hide from ourselves the truth of what we are actually doing...
...This ancient struggle is the world's great con/ tinuing war, compared to which events like the Thirty Years War or the Hundred Years War are but moments in time...
...the Athenians repulsed a small army sent by Darius, the Great King of Persia...
...But such stark choices are of little help in the more difficult and likely cases, as in Iraq, where soldiers must battle an adversary who uses civilians for protection, or where the enemy may use chemical or biological weapons...
...Critics of U.S...
...Yet I can imagine any number of circumstances where a preemptive strike would save lives and forestall greater evil...
...And my tentativeness is not without a moral burden of its own...
...That's a big presumption, and one that's a lot easier on me than on the Kuwaitis...
...They demanded we not rush to war, but after five months during which Iraq pillaged Kuwait and prepared to protect its gains they continued to cling to the infinite regression implicit in any "last" resort contingency...
...Nice Guy," personally led a great expedition across the Hellespont...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin, Jr...
...THE GULF WAR l.IMl'm OF THE/Ub'T WAH EASIER SAID THAN DONE judge the war against Iraq to be ill-advised and irnprudent, but not as some suggest either unjust or immoral...
...But renouncing the use of nuclear weapons leaves one rather at the mercy of less scrupulous opponents...
...More important, I imagine, they concluded that only a military confrontation would neutralize his power and stabilize the region...
...Israel's actions in 1967 as well as their destruction of Iraq's nuclear plant in 1981 are two...
...The logistical accomplishments in the Gulf mobilization were unprecedented, and the technical achievements rivaled those of any war-making undertaking in history...
...In 334 B.C., 150: Commonweal...
...Too many things can go wrong, from the intervention of Israel or Iran, to a crisis in the Soviet Union, to the more likely martyrdom of Iraq and consequent political triumph of Hussein...
...But he was defeated at sea by Themistocles the Athenian at Salamis (480) and on land by Pausanias the Spartan at Plataea (479...
...For many, one suspects, the just war theory was simply employed as a no war theory...
...Ten years later the next Great King, Xerxes, saying "No more Mr...
...And like it or not, our Scriptures teach that in his own actions, Jesus chose self-suffering rather than recourse to force...
...Consequently, I think~it behooves critics of the war to avoid moralistic denunciations...
...Strictly interpreted it is hard to imagine what, short of an act of self-defense, last resort might be...
...The EuropeWestern Asia battle has been going on for twenty-five hundred years according to the historical record, and more than three thousand if we add the testimony of Homer, whose Iliad is the story of a European attack on a Western Asia city...
...Just-war theory would seem to foreclose such options, and in doing so it flies in the face of elemental logic and much of human experience...
...He refused the sword, even to protect his followers--who were initially scattered...
...Ultimately, war in this instance was a question of prudential judgment...
...Quite the contrary...
...I am not saying the argument is over or dissent inadmissible...
...In other words, fighting a bully may require a few dirty tricks...
...But we are also cautioned against testing God's benevolence...
...I'm not so sure it's such an infallible document...
...At this time, I see no evidence of moral illiteracy in the U.S...
...PATRICK JORDAN Patrick Jordan is the managing editor of Commonweal...
...It is incarnational, a faith grounded in personhood, in the body and the blood...
...Ours is not a religion of abstractions, even if it finds Aristotelian, Augustinian, or Thomistic distinctions useful...
...I'm not suggesting we dispense with moral guidelines such as the just-war theory, but I do think they need to be employed with a greater sense of their artificiality, especially by those of us thousands of miles from the actual fighting and dying...
...2. Alexander the Great...
...But we are likely to forget tomorrow...
...Clearly, it is all but impossible to reconcile last resort with the idea of a preemptive strike...
...policy out of hand just as Congress completed an all but unprecedented moral debate over the use of force...
...One is reminded that at one time the use of the crossbow violated justwar theory...
...At Marathon (490 B.C...
...Passing over the Trojan War, let's look at the principal stages in this old contest: 1. The Persian Wars...
...To the extent that just-war definitions suggest there is some clean way to separate the people from the actions of their state it fosters dangerous illusions about the nature of modern war...
...that the war not end with anyone anywhere questioning America's resolve in the immediate future...
...Similarly, it is all very comforting to hear that we are not interested in fighting the people of Iraq or intend them any harm...
...With little loss of American blood (held to "acceptable levels"), we can strike almost anywhere in the world, massively and convincingly...
...But they imply that in our impatience--in our abandonment of effective, sustainable, and proportionate sanctions--we made a fundamental error, an error that will have geopolitical and moral ramifications for generations to come...
...We will never be shown their suffering in depth, nor have we experienced a similar devastation in our lives and families...
...EAST MEETS WEST THE WORLD'S LONGEST WAR n the interest of keeping things in perspective, it may be worth noting that the current war against Iraq is simply the latest phase of an old struggle between Western Asia (or the Near East or Mideast) and the European world (including of course the European diaspora, e.g., the United States...
...How does the morality of nuclear arms shake out then...
...Pacifism is a legitimate position, but it doesn't leave much room for discussion...
...The political and psychological implications are immense, and, for some, reassuring...
...Sinai...
...Bush told a convention of religious broadcasters last month, defending this war as just: "When this war is over, the U.S., its credibility and its reliability restored, will have a leadership role in helping to bring peace to the rest of the Middle East...
...A proportionate use of force is necessary and of course the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations is unacceptable...
...I am not even saying President George Bush is right--I think he's wrong...
...As for the specifics of the present war, Bush and his advisers, for reasons both sound and specious, judged that economic sanctions would not bring Saddam Hussein to heel...
...As in the question of nuclear deterrence, just-war claims seem to leave a good deal of practical reality (or practical madness) out of the equation...
...There are further ironies...
...If anything, the debate over warin the Persian Gulf has illuminated some of the theory's inadequacies...
...These words are not written to in any way to justify appeasement or to acquiesce in the arrogance of aggressors...
...A good outcome doesn't justify an inherently immoral means...
...Finally, however, it was Hussein's actions that precipitated the confrontation...
...As Mr...
...Yet it is their cities we are bombing and their sons we aim to kill...
...If today the United States can claim less and less economic muscle, we have proved without a doubt that we can still make war...
...For example, reconciling massive nuclear retaliation with notions of proportionality is a contortionist's trick, not a philosopher's achievement...
...They will not forget the deadly cost of our smart bombs and surgical strikes...
...that we come out of it with rewards richer than the liberation of Kuwait...
...And the overriding concern has become only that we win, convincingly...
...This will help preserve the spirit of civil discourse and disagreement so remarkably present in the debate prior to the war...
...Last resort, as already noted, is an endlessly receding horizon...
...Faith in God is one answer, true...
...I don't think so...
...Xerxes won at Thermopylae ("Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we lie here obedient to their orders"), and he seized and burned Athens, which had been abandoned by its citizens...
...But I may be wrong...
...command...
...As Lent is meant to remind us, our faith is concemed with redemption and repentance, never with self-justification...
...No wonder the Psalmist prayed that he be delivered from his unknown sins...
...If Iraq directs a chemical attack from a bunker surrounded by civilians what do you do...
...Perhaps to provide some of the latter with a more human touch, last month Dick Cheney and Colin Powell autographed a pair of GBU-27 bombs while at a Stealth fighter bomber base in Saudi Arabia...
...I am saying it is implausible at this point for those in opposition to the war to employ the rhetoric of righteousness...
...PAUL BAUMANN Paul Baumann is an associate editor of Commonweal...
...Surely a renunciation of such indiscriminate slaughter is the only response consistent with just-war conditions...
...Indeed, while we must demand a limited war, I think there is something carping and unconvincing about secondguessing every military decision...
...Some people who argue the inviolability of individual conscience on questions of birth control and personal morality seize upon the just-war theory as though it were handed down on Mt...
...It was especially ironic for churches to condemn U.S...
...What if, for example, we "won" the cold war, defeating Soviet totalitarianism and helping to liberate Eastern Europe, because of our nuclear belligerence...
...I think the unintended consequences of any war of this size in that part of the world make it a very dubious enterprise...
...But something in the cool scholastic operations of just-war theory--like that in the scholastic proofs of God's existence--fails to encompass the true nature and threat of evil in the world...
...Moreover, do we have the right to insist that our neighbors share the risk of powerlessness our moral conviction requires...
...Round I to the Europeans...
...Several days after the signing party, Stealth bombers from the same base attacked the bunker/shelter in Baghdad...
...According to eyewitness accounts, the GBU-27s "cut through the building like butter...
...Over three hundred people died...
...The lesson of the Gulf war is now indeed clear: America has been preparing for war for a generation and we can do the job...
Vol. 118 • March 1991 • No. 5
