Congratulations are due to the 8 million Iraqis who turned out to vote today. Regardless of your sentiments on the war, you should applaud and be heartened by a major milestone on Iraq's path toward becoming a free society. With Afghanistan and Iraq holding meaningful elections (although with years of hard work ahead to become truly free), hope begins to return to a fetid, tyranical region.

It is also a repudiation of decades of American "realpolitik" foreign policy; perhaps even its deathknell. Realpolitik relied on stability above all else. But stability among nations is a chimera. As Mark Steyn puts it today in the Chicago Sun-Times, "The geopolitical scene is never stable...'Stability' is a fancy term to dignify laziness and complacency as sophistication."

One way to think of realpolitik is as the foreign policy equivalent of communist economic policy. The economics of communism was based on central planning: the state/party controlled the economic sector, setting output levels, pricing, and distribution. Realpolitik attempted to control the international political environment via an analogous sort of "central planning": international bodies such as the UN were used to regulate foreign policy through their arcane bureaucracies. The rules of this bodies evolved over time to punish and constrain the most successful countries, and to give succor to the oppressive and genocidal, while providing a cosmopolitan lifestyle for those "public servants" lucky enough to be seconded to New York or Geneva by their masters. Think of the Soviet Union, where everyone lived in equal squalor, except for the apparatchiks, and you get the general idea. Central planning always has the short term appearance of stability, but is ultimately unsustainable and therefore unstable in the long run.

Like communism, realpolitik has fallen quickly, the result of decades of internal corruption, moral degradation, and an unsustainable ethical model. In the coming decades, we may well look back and see that the election today is to realpolitik what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to communism.

The global march from feudalism to freedom continues...

Bradley Lewis picks up on an interesting thread on Mirror of Justice, and expands on it in a thoughtful and compelling manner. I'd like to add my comments as well.

Referring to WMD as the "main" justification for war, even if true (a claim with which I would take issue), is irrelevant. The relevant question is whether, absent WMD as an argument, there was sufficient justification for war. Look at the actual authorization for war passed by Congress in 2002. In complex matters, we write contracts because, with time, memories fade, interests change, and commitments waver. HR 144 lists at least 11 reasons for authorizing force against Iraq:

a) Repeated violations of the 1991 ceasefire
b) Interfering with efforts of UN weapons inspectors
c) Continuing to possess and develop WMD
d) Aiding and abetting terrorist organizations
e) Repression of its citizenry
f) Refusing to release prisoners wrongly detained
g) Failing to return property wrongly seized from Kuwait
h) Attempting to assassinate former President Bush in 1993
i) Firing on US and Coalition forces who were enforcing UN Resolutions
j) Harboring al Qaeda terrorists
k) Failure to comply with UN Resolutions 678, 687, 688, 949, and others

There were other reasons as well, broader strategic reasons like restoring international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region, propagating democracy, etc.

Now according to Section 2309 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, there are four criteria for a just war:

2309 The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. the gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
- there must be serious prospects of success;
- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. the power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

So let's take these four criteria, one at a time.
Criterion 1
Lasting: Saddam had been in power and causing misery and death for three decades, and his sons appeared to be next in line to continue their father's "work". And if we're going to use hindsight to throw out the WMD rationale, how about including, then, the corruption of the UN through the Oil-For-Food scandal, where a rogue state was able to use illegal cash to bribe the very body that was supposed to be monitoring its compliance.
Grave: If you look at the list above, even if you strip out items b) and c) having to do with WMD, you still have a pretty compelling set of reasons. Especially the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens who had been systematically killed and oppressed.
Certain: Again, even setting aside the WMD issues (which seemed certain to everyone at the time), there is no doubt that Saddam would continue his nefarious behavior.

Criterion 2
Impractical: Saddam was a murderous tyrant. What means, other than war, have been used successfully to stop such people?
Ineffective: We had tried economic sanctions, military no-fly zones, embargoes, diplomatic isolation, targeted strikes, inspection regimes, etc. etc. etc. We had tried to get Saddam to comply for more than a decade, and to no avail.

Criterion 3
Prospects for success: No one ever doubted that the Coalition could win a war. And with good reason, in retrospect...

Criterion 4
Proportionality: There can be no debate on this criterion; the data simply don't support any other conclusion. As MOJ points out, according to some (non-Bush-friendly) sources, there were fewer than 20,000 civilian deaths in Iraq in 18 months. That was an average year for Saddam's regime, according to some authorities. In addition, the technological capabilities of the US made proportionality more feasible. The ability to target precision weapons sharply reverses a millenium-long trend toward more collateral casualties, and broadens the scope of a just war.

Conclusion
Based on this analysis, the war appears to be just. Moreover, I have never read an analysis of the Iraq War which directly applied the Church's just war criteria and come to the conclusion that the war was unjust. (Please send me a link if you have seen one.) Most people simply believe the war has to be unjust, and assume the Church's teaching has to support this position.

But an assertion is not an argument. And I believe the most negative thing you can say at this point is that the war may be unjust, but the question is inconclusive.

There is an interesting discussion going on over at the Mirror of Justice blog about whether the lack of any proof of WMD in Iraq means that the war was in fact unjust according to traditional just war theory. From a practical perspective the question is of limited relevance since whatever one thinks about it the question of what ought to be done now is separate and would need to be answered by reference to a different set of principles. But it is of theoretical interest and perhaps of practical importance in a different way related to President Bush's Inaugural Address and the policy he there enunciated.

I want to make two points related to the Iraq issue:

(1) With respect to the justification of the war the main reason was clearly the weapons of mass destruction threat. This was the main reason given by Bush immediately preceding the initiation of hostilities. This also seems clear from much of the reporting that has since been done, for example, Bob Woodward's book, Plan of Attack. Michael Scaperlanda asks if the war could justly be considered a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War. Rob Vischer is doubtful about this asking if such a principle would have justified bombing Germany over its failure to pay WWI reparations. The correct analogy here would not, I think, be the reparations, but rather the aggressive military acts that Germany took in the mid and late 1930s: the Sudetenland, the "rape of Prague," large-scale rearmament. These things could have justified a proportionate military response. Iraq was clearly in violation of the cease fire agreement that ended the fighting in 1991 (there was no peace treaty) and by the later Clinton years there was a great escalation in exchanges of fire between coalition aircraft and Iraqi anti-aircraft units. Iraq regularly targeted and fired on allied planes in the no-fly zone and violated the no-fly zone itself. There is some disagreement among international lawyers over whether or not this justified an end to the cease fire, but some clearly thought it did and it's certainly not patently unreasonable to see this as one casus belli.

(2) But, leaving that issue aside, what about the lack of WMD, which was certainly the main cause of the war? If it really is true that there were none that posed an immediate threat, as distinct from programs that could cause a longer term threat, might one want to make some such distinction as this: the was may have been objectively unjust in the sense that the conditions required to justify it didn't in fact exist, but subjectively just since the major decision-makers thought that those conditions did exist? The main U.S. commander, Tommy Franks has written in his memoir, American Soldier, that he absolutely expected to be attacked with WMD and had been told to expect it by the Jordanians and the Russians. While some have suggested that the president and his advisors lied about the threat, no persuasive evidence to that effect has ever been produced. If the war turns out to have been objectively unjust there is every reason to undertake massive reforms of our intelligence gathering capabilities and perhaps even reason to blame some officials for not doing their jobs effectively. But absent real evidence of mendacity I don't see a moral reason to think that they acted wrongly.

One of the most common criticisms of the free economy is that it hurts the environment. This criticism crops up in a number of contexts: global warming, energy policy, sustainable development, population control, etc. And while it takes on slight variations in form in each of these contexts, the basic argument is:

- The free economy encourages consumption
- Consumption uses scarce resources and creates waste
- The use of scarce resources creates an ecological imbalance
- The creation of waste causes environmental degradation
- Left unchecked, then, the free economy will destroy the environment

Such an accusation, if true, is damning. We have a moral responsibility to be good stewards of the earth, as the US Bishops pointed out in their statement Global Climate Change: A Plea for Dialogue, Prudence, and the Common Good: Indeed, one of the "central moral questions" raised by the Bishops is "How can we as a 'family of nations' exercise stewardship in a way that respects and protects the integrity of God's creation and provides for the common good, as well as for economic and social progress based on justice?"

The very wording of this question seems to imply there is a trade-off between stewardship of God's creation and economic progress. It is a trade-off that has its roots in Rev. Thomas Malthus' classic 1798 work, Essay on the Principle of Population, but has been picked up in recent years by Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. Indeed, this trade-off has become conventional wisdom: economic growth increases pollution of all kinds, which in turn degrades the environment.

The only problem with the conventional wisdom is that the facts don't support it. Consider the following picture:



This graph is taken from The Skeptical Environmentalist, a data-packed, controversial text by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg. But while the book itself is controversial, the data in this graph is not: it is based on studies by the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.

The point here is that, in general, rich countries are cleaner than poor countries. In other words, economic growth is more likely to create a cleaner environment.

The reasons for this are simple. A clean environment costs money. Rather than dump toxins in a field somewhere, we have to collect, transport, and dispose of it. Rather than release noxious gases into the atmosphere, we have to capture, scrub, and dispose of them. Rather than pump waste into a river, we have to filter, process, and dispose of it. All of this costs money.

Unfortunately, poor nations lack the money to clean up their messes. Think of it this way: if you have a choice between food and clean air, you choose food. You might end up with a hacking cough, but that's better than starving to death. On the other hand, if you have sufficient wealth so that you have to choose between clean air and a third car, you'll probably choose clean air.

Now, of course, in the short run, economic growth may get worse. In fact, it almost always does. London was a much dirtier place during the Industrial Revolution than 200 years before. But now, environmental quality has come full circle, and the City of London is cleaner now that it has been in 500 years. The growth that created the pollution also created wealth, which eventually was used to clean up the mess.

So, if you really want to improve the environment, grow the economy.

Last evening the Center co-sponsored, in conjunction with Diocese of Fort-Wayne-South Bend, a marvelous talk by Rev. Dr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk on the ethics of stem cell research. Fr. Tad is a staff ethicist and Director of Education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, and a priest of the Fall River Diocese in Massachusettes (his PhD, in neuroscience, is from Yale; he also worked for several years as a molecular biologist at Massachusettes General Hospital/Harvard Medical School). I'd like especially to thank Fred Everett, Director of the Office of Family Life at the diocese, for bringing Fr. Tad to our attention and for doing so much to make his talk such a great success. I found the most striking aspect of Fr. Tad's presentation to be the large number of amazing, documented success stories that can already be attributed to adult stem cell research--as compared to the zero number of successes achieved by embryonic stem cell research. Below is the link to a pamphlet written by Fr. Tad for the Family Research Council, which sums up the heart of his presentation at Notre Dame last night. I heartily recommend Fr. Tad to anyone who might be looking for a speaker who can convincingly distinguish between the facts and the fairy tales in public comment about stem cell research.

http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=BC04C01

Daniel McInerny