Month: August 2005

Though I was opposed to the Iraq war from the get-go, I’ve been ambivalent, like many people, about what the U.S. should do now that it’s there. After all, whatever the wisdom of going in, Saddam’s regime was truly evil, and I had harbored the hope that it might be possible to help create a decent government there that would at least be more respectful of basic human rights.

Lately though I’ve started to wonder if the insistence on the part of the political and pundit class that, no matter what, we must not “cut and run” isn’t motivated less by an objective assessment of what would happen in Iraq if we left rather than stayed, and more by a fear that leaving would undermine U.S. “credibility.” If there’s one view that is held in common by the mainstream Left and Right, the Thomas Friedmans and the Charles Krauthammers, it’s that the U.S. has the power and the ability to intervene successfully in other countries. But to pull out would be to acknowledge the limitations on our ability to “nation build” and generally shape the world in accordance with our ideals. And that would call into question a central pillar of the worldview of much of the ruling and chattering classes.

In that vein, Sojourners reviews David Rieff’s At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. (I picked up Rieff’s book after reading the review, but haven’t started it yet.) Rieff appears to be a chastened liberal hawk of sorts; he was an advocate of various “humanitarian interventions” but first hand encounters with the results have left him a great deal more skeptical.

No one wants to abandon the Iraqi people to chaos and civil war, but what if, as conservative Andrew Bacevich recently argued, we’ve already done all we can?

I never took Pat Robertson seriously before, and I’m not about to start now.

A question on usage though: somewhere Robertson’s comments were characterized as a “death threat.” Now, it seems to me that it’s only a death threat if he was intending to carry out the killing himself, which is presumably not the case.

Fr. Jim Tucker has some interesting reflections on the idea of political assassination. Why do we regard it as somehow worse than going to war? And why is it more appalling to advocate the killing of one man than thousands (as respectable mainstream pundits and politicians routinely do)?

The latest issue of The American Conservative has an article by Daniel McCarthy comparing the views of Pope Benedict XVI with Catholic “neoconservatives” like George Weigel and Michael Novak on the question of Just War theory. While there’s not much new information here, McCarthy poses the difference between the Pope, who, like his predecessor, opposed the Iraq war, and those, like Weigel and Novak, who supported it in a way that invites further reflection:

Yet war is a matter of both moral judgment and prudential judgment. The church is not competent to deduce the likelihood of strategic success or to address other purely prudential considerations of Just War doctrine. But there remain moral considerations in going to war about which a pope certainly can speak with authority, if not with infallibility. Neither John Paul II nor Benedict—whose intellect neoconservative Catholics have in other contexts praised —needs reminding about what the Catechism says. In Benedict’s case, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he supervised its recent abridgement. In a May 2003 interview reported by Rome’s Zenit news service, Ratzinger was asked about the justice of the Iraq War in light of the Catechism. He agreed that Just War doctrine may require revision, as Weigel and other Catholic neoconservatives have suggested—but in a more, not less, restrictive direction.

If, as McCarthy suggests, the Catholic “neocons” and the current Pope both agree on the need for a revision of Just War theory, but differ as to how that should be carried out, it’s worth asking why they take the different positions they do. A cynical answer would be that the likes of Weigel and Novak are lapdogs for the Bush administration or have traded their fealty to Catholicism for the ideological brew of American conservatism. On the other hand, one might suggest that Pope Benedict and much of the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, is too imbued with the European spirit of appeasement and anti-Americanism.

A more fruitful (or at least more charitable) explanation would be that each party sees the need for revision of the theory in light of different moral judgments about particular actions taken in light of new circumstances. The reasons that folks like Weigel and Novak often offer for rethinking traditional Just War theory involve the changed circumstances of a struggle against rogue nations and transnational terrorist networks. These circumstances, they argue, clearly require rethinking how such concepts as “last resort” and “certain and lasting danger” apply in today’s world. To coin a phrase, they might say that Just War theory is not a suicide pact, and the spirit, if not the letter, of the theory licences things like preventative wars against states that we may have reason to beleive are harboring terrorists and/or developing weapons of mass destruction (leave aside for the moment that, factually, this didn’t apply to Iraq).

On the other hand, Pope Benedict’s reasons for favoring a “more restrictive” approach to war seem to have to do with the destructiveness of modern weaponry (after all, when Just War theory was formulated, wars were still being fought with swords, spears, and bows and arrows. When the crossbow was introduced in the Middle Ages the Pope at the time declared its use incompatible with civilized limits on warfare), and the greater potential for “collateral damage.” As warfare has become more destructive, the Pope reasons, the need to limit its scope and the frequency of its occurrence becomes all the more important.

In both cases, it seems to me, we have a proposed revision of the theory based on changed circumstances and the weight assigned to different facts. The “neoconservatives” emphasize that traditional Just War restrictions may fail to allow the public authorities to adequately secure the peace and well-being of those who are entrusted to their care, which, after all, is the whole point. The danger there is that justifying recourse to war will become too easy. The Pope, by contrast, is concerned to limit the ravages of war as much as possible, perhaps resulting in the “functional pacifism” that conservative critics of the Vatican decry.

Sober dove Alan Bock isn’t sure whether we’re seeing the beginning of a grass-roots anti-war movement that “looks like America”:

As a war opponent from the beginning, I have mixed feelings. Ms. Sheehan has not confined herself to doubting the war’s wisdom, but has unburdened herself of an array of remarks ranging from personal insults of the president and his family to offhand remarks about Israel and Palestine. It’s understandable that one might want to put an array of issues before the public when you have the chance to have your views magnified by the amplifiers of the media. But I think she would have been more effective if she had stuck stubbornly to a single question: “I just want to know what core American interest was served by my son’s death.”

There’s a constituency for comments like saying a protest is “for all our brave souls (American or Iraqi) who have been murdered by the Bush crime family,” which Mrs. Sheehan is widely reported to have said. There are unquestionably Americans who take delights in hearing someone call the president “that lying bastard” or “that maniac.” There’s a frisson in comments to the effect that without the Internet America “would already be a fascist state.” Plenty of people get their intellectual rocks off hearing comments like “You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East.”

In terms of influencing the larger body politic, however, such remarks are not likely to persuade. They might even repel people who are coming to doubt the wisdom of the war in Iraq but are not even close to hating their country, their government or even their president.

None of this takes anything away from the fact that it was Cindy Sheehan, not you or I, who actually took the initiative to go to Crawford. Nor does it justify some of the more scurrilous and personal attacks on her that have come from the War Party from the beginning of her vigil. Indeed, it is impressive that at least several hundred other antiwar Americans, of varying political persuasions, have joined her there. It is encouraging that they have held prayer meetings, demonstrating that like most Americans, they are respectful of religion.

I suspect, however, that the fact that the predominant tone coming from Camp Casey has been embittered-left – which may be how it has been filtered through the media and not reflective of a wider variety of views on the road to the Bush estate – might have been helpful in the short run but not perhaps in the long run. We need at least some faces of the antiwar movement to be people whose deep love of America and respect for her institutions and the promise she still holds of expanding freedom the right way practically oozes from their pores, so there can be no doubt they are patriots. We need people in suits and ties as well as dungarees and bandanas. We need an antiwar movement that looks like America to begin to have a real impact on American policy.

Heavy metal may be the Next Big Thing for kitsch-crazed hipsters according to this Slate article. Well, some of us never stopped loving metal! Though, I admit my tastes run more to 80’s thrash at its peak (early Metallica, Anthrax, etc.), punk-metal fusion (Suicidal Tendencies, D.R.I.), and “classic” stuff like Iron Maiden, with an occasional dip into early 90’s Pantera.

However, allow me to plug the great new album from punk-metal pioneers Corrosion of Conformity. It seamlessly fuses Sabbath-influenced Southern sludge with a thrash element that in places rivals Slayer in their prime (and without all the satanic imagery!).

When it is said that God is the ground of nature’s existence and order, God is not being used to fill a gap in a scientific explanation that concerns the connections between members of the universe. Rather to speak of God as the ground of nature’s existence and order is to address questions concerning the existence of the universe itself and why it has the particular set of members and connections it has. Because these questions are about the universe as a whole, they are beyond the limits of scientific explanations.

[…]

Christianity does not claim that the order of the universe is such that we ought to infer that nature is designed. However great or little its complexity, nature’s order is intended by God. Since Darwin’s theory of natural selection more or less explained how very complex forms of life arise from much simpler forms, we have not been inclined to move toward the idea of design, however great the complexity is. But scientific procedures and assumptions which do not regard nature’s order as intended, do not contradict the Christian claim that the order of the universe is intended by God. It is the Lordship of God over nature, not nature’s complexity, which is the basis of the claim. God as the source of nature’s order gives us no specific information about the relation between its members.

—Diogenes Allen

Is the designer of Intelligent Design the God of the Bible? John Garvey doesn’t think so:

The problem with the God rejected by Darwinian atheists and the God of those who believe in intelligent design is that neither is particularly biblical. (By the way, I think it is fair of those who believe in intelligent design to complain that they are not, as some allege, a wedge into the schools that will lead eventually to teaching biblical literalism. This is not, in fact, part of their argument, and the intelligent designer they posit has little to do with the God of the Bible.) The intelligent designer seen by both camps–rejected by one, accepted by the other–is essentially the God of the deists, a generally benign designer compelled to create the best of all possible worlds, a world in which profound flaws and seemingly mad design would be unthinkable. If intelligent design were science, if it could be supported by fact and not what amounts to aesthetic speculation, it might be a good argument for a Gnostic demiurge, a deranged creator-god. Yes, the intricacy of the eye and the elegance of flagella are amazing and the details beautiful. But a designer with his, her, or its hand in at this clockwork level could surely do something to prevent anencephalic babies or Alzheimer’s disease. What about all the apparently useless parts of the DNA strand? Couldn’t praying mantises have been designed with a way to mate that didn’t require the female to devour the head of the male during intercourse? I’ve seen a mother hamster devouring her young with blank eyes, preferable to grief, I guess, under the circumstances. The designer’s eye is upon the sparrow, the mantis, the mother hamster eating her young, the brainless baby.

[…]

The God of the Bible is responsible for the world, but it is a world that has been wounded beyond comprehension by sin and evil. The whole of creation, Paul insists in the eighth chapter of Romans, groans as it waits for its true completion in God. When we study this creation we study something infinitely more mysterious–and torn and unfinished–than a well-designed machine; it is something at once wonderful and perishing and cannot be reduced to what science can see and tell us, either about randomness or design. The God of the Bible is not the prime mover of Greek philosophy or the benign provider of the deists. He appears in the burning bush and will not give his name. He wrestles with Jacob (who is Israel, the one who “contends with God”). This God has no handle–not designer, planner, nor architect, except as a fleeting metaphor. This God is unknowable, silent, suddenly appearing, interfering when unwanted and absent when wanted, always elusive–and this tricky one is responsible for the universe. In Jesus Christ we are invited to call this God our Father, a father whose son was crucified to begin the release of the universe from the bondage Paul tells us about, inviting us to await a goodness that is only dawning, and certainly can’t be seen clearly under a microscope.

I incline to the view that the existence and order of the universe leaves the question of God an open one. It doesn’t compel belief, but it allows for it. The God of the Bible is not an inference, but a personal reality that is encountered.

Ramesh Ponnuru, proving that conservatism hasn’t totally lost its soul, has an article cautioning against loosening the restraints on the means by which we fight wars. Conservative pundits like Max Boot and Mark Steyn have been citing anguish over the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as well as the bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, etc.) as evidence that we’ve become pantywaist pacifists in our conduct of war (never mind that “smart” bombs are nowhere near so smart as to guarantee no “collateral damage”).

Mr. Ponnuru, however, rightly points out that there are limits to how much collateral damage is morally acceptable, and that intentionally targeting civilians constitutes crossing a bright moral line. He wonders if those who defend the bombings of World War II can logically rule out targeting civilians in our current “global struggle against violent extremism.”

Looks that way, anyway. From Beliefnet:

The nation’s largest Lutheran church on Friday upheld a policy that frowns on blessing same-sex unions, but left the door open for pastors to provide “faithful pastoral care” to all parishioners as they see fit.Delegates from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted 670-323 to uphold a 1993 statement that says gay unions have no basis in Scripture and cannot be an “official action” of the church.

Yet, at the same time, the church said it would trust local churches to “discern ways to provide faithful pastoral care” to all parishioners, which would include gay and lesbian Lutherans.

The church’s unofficial policy remains the guidance offered by church bishops in 1993 that they find no basis in Scripture or tradition “for the establishment of an official ceremony of this church for the blessing of a homosexual relationship.”

Delegates narrowly rejected, 491-484, language that referred specifically to “same-sex couples.” Instead, pastors are called to provide care “for all to whom they minister.”

Read the rest here.

Despite the fact that increasing numbers of Americans (and disproportionate numbers of Democratic voters, one suspects) are disenchanted with the war in Iraq, the Democratic leadership remains steadfastly hawkish. The names most frequently mentioned as possiblities in ’08 (Clinton, Biden, etc.) are invariably national security hawks who continue to support the war. Why is this so?

This article discusses how a “strategic class” of government officials, analysts, think-tankers, and journalists reinforce a hawkish stance and put any kind of dovish or principled position of opposition to the war beyond the pale of “respectable” discourse.