The Next Just War Debate: Bishops Will Miss the Point

Military officers are seriously considering the applicability of the just war doctrine to the changing nature of warfare, particularly with respect to the terrorist threat. Based on my past experience, I predict that the Bishops will pay minimal attention to this entire discussion. In the next crises, they will drag out old textbooks on just war doctrine and attempt to apply them to the changed situation. Their well-intentioned moral pronouncements will be of little use to official decision-makers. These pronouncements will, however, be used by elements of the religious community to justify there opinions on war. Rather than contributing to an informed debate, they will detract from it.

It would be more useful to pay attention to these questions now. Leading church member should join in the following discussion:

In the Winter, 2004 of Parameters , the US Army War College quarterly, Col Franklin Eric Wester writes ... that the use of military force by the Bush Administration against the regime of Saddam Hussein does not meet the ethical criteria for “preemptive war” set forth in the classical Just War tradition. It considers ethical questions raised by the US-led attack against Iraq as part of the war against global terrorism and argues that the doctrine of preemptive war as applied in the case of Iraq fails crucial ethical tests.

Could Operation Iraqi Freedom and the global war on terrorism be as pivotal in the history of ethical decisionmaking as the emergence of the nation-state in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648? Do new ethics for the war on terror sever the fourth-century Augustinian roots of Just War theory and the ties to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica 700 years later? Could the first major war of the 21st century inaugurate a revolution in ethical decisionmaking about warfare, justifying a new set of criteria for preemption or preventive war? Answers to these questions hinge on whether or not the doctrine of preemption matures into new ethical criteria. Such criteria would build not on foundations for constraining unavoidable human violence, but stretch toward a vision of an ideal of liberty that justifies the selective killing of some to achieve a greater good of liberty for many others. This emerging ethic installs the United States as the guardian of a universal, even transcendent, cause of freedom and the ultimate arbiter in that cause.

After a lengthy discussion, Col. Wester concludes

Given the decade of broken promises and provocative pin-pricks by Iraq toward the United Nations and the coalition of the early 1990s, perhaps Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a “pure” case of preemptive or preventive war. But if military forces are to be used to extend liberty, democracy, and free enterprise based on a universal principle of liberty, and if these forces will be called on by national leaders to wage war preemptively, or preventively, then it is imperative to probe for ethical models on which military personnel and legitimate political leaders can launch such wars.

In the spring, 2005 issue of Parameters I argued that there was a just war case to be made for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Due to faulty intelligence analysis, the administration failed to make it.

I hope I'm wrong. Given the fact that many leading church figures (Catholic an Protestant) are hostile to the military, I'm probably not.

Comments

[Herb Ely]

lane,

This is a good example of what we used to call "perceptions and reactions analysis." I think you are right. It is often very helpful to "walk around the table" and look at this issue from the other party's poiint of view. As of yet, Church leaders have little reason to take the military's point of view seriously. They are content to fall back on the Chatechism and be a "prophetic voice". Not that I object to this, I just think that prophets should do their homework. Maybe the church in Spain will rethink its position after the train bombing in Madird. For another example of perceptions and reactions analysis see My March 3 post "Getting into Osama's mind".

[ELC]

I hope I'm not putting too fine a point on things, but I've said in the past that the Catechism's treatment of Just War is too abbreviated, for instance, and that it will be considerably amplified after the first major successful terrorist attack in Rome. Facts on the ground mean a lot more when it's your ground they're on.