THE WAR IN IRAQ
Dula, Peter
THE WAR IN IRAQ How Catholic conservatives got it wrong Peter Dula H. Richard Niebuhr once wrote that the first question of ethics is not "What should I do?" but "What is going on?" The Baghdad...
...But there is really nothing uncertain or unpredictable about the decision to preserve the lives of combatants by endangering civilians, which is what the choice for aerial bombardment over ground warfare amounts to...
...And so all Weigel's claims are turned back on him...
...Those arguments were made in the public square that First Things, especially in light of last month's presidential election, has done so much to open up to religious language...
...The Baghdad version of that principle might be, "What the hell is going on...
...Elsewhere, Weigel claimed that the recovery of the just-war tradition entailed nothing less than "the public moral hygiene of the Republic...
...I, for one, was wrong...
...This is not to minimize the thirty-four hundred civilian deaths that, according to the Associated Press, did occur in the initial stages of the war...
...There is certainly an ideological element to the failures of prognostication in First Things...
...Second, their faith in the competency of the Bush administration, and their contempt for religious leaders who disagreed with them, can now more easily be recognized for what it was: an attachment to a particular brand of neocon-servatism overwhelming their attachment to the just-war tradition...
...I will point to several such statements by Neuhaus and Weigel...
...It is one thing to say that there is a lack of, say, strategic clarity-that it is difficult, for example, to predict how even the best-disciplined soldiers will react under pressure...
...These conservative suspicions are not just about the relative expertise of those making prudential judgments...
...And I pity them...
...First, Neuhaus and Weigel were right about the new weapons technologies...
...Not necessarily in order of importance they are the response to Mel Gibson's The Passion, the campaign for the marriage amendment, the report of the National Review Board on the Catholic scandals (and the responses to it), and the prospect of John Kerry being the Democratic nominee...
...Richard John Neuhaus, author of The Naked Public Square (1984) and dozens of other books...
...At issue now is the nature of democracy...
...I don't know...
...If, alternatively, the war's agile Catholic defenders think getting rid of Saddam counts as a just cause, they have some serious rewriting of the tradition to do...
...First, Neuhaus and Weigel, like the administration they support, failed in the summer of 2003 to see that the war was far from over...
...Iraq debased them...
...Weigel insisted that the just-war tradition is alive and well in the Bush administration, the Pentagon, the officer corps...
...Most of all, as George Weigel reminds us, they must explain their moral muteness in a time of war...
...We dare not...
...That must be clearly established on the public record...
...As George Will wrote in the April 5 Washington Post: Speaking of culture, as neoconservative nation builders would be well advised to avoid doing, Pat Moynihan said: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society...
...Here is his opening paragraph: The outrages committed by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq justly sparked worldwide protest...
...motivated by opposition to American policy or generalized America-bashing" counts...
...The U.S...
...Abu Ghraib shows that he was far more on target than he knew...
...With reference to civilian casualties, some protesters spoke about a "Middle East holocaust...
...So, what was functioning-like a badly manufactured pair of eyeglasses-for these two Catholic theologians who take rightful pride in their otherwise often clear-eyed view of things...
...But I have serious doubts about that...
...What is not at all obvious is why this disparity in access to information is a reason for trust instead of skepticism, or even mistrust, toward even democratic governments...
...Weigel, for example, wrote "There is a theo-logic-a theological logic-that gives priority to the ad helium questions, for these are the questions on which we can have some moral clarity...
...Neuhaus seems to be saying that, while Abu Ghraib was a terrible thing, it isn't enough to constitute the sort of evidence needed to counter American claims to be "the champion of human rights and dignity...
...That raises the question, What would constitute such evidence...
...And so now what we need is not generalities about the evils of torture...
...Still, I know a few of the soldiers in Iraq...
...There is no sense in Neuhaus's condemnation of the "outrages committed by Americans at Abu Ghraib" that the events in that now notorious prison have wider implications for the war on terror, the competence of the current administration, and the moral character of the American people...
...Over and over again we are told about how debased American sexual practices are...
...plans for changing the politics and culture of the Middle East, including Palestinian-Israeli relations, are indeed ambitious...
...Right around the time CNN reported the existence of photographs of prisoner abuse and the Army commissioned the Taguba report...
...Since when are conservatives not suspicious of government...
...And again when, in the late afternoon of August 1, there were two loud thuds and the hotel shook and I saw the plumes of smoke rising over the buildings north of my balcony, buildings occupied by people I work with...
...Contemplating what is happening in Baghdad from a fifth-floor hotel room, listening to the mortar rounds landing across the river, or from the street, peering into the crater left behind by what the security reports call a "vehicle-borne improvised explosive device," will make people beyond bookish theologians too dizzy for clarity in a time of war...
...He asked me how an administration that can't even protect its soldiers from insurgents is supposed to protect the American people from global terrorism...
...Concerned religious leaders were taking up the politicians' valuable time...
...Does Weigel have any clarity regarding whether that death toll is justified...
...For those of us who lean more naturally to the "orthodox" rather than the "liberal" side of church issues, this has been experienced as a profound loss...
...Yet while his essays are wide-ranging, he has been virtually silent on anything to do with Iraq...
...Approximately 80% of the University's 8,000 undergraduates choose to live on campus in 27 single-sex halls...
...Even now, First Things has not conceded the full import of the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were discovered or that there was no link between Saddam and Al Qaeda...
...So I have remained, for the most part, mute...
...There is nothing about the reaction in the Islamic world, unless "worldwide protest...
...These contingencies, after all, are what Tolstoy was describing...
...Is Iraq a just war...
...I remain an admirer of their work...
...His comments, though welcome, still strike me as problematic...
...The point is not to play "gotcha...
...They are meant to foster an environment of transparency and accountability that discourages abuse...
...Perhaps contemplating this carnage from New York is similar, and that is why First Things was virtually silent about Iraq between the summer of 2003 and October 2004...
...Weigel has spent much of his career doing just that...
...Moral muteness in a time of war is a moral stance," he wrote, "it can be a stance born of fear...
...There is certainly an ideological element to these failures of prognostication, as more and more of the world's established Christian leadership has adopted, from the international Left, a functional pacifism whose primary objection to the use of armed force has to do with who is using it-that is, the West, understood as an oppressor culture...
...Nothing about the way the photographs of torture have become virtual recruitment ads for Al Qaeda...
...For religious leaders to raise questions about civilian casualties and Muslim reaction was, according to Neuhaus, "badgering...
...Their conclusions were rejected, their committees silenced...
...But if high-ranking Justice Department officials are implicated, doesn't that constitute evidence against "the claim that America is the champion of human rights and dignity...
...That First Things was so grievously mistaken is an important but secondary issue...
...Of course, in the theological community, both Protestant and Catholic, First Things is hardly obscure...
...Badgering the Bush administration In the March 2004 First Things, Weigel has this to say in response to criticisms made by Rowan Williams ("War and Statecraft: An Exchange"): Time and again in recent years religious leaders have been proven wrong in their predictions about the likely consequences of various uses of armed force...
...Falluja, the Mahdi Army, and the bungled handover of authority from Paul Bremer to Iraq's interim prime minister Ayad Allawi-all have gone unremarked on...
...The most important issue is why theologians who argued for the justice of preemptive war in Iraq have yet to give a just-war accounting of the conduct and consequences of this war...
...There was little that was contingent, in Weigel's sense, about the abuses that happened there...
...Under the direction of the Residence Hall Rector, each hall is a community of faith and learning, where students are encouraged to integrate the intellectual, spiritual, and social dimensions of their education...
...What about Abu Ghraib...
...The competent parties were the Army and the State Department...
...What about civilian casualties...
...And it is true that religious leaders were not always the brightest or most articulate in the months preceding the war...
...Founded by the Congregation of Holy Cross, Notre Dame is one of the premier Catholic universities in the United States...
...In view of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam's murderous regime, the war probably saved innumerable lives...
...Weigel's exchange with Rowan Williams in First Things addressed whether the just-war tradition, Aquinas in particular, had a "presumption against war...
...Its founder and editor in chief is Fr...
...It is only to acknowledge that far fewer civilians were killed than would have been in a similar invasion just a decade or two ago...
...Some possibility of additional part-time teaching or administrative responsibilities at the University, if desired...
...His monthly column, "The Public Square," is usually ten thousand-plus words long, sometimes approaching twenty thousand...
...While I side with Williams on the issue, I also think there are good conservative reasons to act with a presumption against what governments in general say and do...
...But one of the lessons of the war in Iraq is that the Bush administration was and is an incompetent authority because of its disregard for the customary rules governing the conduct of war...
...When I first arrived in Baghdad in January 2004, people were frustrated with the occupation...
...Or difficult to predict the direction any particular battle will take...
...I have chatted with them in Baghdad and Erbil, on the streets and in the fortress of the Green Zone, or waiting in line at the concrete and razor-wire jungle of a checkpoint at Baghdad International Airport...
...If the events and revelations of the last sixteen months have not been enough to tilt the balance toward mistrust, there are also good old-fashioned theological reasons to side with skepticism, and not just toward this administration or other Republican administrations...
...It does not confirm the jeremiads of the cultural critics...
...The successful candidate will possess a Master's degree and a minimum of three years experience in a related field, such as pastoral ministry, education, student personnel or counseling...
...First Things still hasn't said anything about the Baghdad bombings of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) headquarters in October 2003, or the March 2004 bombings in Karbala...
...It has stood for a robust theological orthodoxy around which a great many diverse thinkers, Protestant and Catholic, clergy and laity, academics and nonacademics, were able to gather...
...He moves easily within the increasingly pietistic Republican Party, and is even credited with helping to teach President George W. Bush how to "speak Catholic...
...Living alongside students in the residence hall and accompanying them on their journey of faith, the Rector counsels and advises, provides critical support, and when necessary, calls them to accountability...
...Of course, we know now not only that the Pentagon ignored the conclusions of the Army (which was preparing for conditions predicted by those naive hand-wringing ecclesiastics), but that the whole invasion and occupation were based on a set of dubious claims, if not outright lies, about weapons of mass destruction and the link to Al Qaeda...
...For further information and application materials, visit our Web site at http://osa.nd.edu the Mennonite Central Committee offices in Ottawa, Washington, and New York about justice and peace issues in the field...
...The morning after the terrorist attack on the pilgrims, my driver-a Shi'a who had been among those walking, and who is usually irrepressibly cheerful-arrived at the house and, reeling from the carnage, crumpled into a chair, speechless and traumatized...
...Weigel calls the question of "competent authority" an ad helium criterion...
...Time was, this question would have separated conservatives from liberals...
...Neuhaus, a former Lutheran pastor, is a Catholic convert, a vigorous champion and personal friend of John Paul II, and a powerful figure in neoconservative circles...
...This year the pilgrims were able to walk the pilgrimage...
...What is striking here is Neuhaus's apparent faith in the "competent parties," the same faith proclaimed by Weigel when he wrote of the politicians' "charism of responsibility...
...I am sure George W. Bush meant what he said when he reacted to the photographs of tortured prisoners with "their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people...
...Third, their scant attention to how the war was actually conducted (jus in hello), and their disdain for those who pushed questions about noncombatant deaths and proportionality, suggest the need for a reappraisal of the value they placed on the just causes {ad helium) of the war...
...They can help "clarify the moral issues at stake...
...The simple answer is that such consequences are unknowable and therefore unknown, except to God...
...Still, by acknowledging such contingency Neuhaus and Weigel were able to minimize the importance of jus in hello questions...
...All in all, I think the critique I make of Weigel and Neuhaus in this essay still stands...
...They were trying to clarify the division of labor...
...Cheerleading is not an alternative to badgering...
...Second, they lost sight of the contingency that comes with "the fog of war...
...Throughout its fifteen-year history, it has, at its best, stood for more than just conservative politics...
...The other is that some measure of moral clarity is possible only with regard to questions about the justification/or war, not questions about the conduct o/war...
...Nobody knows what will happen" is not an alternative to so-called nervous handwringing...
...The essays contain frequent moments of brilliance, showcasing Neuhaus's remarkable range and wit...
...But his defense of U.S...
...something else is also going on here...
...It is now, when any day in Baghdad can make one feel like Bezukhov at Borodino, that moral clarity is hard...
...The Rector oversees a staff which includes graduate student Assistant Rectors and senior students who serve as Resident Assistants...
...They couldn't understand why the electricity was, at best, still three hours on, three hours off, and why sewage still lay in the streets...
...That particular view may just be willful and irresponsible optimism in light of an ABC News /Washington Post poll last summer, which found that 35 percent of Americans think torture is acceptable in some cases...
...The refusal to appoint an independent inquiry into prisoner abuse is further proof of this administration's disregard for just-war teaching...
...In the year before the U.S...
...And many more held out hope that they would be better off soon...
...I agree...
...It was as if the only thing for religious leaders to do was to get out of the way and let the responsible parties do their thing...
...Three months after the ICRC headquarters was bombed...
...Moral muteness in a time of war I fear Weigel has yielded to that temptation again...
...The possible consequences of war had in fact been considered day and night for many months...
...But sentiment-"I trust my government to try really hard"-is not any kind of argument...
...Neuhaus says nothing about the massive random arrests or the denial of fair trials...
...The new weapons technologies, though, were useful only in the very beginning of the war...
...It is a symptom of war, especially of those aspects of war conducted in defiance of jus in hello, in secrecy, behind doors closed to the ICRC, beyond the Geneva Conventions...
...September 11,1987), Peter Ste-infels, an advocate of the just-war tradition, welcomed Weigel's attempt to reinvigorate the Catholic debate about the moral necessity of using force...
...Weigel, I presume, still believes what he wrote in January 2003: "the proper role of religious leaders and public intellectuals is to do everything possible to clarify the moral issues at stake in a time of war...
...soldiers to come again, heavy metal blasting from their Humvees, blowing up doors to drag her brothers from their beds and take them off to Abu Ghraib...
...Abu Ghraib tells us little we didn't already know about war, occupation, and the modern state...
...rectors also receive furnished living quarters designed for one person and a partial meal plan...
...This came as no surprise...
...Not only is it Weigel who was wrong before the war...
...Trained to attend theologically and philosophically to texts, I have not proved a quick learner when it comes to attending to this kind of violence...
...One of the curious things about "Drawing the Line Against Torture" is the way Neuhaus concedes that the responsibility for the abuses goes all the way up to higher officials, but he still manages to throw in a jab at the America-bashers...
...The damage is grave...
...The issue is no longer one of the justice or injustice of the war or the Tightness or wrongness of the religious leaders...
...That is what we needed two years ago when First Things was brushing off in hello questions...
...This is a full-time, nine-month position...
...But you don't have to spend much time reading First Things or other "orthodox" critics of secularism to wonder about that...
...Nothing is easier than moral clarity before a war...
...All very interesting, all of potentially historic significance, and on all four developments there will be much more in forthcoming issues...
...Shouldn't Christian theologians have great clarity about the injustice of such methods...
...Even after American soldiers had stood by as Baghdad was looted, he wrote: Leading up to the invasion and even after its rapid military success, critics were predicting a quagmire, a Somalia-like debacle, a rising of the Arab "street" that would be "a storm from hell," and, of course, another Vietnam...
...The administration's failure to discourage such abuses, and its pathetic attempts to account for torture after it was exposed, are not needed to confirm the corruption of our political culture...
...So Weigel and Neuhaus were writing neither to or for those leaders responsible for taking us into war...
...I don't believe that Abu Ghraib reveals how debased we are...
...I am curious about the implication that when it comes to the conduct of war, moral clarity is out of reach...
...Yet Iraq is not a benchmark of any kind or a "development of most particular interest" for what is arguably this country's most influential conservative theological journal...
...By August, in the mosques, they were calling the new interim prime minister "Saddam Allawi...
...They are meant to make impossible the sort of Newspeak spouted by the lawyers of the Justice and Defense departments explaining why Bush's "inherent constitutional authority" over war made the obligations of the UN's Torture Convention "inapplicable...
...I fear we are about to find out...
...Weigel maintained in his "Moral Clarity" essay that "in the nature of the case, we can have less surety about in hello proportion and discrimination than we can have about the ad helium questions...
...It is the divinity schools, the National Council of Churches, and the U.S...
...If it doesn't constitute such evidence, what kind of evidence is it...
...If there haven't been more Somalia-like debacles in Iraq, and there have been enough, it is because the coalition forces have chosen-at least until the recent second assault on Falluja-to avoid street fighting as much as possible, opting instead for aerial bombardment that has had to sacrifice precision...
...Moreover, since I am a theology graduate student, I hoped to "think and write theologically" about what I had seen in Baghdad...
...As it happens, on the day this article went to press, I received the December 2004 First Things...
...To return, once again, to the most obvious example of this artificial myopia: in their 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace, the Catholic bishops of the United States seriously misread the moral and political dynamics of the last decade of the cold war (insisting that nuclear arms control was the key to peace, not regime change in the Soviet Union and its satellites), not because the (complex) facts of the case were not there to be seen and understood, but because the presumption against war blurred their perception of what they were seeing...
...In this case, though, the church's pacifists and liberals proved right...
...While the editors never wavered in their support for war in Afghanistan and Iraq, they opened the magazine to theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, Paul Griffiths, and Archbishop Rowan Williams, who all opposed the war...
...Christian conservatives regularly tell us how "barbarian" and "nihilist" we as a culture have become...
...He seems to suggest that just-war thinking no ionger simply begins with just cause, but that its purview-at least the purview that can offer any clarity-is restricted to ad helium...
...Weigel is doing precisely what he accuses, with some justification, many peace activists of doing: using Catholic teaching to support specific prudential judgments that rest not on the teaching alone but on 'political' readings of fact and history...
...We can talk about things I can't talk about with my Iraqi friends, or my European humanitarian friends, things like college basketball, or golfer Phil Mickelson's finally winning a major, or (with one guy) the Mother's Day caddis hatch in the Yellowstone River Valley...
...it can be a stance born of cynicism about the human capacity to promote justice, freedom, and order, all of which are moral goods...
...The central purpose of Weigel's "Moral Clarity in a Time of War" was to reinsert just-war theory into its "proper context within a theory of statecraft...
...Weigel's essay declared that "the fog of war" must not be allowed to "suggest that warfare takes place beyond the reach of moral reason...
...The issue, especially in light of President George W. Bush's re-election, is their current "moral muteness in a time of war...
...Bezukhov at Borodino is on my mind because it is the image that introduces an essay, "Moral Clarity in a Time of War," published in January 2003, in what the mainstream media like to call "the obscure but influential" journal First Things...
...We can be sure that it is civilians who will bear the brunt of such a decision...
...For Neuhaus, Abu Ghraib presents an opportunity to condemn torture, but not an opportunity to think about this war...
...See, for example, James Fallows, "Blind into Baghdad," the Atlantic Monthly, January-February 2004...
...In short, he argues that we will have to wait many years before a judgment about the justice of the war can be made...
...I don't mean to suggest that Neuhaus doesn't think these things are important, only that I am curious why he doesn't think they are important enough to explore in any detail...
...Sometimes it is a delirium-induced clarity that comes after the battle, but most often the clarity is in the run-up to war, precisely the sort of clarity Weigel provided in his essay, and that the First Things editors articulated in an earlier essay "In a Time of War" (December 2001...
...One is that "every human action takes place within the purview of moral judgment...
...Almost...
...I remember my surprise when I arrived in Baghdad and realized that it is now really possible to bomb with "surgical precision...
...For Iraq is a catastrophe-on all accounts (except perhaps Dick Cheney's...
...I can easily imagine grabbing a drink with them...
...Weigel and Neuhaus were writing to Christian pacifists and liberals to discourage them from getting in the way of this administration...
...The reader who approaches Tranquillitas Ordinis suspecting a strong political spin on its theological argument will not be mistaken," he wrote...
...Something certainly functioned like a badly manufactured pair of eyeglasses, distorting the vision of Christian supporters of this administration...
...Weigel thinks it doesn't...
...Peter Dula is the Iraq program coordinator for the Mennonite Central Committee...
...I agree...
...So Weigel makes two claims...
...The same, I suggest, holds true for the many warnings of catastrophe from religious leaders that preceded the Gulf War of 1991 and the most recent Iraq war...
...Starting salary in 2004-05 was $30,000 plus benefits...
...What about the possibility that one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians may have already died in this war...
...I am not sure if Weigel means that moral clarity will have to wait on events that are strategically unclear: discussions of proportionality will have to wait until we know how many civilians have been killed in Falluja...
...That is why I was in Iraq for ten months...
...Right around the time people began calling the entrance to the Green Zone "Assassins' Gate...
...It took until October 2004 for the most prominent journal of theological orthodoxy in the United States to say something about Abu Ghraib...
...And I agree that this ideological movement is a bit disappointing-though probably for reasons different from Weigel's...
...I will consider each of these views in turn...
...This was published last March...
...Or if he means that even when we do know how many civilians have died, there can be no ready algorithm for determining when violence can be declared disproportionate...
...Nowadays it separates conservatives from neo-conservatives...
...Collaboration with a wide array of University departments responsible for student welfare and University facilities is an essential feature of the Rector position...
...The public square-now that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al., occupy it-is not so naked...
...I rather like them...
...And that something else is, I think, the presumption against war, which functions like a badly manufactured pair of eyeglasses, distorting the vision of the observer...
...Even Neuhaus and Weigel weren't really needed...
...Religious leaders and theologians need to admit that there are many things they simply don't know...
...I don't know when Weigel actually penned it-perhaps late January or early February...
...Weigel argued that the sort of preemptive war Bush was threatening against Iraq could be justified by traditional just-war standards...
...There seems to be nothing he hasn't read and read well...
...Or say that estimate is way off...
...Right around the time sixty-seven people were killed by car bombs at the two Kurdish political party headquarters in Erbil...
...The issue is not only, or not simply, that they were wrong...
...Those who thought otherwise were derided as milquetoasts or as unwilling to rise to the defense of freedom and democracy in a dangerous world...
...The book was Rowan Williams's On Christian Theology-one can imagine what would happen if only more contractors in Iraq were interested in Rowan Williams...
...None of that happened...
...So it comes as something of a surprise, at least to me, that First Things has failed to follow through on another claim Weigel made in that essay...
...Yet it is precisely as a theologian and a reader-and more broadly as a citizen-that I want answers to questions raised by the arguments Weigel and Neuhaus made in support of the preemptive war in Iraq...
...We handed them the bat with which to bash us...
...decision makers, badgering them about whether they had thought of this possible consequence or that...
...Like so many American participants in this war, whether soldiers or contractors, he didn't take long to begin to complain...
...They were simply agents of the ground clearing, trying to minimize the influence of those whiny pacifists so that Bush and the neocons could have a clear and unobstructed path to war...
...But we have...
...Maybe it is more like the terror felt by a nine-year-old Iraqi friend who for weeks spent the nights crouched by her window, waiting for the U.S...
...Such a presumption would demand nothing less than the encouragement of as much "badgering" as possible from as many unruly corners of the demos as can be found...
...If they have been wrong, especially if they have been theologically wrong about the justice of this war, it should matter to those who share Weigel and Neuhaus's belief that religion should play a major role in the public square...
...Now we need a long close look in the mirror and at those photographs, to see if they show the same thing...
...Thus, Neuhaus is open to, even persuaded by, the possibility that the blame for the horrors of Abu Ghraib extends high up in the chain of command (though he is clear that it doesn't go as high as the president...
...I know that possible consequences have been considered, day and night for many months, by competent parties...
...I have done almost none of that...
...Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from across the Shi'a world had come to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, assassinated in Karbala in 680...
...Still, I remain curious why Weigel and Neuhaus are so oblivious to some other good reasons why conservatives should question what their government says...
...He told me with baffled amazement that many of the army's Humvees are not fitted with armored windshields...
...What kind of democracy doesn't entertain dissent, doesn't even find it tolerable...
...bishops in the wake of the sexual-abuse scandal and the election of an openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church...
...I had seen them the week before on the highway south of Baghdad, small groups of devout Shi'a walking dozens, sometimes hundreds, of kilometers to Karbala...
...it can be a stance born of indifference...
...When will this president's most theologically articulate supporters admit that the absence of weapons of mass destruction and the absence of compelling evidence of a link with Al Qaeda mean there was no just cause for this war, and that the incompetence and duplicity of the current administration mean that there was no competent authority for this war...
...But the lack of resources among those outside of government is, finally, obvious...
...Something blurred their perception of what they were seeing...
...We dare not trust ourselves to torture," writes Neuhaus...
...They couldn't understand a great many actions of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), but they were starting to call it "Can't Provide Anything...
...In it Neuhaus offers an explanation for why "the war on terror has not been center stage in these pages...
...The laws and mechanisms of inspection instituted by the Geneva Conventions are not primarily meant to detect abuses after they have happened...
...Perhaps my confusion and fear were something like what Tolstoy's Count Bezukhov was feeling in War and Peace when he surveyed the carnage at the battlefield of Borodino...
...First Things can rightly claim a distinct and important place in contemporary American religious thought...
...I was asking it the next morning when I discovered that two more car bombs had exploded next to a Christian seminary, killing ten, leaving professors and students shaking and looking in vain for loved ones, and burnt car parts spotting the lawn...
...I asked it again last March when 223 Shi'a pilgrims died in Karbala...
...As is often the case, the book I was reading served as the catalyst for a conversation with the person sitting next to me...
...Abu Ghraib presents a dilemma for Christian defenders of Bush's "war" on terror...
...Start by returning to Neuhaus's giddy proclamations of the end of the war, and his criticism of religious leaders, in the May 2003 First Things: Ranking ecclesiastics took up the time of U.S...
...Like much of his writing, Tranquillitas Ordinis is highly polemical, alleging that liberal Catholic theologians and ethicists, under the influence of an "anti-anti-Communist" ideology and a naive pacifism, abandoned a proper understanding of the just-war tradition...
...It is a muteness born of fear and cynicism, one that is a deficient form of moral judgment...
...Surely, when seen through the lens of the conservative Christian indictment of American culture, the events at Abu Ghraib must raise the question of whether America can produce soldiers capable of jus in hello...
...Still, it isn't clear that even that is necessary in light of Weigel's faith in the vibrancy of the just-war tradition in this administration...
...Those who feared a "Somalia-like debacle" were predicting bitter street warfare against Saddam's fedayeen...
...We already knew that, already knew that we live in an America where the speech of politicians is as necessarily manipulative as anything coming from Madison Avenue...
...Nervous handwring-ing is not a moral argument...
...Neuhaus, for one, has been preoccupied with other things, such as the lay review board established by the U.S...
...Never mind that much of the protest was motivated by opposition to American policy or generalized America-bashing...
...Five months after the UN left Iraq with twenty-two fewer people than it had entered with...
...I am supposed to write "advocacy reports" to Make a difference in countless lives...
...Neuhaus concedes that those opposed to the war have a "legitimate argument," but cautions administration critics that "leaders do not have the convenience of making decisions retrospectively...
...Until the October 2004 issue, the last time Neuhaus addressed Iraq was August-September 2003...
...Here is Neuhaus in March 2004: Quite suddenly, it seems, there are four imminent developments of most particular interest to a magazine of religion, culture, and public life...
...Last June I was on a flight from Erbil to Baghdad...
...invasion, when Saddam was trying to look a bit less like a tyrant, the pilgrimage had been permitted for the first time in decades...
...Steinfels also judged "disingenuous" Weigel's claims to political disinterestedness...
...I was asking it when a Kurdish colleague took me to see the memorial at Halabja, where Saddam gassed five thousand villagers...
...In doing so, he reiterates the just-war arguments in favor of invading Iraq and in defense of the subsequent occupation...
...In fact, a large part of my job as a Mennonite Central Committee worker in Baghdad and Amman, Jordan, is "advocacy...
...If I had to date the point when things began to change, it would be March 2,2004, the holiest day of the year in Shi'a Islam and the bloodiest day of this ongoing war...
...Neuhaus finally did address Abu Ghraib in the October 2004 First Things in an essay called "Drawing the Line Against Torture...
...I don't mean to be patronizing, but of all the many people currently occupying Iraq-soldiers, administrators, contractors, journalists, and NGO workers like myself-our soldiers are the most vulnerable...
...What I am most concerned with can be reduced to four points...
...Alternatively, it could be said that the torturers were not debased before they got to Iraq...
...Since when is a deep mistrust of state bureaucracies not a defining characteristic of conservatism...
...But most were still able to say they were better off than under Saddam...
...He is right...
...Six bombs in Karbala left 223 worshippers dead...
...Perhaps Abu Ghraib tells us more about modern war and occupation than it does about American culture...
...Or, at the least, the debate about the rules governing the treatment of prisoners suggests that there can be no clear line between the questions of just cause and just conduct...
...It is the centerpiece of the magazine's appeal for many, and often the first and only part I read, if pressed for time...
...Weigel and Neuhaus are right to remind us that there are many things religious leaders don't know that the government does know...
...But whatever its psychological, spiritual, or intellectual origins, moral muteness in wartime is a form of moral judgment-a deficient and dangerous form of moral judgment...
...He has spent the last ten months in Iraq and Jordan...
...intentions sits uneasily with other things he says...
...What about Muslim reaction...
...Each has the potential of being a benchmark of historic change...
...Here we reach the real issue about Iraq...
...Notre Dame's Office of Student Affairs is now accepting applications for the position of Residence Hall Rector for the 2005-06 academic year...
...So the critics were abysmally wrong on almost every point...
...It was a clarity provided by arguably two of the most influential conservative Catholics in the United States, intellectuals who have the ear of influential American bishops and the Vatican...
...What if fifty thousand civilians have died...
...The pictures of what happened and the failures of policy that permitted what happened will long be cited as evidence against the claim that America is the champion of human rights and dignity...
...Before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, and in its aftermath, Weigel and First Things promoted a reasoned debate about the war on terrorism...
...How did First Things respond to such events...
...Nobody can know for sure what will happen, but religious leaders should bring more to the discussion than their fears...
...The issue is the second half of Moynihan's formulation-our ability to wield political power to produce the requisite cultural change in a place such as Iraq...
...The argument that Abu Ghraib was just the work of "a few bad apples" might have convinced some, but it should give pause to theologians who spend so much time telling Americans how corrupted we have become because society has turned away from religious truth...
...Abu Ghraib was no fluke Despite Neuhaus's misguided euphoria in May and June 2003, it is important to acknowledge that both he and Weigel were aware, in their prewar writing, of the "contingency" and "unpredictability" of battle...
...Conference of Catholic Bishops that have forgotten the tradition...
...Rightly and unequivocally, he rejects the "few bad apples" argument, writing that the Justice Department's own Office of Legal Counsel was trying to find loopholes in the prohibition against torture as early as 2002...
...Contrary to Weigel, that clarity must come before questions concerning the just conduct of war...
...What about now...
...Trusting the government...
...The policies of the officials in charge of military prisons from Guantanamo to Baghdad-random arrests, denial of fair trial, secrecy-are jus in hello issues about which we should have a great deal of clarity...
...Such injustices fall, presumably, under "failure of policy which permitted what happened...
...Can there be any doubt that what blurred their perception was their faith in the current administration...
...Finally, I would argue that their silence since the fall of Baghdad is more disturbing than their mistakes before and during "major combat operations...
...He has written on the role of the churches in the collapse of communism, and at great length on the just-war tradition in Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (1987...
...Perhaps they think they were right...
...War has always created its own horrors, but when you add soldiers produced in a culture as debased as First Things thinks this one is, Abu Ghraib should be no surprise at all...
...Those abuses were the predictable result of massive random arrests, denial of fair trials, poorly trained guards, and power shrouded in secrecy...
...Williams thinks it does, as do most Catholic theologians and ethicists...
...Writing in Commonweal ("The Heritage Abandoned...
...It is a question that comes to me when I wake up to a car bomb or fall asleep to the sound of mortar fire...
...One could almost teach a "Theology and Culture" course assigning nothing but his column...
...There has been a clerical lurch to the left in the churches, though it is hardly global...
...They had two basic approaches to addressing questions about noncombat-ant deaths and proportionality...
...The University prizes residential life for the unique opportunities it offers students to develop the commitment to service and sense of responsibility essential for leadership beyond college...
...The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself...
...And the most recent Iraq war...
...I know there is a determination to minimize damage to innocents, and a reasoned expectation that successful action will weaken Islamist enemies of civilization and strengthen the Muslim forces of decency and freedom...
...Still, people are allowed to be wrong...
...First, they were confident that new weapons technologies would keep civilian casualties at a minimum...
...Moral Clarity in a Time of War" was written by Catholic theologian George Weigel, a member of the editorial board of First Things (along with fellow neoconservative Catholics Michael Novak and Mary Ann Glendon)-and perhaps best known for his biography of Pope John Paul II (Witness to Hope...
...Become a Residence Hall Rector at the University of Notre Dame and participate in a rich tradition of ministry at the heart of student life...
...War and Peace is full of examples of moral clarity about war...
...Weigel is still wrong eighteen months after what Bush called "the end of major combat operations...
...But ideological predispositions don't explain every facet of this global clerical lurch a gauche...
...He was a Department of Defense contractor with an interest in theology...
...In Neuhaus's remarks, Abu Ghraib is treated as an isolated event, not a problem pervading the entire war on terror in prisons across Afghanistan, Iraq, and at Guantanamo...
...None of these things is remotely as important as what was going on and is going on in Iraq...
Vol. 131 • December 2004 • No. 21
