Just War and Counterterrorism:
Views from the Catholic Church
On September 24, 2001, the Faith & Reason Institute sponsored a debate and discussion at the Institute of World Politics on the Catholic just war tradition in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11. The presenters were former chief of Naval Intelligence Admiral P. Michael Ratliff (USN-Ret.), Dr. Andrew Bacevich from the Department of International Relations at Boston University, the Rev. Drew Christiansen, S.J. of Woodstock Theological Seminary, Gerald Powers from the Office of Social Development and World Peace at the U.S. Catholic Conference, George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Dr. Keith Pavlischek of the Center for Public Justice. A slightly edited version of their remarks follows. This event was one of a series in the Institute's program on Catholicism and the American Public Square, supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Robert Royal
We all know the unusual situation that we find ourselves in, unusual, but not entirely unprecedented in either military history or in moral and theological considerations on the just war. But it does present a very wide range of hard questions, hard questions that deserve some hard answers.
We cannot entirely predict what the United States is going to be faced with or what we are planning to do at this point. We want to get as much on the table as possible for consideration, militarily, theologically, and ethically. Among the many things that we can see coming down the line are actions such as military strikes against nations harboring terrorists, which fall clearly within the intrastate kind of definitions of just war.
We also know that there are lots of other things that don't fall into that regular category of state-to-state just war thinking. Obviously, this will include open strikes against terrorist bases and organizations, covert special ops of various sorts, economic and political retaliation to disrupt terrorist networks. There will doubtless be psychological and propaganda efforts of various kinds. And, as we know, there will be heightened domestic activity against terrorist agents likely to remain in this country.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, we've already seen two very different authoritative statements from Catholic bishops' conferences. The European Catholic Bishops issued a statement just prior to the meeting of the EU leaders, in mid-September, which warned the United States against a massive military response. What "massive military response" means is unclear, but that kind of statement is rather disappointing from bishops who are very careful about what they say on these issues. And perhaps some of our speakers, who have had experience with bishops' conferences, can clarify those statements.
The U.S. Catholic Bishops put out a very different type of statement that is more reserved and much more supportive of what we hope will be a very responsible U.S. answer to the terrorist threat. But perhaps that too is something that some of our speakers may clarify.
I just want to read to you something that I found quite astonishing, in, of all places, The New York Times. Edward Rothstein writes a cultural column on Saturdays. Recently, he looked at what he calls, POMO, post modernism, and POCO, post colonialism. Both are dominant, of course, in colleges and universities, but, he says, are utterly useless for thinking about what has happened on September 11th and since: "This destruction seems to cry out for a transcendent ethical perspective."
We are fortunate to have with us today some people who accept the transcendent ethical perspective and also have long experience, both in the military and in ethical reflection.
If we are to sustain the clarity with which we have begun this war on terror, if we are to sustain the national resolve and unity that gives us the possibility of success, it will require a great number of us, such as those gathered today, to think about these issues carefully. And we will need to articulate in our communities an understanding of the real issues that will answer the critics.
All of you have seen the critical statements as they've begun to be quoted in the press. At the University of North Carolina, one man said that if he were the president, he would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and the impoverished, and all the millions of other victims of American imperialism.
At Boston University, another critic ridiculed what he called the arrogance of the United States for trying to pull together a war against terrorism which is, after all, he says, a weapon used by the desperate of the world. The implication being, of course, that it was American policy that made them desperate. So somehow we are culpable.
If we are unable to sustain and deepen the moral clarity with which we watched those terrible events on our televisions September 11th, we will very quickly see an unraveling of the resolve that is so important to us. We cannot afford to allow the critics to call into question the process by which we conduct our military operations and portray it merely as the moral equivalent of another gang of terrorists.
So I want to make three pretty simple points. The first is that U.S. military planning and operations are, probably for deep cultural reasons, strongly informed by just war theory. The terminology I was accustomed to use for thirty years as a military planner, operator, and intelligence officer is shaped by the kinds of issues that just war theorists grapple with.
The second thing that I'll get to is that I believe that a desirable and moral outcome depends, fundamentally, on good intelligence. And I'll describe to you the voracious appetite for intelligence that our operators have in order to be successful and also achieve the right kind of end.
And, third, I'll talk about some of the imperatives for successful military operations, specific information, a tremendous demand for specific information turned around with a rapidity that is almost mind-boggling. While this is absolutely essential for a successful military operation, you cannot have 100 percent assurance that, in the end, the outcome will be everything you want. And if pundits demand certitude, we might as well fold up our tents now and just go back to our living rooms. The reality is that a successful military operation will require a rapidity of action that sometimes means very difficult, split-second choices. We've got to understand that our nation's leaders and our military planners have to operate in that context.
But let me return to my first point: I am deeply impressed at the degree to which American military planning and operations are informed by the concerns of just war theorists. Take a volume such as James Turner Johnson's Morality in Contemporary Warfare. As I looked at the kinds of language that just war theorists use, I was impressed at how much of an overlap there is with the issues and language of military operators and planners.
For example, competent authority is one of the essentials for a war to be just. And the U.S. military, of course, takes great pains in insuring that nobody who is not authorized gets hands on the levers of military action and carries out rogue actions that would be clearly immoral.
Whether it is extremely expensive technology, or the command and control systems to insure that nobody other than the President and the national command authority can unleash nuclear weapons, or whether it is the processes that we invest in at the tactical level, all the way to the rifleman, we are insuring that all along the line, the people giving orders are competent authorities, people whom we have given the responsibility to make decisions and to direct military actions.
A reasonable hope of success must also exist for an act, for a war to be just. One of the things that you do as a military planner -- others in this room have had some experience at that -- is you lay out a range of options. The policymaker asks for a range of options and you try to identify those which have the highest likelihood of success.
Among those options you also take into account principles such as proportionality, last resort, not attacking noncombatants. You also lay out for the policy maker, the decision maker, the risk of collateral damage, in the military jargon. Nobody is going to launch an operation, or make a decision, unless you have spelled out for them what the risk is of collateral damage to the civilians in the vicinity of the target.
And in terms of last resort, we lay out not merely military actions, but diplomatic options, economic options, or a range of things so that the policy maker can make an informed decision as to whether putting missiles on the target, troops on the ground, sending the diplomats in, or taking some economic step would be the right approach.
At any rate, I am struck at how almost every one of the just cause principles is addressed in detail and explicitly in the military planning and operations process. And so I think we should have some confidence -- and we should communicate that confidence to our citizens -- that we have a process for reaching a decision that is well-intentioned and fundamentally informed by moral concerns.
But for that process to have a desirable outcome, you need a tremendously high quality intelligence product. Because even if you have the best of intentions, if your intelligence is bad you are going to suffer losses. You are going to have a higher risk of failure. You are going to have collateral damage, the killing of innocents beyond anything that you might have intended. In contrast to what I've described to you, just think if these operations were conducted by, for example, the United Nations. They have virtually zero intelligence capability. Or think of another national organization that goes in with the best of intentions, but clumsily conducting operations because their culture virtually rejects intelligence. They regard it as some form of spying. They would act without the understanding and the fine grain detail that is essential for a positive and desirable outcome.
The United States has invested tremendous sums over decades in building an intelligence system that supports these military operations and planning efforts. Against terrorists, there are all kinds of intelligence sources that are of value. Acoustic intelligence, measurement and signature intelligence are of real but limited value. Other kinds of intelligence are extremely important. The intelligence that we'll depend upon for successful counterterrorist operations are number one, spies, human intelligence (that is, spies that you might recruit or insert into the terrorist organizations); number two, signals intelligence (signals gathered by all kinds of means from the communications of the terrorists, or the electronic equipment that the terrorists might use in conducting their operations); and, number three, photo intelligence, pictures taken by handheld devices, ships, airplanes, and satellites.
All three of those can be very rich sources of the detailed information necessary for an effective and ultimately desirable outcome. But we should all be aware of the tremendous limitations of those sources. Spies, after all, are people whom you shouldn't trust. They tell you something because you pay them. They are people who have already betrayed their own friends and you can't rely upon their information always being 100 percent accurate.
Signals intelligence too, always has limitations when you are listening in, say, to the telephone calls of the bad guys. It is always possible that they are feeding you disinformation.
Even the pictures that we get are not 100 percent reliable. The reality is that it requires a roomful of very highly trained people to interpret photographs, because photo intelligence rarely has the resolution of the photo album from your holiday last summer.
For example, you can't see Osama bin Laden at the camps in Afghanistan. You see evidence that he might have been there, a truck that may be associated with his movements, a tent or a structure that might indicate his presence. And if you infer from that that Osama bin Laden is there, and that inference is wrong, you kill innocent people when you strike that facility. But if you realize the limitations of those sources, you can understand how you are, after all, not making decisions that are black and white. You are making decisions that represent your best judgment and a management of the risks that you are willing to take in order to achieve a successful military operation.
The United States has the best intelligence system in the world. As a nation, we have invested huge sums in that in order to sustain an effective, good, and desirable military process. And we should be proud of that and pleased, even though, sometimes because of human failure, it does not amount to everything we need.
Let me describe to you the voracious demand for intelligence today. When I first went into the Navy, it was enough that you be able to track the Soviet fleet as it moved through the Mediterranean so that somebody could put an aircraft on that target. Today, counterterrorist operations want to know the interior layout of the corridors inside a building, what kind of lock is on the door, and whether the door opens in or out. In the dark of night, when you are going to conduct a counterterrorist operation and the special force troops go in, they've got to operate with great precision and rapidity. They cannot afford to reach the door and find that it is impossible to get through, or to fail owing to any of a number of other very specific pieces of information.
If you get that wrong, what happens? You have higher casualties, kill noncombatants you didn't intend to, etc. So the outcome may sometimes not be everything you want because our intelligence sources will not always be rich enough for the perfect operation.
So the third thing I want to address is that it is important to keep in mind, against the background of the world's best intelligence picture (even though it still suffers from limitations) that a successful military operation today depends upon operating at a rapidity that makes it very, very difficult to answer the objections of every Monday-morning quarterback who is going to review your operations later on.
What do I mean by that? We talk about our military operating within the enemies' decision cycle, getting inside their operational loop. We think about things like using network capabilities that get information directly from the sensor to the shooter. Why? Because somebody like Osama bin Laden will change his location every day. You cannot afford to get the right picture and give it to planners three months later. You've got to provide it to them within a matter of hours if they are going to be effective. The entire military planning process has to make many very hard decisions because you\rquote ve got to react very rapidly.
As the intelligence guy, this always made me uneasy. Because you really need time to gather information, analyze it, fuse it with other intelligence. That is, to look at the entire picture, put it all together, so you could insure that you were not being misled by bad information somewhere. And then you want to do a quality control analysis so that you have greater confidence in the outcome.
Let me tell you, you become very unpopular in a room with military planners and operators when you tell them such things. They know that the target is going to move within hours, literally, to another location. And their chance of success will diminish with every minute you hold up the process. So the reality is sometimes you are going to have to manage your risks and conduct an operation, launch an attack, before you\rquote ve had the final look by every analyst in the American intelligence structure. And we need to communicate this to all those who are thinking about these issues and who will ultimately determine whether or not we can sustain the American public's confidence that what we are doing is the right thing. On the whole, we have a good system. And we need to assure the American people that we have a process in place that is both moral and well informed.
I'd like to make several observations about the war now in progress. First, I'll begin by offering some comments about the defeat that we suffered on September 11th. We really don't know how things are going to unfold, but I'll also offer some thoughts on the coming U.S. response which is already, in some respects, now under way. And then, finally, I want to try to offer some suggestions about what might be the neuralgic points from a moral point of view.
First of all, the defeat of September 11th. Point number one is, that's not when the war began. The war began years prior to September 11th. I can't specify a precise date, but, probably the early 1990's would be appropriate, although the United States has all along chosen to pretend otherwise. There was a brief period, after the embassy bombings in 1998, when the rhetoric coming out of the Clinton White House and from Secretary of Defense William Cohen seemed to suggest that the United States now realized it was engaged in a war.
That was part of the justification for the cruise missile attacks that followed. But the rhetoric was not matched by action. And as a people, we did not view ourselves as being at war. But, in fact, war has been going on for some time.
Who are we at war with? As I try to understand what the Administration is thinking and doing, I don't sense great clarity. Indeed, it seems to me there is a big argument under way. Is this a war in which the adversary is Osama bin Laden and his apparatus? Or is this a war against global terrorism? Or is this, in some sense, a war against radical Islam? (Radical Islam, it seems to me, thinks it's at war with us.) Or is this a war in which we are going to sequence our way through a series of villains moving from one to the next? I'm not arguing a position, I'm just saying I don't think there is great clarity.
Second point, the terrorist operation itself: one has to be struck by its daring and sophistication. It is not the work of mere fanatics. And as evil and as vile as the perpetrators were, it is not the work of cowards.
The third point, the operation was not simply daring and sophisticated. It suggests extraordinary imagination. It was a massive intelligence failure on the part of the United States that this disaster occurred. But it wasn't simply an intelligence failure; we were fundamentally outthought. These people are on a different plane. And if they were on a different plane in thinking about the war on September 11th, that may continue to be the case afterwards.
The attack targeted two symbols of American power. There have been many references in the media pointing to the importance of these symbols. The Pentagon is a symbol of American military power. The World Trade Center is a symbol of American economic power. Yet less than two weeks after the fact, one cannot help but be struck by the fact that, apart from the immediate loss of human life -- and I don't, for a second, mean to minimize that -- the effects on the American military were merely symbolic. All 4,800 displaced workers from the Pentagon are already in other office space. And it is hard for me to see that the attack on the Pentagon has slowed, by an iota, the deployment of U.S. forces. The effect has been merely symbolic.
On the other hand, the impact on the economy of the World Trade Center attack has gone well beyond mere symbolism, producing significant second-order effects that continue to ripple through the economy. The stock market will eventually recover. But the losses last week were about $1.6 trillion. If we were on the verge of a recession, the layoffs and travel downturns may be tipping us into that recession. You have to ask yourself, is it mere luck that these second-order effects have occurred? Or doe s it also reflect the planning and thought that went into this operation? I really don't know. But one shouldn't simply assume it was luck.
The attack represents a stunning escalation in the level of violence, beyond the embassy attacks, the Cole, and the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. And from this point onward, there is nothing that we would have to consider to be beyond these people. I point my finger at myself, people like me who pooh-poohed the idea of terrorists employing weapons of mass destruction. We all need to think again.
Last point with regard to the defeat of September 11th: just as this was not the first shot in this war, it is not likely to be the last. There is much talk about the fact that we now are launching a campaign against the adversary. Well, they too are involved in a campaign against the United States of America. So to imagine that this was the last shot and they are going to remain passive while we dismantle their apparatus is an illusion that we must avoid.
Topic number two, the coming U.S. response. We have enough guns and we have more than enough firepower. The problem is knowing where to point the guns and when to pull the trigger. I really hope it is not engaging in Monday morning quarterbacking to say that the intelligence system has failed us. And that failure suggests fundamental inadequacies. Correcting systemic intelligence inadequacies will require both money and time. I'm not an intelligence professional, but it seems to me that the Bush Administration and the country can afford the money. But the Bush Administration cannot afford to waste time from a political perspective.
It is not my job to make sure that the Bush Administration gets reelected, but, certainly, there are people in the White House with that job. And from their perspective, it is imperative that the administration be able to make the plausible case that this war is won or at least all but won within three years. If on September 24, 2004, the Bush Administration can't say it's won, or, virtually won, it seems to me that its prospects for winning reelection are questionable.
And as for winning a crusade to eradicate evil worldwide, which President Bush suggests is partly our purpose, that may exceed the Administration's grasp.
Now, fixing our intelligence problem requires money and time. Well, what do you do in the meantime? The near-term fix for the intelligence problems lies in tapping sources that are better situated than our own to provide information about the enemy, his location, and his activities. Who are these sources? Well, they are foreign intelligence services: Pakistanis, Russians, Iranians. And one would have to note at a conference like this, that few of those services subscribe to principles of liberal democracy. Gaining the cooperation of those services is going to come at some price from us. We'll just leave that for now.
Just as the political imperative for winning within three years ought to create an incentive for defining our purposes and our objectives in a fairly limited way, so the need for cooperation, from an intelligence, air transit, basing, or economic sanctions perspective, suggests that the United States exercise some amount of self-restraint in its use of force.
This is not a counsel to be wimpy. But we need to think about exercising some restraint if we are going to maintain the cooperation we need. Or to put it another way, I really think that if the United States goes it alone -- when I turn on AM radio talk shows, there is a certain amount of sentiment that says we should go it alone -- that will immeasurably complicate our problem.
With regard to the response: a large-scale air attack against the Taliban is probably inevitable, and, it seems to me, probably useful. Useful because the Administration needs to show Americans, in some visible way, that it is not all talk, that the campaign is under way, that we are really doing something, responding to the attack of September 11.
It is also useful because we need to demonstrate the fate that awaits states or regimes who support terror. We should not confuse any such attack, however, which may be quite visible, with the actual campaign against Osama bin Laden and his apparatus. To the extent that the actual perpetrators of terror, as opposed to states that tolerate terror, remain the principle object of our attention, then the campaign will bear scant resemblance to a campaign in a traditional military sense. We are hearing this from the Administration, and, although they often repeat it, I know my students at Boston University don't hear it. My students hear the word war and think conventional military campaign.
Those words conjure up rather specific images that in this case are likely to be misleading. The actual military campaign will tend to be sporadic, rather than continuous. It will assume varied forms: intense, but, very carefully focused air strikes; commando style raids that, at best, we will learn about after the fact. And there will be operations mounted not by soldiers, but by police, some abroad and some here at home.
So there will be these small, different, disparate types of actions. And they are going to occur one this week and one two weeks from now and one four weeks later in some other part of the world. Most of these operations will occur on a relatively small scale. And some are going to remain invisible to the public. But my expectation would be that, unlike the episodes in the recent past, especially during the Clinton era, when the United States used force to make a show of resolve, or, worse still, to distract attention from domestic political problems, this new campaign will have as its aim the step-by-step demolition of the adversary.
But please note: in the context of the canonical lessons of the Vietnam War, please note in the context of the Weinberger doctrine and the Powell doctrine, that there will be no clear definition of victory; there is no exit strategy: and there is no end state. This commitment is as open-ended as was the commitment of U.S. troops to Vietnam in the spring of 1965.
I do not wish to pick on Secretary Rumsfeld, who is carrying a heavy load that I'm glad I don't carry. But at a recent press conference, he was asked to define victory in the war against terrorism. A snide reporter commented that, after five hundred words of hovering, he landed on this definition: "I say that victory is persuading the American people and the rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that is going to be over in a month or a year or even five years."
I cannot give you a definition of victory. But that's the sort of definition of purpose, end state, and victory that we would have said, in past times, has led us astray.
In the context of this campaign, we observers are going to have a hard time discerning how all the disparate actions add up to a coherent whole. And yet, it is going to be very important that the Bush people find a way to do so. Because if they can\rquote t make that case, then three years from now our unity of purpose is likely to erode. Popular support is likely to dwindle.
And what is our role? What is our job, as American citizens? The comparisons of September 11th to Pearl Harbor in some respects are apt. I wasn't alive then, but I gather that when the United States found itself in World War II, the engagement and the support of the American people was sustained because the American people were told that they would be required to sacrifice. There would be no nylons. There would be no new cars. There would be no new refrigerators. Gasoline would be rationed. There would be a limited amount of meat. Today what are we told? That Americans should continue consuming -- not an inspiring battle cry. I understand the logic of that, but for mobilizing long-term American popular support for what we are told is going to be a protracted struggle, it does not have a lot of moral content.
On the campaign: we can win. But we ought not to assume that the adversary is going to remain passive. There could well be more surprises and setbacks. We have and ought to have great confidence in our military, which is the best in the entire world. But technology, firepower, and high standards of training do not guarantee that the enemy can\rquote t turn the tables on us, even when we are fully aware of being engaged in a war. You don't have to think back any farther than October 1993, in Mogadishu, to get a very vivid and painful reminder. So we can win, but it won't be easy.
Last point on the campaign. Suppose the enemy employs weapons of mass destruction in a subsequent attack, or we find clear evidence of state sponsorship of September 11th, and, I don't mean, simply, the Taliban allowing Osama bin Laden to live in Afghanistan. I mean, to cite a specific possibility, Saddam Hussein's fingerprints on the attack. Then all bets are off. Everything I just said about the campaign changes. Then the campaign goes from being small-scale, sporadic, disparate acts spread out over time, and becomes something much more like a conventional war.
The last of my three topics: what are likely to be the neuralgic points in a moral sense. Four comments. One, we are desperate, I suspect, to gain better intelligence than we have. And that is likely to get us in bed with some very unsavory regimes and individuals. The cozying up to the military government of Pakistan is only the first indicator in that regard.
Second point, much as Israel does, I suspect we will now engage in assassination. And, frankly, I'm not sure that bothers me. But after thirty years of insisting that assassination is absolutely illegitimate, and, frankly, after months of chastising the Israelis for using this technique, the fact that we will likely do so is going to generate some controversy.
Third, when we use force, and to the extent that we rely on air power to punish regimes who are supporting terror, beginning with the Taliban, we will kill and injure noncombatants and/or deprive them of things that they need to support life. Given the perception that, for the last decade, we have been punishing Iraqi noncombatants, given the perception that we were reckless, for example, in our use of our capabilities in the destruction of the pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, this is going to reinforce perceptions in some quarters that the United States is callous and brutal.
Finally, from a political perspective, it seems to me that the Bush Administration has a very strong interest in demonstrating that it is avoiding the failures of the Clinton Administration. And, in this regard, the big failure among the many perceived failures of the Clinton Administration is the habit of engaging in pinprick strikes and proclaiming victory. The Bush Administration wants to make sure that it is understood that we don't do pinprick strikes. No. We do powerful strikes. And to the extent that this becomes a political imperative, then it is possible that this Administration is going to go too far and will be perceived in some quarters to be guilty of using excessive force to achieve its purposes.
And if you imagine that, God forbid, next week in the Boston subway system, a terrorist organization releases a bacteriological agent that kills a number of my fellow Bostonians, that would be viewed as not simply another attack like the attack of September 11th, but something that would be more heinous still. And would likely provoke demands for a response that would go beyond anything we have talked about.
I want to begin with a quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that Jean Bethke Elshtain put at the head of her new book, Who Are We, which is a reflection on Christian anthropology from the stand point of Bonhoeffer and John Paul II. This epigraph sent chills down my spine. And I thought it would be an appropriate way to put this discussion in context, because when Christians talk about just war, they include certain elements that simply do not appear in the secular discussion. Bonhoeffer says:
If evil appears in the form of light, beneficence, loyalty and renewal; if it conforms with historical necessity and social justice, this, if it is understood straightforwardly, is a clear, additional proof of its abysmal wickedness. But the moral theorist is blinded by it. With the concepts he already has in mind, he is unable to grasp what is real and still less able to come seriously to grips with that of which the essence and power are entirely unknown to him.
I'm not a Lutheran with that kind of view of human evil. But it reminded me that the kinds of categories we use sometimes don't look at the religious dimensions deeply enough. They proceed as if there were a kind of calculus of just war that we can apply to situations. But we have to think about these things with some fear and trembling as we look at the different issues that will confront us.
So I will deal with three questions. First, war: is this a war, or, under the circumstances, is calling it a war a metaphor? Second, an issue that has already been raised, what counts as success? And, lastly, another issue that's been raised, but, I think, is important to the long-term victory: can we, in the United States, really hear and respond to grievances -- and ought we -- coming from the Third World?
I. Is it a war or a metaphor? Many people have asked me, quite spontaneously, this new war President Bush has declared against terrorism, it can\rquote t be a just war, can it? Celestine Bohlen wrote in the September 22 New York Times that few moral philosophers dispute that the United States has just cause for the use of force to respond to the attacks of September 11th.
But many emphatically reject the use of the word war in any but a metaphorical sense, noting that in this case the enemy is not a state against which hostilities can be formally declared and from which surrender can be sought. The supposition of these commentators is that one cannot wage a war against non-state actors. Is that so?
I would argue on the contrary that one can conduct military operations against terrorists in the tradition of just war. The just war tradition has evolved over the centuries to fit a variety of political situations. St. Augustine placed his advice on the use of force in the context of the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire. He assumed that there was one political entity: the empire. And its magistrates, what contemporary Catholic teaching calls public authorities, had the responsibility to defend citizens against attack. Barbarians have leaders and they sometimes later settled in to mix with populations of the empire. But they could also be roving, stateless hordes. There was no doubt, in Augustine\rquote s mind, at least, that action against them, their subjection, perhaps even their punishment, was legitimate.
Aquinas wrote as feudalism was giving way to town life, and he pursued new questions, for example, arising out of the struggle among the communes in Northern Italy. Again, the political setting had changed. Vittoria extended the protections of just war to the peoples of the Indies in an attempt to curtail the barbarities of the Iberian wars of conquest. Many of those new peoples lived in empires. But many were also tribal.
So the context, the political context, in which the just war has been formulated and applied, has varied over the centuries. In the last two centuries, theorists have tried to grapple with applying just war principles to guerrilla war. Again, a situation when you are dealing with a non-state actor, at least to some extent. So within the broad arena of the just war theory, I believe there is room for a war against terrorists, as long as it is limited war against specific malefactors.
As a practical matter, however, I agree with the critics. The struggle against global terrorism is more a metaphor calculated to rally support and resolve than a term denoting an open armed conflict between military forces. I don't exclude here that we are dealing with military action. But the long twilight struggle in which the United States and its allies will be engaged will have many dimensions: multi-lateral diplomacy, cooperative intelligence gathering, cooperative policing, financial investigation, and ideological competition. Arguably, the military aspects of the conflict, as the most visible and, perhaps, most expensive, may be less crucial to victory in the long run than the other components of the struggle.
In July 2001, I visited Israel and the Palestinian territories. What really alarmed me there was how much of the feel and the direction of thought among secular Muslim intellectuals seems now to be informed, in the light of the Intifada, by the more radical elements in that society. It came up particularly in relationship to Christians, with Muslim leaders saying that they couldn't deal with some Christian leaders because they were in dialogue with Jews.
Now, I don't say this exists across the board. The Palestinian Authority has been very helpful to the Christian population, and has always intervened to protect them from harassment and persecution by others, and remedied the injuries done them on repeated occasions. But the sense that I got was that in that society, in that struggle, the moderates are really being pushed out of the scene. You very much have to engage, re-engage those moderates.
Think back to World War II and the post-World-War-II period, the early Cold War, where various intellectuals were brought in to work on creating pro-democratic opinion in Western Europe. It seems to me that needs to be done now in the Muslim world as well.
So this conflict is a campaign on many fronts. And we may be quite misled by focusing too strongly on the military action as the heart of it. It\rquote s spectacular. It is there for TV. But as important as armed force may be in establishing justice for the terrorists, it seems to me that we forget these other dimensions at our peril.
Furthermore, as many of us know, success in a war on terrorism may depend on keeping military engagement to a minimum, lest inappropriate, excessive or ill-informed recourse to force reduce morale at home and increase hostility abroad. Looking at America's options, Michael Waltzer has said of current U.S. policymaking that there is a very close connection between fighting effectively and fighting justly.
II. But let me turn to a second point: What counts as success? From the point of view of the just war tradition, as I see it, the most troublesome criterion for the war on terrorism is to meet tests of being morally justified. Is that a success? Having learned flexibility in the Balkans in dealing with the Weinberger-Powell doctrine's requirement of an exit strategy, we may now need a special perspicacity to identify what counts as success in an endless war against global terrorism.
Again, in the short run, it may be that the less spectacular actions done in terms of homeland defense may provide a better measure of success, by increasing security and preventing new mass assaults on our people, than daring commando raids against militant training camps.
The turn to the use of armed force, limited uses of force against specific groups, may be readily justified. Problems multiply with the expansion to a wider war against states alleged to support or harbor terrorists. The question must always be, will military action increase the overall evil or will it reduce it? That evil can come in many forms. Most obvious is a dramatic rise in civilian deaths or civilian suffering.
For Catholics, the question of civilian immunity is a very grave problem in modern warfare. In religious teaching on just war among the churches, the Catholic Church and the other churches, civilian immunity has become a very firm principle. Owing to terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and doctrines of personnel protection, civilians amounted in the last part of the twentieth century to more than 90 percent of the casualties in wartime. So, if one function of the just war tradition is to limit war, then the rise in civilian casualties is a real concern of Christian just war, as the bishops and the Holy Father have repeatedly made clear.
There are also problems if intervention results in political instability in moderate Arab and Muslim regimes. There are further problems, too, if short-term victories lead to lasting resentments that fuel a new generation of terrorists. And there are problems and responsibilities if intervention results in the collapse of societies. Those advocating a broad war against terrorism, it seems to me, have a very high hurdle to jump to satisfy the criterion of success. This is by no means a precious point of moral theology. It is a point where questions of political advantage and the institutional interests of the military coincide with moral reasoning, it seems to me.
III. A third point: Can we listen and respond to grievances? Writing ten years ago, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, Pope John Paul II argued that it must not be forgotten that at the root of war there are usually real and serious grievances. Injustice is suffered, legitimate aspirations frustrated, leading to poverty and the exploitation of multitudes of desperate people, who see no real possibility in improving their lot by peaceful means. Writing on September 14th in The New York Times, historian Ronald Steel, the biographer of Walter Lippmann and generally, I think, on issues of war, a realist, wrote in similar terms. He said, the terrorists hate us because they cannot accept a new world order of capitalism, individualism, secularism, and democracy which should be the norm everywhere. We orchestrated a global economic system that dictates what they shall produce, what they shall be paid, whether or not they find work. We proudly declare that we are the world's undisputed number one. Then we are surprised that others might hold us responsible for all they find threatening in the modern world.
Steel rightly concludes that this does not mean that we should shrink from retaliating against those who attack us and any state that harbors them. But at the same time, we cannot deal with terrorists unless we understand them. Be assured, this is not geo-politics as therapy. Steel is a realist in international affairs. Even as the malefactors are brought to justice, or justice is brought to them, as President Bush has put it, a long-term solution to terrorism necessarily entails coming to understand the resentments that breed terrorism.
At the risk of being ecologically incorrect, let me put it this way: a pesticide works for a season. To eliminate the mosquitoes, you must drain the swamp. In the war against terrorism, this means reducing the occasions for resentment by assessing what the United States can do differently.
Let me conclude by noting a few other points about Steel's analysis. He doesn't deal with any of the things normally talked about in Islamic fundamentalism. He is dealing with other kinds of resentments in the Third World. This hit me very strongly because I was part of the Vatican delegation in the WTO. We were observers, not members. We expected to walk the corridors with delegates from many countries.
As I have said many times, Seattle collapsed not because there were rioters in the street, but because the delegates in the hall didn't want to accept the solutions that were dictated to them. One of the very simple realities of that meeting, something the Vatican argued for very strenuously, was that there was a need to implement the agreements made ten years before at Uruguay about agricultural and textile imports to developed nations.
None of the developed nations, the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia, wanted to honor those agreements. They wanted to keep them off the table. Furthermore, and this is really key, delegates who were legitimately there to represent their countries, were not permitted to enter their committee meetings. Committee meetings were either never called, or only the leading nations met in rump sessions of those committees.
Now when I came back, I was convinced that what we needed most of all was reform of the practice of trade law. I mean, it seemed to me that the way the United States conducted that meeting, the way the U.S. Trade Representative managed that meeting, was the source of a failure. I never would have guessed from the outside that this is the way the United States deals with these problems. But it does so with the utmost arrogance.
I can go through other very specific examples. But the question really is, can we succeed in terms of the long-term goal of draining the swamp, that is, clearing the atmosphere of resentment against the United States in certain parts of the world? Some resentment is always inevitable if you are successful and powerful. But can we do things that will prevent us from creating and helping those resentments to fester? Can we conduct our diplomacy differently? Can we do our trade negotiation differently? There are lots of questions that we are going to have to ask over the long-term about how we behave, particularly with respect to the Third World.
And that takes me back to the kind of theological ground with which I began. One of the motifs that runs through John Paul II's social theology I trace back at least to 1978 when he gave a retreat to the Papal household. It is the theme of the story of Lazarus. Lazarus is the poor man who dies at the gate of a rich man who doesn't even know he's there. And Lazarus' only solace is that the dogs come and lick his sores. And then, when he dies, there is a gulf revealed between them. The rich man then wants Abraham to send down Lazarus to at least put a little bit of water on his tongue. And the answer is no. There is a gulf set between you because you didn't care for Lazarus during his life, you didn't even notice him.
The Pope has come back to that particular story, repeatedly, to ask the developed powers, and particularly the United States, first at Yankee Stadium and again at Hamtramick, outside Detroit, are you not indifferent to the problems outside your own country? He literally said, at Hamtramick, did you not hear me when I raised that question at Yankee Stadium? So from a theological point of view, the question is: do you really care that others have grievances against you? Are you willing to examine yourself well enough to see that you can get at them? We have a self-interest in that, it seems to me. The self-interest is draining the swamp of terrorism.
Part of the effort, certainly, as I said earlier, is going to be ideological. And there is a real need to engage Islamic scholars and find people who can deal with the competition of ideas in the Islamic and Arab world. But another part really has to be to see that those resentments will not continue to be fired in the years ahead. That's a very difficult thing to do. Americans are not given to that kind of self-examination. But in terms of the Catholic tradition, this is very closely linked with section 52 of Centesimus Annus, where the Pope reflects on the occasions of war that have just transpired. He says that given this grievance factor, the fundamental way to think about peace is development.
But for that reason, what we need is a campaign for development. Right now, you are talking about something much more. But a campaign that, for instance, allows really equitable trade relations for third world countries is going to be part of what needs to be utilized. If we don't want the parable of Lazarus and rich man read to us again, as the Pope suggests, we should ask ourselves: do you not think that this parable applies to you?
Let me briefly talk about what the U.S. Catholic Bishops are doing at this point in response to this crisis. Usually, when I'm asked to talk about the bishops position on issues like this, there is a position to explain and to claim. In this case, we really do not have a clear, well-thought-out position for many obvious reasons. This is very much a work-in-progress for the bishops. They have been totally absorbed in the last two weeks with the pastoral response to the attacks. Like the rest of the country, we are still trying to figure out what exactly this new, unique threat is all about and what the U.S. response is going to be. And frankly, the bishops have not spent a lot of time over the years in looking at the moral aspects of terrorism and counterterrorism, particularly as it relates to these forces.
What I'd like to do, quickly, is say a word about the bishops' pastoral response, because that provides the context for their response to policy questions; to say a word about what the bishops' place in the national debate over what the U.S. response might be; and then to say a word about the bishops' policy response in terms of their just war analysis, as unclear as that is at the moment.
The pastoral response is clearly the most important, immediate dimension of the Bishops' Conference and of bishops as individual religious leaders. You've probably seen most of the cardinals on television over the last couple of weeks. They have had a very similar message. Of course, they have prayed for the dead and injured, those involved in rescue efforts, and for our nation and its leaders. They've tried to offer words of healing and consolation for a suffering and traumatized nation. They have appealed to Catholics to come to the aid of people in need. They've warned against succumbing to hate, revenge, and violence, echoing the Pope's message to Catholics. And they've made a special call to repudiate acts of ethnic and religious intolerance against Arab Americans and Muslims in this country.
This has affected their approach to the larger national debate over U.S. policy. And in order to understand how the bishops will think about responding to whatever use of force or other measures are taken by the United States, we should think a little bit about ecclesiological concepts, i.e., how the bishops view their role in the church and also how the bishops view their role vis-á-vis the wider society, in particular, vis-á-vis political authority. The bishops, in addition to being pastors, are teachers and public figures. As teachers, the bishops feel that it is their main obligation in situations like this to try to educate the Catholic community in particular, but also a wider community (to the extent that it is listening) about some basic moral principles.
In this case, the just war tradition tends to define the military response to the situation. But there are other aspects to the question, other moral concerns that will come into play: civil liberties, human rights, foreign policy, and that kind of thing. The bishops see this as a teachable moment. They are teachers in that when they speak at moments like these, they are really providing some general norms.
They are not engaging in a very detailed theological debate about the nature of just war tradition, vis-á-vis terrorism, and how particular principles might apply to this particular case. That responsibility lies with social offices, lay people, people in positions of authority to take the principles and apply them. The bishops are not competent in any ecclesiological sense or real sense to make clear, hard, and fast moral judgments about a crisis like this.
The bishops, as a matter of good pedagogy, will go beyond just restating the moral principles and will offer some indication of how they think those principles might apply in a particular case. Given that they are public figures, good leadership also dictates that you go beyond simply restating the norms and leave it at that. It indicates some direction that you think things ought to go.
With regard to the posture toward political authorities, I think there are two sets of countervailing tendencies. On the one hand, the bishops try to respect the relative autonomy of the secular order, which leads them to give the benefit of the doubt to the legitimate decisions makers. After all, the political authorities are elected or appointed to deal with these kinds of situations, are experts in these areas, have better information than the bishops do, and the like. So there is the tendency to respect the relative autonomy of those who are responsible for making these decisions.
The bishops are also very concerned about creating crises of conscious unnecessarily or inappropriately with respect to the fighter pilot who might be asked to take part in missions, with respect to political authorities who are making tough calls, and for military decisionmakers who are trying to figure out how best to respond. They really do not want to lay a burden of conscience on someone when it is not very clear, morally, that they should do so.
Finally, there is the virtue of patriotism. And this is especially strong at the moment. It is the natural tendency to rally around the flag, because we try to encourage and promote national unity in response to this grave atrocity, to provide pastoral guidance and support to political leaders, for example.
On September 20th, a number of Catholic bishops and other religious leaders were at the White House talking privately to President Bush, praying with the President, as an example of that sort of pastoral response to the political authorities. That is the chaplaincy role, if you will.
Now, on the other hand, the nature of the decisions being made, particularly the possibility of massive use of force, have such moral salience that it would really be malpractice for the bishops simply to limit their role to a chaplaincy. They really do have a responsibility to raise moral questions, while not taking a totally critical approach to decisions made.
Part of the virtue of patriotism is avoiding an uncritical approach to national decisions and falling into some sort of civil religion that is mostly just blessing whatever military or other actions are taken.
The Catholic tradition begins with a strong presumption against the use of force. And that, I think, creates a hermeneutic of healthy skepticism when you are evaluating military decisions. Part of the bishops' role is to bring that healthy skepticism to the table.
Now what are the bishops saying in terms of the moral and policy analysis? In their letter to President Bush, they raise two grave moral obligations that the United States has in responding to these attacks. One grave moral obligation is to defend the common good and to hold accountable those who are responsible. The other grave moral obligation is to protect innocent human life in all decisions that are being made, and also to respect other criteria of the just war.
Now, with respect to the grave obligation to defend the common good, it should be obvious that there is a just cause and a responsibility to take action, even military action, to find the terrorists and prevent this kind of threat from taking place in the future. As others have already mentioned, though, it seems clear that many things short of military force must be done in order to fulfill this grave obligation to defend the common good. And in fact, this may be a new kind of war where military weapons are relatively marginal to the long-term success to defend the common good.
Just cause clearly exists, but we have to avoid the temptation, especially when you are responding to abominable acts, to pursue something akin to a total war. And the total war mentality could be evident in a couple of different ways.
First, you have to be clear about what your objectives are. They really have to be limited to those who are directly responsible for the terrorism or directly involved in supporting terrorist acts. A lot has been said about that already. Secondly, the kind of force that is used has to be limited and targeted. This is classic just war teaching. And the bishops are raising, in particular, the grave obligation to protect innocent human life. Civilian immunity and proportionality are the standard criteria used.
I'm going to say a little bit more about this than Father Christiansen did. On the one hand, if you look at recent conflicts, the United States has bent over backwards to avoid indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations. Iraq, the bombing of Serbia, were massive campaigns that did not directly, intentionally target civilian populations. They were possibly the most discriminating bombing campaigns in history.
On the other hand, there are several reasons to worry about civilian immunity and proportionality criteria of the just war tradition as we think about our response. While the recent wars in the Gulf and Serbia were very discriminate, two factors are weakening discrimination. One is the desire to avoid American military casualties almost at any cost, which led us to pursue tactics that may actually increase the risk of civilian harm, which, effectively, reversed the duty of care that the military owes to civilians.
The second factor is the concept of overwhelming force, which led us to adopt essentially a decapitation strategy where we destroyed much of the infrastructure, particularly the power plants, the water treatment plants, and the rest. In destroying the infrastructure, you are really violating the norms of civilian immunity and proportionality.
Another reason we ought to be concerned about civilian immunity and proportionality in the present case is that there are a lot of people now who are calling for less scrupulosity in worrying about collateral damage. Tom Friedman of The New York Times is not the only one who called for taking off the kid gloves and accepting collateral damages, given the magnitude of the atrocities against U.S. civilians.
Finally, we should worry about civilian immunity because when you are dealing with terrorists, it will be very counterproductive if you are not scrupulous about avoiding civilian casualties. It would not be hard to imagine that bin Laden would be jumping for joy if we launch a massive military attack on Kabul or Baghdad because it would likely do more to help his recruiting than anything that he himself could do. It's not clear, obviously, what the United States is going to do. The Administration has said that this war will not be like the wars against Serbia and Iraq. So I might well be like the general who is preparing to fight the last war and not preparing for the current war. But recent history and, at least, initial indications of the possibility of massive bombing remind us that we must be very concerned about civilian immunity.
I would reiterate what others have said, that the key challenge for just war in this case is its probability of success. Given the difficulties in defining success and the high risk of counterproductive actions, this is not a strong criterion by which to criticize the use of force. But we should be reticent about using success as a moral justification for the use of force in this case, given how difficult it is to apply the norm.
Finally, the bishops are trying, like a lot of others, to say that, on the one hand, you have a grave moral obligation to respond to this real, clear, and present danger. But on the other hand, you can't lose sight of some of the larger issues that may be related to world terrorism. There are concerns about the U.S. role in the Middle East. There are concerns about the U.S. role vis-á-vis Iraq, particularly the embargo. And the bishops are using this occasion to remind people about the importance of pursuing a global common good of justice and peace as we respond.
In conclusion, if I had to summarize the bishops' position, I would point to the line in the letter to President Bush, which said our nation must find just, wise, and effective ways to respond with resolve and restraint for the long-term task. Emphasize resolve, but also emphasize restraint.
Since the days when I was so foolish as to think that you could mass market books with Latin titles such as my Tranquillitas Ordinis in the United States, I have tried to argue that the just war tradition, rather than an algebra, is something analogous to a recipe that tells you how to get the size and shape and texture you want. In that sense, I would insist that the purpose of just war theory is not simply to limit war or to legitimize the use of force. Rather, it helps us think in publicly accessible, reasonably grounded moral categories about building a measure of order in international life. That measure of order has two crucial components. One of them is justice. For example, it involves the notion that mass violence against innocents, of the sort we saw on September 11th, should be off the board in a justly ordered world political community. And the second component is freedom. And the defense of freedom, especially in the Catholic context, is religiously sanctioned.
Now if we imagine the just war tradition as a way of thinking about international affairs, it should help us see things a bit more clearly. And by us, I mean both people in our business -- analysis, commentary, etc. -- as well as people at the policymaking level, as Admiral Ratliff indicated.
What are some of the things that this tradition would help us see today? First, it would help us see that it is morally unacceptable to say, yes, this was awful, but there are terrible problems in the Middle East. It is also morally unacceptable to say, well, that was awful, but we\rquote ve got problems of poverty in our own societies. Mass murder of innocents for political ends should not get a "but" attached to the moral judgment.
Just war thinking also helps us resist a temptation that is not a product of post-1960's America, but is deeply rooted in our puritan culture: indulging in forms of moral equivalence. We can see something like that in some commentators in the public press. But we also see dangerous drifts in that direction from the National Council of Churches, and other members or leaders of liberal Protestant denominations.
And we see it even, if I may say so, in the very impressive and helpful joint statement by the Catholic bishops and Muslim leaders, which in many respects is quite wonderful. Together we condemn those actions as evil, and diametrically opposed to true religion. But prior to that, we have this astonishing statement of warning American citizens from sinking to the mentality and immorality of the perpetrators of Tuesday\rquote s atrocities.
I reject completely the kind of episodes of prejudice, xenophobia, etc., that we see. But the notion that a few crazy people throwing bricks through the windows of mosques is sinking to the mentality and immorality of people who hijack jumbo jets and drive them, deliberately, into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, suggests something a little wrong with the moral analysis.
Third, I think that the realism of the just war tradition would help us cut through the kind of media stereotypes that so often get in the way of clear policy thinking, as well as clear moral thinking, on these matters. If you ask, for example, why did the bishops of the European Union make the statement that Dr. Royal quoted at the beginning? I think the answer is clear to anyone who has spent any significant amount of time, as I have, in Europe in the past fifteen months.
The relentless portrait of George Bush as a moronic cowboy eager to do something desperate in the world is deeply imbedded in the European media. And I don\rquote t mean the tabloids. I mean the BBC, and the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. Given that, it's no wonder that people have difficulty seeing what the true situation is here. And one would hope that just war tradition, more accurately received among our religious leaders, would help them cut through some of those media stereotypes.
The just war tradition in its attempt to help us think about international public life as a whole would help us in this instance discriminate, as many of my colleagues have rightly done, between crime and war. The just war tradition would help us to understand rather clearly that acts of mass violence, whose aim is quite clearly the destruction of our national life, is not to be considered a crime. And the people who commit it are not to be considered criminals. They are to be considered combatants and dealt with in those terms.
The just war tradition, as I understand it, at least, would encourage the kind of very carefully calibrated analysis of the strategic and technical options that we heard from Dr. Bacevitch, rather than the indulgence that we have seen in the past week in enormous amounts of frettings that the United States is going to go off half-cocked and bomb half of Central Asia. In fact, it seems to me that the real danger, right now, is that we are going to be satisfied with too little.
Will we be satisfied simply with getting public enemy number one and bits and pieces of his network, rather than undertaking the kind of careful, step-by-step process implied by the President\rquote s speech on the Thursday night after the terrorist attacks? It is going to be very difficult to sustain public commitment.
Finally, on this front, let me just say a word about how the realism imbedded in the just war tradition leads to a gritty determination to see things as they are, not in a cynical way. In an optic of the Christian apprehension of reality, always rooted in hope, it would lead us to think very carefully about the complex realities of the Islamic world. It would lead us to welcome, to lift up, to celebrate, to give far more attention to the condemnations of this act that we have heard from numerous leaders in the Islamic world, even as we note the fact that virtually all of those condemnations have been cast in what I called a moment ago, the "yes, but" mode.
Secondly, we would have to recognize that not a single Islamic state today is a stable democracy. That none of them protects religious freedom and other basic human rights. In part, this is because it is very difficult to justify religious freedom, as the Second Vatican Council defined it, on the basis of the current understanding of the Koran. Therefore, one of the things that this way of thinking would urge us to do in the future, as part of dealing with "root causes," is to devote much more attention to joint work. And we should advance a dialogue on religious freedom, what we can only call a development of doctrine in Islamic thinking, on religious freedom and other basic human rights.
Finally, this way of thinking would allow us to see clearly the terrible crisis of the Islamic world today -- described nine years ago by Bernard Lewis in a terribly important article, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," (Atlantic, September 1990) for which he was hammered mercilessly at the time, and which seems remarkably prescient today. We would have to face the fact that these are in many respects failed societies, deeply corrupted by their elites. And yet it is precisely in the interest of some of those elites to cooperate with us in facing down terrorism, since it grows in the soil of a profound resentment and dissatisfaction often aimed at those who are regarded as collaborators with the West.
All this suggests that the just war tradition needs development. Since the Second World War and the development of atomic and other weapons of mass destruction, the just war tradition has moved along the lines that Gerry Powers was suggesting, what we call the way of conducting war, or, ius in bello, finding proportion and discrimination, given the new technological means of warfare.
Some of us have argued for at least fifteen years now that this needs to be addressed. Ius ad bellum, when is it morally legitimate to resort to armed force, is much more underdeveloped in our thinking and needs to be much more carefully refined, precisely to take account of some of the new kinds of situations that Father Christiansen was describing. For example, just cause. As Father Christiansen indicated, the fact that the adversary, in this case, is not a nation state, does not pose insuperable problems for the just war tradition. What does propose real problems today is the tendency in much of contemporary Catholic just war thinking to limit just cause merely to repelling an aggression underway.
When facing terrorist organizations, preemptive military action, given solid intelligence and information, is not only morally justifiable, it is morally imperative. But how we may articulate a moral case for preemption without turning the world into a free fire zone, is something in need of discussion.
Others have touched on the question of legitimate authority today, one of the other criteria in war decision law. Who's the legitimate authority? I am sorry: I cannot consider a United Nations, which just before this attack put on an extraordinary farce in Durban, South Africa, as constituting a legitimate authority in any recognizable sense of the term. If someone is making war on us, as the terror network surely is, we do not require the permission of others to defend ourselves or to take the war to the enemy in order to defeat it. Allies in that enterprise are welcome, but their approval, it seems to me, is a matter of prudential judgment, rather than moral necessity.
And it is not deeply problematic that a number of European bishops have suggested that only a coalition or coalition sanctioned by the United Nations could possibly meet the criteria of just war. I think we just have to say this is a mistake and outside the tradition.
My colleagues have talked, at great length, about the problems of reasonable chance of success. So, we'll let that pass.
Last resort is another principle that needs stretching in the war decision component of just war thinking. We think we know what we mean by last resort, namely, we tried everything else to meet the threat. Yet terrorists, by definition, do not play by the rules, diplomatic or otherwise. And I frankly cannot see how it makes moral sense to argue that we must first attempt to negotiate with people who regard negotiation as weakness, who think of the other as vermin to be exterminated, and for whom acts of mass murder are deemed religiously praiseworthy. Again, how to employ this classic criterion so that it sheds light on the current situation is very much something in need of development today.
There are issues concerning the conduct of war as my colleagues have described. I would like to just take up two of them briefly. Dr. Bacevitch raises the question of assassination: should we get back into that again? I would raise the counter question. If what was perpetrated on September 11th was an act of war -- not a crime to be understood in terms of criminal justice, but an act of mass violence and aggression against the United States -- does not that constitute those who did it, supported it, abetted it, and so forth, not as civilian leaders of causes or nations, but, in fact, as combatants. There's a question to be thought through. Again, I don't propose an answer, but, I think it's a good question.
And then Father Christiansen raises the question of attacks on infrastructure, Iraq, etc. from the Gulf War. At the time we speculated: what do the proportionality and nondiscrimination criteria tell you about targeting infrastructure in a society whose entire infrastructure is not set up to provide for the civilian population, but to provide for the war machine of the tyrant, in this case, Saddam Hussein? This is very complicated. Michael Waltzer is being too simple in saying that targeting infrastructure constitutes a violation of non-combatant immunity.
Finally, and, really finally, I would like to throw out, yet again, to Drew and Gerry, in particular, but, also, to all of us, the question of whether the way several of you have described the just war tradition is, in fact, accurate. It is simply inaccurate, historically, to say that the just war tradition begins with a "presumption" against war, or a presumption against violence. In fact, what it begins with is the presumption of the moral imperative of legitimately constituted public authority to defend the common good and promote a minimum of just order in international affairs.
Then, the tradition tries, as John Courtney Murray once put it, to order what is inherently irrational, namely the use of violence, to rational ends, the ends of the defense of freedom, justice, and peace. It seems to me we have gotten into a lot of trouble, intellectually, in the past twenty years, by importing into the just war tradition a presumption from a different moral tradition, a tradition of Christian pacifists.
This is not only a matter of intellectual hygiene in terms of understanding rightly construed just war tradition. It is a matter of skewing the analysis at the outset so that it doesn't give us that kind of clear reflection that I was suggesting at the outset is the whole point of this kind of thought in the first place. So a lot of work is to be done, and a lot of catch-up ball to be played intellectually by those of us who cherish this as the way to think morally.
The atrocities of September 11 and the subsequent public response should force Christians of all denominations and theological persuasions to return once again to the fundamentals of moral reflection on the use of military force. The first fundamental that they ought to consider is this: There are two, and only two, responsible ways for Christians to think about the use of military force. For shorthand, I'll call this classic pacifism and classic just war.
The classic just war position needs no extended exposition for this gathering. It was clearly summarized and articulated by Thomas Aquinas, and for all intents and purposes was adopted by the Reformers as well as the early modern Protestant and Catholic natural law theorists. Thomas held that three requirements are necessary to morally justify the resort to force: legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention. By legitimate authority he insisted, in line with the Biblical witness (citing Romans 13:1-6) and medieval thought, that force was to be employed as a public act by a sovereign political authority. Sovereign political authority means that there is no superior political authority to which aggrieved citizens can appeal. This means that the resort to war is normatively part and parcel of the coercive power of the law itself in its capacity to act on behalf of a political community that has been seriously wronged. In short, the political decisions on whether to resort to war (jus ad bellum) and the art of war itself (jus in bello) were a part of the art of statecraft. This, as we shall see, is most relevant to the current situation.
The criterion of just cause classically and explicitly included one or more of three possibilities: defense against wrongful attack, retaking something wrongly taken, or punishment of evil. (Following the Westphalian settlement of 1648 the classic possibilities were reduced almost entirely in international law to defense against wrongful attack. But that is a long story that need not detain us here.) Right intention negatively meant that war should not be undertaken with a lust for battle, personal glory, bloodlust etc. Positively, right intention insists that the aim is to bring about peace, not a utopian peace, but a tranquility of order.
As the tradition developed, other "criteria" (if that is the right word) were added to the jus ad bellum as prudential considerations to guide statesmen when they considered the use of force: Is there a reasonable chance for success? Will the overall good exceed the harm done (proportionality)? Have other means to redress a harm been attempted or are they possible (last resort)?
The classic pacifist position is, I think, best expressed in the Schleitheim Articles of 1527, widely regarded as the theological consolidation of Anabaptism. The sixth article articulates and summarizes this pacifism:
...It is asked about the sword, whether a Christian may hold a position of governmental authority if he is chosen for it. This is our reply: Christ should have been made a king, but he rejected this (John 6:15) and did not view it as ordained by his father. We should do likewise and follow him. In this way we will not walk into the snares of darkness. . . .Also, Christ himself forbids the violence of the sword and says, "Worldly princes rule," etc, "but not you." (Matt. 20:25)
Nor, they continued, is it
fitting for a Christian to be a magistrate because the authorities' governance is according to the flesh, but the Christian's is according to the spirit. Their houses and dwellings remain in this world, but the Christian\rquote s is in heaven. Their weapons of conflict and war are carnal and only directed against the fortifications of the devil. Wordly people are armed with spikes and iron, but Christians are armed with the armor of God.
It is worth noting, first, that the prohibition against Christians wielding the sword was part and parcel of the prohibition against holding political office. However, secondly, this prohibition was accompanied, indeed it was preceded by, a recognition that public authorities had a mandate from God to do what they as Christians were prohibited from doing:
Concerning the sword we have reached the following agreement: The sword is ordained by God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and kills people and protects and defends the good. In the law the sword is established to punish and to kill the wicked, and secular authorities are established to use it.
When is the last time you heard a modern pacifist, say, from the Mennonite Central Committee, talk like that? (They don't make pacifists like they used to.)
Now, this position was a distinctly minority view among the reformers, for very good and compelling theological reasons, I might add. (I don't have the time to bore you with the details.) The fundamental distinction between classic pacifism and classic just war thought was not over whether or not public authorities were authorized to punish evil-doers by death and waging war if necessary. The Biblical witness was simply too perspicuous for them to doubt this. The issue between them and both the magisterial Reformers and Roman Catholics was more precisely over whether Christians may legitimately hold a political office. That political authority could legitimately employ lethal force and coercion was simply acknowledged and accepted.
The second fundamental point to be considered is this: The assertion by contemporary academic guild "ethicists" and some ecclesiastical authorities that the just war tradition is really a form of "crypto-pacifism" (Philip Wogaman), or that it shares with pacifism a "prima-facie" opposition to the use of force (James Childress), or shares with pacifism a common presumption against force or violence (The Challenge of Peace) should be rejected root and branch, along with academic fads such as "just peacemaking." Such attempts at synthesis must of logical necessity fundamentally distort both traditions and render them logically, morally, and theologically incoherent.
Practically speaking, these hybrids cannot do the work that the just war tradition is precisely designed to do: to provide moral guidance to political leaders as they consider the resort to force, and provide guidance to military planners as they plan the conduct of the war and prosecute it. Nor can it provide guidance for responsible Christian citizenship. As a result, church leaders and theologians, those whose very office is to provide moral clarity in times such as these, do more to contribute to the moral obtuseness among Christian citizens than to relieve it.
Here, let me relate to you the following sent to a colleague by a senior Justice Department lawyer.
I was listening to Don Kroeh on [radio station] WAVA yesterday and heard his interview with Keith Pavlischek about just war principles. I appreciated the discussion because I have been participating in a lot of meetings and religious services recently where some have asserted that the command to turn the other cheek precludes Christians from supporting a war against those who attacked us. At a family retreat last weekend one woman almost walked out when I said I didn't think Jesus had a terrorist attack in mind when he preached the Sermon on the Mount. That's why I especially appreciated Keith's succinct application of just war principles to the evil of terrorism.
This woman's reaction is increasingly common. Why? Contemporary moral reflection by "ethicists" and church leaders has failed to clarify and outline the normative duty and responsibility of public officials who are, in the words of the Apostle Paul, "God's servant[s], agent[s] of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer." (Rom.13:4b NIV)
Again, recall that the classic pacifists did not deny this was the duty of political authorities. It is precisely here that one finds the "point of contact" between the two classic traditions, and it is most relevant to the war against terrorism. The point of contact cannot be located in a purported common agreement about a "presumption against war" or the claim that the just war tradition is really "crypto-pacifist," or that they share a "prima facie" opposition to force (as if Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Suarez need to be tutored by the moral philosophy of W.D. Ross.) Rather, the similarity lies in the fact that for both the classic pacifist and classic just warrior, political authorities are not only permitted by God to wield the sword for the sake of justice, order, and peace, but are required to do so by God Himself, whether they personally acknowledge God as the ultimate source of their authority.
It is, in fact, the near emasculation of the criteria of legitimate authority in contemporary ethical reflection on the use of force that renders so many Christian citizens incapable of serious and sustained moral reflection in response to a terrorist threat. As I've suggested elsewhere, the profound evil in terrorism is not to be located merely in the fact that so many innocent noncombatants were killed. In fact, to locate that as the sole evil is to make a fatal concession. After all, the notion of noncombatant immunity is a part of the jus in bello and the notion of guilt and innocence is a legal one that holds in a state of war between two political communities. To fully understand the evil of terrorism we must consider it in the context of the very point where classic pacifists and classic just warriors most profoundly agree -- only legitimate public authority has the right to wage war.
It is not insignificant that in addressing whether war could be waged justly, Aquinas began with the issue of legitimate authority, citing as Biblical support Romans 13: 1-6. Thomas was articulating nothing new here. Beginning with Augustine, and throughout the Middle Ages, Christians sought to curb violence by emphasizing that only sovereign political authority could wage war. They thereby declared illegitimate any use of force by subordinate nobles, private soldiers, criminals, and even the Church. Eventually, when confronted with a militaristic Germanic culture in which princes frequently engaged and glorified in combat for private ends, Christian thinkers repeatedly insisted that warfare was a public issue. War could not merely be an extreme tool of private parties but had to be a legal instrument, a part of the coercive power of law itself. Historically and theoretically, securing the public monopoly on the use of force was a necessary (albeit not sufficient) precondition for a peaceful and civilized society. Even the pacifists of the radical Reformation recognized this.
The free-lance terrorism of the late twentieth and now the twenty-first century is nothing less than a direct assault on this Christian achievement. Left unchallenged, the rise of terrorism may foreshadow a return to the barbarism of private war. But a return to private warfare in the twenty-first century is even more ominous since vengeance is no longer fueled by distorted notions of private glory and honor. Now the motive is ideological, ethnic, and religious fanaticism, which knows no bounds. In fact as James Turner Johnson has observed in a remarkably prescient article in First Things (1999), terrorism by its nature aims to undermine the political goods of justice, order, and peace, which are secured by political authority, and thus attacks all who benefit from them.
While the tradition has allowed for the possibility of a war between two states both seeming, because of the complexity of the issues involved, to be just, the kind of violence we today call terrorism is evil in its very nature, because it attacks the foundations of political community itself. The authority to use force to curb and punish terrorism is thus the same authority that seeks to protect the goods of the political order as such. There is no justice in terrorism, only injustice.
Classical pacifists and classical just warriors recognized this. It remains to be seen whether contemporary pacifists and "modern" just war advocates will come to recognize it as well. I have my doubts. And it will be most instructive to see how far the Vatican and the U.S. Bishops have traveled down the path away from the classic just war tradition.
Right Reasons is an occasional publication of the Faith & Reason Institute.
Faith & Reason Institute
666 Eleventh St. NW, Suite 450
Washington, DC 20001
(202) 289-8775
(202) 393-7004 F
info@frinstitute.org
Home