A Thinking Reed

Category: War & Peace

  • Let the peaceniks have their say!

    Good article at Reason on the Ron Paul-Rudy Giuliani showdown:

    No one knows precisely what morbid formula inspired the Sept. 11 attacks. Most likely, it was some mix of U.S. foreign policy exacerbating radical Islamists’ already deep-seeded contempt for Western values.

    But to suggest that we shouldn’t even consider that our actions overseas might have unintended consequences is, frankly, just ignorant. And to attempt to silence anyone who says otherwise by attempting to define them as the lunatic fringe of political debate is not only ignorant, it’s an embrace of ignorance—a refusal to even hear ideas that might challenge your own perspective.

  • Just War theory and the “charism of discernment”

    This post from Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh revisits some of the arguments of pro-Iraq war Catholics, in particular papal biographer George Weigel (link via Eric).

    Weigel’s notion of a “charism of political responsibility/discernment” is muddled at best. Here’s the relevant passage from his “Moral Clarity in a Time of War”:

    If the just war tradition is indeed a tradition of statecraft, then 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, while recognizing that what we might call the “charism of responsibility” lies elsewhere-with duly constituted public authorities, who are more fully informed about the relevant facts and who must bear the weight of responsible decision-making and governance. It is simply clericalism to suggest that religious leaders and public intellectuals “own” the just war tradition in a singular way.

    As I have argued above, many of today’s religious leaders and public intellectuals have suffered severe amnesia about core components of the tradition, and can hardly be said to own it in any serious intellectual sense of ownership. But even if today’s religious leaders and public intellectuals were fully in possession of the tradition, the burden of decision-making would still lie elsewhere. Religious leaders and public intellectuals are called to nurture and develop the moral-philosophical riches of the just war tradition. The tradition itself, however, exists to serve statesmen.

    There is a charism of political discernment that is unique to the vocation of public service. That charism is not shared by bishops, stated clerks, rabbis, imams, or ecumenical and interreligious agencies. Moral clarity in a time of war demands moral seriousness from public officials. It also demands a measure of political modesty from religious leaders and public intellectuals, in the give-and-take of democratic deliberation.

    Now, you could legitimately argue, I think, that public officials have the unique responsibility for making decisions to go to war, but that’s no reason to suppose that they are given a unique gift of discernment or judgment. It’s true that they will often have access to privileged information (though, fat lot of good it did ‘em in the case of Iraq) but that’s a separate issue.

    What Weigel seems to imply is that public officials are granted almost supernatural aid in deciding whether or not a given war is just. I can’t imagine what in the tradition would support this claim unless we’re reverting to the idea of the king as God’s anointed.

    Cavanaugh puts it well:

    Regardless of the facts of this particular case, moral judgments about war, like all moral judgments, are not primarily a matter of good information. Good information is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for sound moral judgments. Sound moral judgments depend on being formed in certain virtues. Why a Christian should assume that the president of a secular nation-state would be so formed – much less enjoy a certain “charism” of moral judgment – is a mystery to me. “Charism” is a theological term denoting a gift of the Holy Spirit. To apply such a term to whomever the electoral process of a secular nation-state happens to cough up does not strike me as theologically sound or practically wise.

    It’s also worth pointing out that the Constitution envisioned war being declared by Congress, not the President (Article I, Section 8). While again it’s true that public officials have a unique responsibility for making these decisions, they aren’t guaranteed a special wisdom. It seems to me that only an inflated, quasi-monarchical concept of the presidency would even be tempted to impute this kind of “charism” to the occupant of the Oval Office. If the decision to go to war was kept with Congress (or, heck, with a plebiscite), there would probably be much less temptation toward this kind of obscurantism.

  • Christians and war revisited

    Doug Bandow has an article worth reading on Christians and the Iraq war.

    I think we see here one of the problems with Just War theory, a problem that many pacifists have pointed out, namely that it can be so flexible as to (rhetorically at least) justify virtually any war.

    However, Just War adherents obviously think that pacifism is too high a price to pay for a bright, clear line about when to go to war. But Bandow articulates what some JW thinkers have called the presumption against the use of force:

    Christians should be particularly humble before advocating war. War means killing, of innocent and criminal alike. It means destroying the social stability and security that creates an environment conducive for people to worship God, raise families, create communities, work productively, and achieve success – in short, to enjoy safe and satisfying lives. Wars rarely turn out as expected, and the unintended consequences, as in Iraq, often are catastrophic.

    Indeed, in Iraq the U.S. has essentially killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of humanitarianism. Christians, even more than their unbelieving neighbors, should be pained by the horror of sectarian conflict unleashed by the actions of their government with their support. Believers especially should eschew nationalistic triumphalism in pursuit of war. And when they err, like predicting health, wealth, liberty, and happiness in occupied Iraq, they should acknowledge fault – and seek forgiveness. At the very least they should exhibit humility before saddling their white horses to begin another crusade.

    I tried to make a similar point here, specifically with respect to proposed humanitarian interventions. A lot depends on whether we see war as an extraordinary last resort, or as a routine tool of statecraft. Andrew Bacevich and others have argued that Americans have come to see war as the latter, with disastrous results. And Bandow is surely right the Christians, even if they’re not pacifists, should be wary of war and set the bar high for supporting it.

  • Is Ron Paul right?

    The debate kerfuffle between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani over the question of the causes behind the 9/11 attacks has generated a fair amount of comment. I think Paul got the better of the exchange and Giuliani came across as a bit of a demagogue, but it’s still worth asking whether Paul is right here.

    Talking about the connection between our interventionist foreign policy and “blowback” in the form of terrorism has been the genuine third rail of US politics over the last 5+ years. What I didn’t hear Paul say was that we in any way deserved the 9/11 attacks. This is the canard frequently used against people who try to explain the motives of the terrorists with reference to US foreign policy. But there’s a big difference between explaining something and justifying it. Saying that OBL and co. want to attack us because we’re “over there” as Paul puts it does not imply that they were right to do so.

    My view has been that our interventions in the Middle East are at least a contributing factor in Islamist terrorism and the 9/11 attacks. I don’t want to discount the role of Islamic extremism, as some leftists and anti-war conservatives seem to do. The former often advert to sheerly economic or political explanations, while the latter sometimes fixate on the role of Israel. Nevertheless, as Paul pointed out in the debate, bin Laden and his confederates have explicitly said that they attacked us because of our presence over there. It would be extremely foolish to disregard their own account of their motives, even if it’s not the full story.

    An important component, I would think, of any sound strategy against terrorism would be to “peel off” potential supporters of terrorist groups by listening to their concerns about our presence in the region. Granted there are a hard core of radicalized jihadists who will be swayed by nothing, terrorist groups seem to thrive only when they have some kind of support from the larger public. Presumably one of the reasons the IRA was able to carry on its campaigns for so long was that there were people not directly involved who at least sympathized to some degree. Paul is surely right that it’s important to ask how we would feel if some other country was meddling in our affairs like we do in the Middle East (and elsewhere).

    And even apart from the question of blowback, we need to ask whether our interventions are a) good for the US on the whole and in the long run and b) morally legitimate. Even if Osama bin Laden didn’t oppose it, there’s still reason to doubt whether US forces should’ve be stationed in Saudi Arabia, just like there’s a legitimate question whether our forces should remain stationed in Iraq. And the fact that it would likely make the Iranian people dislike us even more (possibly leading to terrorist reprisals) is not the only reason to doubt the wisdom of attacking Iran to prevent the government there from acquiring nuclear weapons.

    Conservatives have reacted (at times understandably) against the leftist litany of American misdeeds, but this has all too often spilled over into an uncritical approval of everything the US does or has ever done. If conservatism means anything it means dealing with reality as it is, not as you would wish it to be. At least the kinds of conservative thinkers I’ve always found congenial are those who criticize simplistic, utopian, and ideological thinking. Repeating the mantra that “they hate us because we’re free” won’t help us understand our enemies and ultimately deal more intelligently with them.

    Moreover, Christians of all people should be able to look unflinchingly at their own sins. We don’t need to pretend that we, individually or collectively, are free from fault. Believing in the power of forgiveness ought to enable us to look honestly at our own failings and those of our country, without sliding into self-loathing. We shouldn’t have to fear acknowledging them and, if necessary, changing course. That’s part of what I think Christians should bring to the civic conversation, especially when political parties seem institutionally committed to an uncritical nationalism.

  • Confessions of a thirtysomething right-wing peacenik

    Marvin points to a blog post discussing a poll indicating that we thirtysomethings are the only age group still giving majority support to the Iraq war. Much speculation abounds in the comment thread about us children of the 80s having been brainwashed by the evil Reagan.

    Coming near the tail end of this cohort (I’m 32), I’ve always been anti-war, beginning with my teenage skepticism of the Gulf War propaganda fed to us by the classroom “news” program Channel One when I was in high school. I did have a slight deviation during the Afghanistan conflict, seeing it at the time as a justifiable response to the 9/11 attacks (I’m a bit more ambivalent about that now).

    Perhaps surprisingly, it was really the liberal “humanitarian” wars of Bill Clinton that put me solidly in the anti-war camp. A truly self-defensive war I could theoretically get behind, but the whole idea of dropping bombs on foreigners to make them get along better always struck me as incredibly corrupt and perverse. I think this is actually part of the reason I became something of a right-winger in the late 90s – in those days it was the congressional Republicans who were opposing the President’s wars! This trend of Republican dovishness probably peaked with candidate George W. Bush’s “more humble” foreign policy and skepticism about nation-building.

    Obviously times have changed, and the anti-war position is only represented in the current crop of GOP candidates by Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul made the case that non-intervention is the traditional conservative and constitutional position, though it might be a bit of a stretch to call Ike an isolationist of any sort. It’s indicative of how surreal these debates are that Paul, a radical libertarian “fringe” candidate, is the only GOP contender who comes anywhere close to the position of the majority of Americans on the war, even if not us warmongering thirtysomethings.

  • The Middle East: not that important?

    I don’t agree with everything in this Edward Luttwak article (particularly the stuff about the hopeless backwardness of Arab culture and the “perfectly understandable hostility of convinced Islamists towards the transgressive west”), but he makes some points that need making. Our political class is way over-invested in the idea that the Middle East is of tantamount importance. Also, it’s obvious that our support for Israel is the cause of a lot of the anger aimed at the US in that part of the world. However, I’m not convinced we should abandon our support of Israel even if that were a political possibility. It would be better, I think to work for a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to defuse some of the hostility toward the US and otherwise get the heck out of there. With the Cold War over and the OPEC oil cartel weakened, what strategic interest does America have in maintaining a major presence in the Middle East?

  • Augustine, just war, prevention, preemption, etc.

    Chris at Even the Devils Believe has a follow-up on the question of preemptive/preventive war & Just War Theory. He riffs on an article from the Journal of Religious Ethics that discusses Augustine’s view of these matters (not available online, alas).

  • Preemption, prevention, and the Pope

    Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus have both offered some critical comments on Pope Benedict’s Easter address where Benedict reiterated (by implication, at least) some of his criticisms of the Iraq war. Novak has consistently remained a steadfast supporter of President Bush, so his comments aren’t particularly novel or surprising; he offers the now-cliched rebuttal that the Pope, much like the “American Left” is ignoring all the “good news” coming out of Iraq.

    Neuhaus, by contrast, has expressed at least some misgivings about the war over the last several months, but here tries to get the Bush Administration off the hook for its embrace of “preventive war,” which, as numerous theologians, including the Pope himself, have pointed out, is incompatible with Catholic teaching on Just War:

    Talk about preemptive war was part of the Bush administration’s less than careful (others would say arrogant) strategic language, most assertively expressed in the statement on national security of September 2002. Language about preemptive war was provocative and entirely unnecessary. As George Weigel has explained (here and here) in the pages of First Things, traditional just-war doctrine adequately provides for the use of military force in the face of a clear and present threat of aggression. Such a use of force is more accurately described as defensive rather than preemptive, and it is worth keeping in mind that in 2003 all the countries with developed intelligence services agreed that Saddam Hussein had or was quickly developing weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in aggressive war.

    There needs to be a distinction made between “preemptive” war and “preventive” war. Fr. Neuhaus is correct that preemption is allowed for in Just War thinking. If a country is facing an imminent threat it needn’t wait for the other side to attack before engaging in defensive action. The textbook (literally) example of this is Israel’s preemptive attack which began the Six Day War.

    But “preventive” war refers to initiating hostilities when the threat is only hypothetical. Daniel Larison dissects some of the problems with this concept here, but it is to say the least far harder to justify according to traditional Just War criteria.

    Fr. Neuhaus, unfortunately, seems to be engaging in a bit of sleight-of-hand here when he talks about the supposed threat from Iraq as “clear and present threat of aggression” and says that “all the countries with developed intelligence services agreed that Saddam Hussein had or was quickly developing weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in aggressive war.” The “threat” posed by Hussein’s regime was always a very hypothetical one, relying on a chain of inferences involving its possession of WMDs, its alleged ties to al-Qaeda (always the weakest of the Administration’s arguments), and the claim that it couldn’t be deterred from launching what would appear to be a suicidal attack on the U.S. via these terrorist proxies. Even Administration spokesmen shied away from describing this “threat” as “imminent.” In fact, President Bush himself in his 2003 State of the Union address said:

    Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.

    In fact, after it became clear that the threat from Saddam’s Iraq was largely illusory, there was a concerted effort by Administration spokesmen to deny that they ever claimed that the threat was “imminent.”

    Now, it’s open to the defender of preventive war to argue that a threat needn’t be imminent for war to be justified, but that would represent a serious departure from the Just War tradition; to mention only one problem it’s very difficult to see how preventive war could be reconciled with the criterion of “last resort.” But, if so, it should at least be admitted that it is a departure. Either the Administration was claiming that that the threat from Saddam was imminent, in which case it was either wrong or dissembling, or it was not claiming the threat was imminent, in which case it went to war in contravention of accepted Just War principles.

  • The “hegemonist consensus”

    Good article from Jim Pinkerton about how little evidence there is that Chuck Hagel, despite his criticisms of the Bush administration, would dissent from what Pinkerton calls the “hegemonist consensus” shared by elites of both parties. Only “fringe” candidates like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich seem willing to question this consensus.

    That said, Hagel certainly looks better to my eyes than any of the current GOP candidates, but it’s not even clear he’s going to run (and even less clear that he’d have a shot at the nomination). Given that, I’m inclined to root for the Dem candidate who stands the best chance of at least ameliorating the situation in Iraq and exercising some degree of executive restraint in the future, both at home and abroad.

  • It’s the national security state, stupid

    Andrew Bacevich, reviewing several new books on the presidency, contends that the Imperial Presidency is a symptom, not the cause of our current troubles. The underlying problem is the state of permanent semi-mobilization that the country entered into after World War II and the attendant national security apparatus that it gave rise to. In matters of foreign policy and warmaking the president, Bacevich argues, has become more beholden to the various institutions within the national security state that act as quasi-independent centers of power and less beholden to the people.

    In short, as the atmosphere of semiwar took hold in the later 1940s, the formulation of national security policy became less democratic, but it did not become less political. It’s just that politics became an insider’s game, shielded from public scrutiny; henceforth, the politicking that counted occurred within the presidency behind closed doors. Keeping the Joint Chiefs on board became more important than gaining the assent of Congress. Maintaining a consensus among the various entities represented on the National Security Council took precedence over attending to what was once called the common good.

    If that’s right, then simply changing the current occupant of the Oval Office (however desirable that might be) will do little to restore democratic accountability to the conduct of foreign policy. Some kind of structural or constitutional change would be necessary, maybe along the lines of the Ludlow Amendment proposed in the late 30s to require a national referendum on any declaration of war except in cases where the U.S. had been attacked. Of course, the Ludlow Amendment applied to Congress, whereas nowadays presidents regard congressional authorization for war as a formality at best. But something in the same spirit might be one way of restoring some kind of check on the autonomy of executive branch, however unlikely such a thing is.