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Posted on 09/16/2001 3:50:27 PM PDT by Int

Just War just beyond reach?
Americans' thirst for revenge imperils Christian values, leading ethicists fear
By MICHAEL VALPY, The Globe and Mail
RELIGION AND ETHICS REPORTER
Saturday, September 15, 2001

Few religious ethicists believe the U.S. government will honour the Christian doctrine of Just War when it begins military action against terrorism. Perhaps even fewer believe that Western publics will care.

The fear, rather, is that public opinion will accept intentional collateral damage -- the icy military euphemism for the planned killing of innocent civilians. There will be little interest in the Just War doctrine's distinction between legitimate defence and illegitimate revenge and punishment.

Little if any heed will be paid to the doctrine's criterion of achievability, that if a government cannot be sure of a military action's success, then it is only adding to the evil of violence by going ahead.

U.S. academic theology's most provocative intellectual, Stanley Hauerwas, said from his office at Duke University Divinity School yesterday that the U.S. public has for years been more hawkish than the U.S. military establishment. "The Vietnam-No has gone from our society.

"Christians in contemporary society are a blank-cheque people: we go kill whoever our democratically elected leaders tell us to kill," he said. "As for Just War doctrine, I've never met a Just War warrior who didn't like war."

Joseph Boyle, a leading Roman Catholic philosopher and principal of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, said his fear -- "my heartbreak" -- is that the United States will erupt in rage and thirst for retributive blood and sweep aside moral restraints.

He said he also feared that the U.S. government, with the support of its citizens and allies, would embark on a course of cleansing by violence -- of attempting to set things straight in the world by war -- which post-Vatican II Catholic moral theology says is outside the bounds of moral military action.

The moral rules for the Christian conduct of war were codified by St. Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century and polished by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. They rested on two principles: jus ad bellum (the right to war) and jus in bello (what is right in war).

In the Just War doctrine, there must be a good cause -- protection of the innocent and the recovery of things unjustly taken. There must be the right intention (which excludes revenge and hatred of the enemy).

The direct killing of the innocent and the destruction of population centres are forbidden.

Prof. Hauerwas -- who doesn't accept the theory of Just War and says the only legitimate Christian position is pacificism -- speculated yesterday on what U.S. military policy would be like if it operated according to the doctrine.

There would not be nuclear weapons aimed at population centres, he said. The Americans wouldn't have bombed Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and thousands of Iraqi civilians would not have died as the result of the U.S. blockade. The U.S. armed forces would be much smaller because they would be only for defence.

Prof. Boyle does accept Just War as valid Catholic doctrine. But, he says, "if you apply Just War standards, most of the time what you want to do, you can't do. It's like sexual ethics."

What invokes the Just War doctrine in this instance, he said, is that the United States and its allies face an ongoing activity by organizations "keen on killing innocents to get at their political goals."

But what worries serious Catholic moralists in Europe and North America since 1939 is the death of innocents caused by the governments of ostensibly Western Christian societies, he said. "There is not just the threat anymore to kill bad guys. There is also the threat to kill their grandmothers and children.

"There is a challenge to our integrity, not to kill innocent people. Much of the world is saying to us: 'You do it all the time and don't own up to it.'

"The truth is, we didn't do very well against Baghdad. We didn't do very well against Belgrade [in the recent NATO action in the Balkans] and there has been an attempt to cover that up.

"We must figure out morally good ways of doing this. There is an imperative not only to get at terrorists but to get at terrorism by not engaging in anything that looks like terrorism.

"We fought the war against Germany wrongly [by bombing civilians in the Second World War]. Fighting terrorism is a good thing to do. Killing a lot of Afghans and Iraqis -- that can't be right."

Rev. Eric Beresford, an ethics adviser to both the Anglican Church of Canada and the world Anglican Communion, said the argument can be made that Just War doctrine applies only to war between states and no state has been definitively linked to the terrorists who carried out Tuesday's attack. "You'd still be looking for legitimate criteria to justify the use of violence."

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