The 'just war' war
Winters, Francis X.
THE 'JUST WAR' WAR FRANCIS X. WINTERS THE BISHOPS REACH DISSENSUS I n a season of surprises--the duration of Operation Desert Storm--perhaps the most arresting irony was the jux-...
...That day, the NCCB had passed (249-15) a resolution in which they "affirmed and made their own" an earlier (November 7) letter from Mahony to Secretary of State James Baker, outlining the traditional just- war criteria and, without seeking to"offer a definitive judgment" on the moral legitimacy of the resort to force in these circum- stances, urged that the U.S...
...officials, his formulation of the relevance of proportionality to the present crisis included an extremely curious question, without providing any evident reply...
...And, as is now evident, reasonable bishops can differ on the same issue...
...If we're guilty in the first instance, are we being too quick to judge in the second...
...Paul-Minneapolis, who had recently succeeded Archbishop Mabony as chairman of the International Policy Committee...
...There the matter stood between the Catholic hierarchy, or at least its leadership, and President Bush...
...Most bishops, given the specific judg- ments required and the limited information available, have with- held a definitive judgment...
...Our political culture is not Bismarckian, but one where moral and religious conscience 5 April 1991:223...
...Archbishop Mahony's subsequent plea for rejection of the use of force suggested, indeed, that his own answer to that question was negative: The survival of Kuwait was not worth a war...
...Ryan's letter, unlike the three earlier statements, is addressed to a segment of the Catholic community itself, rather than to political officials...
...national interests...
...Like Pilarczyk, he is used to the give-and- take of intellectual debate, and is comfortable in dissenting from Pilarczyk's earlier claims that the NCCB showed a "significant consensus" against the justice of the war...
...Reasonable men and women could differ, it seemed, on the moral evaluation of the war...
...he too had been a seminary teacher and now concedes that he feels most at home as bishop when he is teaching...
...Into this charged situation stepped Archbishop John Roach, of St...
...Once Kuwait was invaded by Saddam Hussein in vio- lation of the criterion of last resort, just-war theory accorded an immediate right of armed resistance to Kuwait and whatever allies it could speedily gather...
...This theme of the local authority of the bishop was again taken up in the closing words of the address: "I frankly do not believe this [the morality of the war and its conduct] is a decision for one chairman or one committee, but for every bishop, and for that matter, ever~ believer...
...The significant con- sensus did not, however, attain sufficient unanimity at the annual meeting to warrant formulation in a resolution...
...Anselm "s Abbey School in Washington, D.C...
...Politicians "moralize" history to mobilize large numbers of voters around THOMAS LECKEY teaches history at St...
...Much later, social his- torians suggested that American viewers might have sensed a subliminal cold-war parable in Cooper's travails...
...In challenging the moral acceptability of the military strategy in the Gulf, the president of the NCCB had rested his rejection of war-fighting additionally on the just-war principle of pro- portionality...
...In a further irony, President George Bush chose the assembly of National Religious Broadcasters, not traditionally a bastion of just-war (or other natural law) think- ing, to unburden himself on January 28 of his own essay on just-war thinking and the ongoing military crisis...
...For in 1983, the same conference of bishops asked itself the same question about the survival of (West) Germany...
...Perhaps the most difficult hurdle for history teachers is the readiness of students, aping Hollywood, the television networks, and politicians, to substitute facile moral judgments for the objec- tive detachment that undergirds the study of history...
...Roach went beyond this mediatorial role, however, in raising important moral questions about Operation Desert Storm that had for different reasons been left largely undeveloped in the previous episcopal statements...
...Pilarczyk then voiced his own feelings, presumably reflecting the informal con- sensus of the NCCB, that"offensive military action could well violate these criteria of the just-war theory, especially the prin- ciples of 'proportionality' and 'last resort.'" Later, on the eve of war, after the UN deadline expired on January 15, Pilarczyk again wrote to Bush, this time signaling that his own discernment of the morality of the war had shifted markedly...
...No surprise, when Bush did his calculations, Operation Desert Shield/Storm passed moral muster...
...By college, impracticality replaces tedium as the chief disin- centive...
...Pilarczyk, archbishop of Cincinnati REV...
...That tone was struck early, on the evening of November 12, during the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour," when Robert MacNeil quizzed Archbishop Roger Mahony, then chairman of the National Council of Catholic Bishops' (NCCB) International Policy Committee, on the relevance of just-war categories to the military preparations in the Gulf...
...Roach signaled his message in the opening words of his address, insisting that he spoke as a local bishop as well as chairman of the Committee on International Policy...
...Roach controverted this reading of the November meeting: "I do not believe our conference as a whole has a sufficiently clear consensus at this time to offer a decisive and united judgment on the overall moral justification of this war...
...Using history to teach morality is usually a dubious exercise...
...It seems to have been the American bishops who set the tone of the public discussion of the war in their own traditional just-war terms...
...government not go beyond the main- tenance of sanctions, backed by the substantial military deploy- ment in the region...
...In their pastoral letter on war and peace, the bishops resoundingly endorsed (238 to 9) a revision of NATO strategy for the defense of Germany and Western Europe, even calling for an increase in defense spending in order to defend Europe's security without relying on first use of nuclear weapons...
...Are we guilty, as Costner suggests, or righteous, as Bush proclaims...
...Peace of a sort was established simply by citing the relative autonomy of the local bishop...
...There were many voices in America for whom this prudential calculation would be wholly unremarkable as a statement of U.S...
...He served in 1982-83 as a consultant to the bishops' com- mittee drafting the pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace...
...In this case, of course, that party was Iraq, which violated the territorial integrity of Kuwait on August 2, 1990...
...Now, as it seemed, it was a season to "select a bishop" on the morality of the war...
...Obviously, then, at least some knowledge of history is helpful if we are to follow the narrative of our policymakers and make a democratic assessment of their debates...
...To the extent that presidents and producers popularize history, we are indebted...
...If these two situations are not morally analogous in the eyes of Pilarczyk, the structure of his moral reasoning urgently deserves to be shared with the rest of the Catholic community...
...Though the bishops had apparently succeeded in framing the terms of the public debate, they differed with the president's independent application of the theory to this war effort...
...THOMAS LECKEY magnetic themes, and TV does it to hook viewers quickly before remote control preempts the program...
...While in November he had estimated that the actual use of alliance forces "could well violate just-war theory criteria," he now concluded more certainly that Operation Desert Storm "would likely violate" the same principles...
...Never, perhaps, had this caution been more urgent...
...Roach could have quoted in this context the caution of one Arab commentator on the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour," who brought a discussion to an abrupt halt by pointing out to the other [American] panelists that there is no word for "collateral damage" in Arabic and no such concept in Islamic or Arabic cul- ture...
...For example, in 1952 when Americans flocked to see Gary Cooper give his Academy Award-winning performance in High Noon, they thought it a traditional Western, one where a lone courageous sheriff dispensed justice from a gun barrel despite the objections of cowardly "appeasers...
...The resonance of the moral analysis of Operation Desert Shield/Storm continued through the week of February 4-11, when Time, U.S...
...He insisted on the church's tra- ditional teaching on the limits of the violence that can be tolerated in war, citing the complementary principles of discrimination (the limitation of deliberate targeting to combatants) and pro- portionality (the close scrutiny of strategies to test their suitability to attain the liberation of Kuwait without the accompanying [perhaps deliberate] destruction of Iraq...
...The problem, however, is that history, especially modern history, often ends in moral ambiguity rather than certainty...
...The bishops' conference is a diverse body that functions best when we act with unity...
...All of this hand-wringing raises interesting questions for those, like myself, who teach history...
...In this letter, Pilarczyk cited "a significant consensus" at the NCCB meeting that the U.S...
...On February 17, Joseph T. Ryan, archbishop for the military services, published a pastoral letter directed to the one hundred thousand Catholic servicewomen and men in the Gulf, their families and chaplains...
...Roach may be singularly suited to enter into the controversy with healing words...
...In the more recent film, Kevin Costner's camera dramatizes American genocide against native peoples...
...For both good and bad reasons, the United States has always resisted the Machiavellian argument that governments should divorce morality from politics...
...With this counsel, Roach sought to make room within the church for the conflicting, indeed contradictory, views of Pilarczyk and Ryan within the limits of their jurisdictions, that is, the archdiocese of Cincinnati and the archdiocese for the military services, respectively...
...There had, of course, been statements supporting President Bush by Cardinals Bernard Law of Boston and James Hickey of Washington, seeming to differ with Archbishop Pilarczyk...
...For even the combination of precise targeting mechanisms and disciplined observance of the principle of discrimination, which still permitted the loss of civilian life and the destruction of Iraq's economic infrastructure and its cultural treasures, could be seen, in that country and in other Islamic nations, as deliberate massacre...
...The question, "In this case, are the expressed values at stake so important, that is, the survival of Kuwait, repelling aggression, etc., that they justify the resort to force and the con- sequences of the use of force...
...To argue that, after being invaded, as Kuwait was on August 2, the wronged nation must negotiate with the aggressor for an unspecified period of time, while the aggressor pillages the conquered nation, is, some have argued, to stand the just-war theory on its head...
...Scrupulous caution was in order...
...On a deeper level, students who grow up laboring under the impression that real human problems can be solved using textbook generalities are not likely to listen patiently to the moral ambiguities real history presents...
...In the face of President Bush's bow to the calculus of military necessity, Roach raised up the civilized standard of moral and political limits to the scale TEACHING HISTORY AT HIGH NOON LETTING THE LESSONS EMERGE istory has never been easy to teach, and thanks to George Bush, Saddam Hussein, and Adolph Hitler, it is made even more difficult...
...of war...
...222: Commonweal he handful of faithful who observed this emerging rift in the conference of bishops may have begun to feel that they were back in the late sixties, in the days of Humanae vitae, when the sensus fidelium opted to "select a confessor" in the face of public disagreement among bishops about the morality of con- traception...
...Later, however, the rift in the hierarchy appeared to widen considerably...
...From bishops, however, such a negative response was puzzling...
...High school students say that it's got too many dates, too many superfluous names, and entirely too much talk of tariffs (I happen to agree with them on the latter...
...In doing so, he appealed to the core of the tradition, namely, the warning that a nation's leaders may not initiate (defensive) hostilities without making conscientious calcu- lations of the probable destruction latent in the resort to force...
...News and World Report, and Newsweek delivered descriptions of the moral logic of war and expert assessments of the moral "bottom line...
...In less technical language, Pilarczyk con- cluded: "the presumption, in my view, is still [January 15] for blockades not bombs, diplomacy not destruction, words not war...
...On what moral grounds did they base such a differentiation...
...I do not share the clarity or con- fidence of those who see the morality of this whole question in absolute and certain terms...
...Yet, when Mahony spoke the first word in the bishops' cam- paign to urge such caution on U.S...
...For, like Pilarczyk, Roach had served as president of the NCCB (1980-83...
...To the extent that they burden students of history with simplistic moral con- clusions, they make our task more difficult...
...THE 'JUST WAR' WAR FRANCIS X. WINTERS THE BISHOPS REACH DISSENSUS I n a season of surprises--the duration of Operation Desert Storm--perhaps the most arresting irony was the jux- taposition of high-tech weapons and venerable theories about their use in war...
...He made room at the same time for the judgments of all those other bishops who had, or perhaps had not yet, come to their own conclusions...
...For, in the Gulf crisis, long-standing grievances of a great variety were gathered just beneath the surface of the Gulf region, ready to erupt with incalculable power and destruction...
...Similarly, future historians may note the ironic juxtaposition of this year's Hollywood blockbuster, Dances with Wolves, and our involve- ment in the Persian Gulf war...
...220: Commonweal and NCCB president, had first addressed Bush on the topic soon after the bishops' annual meeting, informing the president of the resolution adopted on November 12, and going significantly beyond the text of the NCCB resolution itself, insisting that pursuing a sanctions policy, without resorting to force, was "a moral imperative...
...FRANCIS X. WINTERS is associate professor of moral theology and of international affairs, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University...
...We seek to share our moral judgments and raise serious questions with both conviction and modesty whenever there is sufficient consensus to permit us to speak in the name of the conference...
...Since we all seek moral equanimity, we are vulnerable to these tricks...
...Since, in Roach's reading of the meeting, no consensus existed in judging the war, the problem reverts to the court of first resort, the delib- eration of the local bishop, speaking to the faithful of his own diocese...
...In the wider world, President George Bush justifies war by accusing Saddam Hussein of being another Hitler--anoth- er genocidal murderer...
...Did some bishops now discern some moral difference between the survival of Kuwait and the survival of Germany...
...Of course, everybody likes to have a little history on hand, either to argue a point effectively, or to follow the conversation of some history buff, or perhaps to read George Will...
...government must"pursue the course ~ of peaceful pressure and not resort to war...
...As Congress debated the Gulf war resolutions in January, viewers were treated to a barrage of historical analogies: references to Hitler (198), Churchill (46), and Neville Chamberlain (45) were all outnum- bered by Vietnam (413), our most vivid historical memory...
...There are few jobs directly related to the discipline, and the monetary rewards are fewer still...
...On the eve of a season of chest-pounding in America, Roach urged, in the season of ashes, a little breast-beating...
...Ryan's pastoral the Arab League, the World Court, the UN Security Council) has normally been understood to articulate an obligation on the party who initiates war...
...For Bush seemed to ignore the logic of the two letters that Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk had sent him...
...Star-Wars" footage on TV was continually interspersed with just-war calculations about the moral choice between sanctions and assassination...
...The occasion (February 25) was a meeting observing the cen- tennial of Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, the charter of all Catholic social teaching...
...For moralists, and for military personnel, this shift in terminology is weighty: replacing the judgment "could well violate" with the more certain "would likely violate" just-war criteria clearly shifts the burden of proof on to those willing to serve in this war...
...Each of us will have to search our own conscience to respond to these challenges and to make our own specific judg- ments on the moral dimensions of the war...
...An historical analogy may shed light on the normal understanding of this principle of last resort: When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, no Catholic bishops argued that Poland, Britain, and France were morally obliged to negotiate with Hitler or await vindication from the League of Nations or the World Court before taking up arms...
Vol. 118 • April 1991 • No. 7
