From Middle East Online:
The Church of England offered Monday to take the lead in reconciling with Muslims by apologizing to their leaders for the US-led war in Iraq if the British government fails to do so.
The proposal was contained in a report, entitled "Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post-9/11" which written by a working group of the Church of England's House of Bishops.
"We do believe that the church has a visionary role for reconciliation, beyond that of any government," the Bishop of Oxford, Right Reverend Richard Harris, told BBC radio.
"Beyond that of any government"
What role, exactly, does the Church play as being a check on State matters? And here I'm going to use the word "Church" as that countpart to the "State", as opposed to the Church of England specifically.
The goal of the State is the temporal happiness of man, and its proximate purpose the preservation of external juridical order and the provision of a reasonable abundance of means of human development in the interests of its citizens and their posterity.
In all purely temporal subject-matter, so long as it remains such, the jurisdiction of the State over its own subjects stands not only supreme, but, as far as the Church is concerned, alone.
Now that is Catholic theology, but the Roman Catholic Church has had the most experience in these matters, and has spent two thousand years thinking about them.
Interesting. As far as the Church is concerned, temporal issues our properly the concern of the State, and more importantly, solely the concern of the State. The State's goal is to provision for the interests of its citizens and their posterity.
This principle gives great latitude to the State. For instance, the State could decide to implement a socialist or even communist scheme if it believed that such an organization would enhance the temporal happiness of its citizens. The Church would rightly not have an opinion unless it became clear the State was failing to fulfill its functions.
So what about the Iraq War?
War, in its juridical sense, is a contention carried on by force of arms between sovereign states, or communities having in this regard the right of states.
The right of war is the right of a sovereign state to wage a contention at arms against another, and is in its analysis an instance of the general moral power of coercion, i.e. to make use of physical force to conserve its rights inviolable. Every perfect right, i.e. every right involving in others an obligation in justice a deference thereto, to be efficacious, and consequently a real and not an illusory power, carries with it at the last appeal the subsidiary right of coercion. A perfect right, then, implies the right of physical force to defend itself against infringement, to recover the subject-matter of right unjustly withheld or to exact its equivalent, and to inflict damage in the exercise of this coercion wherever, as is almost universally the case, coercion cannot be exercised effectively without such damage.
Now the State has corporate rights of its own which are perfect; it has also the duty to defend its citizens' rights; it consequently has the right of coercion in safeguarding its own and its citizens' rights in case of menace or violation from abroad as well as from at home, not only against foreign individuals, but also against foreign states. Otherwise the duty above indicated would be impossible of fulfillment; the corporate rights of the State would be nugatory, while the individual rights of citizens would be at the mercy of the outside world.
Despite what Cindy Sheehan, who is allegedly Catholic, would have us believe, the State has a right to pursue war as a means to defend the rights of its citizens. War is a temporal issue, should such a war meets the standards of a just war. Should it meet those standards, the State has the sole jurisdiction in this, as per the principle stated earlier.
So is the Iraq War a just war? That is a trickier question, and frankly, there seems to be a great deal of debate:
St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-74) significantly contributed to the development of just war theory in his Summa Theologica in the 13th century. He formalized three criteria for a just war—right authority (a sovereign government, rather than individuals), just cause (to avenge wrongs or to restore what was unjustly seized) and right intention (the advancement of good or the avoidance of evil)—while also laying the groundwork for other criteria that would eventually be integrated into the tradition.
Protestant Reformers, as well as Catholic and Protestant natural law theorists, upheld the just war tradition. Some influential thinkers who significantly contributed to the development of just war theory include Francisco de Vitoria (1492-1546); Francisco Suarez (1548-1617); Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), often called the father of international law; and Emerich de Vattel (1714-67). In modern times, just war principles, frequently divorced from their religious origins, have been encoded in international laws governing armed conflict, such as the Geneva Conventions, as well as in American military doctrine and practice.
The result of 1600 years of evolving tradition is a fairly complex set of criteria that govern both moral justifications for waging war (jus ad bellum) and moral conduct once engaged in war (jus in bello).
So what are the justifications that must be met?
- Legitimate authority. Private individuals and groups are not permitted to take up arms against others, however justified their cause may appear. Only governments—those who have been entrusted with the public good—may wage war, and they must do it openly and legally.
- Just cause. A government may wage war in self-defense, in defense of another nation, to protect innocents or to regain something wrongfully taken. The desire for personal glory or revenge, or to impose tyrannical rule, is never an acceptable cause for waging war.
- Right intention. The ultimate end of a government in waging war must be to establish peace, rather than to use a "just war" as a pretext for its own gain.
- Last resort. A governing authority must reasonably exhaust all other diplomatic and non-military options for securing peace before resorting to force.
- Reasonable chance of success. A government may not resort to war unless its prospects for success are good. In this way, lives will not be needlessly wasted in the pursuit of a hopeless cause.
- Proportionality. A government must respond to aggression with force only when the effects of its defensive actions do not exceed the damage done by the aggression itself.
In my mind, the only real question was whether this was a war of "last resort". Traditionally, you would define "last resort" in terms of the calendar. Essentially, you've run out of time.
But in the case of Iraq, and the larger War on Terror, the debate hinges on whether waiting to the last possible moment actually aggravates the situation. Would the war have been more just if we had waited for the UN sanction regime to have fallen apart completely and for Saddam Hussein to have acquired weapons of mass destruction? Many people believed that it was already too late, and that Saddam had such weapons already. Certainly North Korea stands as an example of what a tricky proposition "last resort" is.
Here is an excerpt from Bishop Wilton Gregory in a letter to the President in September 2002, from the Conference of Catholic Bishops:
We raise these troubling questions to contribute to the vital national debate about ends and means, risks and choices reflecting our responsibilities as pastors and teachers. Our assessment of these questions leads us to urge you to pursue actively alternatives to war. We hope you will persist in the very frustrating and difficult challenges of building broad international support for a new, more constructive and effective approach to press the Iraqi government to live up to its international obligations. This approach could include continued diplomatic efforts aimed, in part, at resuming rigorous, meaningful inspections; effective enforcement of the military embargo; maintenance of political sanctions and much more carefully-focused economic sanctions which do not threaten the lives of innocent Iraqi civilians; non-military support for those in Iraq who offer genuine democratic alternatives; and other legitimate ways to contain and deter aggressive Iraqi actions.
There is no question for the Catholic Bishops on whether Iraq was a danger, nor any serious challenge to the President's moral authority under Catholic doctrine to pursue war. The Bishops do bring up the requirement for UN approval, which I disagree with -- the US President is accoutable to the US people and is judged on how well he protected the Constitution of the United States. The concluding paragraph I quoted distills their concerns down to the issue on whether there were any other means to achieve the ends desired (which the conference did not see fit to challenge).
Arguably, those means were exhausted. The French made it clear their diplomatic weight at the UN would be used in defense of Iraq and to foil any diplomatic attempt by the US to lean more heavily on Saddam. The Oil-for-Food program was either killing thousands of Iraqi children, or was so full of holes that its effectiveness was nil -- either way, no one was arguing that it was working, just on exactly how it was failing. A new sanctions regime was not in the cards -- France and Russia made it clear that they were seeking to lift all sanctions so that their domestic oil concerns could reap the reward of supporting Saddam, privately and publicly, in the years since the first Gulf War. Inspections were a mess -- whenever they seemed to be on the verge of seriously slapping Saddam down, Hans Blix would write the report in such a way as to forgive Saddam and beg for more time and money for more inspections.
The Bishops suggested more money and other covert support for democratic forces in Iraq, but that seemed naive. The security apparatus within Iraq dealt with such groups with deadly efficiency. Arguably, such an approach would spell a death sentence for any individual or group receiving this support. Hardly the Christian thing to do.
Finally, they ask for other "legitimate" ways to contain Irai aggressiveness. Fine, but war is legitimate too. If Saddam got the Bomb, or rebuilt his stockpile of chemicals and germs, while the world pursued ineffective means of "containment", then where would we be? And moreover, if we knew that these other ways were ineffective, and yet avoided war as a solution, then the State would have failed in its responsibility to ensure the temporal well-being of its citizens.
The Bush administration looked at the situation, saw the ineffectiveness of the all the means beings used, and likely to be used, in containing Saddam, and went with the last resort. But more than that, the reasoning by many people, including the conference, is that Iraq is not a part of the Global War on Terror. I beg to differ. That war started in earnest on 9/11, when the "last resort" of war was pursued, obviously too late. But terrorism is the not the product of some tribesmen and some wealthy Saudis hiding in caves in Afghanistan. It is the product of an entire civilization (Islamic) that, on many levels, is disintegrating. To look at the situation piecemeal is to invite more 9/11's, or worse, in the future. If the Global War on Terror is ongoing, then Iraq is just another battlefield within that same war.
Either way, to keep going on about how the Iraq War is not a just war is to apply the standards of a just war in an intellectually illegitimate way. In the months after the Conference sent the letter, the other means were exhausted, or shown to be a fraud. Was this a war of "last resort"? In Medieval times, a nation could afford to wait for the first arrows to be loosed before responding with war. Today, that arrow has a range that could deliver a nuclear or chemical warhead to Israel, southern Europe, or perhaps farther. As a result, the State has to consider when exactly the point-of-no-return is, and unfortunately, that might be well before the first blatant aggressive action is seen. Indeed, just to be seen to be building a nuclear missile, or even earlier, could be seen as the moment when all options are exhausted.
This is not a pleasant state of affairs, but then being King, President, or Prime Minister is not an easy job. And that job is not made any easier when clerics like the Church of England's House of Bishops take it upon themselves to undermine the actions of the State, that are legitmately seen as solely the domain of the State, by publicy announcing that the State's actions were wrong, when frankly, they were not, or at worst, debatable.
So why are they apologizing?
The meeting is offered as a solution to the moral dilemma that members of the church who opposed the war find themselves in.
It is a moral dilemma of their own making. In ignoring the failure of Iraq to live up to its commitments under various UN resolutions, and in indulging in their own anti-American sentiment, they have set the Church to be in conflict with the State. But that conflict, I think, is a false one, and I think more than a few religious authorities would agree with that:
Saddam knows from experience that the will of the so-called "international community" to sustain containment will erode over time into appeasement. Thus his entirely predictable strategy of lies and delay, making only minimal concessions until the world returns to business as usual. The likely consequences of such appeasement are too horrific to contemplate. Other rogue states will take note and be encouraged to join the WMD league, increasing the likelihood of terrorist groups acquiring them. And using them.
Permitting any part of this scenario can’t be the moral course of action.
Those are the words of Dr Keith Pavlischek, PhD, systematic theology and religion and ethics. He is also a Colonel in the US Marine Corps.
The House of Bishops need to seriously examine the reasons for their view on the war, and on how much of it is rooted in legitimate Christian philosophy, and how much of it is rooted in secular Euro-centric politics. If an honest assessment causes them to admit that their philosophical argument is, at best, weak, then in that case, they have no business interfering with the actions of the State, and should immediately abandon this plan for an apology.
Needless to say, that assessment won't happen, given the fact that the Anglican Church has long been an organization dedicated to a liberal political agenda, and using Christian Scriptures as a shield against criticism:
As Anthony Trollope demonstrated so delightfully in his novels, the Anglican Church is a pretty risible outfit, and I certainly agree with Peretz when he scores that peculiar ecclesiastical body for its latest foray into politically correct geopolitics....I suspect that Anglicans' vulgar, pseudo-prophetic witness in support of a possible boycott against companies that do business with Israel is but one more sign of their hopeless hankering for approval from the secular left, whose enmity against Israel (which has now broken out into outright anti-Semitism) can hardly be said to have Christian roots, since it tolerates Christians only when they serve as "useful idiots." I admit, when Presbyterian and Anglican Church bodies indulge in such fatuous politics, they deserve criticism. But, in this instance, they deserve criticism because they are whoring after secular gods, not because they are harkening to Christian Scriptures.
Edward T. Oakes, Society of Jesus, University of St. Mary of the Lake, Mundelein, Illinois
