I spent some time this weekend reading some thoughtful conservative justifications for the war. See for instance this interview given by First Things editor Father Richard John Neuhaus before the war and his reflections on events since then in a piece he wrote in October of 2005. This is about as reasonable a Christian justification for the Iraq War as your likely to find:
In just-war doctrine, the Church sets forth the principles which it is the responsibility of government leaders to apply to specific cases (see Catechism of the Catholic Church 2309). Saddam Hussein has for– eleven years successfully defied international authority. He has used and, it appears, presently possesses and is set upon further developing weapons of mass destruction, and he has publicly stated his support for the September 11 attack and other terrorist actions.
In the judgment of the United States and many other countries, he poses a grave and imminent threat to America, world peace and the lives of innumerable innocents. If the judgment is correct, the use of military force to remove that threat, in the absence of plausible alternatives, is both justified and necessary. Heads of government who are convinced of the correctness of that judgment would be criminally negligent and in violation of their solemn oath to protect their people if they did not act to remove such a threat.
There’s more. His argument is thoughtful, tempered, humble. After reading him, anyone would think that invading Iraq was every decent person’s moral obligation. But he is careful to say that it is not his job as a theologian to make the
prudential judgment whether the war was on a practical level a good
idea or not:
Whether that cause can be vindicated without resort to military force,
and whether it would be wiser to wait and see what Iraq might do over a
period of months or years, are matters of prudential judgment beyond
the competence of religious authority.
Yes, but. His bias is toward supporting the war, and I have to ask why. He’s not some mean-spirited fanatic–he’s an idealist, and I don’t question his or the sincerity of many others who supported the war. But I have to ask, how could he be so wrong? My quarrel is not with just war theory. I am not a pacifist, and I recognize that there are some rare situations where the use of lethal force by the state is necessary and justified. I am, however, sympathetic to the Mennonite argument for pacifism not for theological reasons, but for practical reasons–because no matter how just the cause theoretically, the uses of state violence almost always have unnamed or unconscious motivations which more often than not become the tail wagging the dog.
Yes–even in wars that everyone recognizes as justified. If we truly lived in a just international order, American leaders would have been brought before a war crimes tribunal to stand trial for the firebombing of Dresden, Tokyo, and the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is probable cause enough to warrant an indictment that these were acts of terror against civilians more than they were acts of war designed to diminish the German and Japanese war-fighting capability. That isn’t to say that the war against Japan and Germany was not justified; only that the ‘good guys’ in a conflict like WWII are not less likely commit atrocities just because they are Americans. The average American is no better or worse than the average German, Japanese, or Iraqi. Americans are not exempt from the human condition, and especially now, American leaders are particularly vulnerable to delusional thinking because of the temptations that come with virtually unchecked power. War, contrary to the right’s tendency even now to romanticize it, more often brings the worst out of humans, not the best.
Once the dogs of war are unleashed, everyone involved is dragged by them to corrupt regions of the human soul any sane person would seek at all costs to avoid. We should not be shocked by Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha. And while those who participated in the atrocities committed there are morally responsible for their actions, those who released the dogs of war are one hundred times more responsible. That’s why the Mennonite position on war has practical moral significance, even if I would agree that violence in some instances is justified. And I have to wonder if Fr. Neuhaus did not discern an eagerness on the part of this administration for this war and whether this did not bother him. I know what Bush said, but does he really take it at face value? I cannot believe he is so obtuse, especially not after everything we have learned about the PNAC push to invade Iraq since Desert Storm. This was not a war reluctantly entered into. It was one the neocon militarists were salivating about for over a decade.
We have been corrupted in every war in which we’ve participated, and we will be in every war we will ever participate in–that’s just the nature of war no matter how theoretically just the cause. And that’s why you don’t go to war, even if theoretically justified, unless absolutely forced to as a last resort. Our invasion of Iraq is all the worse because it was never a war that was necessary to begin with. It didn’t take a lot of shrewdness to see there were other possibilities. Saddam could have been contained, but this administration wanted this war too badly.
And the rest of us, including otherwise shrewd observers of the American scene like Fr. Neuhaus, should have smelled a rat. We knew who the architects of the war were. They’ve been around for years. Many were around during the Nixon/Ford years; they were around during the Iran Contra crimes; they are the fraternity of "rollback" militarists and warmongers who see every problem as having only a violent solution. They are the same powerdrunk bunch who crashed the car before, and yet we gave them the keys to the car again anyway.
This is what makes me wonder about Neuhaus’s powers of discernment. Why is he so comfortable with these people and their vision? Why would he have reason to trust them? Why wasn’t it obvious to him that things would turn out the way they did? Even if an invasion of Iraq were absolutely necessary, these are the last people in the world you would want running it. Whether it fits some abstract criterion of just war theory is the least important factor; more important is who is pushing for this war, what is their record, and what are their motivations. To have trusted these guys for a minute was the first big mistake.
But even if the motivations of the war’s architects were as pure as humanly possible, the choice for war would still have to be balanced against its potential for unleashing forces of evil they would have no power to control. That, in my opinion, was the second major mistake the idealistic supporters of the war made. They were so infatuated with their dreams to get rid of the bad guy and to bring democracy and freedom to the long-suffering Iraqis, that they thought it unnecessary to understand much about the historical cultural reality with which they were tampering. They will see us a liberators, not invaders. Oy.
People like Fr. Neuhaus are impeccable, usually, in their reasoning, but deficient in their discernment. And their blindness is not something that is exclusive to people who are temperamentally inclined toward the right. We are all afflicted by it at one time or another. But insofar as he and people like him have made the judgment that the invasion of Iraq was a just cause, I think the record now shows that their discernment was deficient, and their judgment wrong. He doesn’t quite admit to this in his comments after the interview. The closest he comes is to say, "I don’t know." He then quotes Bush’s second inaugural address as if to say, well, our intentions were noble:
The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America’s influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause.
We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner “Freedom Now”—they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.
Who could gainsay the sentiments expressed in this speech? But the real question is whether such idealistic justifications for this war and for the militarization of our society point to our real motivations. This is where the failure of discernment comes–in failing to see the deeper, darker forces that are really driving our policy.
Neuhaus, like many Americans, wanted to believe that the administration was mainly motivated by these ideals, and I don’t doubt for a minute his sincerity. I do, however, question the naivete of his judgment. Naivete is always the result of projecting our own wishful thinking onto a situation. It’s an infatuation with our own ideas, which blinds us to reality as it is. Our ideas may in fact be very sophisticated and elegantly developed, but nevertheless fundamentally mistaken, as when we have fallen in love with the wrong person. No shame in that; it happens to the best of us. But it happens, and when it does, we see only what we want to see. But reality has a way of sooner or later waking us up, and forcing us to see what before we could not. And usually the more resistant we are to seeing what we don’t want to see, the more violent the shock that finally brings us to our senses.
I think that this is the condition of the idealistic supporters of the war. They failed to recognize that they were in the position of Little Red Riding Hood looking at the wolf disguised in grandma’s nightgown. They were seduced by the conventions, the normal reality of militaristic establishment-think that has corrupted our society in ways that remain for the most part invisible to us–although very visible to everyone else around the world. The rest of the world discerns the wolf disguised in American idealism.
But there is still hope that this disaster will finally shake us out of our stupor and wake us up to the futility of our militarism; there is still hope that a majority of us Americans, whether traditionalists or cosmopolitans, will have the moral clarity to face the situation as it is, not as we wish it to be, to do what we can to clean up the mess we’ve made, and to make sure we don’t make the same mistake again. And for me that means taking the key to the car away from these militarists, and never giving it to them ever again.
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