Preparing for the Next War
Stratford Caldecott

The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by a "coalition of the willing", with the intention of disarming and deleting one of the most brutal regimes in history, raises many difficult moral questions that still deserve attention – not least because other wars are likely to follow in its wake. Catholic Neo-conservative writers such as Michael Novak and Fr Richard Neuhaus in the United States were from the outset vociferous in defence of the attack. It was, they argued, a justified and proportionate response to a real and present danger. The Pope, who had also opposed the Gulf War in 1991, took a somewhat different line. In his view, war is an option of last resort, and in this case other options remained to be explored.

In geopolitical and military matters the judgment of popes is not infallible. Nevertheless, it shocked many Catholics in England and on the Continent that the views of this Pope in particular, with his proven understanding of the contemporary world and his record of helping to dismantle dictatorships in the former Communist bloc, should be discounted by loyal Catholics the moment they appeared to conflict with American interests. Once the war was over, the continuing failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq rekindled arguments over the moral basis of the invasion. In this article I want to try to think my way through some of these arguments and raise some further questions of my own, in the light of recent events.

Truth and Consequences

Since the war, the public's view of whether the coalition was in the right or the wrong has swung back and forth depending on the visible consequences of the invasion. Those who predicted massive casualties and months of savage conflict against a powerful enemy possessed of WMDs struggled to retain their dignity in the face of the rapid collapse of Saddam's regime, then took cold comfort from the chaos that ensued. Continuing revelations of the total iniquity of the regime have fuelled a widespread feeling that, when all is said and done, the war may have been the lesser of two evils. On the other hand, the apparent incompetence of the American and British authorities to manage the peace contrasts with their efficiency in the field of battle.

These days a majority tend to judge the rightness of an action by its outcome. However, no particular outcome, even a blissfully successful one, can affect the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of the invasion in the eyes of those who believe in a natural moral law. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church points out (paras 1755-6), good intentions and extreme circumstances cannot justify the choice of an action that entails a "disorder of the will" or moral evil. Furthermore, consequentialist theories of ethics suffer from the inherent weakness that historical outcomes are never final. Consequences will continue to unfold until the end of time, and at no point is it possible to arrive at a final judgement on this basis alone.

The "just war" (or more accurately "legitimate defence") argument laid out in paragraphs 2307-17 of the Catechism is based on a natural law understanding of ethics. It relies specifically on the principles of just cause, of last resort, of morally acceptable means, of legitimate authority, and of possible success. Let me try to assess the Iraq war under each of these headings, before asking whether the argument itself needs to be extended in new directions.

1.   Just cause and last resort.   The invasion of Iraq was initiated while arms inspectors were still asking for three more months to complete their work. It seems undeniable that Saddam was in breach of earlier UN resolutions that required verifiable disarmament after the 1991 Gulf War. However, if he had actually possessed them, Saddam would not have been in a position to use his weapons whilst also trying to hide them from the inspectors, and thus could not have been a real and present threat to the rest of the world at the time the war was initiated. The British government's claim that he could have launched his weapons "within 45 minutes" is now known to have been based on discredited intelligence, and may not even have been believed by ministers at the time it was made. What, then, was it that provoked the invasion in the first place?

Supporters of the coalition argued that the invasion was not the start of a new war at all, but simply the continuation of the earlier Gulf War provoked by Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. The effect of 9/11 had been to awaken the United States to the need to finish what had been started. Meanwhile, UN Security Council Resolution 1441 (arguably) provided a legal basis for military action against Saddam, to bring about the disarmament that had been a condition of the earlier ceasefire.

This argument that the invasion was merely the final move in a defensive war on behalf of Kuwait does strike many people as rather weak. The further "defensive" justification for the invasion, namely the alleged possession by Saddam's regime of WMD and its possible connection with the spread of international terrorism, carries weight only if these allegations can be proved. In any case, the fact that they were not conclusively proved in the run-up to war counts strongly against the claim that the invasion was fought on these grounds alone.

2.   Morally acceptable means.   The coalition claimed to have done its best to minimize civilian casualties. Even so, a few massive bombs intended to destroy Saddam and his immediate circle were dropped in the wrong place, killing innocent families in their homes. The British government also authorized the use of what were effectively "cluster bombs", normally regarded as a weapon that cannot be deployed without risk to the civilian population.

In the Afghanistan war, between 3,000 and 8,000 innocent civilians were killed by allied forces – ironically more than the number of Americans who died in 9/11. Apart from those British soldiers who were killed by "friendly fire" from the Americans, the number of innocent dead in Iraq may never be calculated accurately. On 27 January 2005 the Daily Telegraph estimated that 10,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed since the official ending of the military engagement (added to the 7,350 killed during the war itself). The total US dead in the previous year had been 1,448. Notoriously, the Lancet had put the number of civilian dead much higher, at around 100,000. Today's weapons are capable of great precision; however, the extreme likelihood of human error as well as occasional equipment failure, and the difficulty of employing such devices against an enemy who deliberately mingles with the civilian population, is also evident.

3.   Legitimate authority.   The Catechism states that "as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defence, once all peace efforts have failed" (n. 2308, my emphasis). Does such an "international authority" actually exist? The UN is not a world government but a forum for negotiation and dialogue. Sovereignty is claimed by the individual member states, whose job it is to make decisions concerning their own security (as the Americans and the British have done in this case by linking Iraq to an "axis of evil" in the larger war against terrorism).

Nor does the Catholic Church claim political authority in international affairs. Many Christians have concluded from this that it is not the role of the Pope or any other religious leader to decide the legitimacy of the war: the judgment must be left to heads of state. On the other hand, what the Catechism implies here is surely that while it is the public authorities who initiate military action, they should do so only in the light of the moral considerations, which are more competently discussed and discerned by religious authorities than by politicians.

It could also be argued that the state is not necessarily – or not any more - the natural or the best agency for protection of the common good, especially on a global scale where the self-interest of different nations is often opposed. In Theopolitical Imagination (Continuum, 2002), William T. Cavanaugh argues that the modern secular state did not – as most of the history books claim – save us from a period of "religious wars". In fact it produced more violence, rather than less, and it did so "not by secularizing politics, but by supplanting the imagination of the body of Christ with a heretical theology of salvation through the state".

4.   Possible success.   The success of the war will ultimately be judged not only by the removal of a murderous regime from power in Iraq, but by whether regime change in the longer run helps to bring the nation and the region into a wider coalition against terrorism. Related to this in most people's minds is the question of whether the US can successfully establish a democracy in Iraq to serve as a "beacon" for other Middle Eastern states. And the related need to resolve the Palestinian question is obvious to everyone: a sine qua non of political progress in the region.

Nevertheless, some well-informed observers have judged it to be more likely that the war will continue to destabilize the Middle East, and alienate the Arab world yet further, thus feeding the growth of worldwide terrorist networks. The image of American troops standing guard over the Iraqi oil ministry in Baghdad while mobs and organized criminals were left free to ransack the National Museum and burn the National Library, destroying an irreplaceable cultural heritage dating back 7,000 years, will live in the memory of the Arab world for a long time, if it is not effaced by the even more horrific images of American (and British) abuse of Iraqi prisoners, which appear to many in the Arab world to confirm the complete moral decadence of the West. Meanwhile (as already mentioned) the long guerrilla war with insurgents in Iraq has claimed many more lives than the war itself.

The question of democracy is complex. There are many types of democracy, just as there are many types of capitalism. Each is the expression of a long cultural history. It could be argued that if a Western-style democracy were to be successfully established in Iraq, it might exacerbate the cultural tensions in the Middle East. But is a genuinely Islamic – that is, "theocratic" – democracy possible? In theoretical terms, it would seem the answer is yes. A theocratic democracy is quite conceivable. Islam certainly has the basis for it in its teaching that all men are equal before their Creator. Iran is (in theory) a type of democracy. The largest Islamic state in the world, Indonesia, is a more convincing example. Furthermore, the political history of the religion from the time of the earliest squabbles over the leadership of the Prophet's community to the present gives plenty of scope for new political experiments today. If not a democracy, then some form of open society, or at least the tolerant treatment of religious minorities, must be desirable for a whole range of reasons. An article by Robert Skidelsky in Prospect magazine (July 2003) argues that "any brand of democracy [in Iraq] will have to be derived from Islamic principles, not from their rejection. It cannot be imposed from outside by legions of Washington think-tankers." Whether such possibilities will flourish in the aftermath of the recent war is another question. At the time of writing, the result of the 30 January election in Iraq is not yet known.

A New World Order?

From the above considerations, it would seem impossible to get a clear endorsement for the invasion from traditional just war arguments alone. On balance the conclusion would probably be against it. Most supporters of the war therefore try to extend these arguments by broadening the concept of legitimate defence. They speak of the need for pre-emptive action to forestall a growing threat to one's own security, or of the moral case for military intervention by one state to defend the population of another against its own government.

This was the line taken by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who emphasized the sheer iniquity of Saddam's regime and his long oppression of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs. The Prime Minister made it seem that the liberation of Iraq was quite simply a moral duty, and one that had been shirked by the West for far too long. (It might have been better for him if he had stuck to this argument from the beginning.)

Some statements by John Paul II, made in another context, seem to offer potential support for this broader approach. In his Peace Day message for 2000, the Pope stated: "Crimes against humanity cannot be considered an internal affair of a nation. We must thank God that in the conscience of peoples and nations there is a growing conviction that human rights have no borders, because they are universal and indivisible." "The good of the human person comes before all else and stands above all human institutions", and consequently it may be "legitimate and even obligatory to take concrete measures to disarm the aggressor" – meaning, in this case, an aggressor not against a neighbouring state but against his own people. In 2004 the Holy See proposed the addition of a new principle, "humanitarian intervention", to the UN Charter.

It would appear that these Vatican statements could be used retrospectively to justify the invasion of Iraq after all, despite the Pope's personal opposition to it. Most people would now accept that Saddam's regime had been systematically committing "crimes against humanity" within the borders of Iraq. Does this legitimate the invasion? But if so, it would also imply a mandate for further military intervention around the world, to deal with the danger posed by any number of rogue states and dictatorships deemed to be oppressing their own peoples, quite apart from any threat they might offer to the rest of the world.

I am not sure that things are that simple. For one thing, it is inconceivable that such "altruistic" interventions would in fact take place unless there happened to be other, more pragmatic reasons for them. An American president would hardly risk the lives of his troops in some distant war unless American interests were directly involved. The argument from altruism therefore risks being used as a fig-leaf to justify actions that are being taken on completely different grounds – often grounds that might not bear careful public scrutiny.

More importantly, it is implicit in the Pope's statement that any policing of human rights abuses and rogue states, and the coordination of any necessary surveillance across national boundaries, cannot be entrusted to a single nation or even a couple of allies working together. It requires an organization answerable to a genuine community of nations and cultures. The obvious candidate would be the United Nations. However, the ability even of the UN to play such a role is open to question, and Catholics may have particular reasons to be sceptical about this.

The UN was founded around the middle of the 20th century on ideals that were derived from mainstream Christian traditions. By the end of the century other idealistic movements had become dominant within the organization. Allan Carlson, the Lutheran president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, has shown that Christian Democratic influence boosted by the postwar reaction to Nazism gave way in the 1960s to Social Democratic and radical feminist influence mediated by key figures like Trygve Lie, Dag Hammarskjold and Alva Myrdal1. In this way the doctrine of "human rights" was effectively subverted. At a series of UN conferences in the 1990s the Holy See became a rallying point for developing nations, including many in the Arab world, alarmed at the growing consensus in the UN against traditional family-based cultures.

From this we can see that the UN could easily become a slave of an ideology completely opposed to conceptions of morality founded on the natural law, or on a Christian understanding of the human person. If that were to happen, as seems quite likely, a Catholic could hardly be happy for it to play the role of international policeman, or impartial moral judge over member states.

This said, we can surely endorse what the Pope wrote in his Message for World Peace Day 2003:

In a similar vein, Robert Skidelsky's article recommends a "new multilateralism" to hold in check the tendency towards US unilateralism which, he believes, is economically and politically unsustainable. "The most important need today is not to create a universal democracy – a parliament of the world – but to restore collegiality among those countries which, however unevenly, have power to shape the future. Such collegiality is the best way to preserve the independence and protect the interests of small countries."

Conclusion

There are many battles going on today, and not all of them are being fought in the Middle East. One battle that is too big to be visible on our TV screens is the battle to redefine the moral basis for international politics. The "global ethic" presently emerging from the UN community, and which is clearly driven by Western liberal thinkers, may not be something that Catholics (or Muslims for that matter) will be able easily to accept – even if the Pope is making a valiant effort to "subvert" it in the name of personalism and solidarity. The stand of the Holy See against the easy resort to war, and the questions increasingly being raised about the ability of democratic capitalism to solve the problems of the world, may mark the beginnings of a change in the way the Church relates to modern culture. The optimism of Gaudium et Spes is increasingly a thing of the past. Certainly, without some sense of the inner "logic" of our mechanistic culture we have no hope of establishing the very different logic of a civilization of love2.

Where does that leave us? Confused, no doubt. But perhaps that is preferable to having a false confidence in the opinions of our favourite newspaper. We all need to keep our wits about us in the years ahead. It is to be deeply regretted, but perhaps it should have been expected, that precisely when Catholics most need to pray, to think and to discern together about all these matters in communion with the Holy See, we seem to have become more fragmented than ever.

This is the revised and expanded version of an article that appeared in Faith magazine in the UK and Inside the Vatican magazine in the United States.

NOTES

1 See Allan Carlson, The UN – From Friend to Foe, Touchstone, November 2000. back

2 See Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition After Vatican II (Routledge, 2003). back