Here is a nice piece in Commonweal. The author revisits the question of the role that Catholic teaching should play in the lives of Catholic voters. This return to the question after the election is welcome. One of the points I tried to make in my own post on this question, Sacred Monkeys, just prior to the election, is that very often Catholics only think about these issues as the election cycle heats up. As a result, our reflection is quite often hurried and thus weakened in the heat of the moment. But questions involving the governance of the common good are important enough that we should be reflecting upon them regularly, and when we are not caught up in the maelstrom of our political passions during an election.

I think that the case of the Attorney General and torture is a very good one for the author to raise, and for us to reflect upon. We are accustomed to thinking mostly of abortion and its political ramifications. When in Veritatis Splendor* the pope included torture among abortion and other types of action that may never be done in any circumstance or for any goal, it never occurred to me that in this day and age I would have to face the possibility of my own country engaging in it as a result of government sanction. One ought not to be naive, and think isolated instances of torture will not take place in wartime, just as murder, theft, and all sorts of other crimes are committed by our troops as rare and isolated events. It is, among other things, why we have the Judge Advocate General. But the extent to which some of the abuses that have taken place may have been sanctioned by our government is appalling. I recall that when the scandal broke I thought, as I continue to think, that the Secretary of Defense should resign or be fired because these things happened under his watch. It was enough that they happened on the scale that they did. At that point I did not dream that some of them may have been officially sanctioned, or that there would have been any policy and legal discussions of our government in which they were even contemplated. So much for my own naivete.

I think the author is correct to point out that Catholic Republicans should have raised a voice of concern, if not outright rejection of a candidate for Attorney General involved in the government sanction of some forms of torture. One might of course claim that what was argued was that the various types of acts do not count as torture, and therefore no one was actually advocating what they understood to be torture as such. But this is where we have to recall that with regard to most types of human action neither law nor conscious inner intention creates their kind and moral character, but has to reflect it. The corsair may claim that he is merely testing the sharpness of his blade on the sailor's neck. But of course we know that he is wrong in the "merely." These Republicans lost the opportunity to demonstrate that they are not in the back pocket of their party in the way in which pro-abortion Catholic Democrats are in their own.

In charity, one would want to point out that the Republican party does not have a thirty year history of supporting government sanctioned torture, does not have a plank in their platform supporting torture, does not have a history of a litmus test for national office involving the support of torture, does not have leaders appearing at pro-torture conventions seeking political and financial support, and does not yet have numerous Catholic politicians abdicating their responsibility for political leadership while privatizing their opposition to torture. To the best of my knowledge neither of the senators mentioned said, "I am personally opposed to torture, but...." In addition, the response of the government and the Republican party to this scandal was not to suddenly start advocating all these things, but to correct the abuse. As the Center for Ethics and Culture's Alasdair MacIntyre has argued at length, one of the features of a healthy tradition is its ability to engage in self-critque, and reform in the face of the problems that arise within it. I think it is fair to say that on abortion, there is little or no such health in my own Democratic party. These sorts of differences should also weigh upon our political judgments. And yet one fears that here on the confirmation of the Attorney General, given his role in the formation of policy that allowed for torture, the failure of Catholic Republicans to even raise an eyebrow could be the first step down the road to their own pathology.

If there is a place where I think the author stumbles it is where he simply throws in "collective action-progressive taxation, Social Security, labor unions," and so on. Neither what he wrote before this point, nor after, appears to justify simply throwing these issues in for good measure. It was a concern of my Sacred Monkeys that this sort of move expressed a tendency toward a kind of policy utilitarianism where we lump in all political questions together, as if they differ only in degree, and weigh them for what we perceive to be the optimal benefit. In the Catholic case we end up with a kind of vague sense of overall fit with Catholic teaching, or to pursue the famous metaphor a rather dull, drab, and undistinguished seamless garment, rather than something that is vibrant, colorful, and distinctive, in which absolute commitment to the protection of the life of the innocent is not simply part of the weave, but, rather, the thread that is woven. As I see it, these other questions are matters of political prudence quite distinct from such matters of principle as abortion and torture. It was after all the New Democrats under the leadership of Bill Clinton who tried to make the Democratic party as indistinguishable as possible from the Republicans on these types of issues, ending welfare as we know it, increasing the number of federal crimes punishable by death, and so on, in order to gain political power. "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss." We won't be fooled again.

Happily, I think I will try to address that tendency at "Can the Seamless Garment be Sewn? The Future of Pro-Life Progressivism". Little did I think that when I wrote my doctoral thesis "Mental Representation: St. Thomas and the De Interpretatione" that the love of wisdom would lead me here.

Such is love.

John

*"Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, PHYSICAL AND MENTAL TORTURE AND ATTEMPTS TO COERCE THE SPIRIT; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator".(Veritatis Splendor #80)

Nice to see my colleague Brad taking up the discussion. Always a paradigm of clarity. Two thoughts on your entries. 1) If we are committed to democracy as a genuine political good for the governance of a community with a genuine common good, (at the very least in the minimal Churchillian sense of the least worst form of governance), we have to be willing to welcome the results of elections that are not obviously in our narrow national interests. We promote democracy because it is primarily good for them, even if there being other democracies is generally good for us in a secondary way, and despite the fact that they may on occasion be opposed to us. I had to remind a friend of this once when he complained that Turkey had elected some version of Islamists to govern itself. I said, "it's called democracy, and either we are genuinely for it, or it is merely a tool of our power, as most tyrants believe is the case in their democracies." Obviously the danger is that democracy can become the tool of tyranny, and destroy itself. But that is the risk one takes with the great goods of life.

2)On the justice of the war in Iraq, among my points was that if one is asking the question of jus ad bellum of our escalation of military hostilities to the level of an invasion, one is asking the wrong question. We were already at war with Iraq. The question of jus ad bellum had to be asked about the appropriate response to the invasion of an ally, namely Kuwait. And there I do not doubt there are different judgments among people of good will. But the correct question in the escalation of military hostilities to the level of the invasion, as I saw it, has to do with jus in bello. The good effects you are pointing to may well be overdetermining factors. But I don't believe they were necessary to answering either the incorrect question of jus ad bellum, or the correct question of jus in bello. But I certainly welcome any such goods.

In the abstract, I am likely to answer your last question in the negative, that is, that instilling democratic reform by force of arms is not itself a sufficient condition for jus ad bellum. On the other hand, I do think stopping genocide and ethnic cleansing probably are. And if I recall, at least some were citing humanitarian reasons in the case of Iraq, though not very often or very loudly. Though he disagreed with the case of Iraq, I seem to recall Michael Walzer on Charlie Rose saying something like, "when one can stop these things, one should." The only other thing I might add here is that when we think of some state of affairs as a sufficient condition for jus ad bellum, that does not imply that it is an obligation to go to war. All it implies is that one can go to war justly. It does not imply that one must. Even when one can, one must exercise a judgement of prudence about whether one should.

John

If the main question about the administration's larger geopolitical strategy in the Middle East concerns its realism and chances of success, I suppose we need to count as evidence (along with the relative success of the Iraqi election) the following items from Thursday's Washington Post.

1) Jim Hoagland's column reports on the participation of Iraqi women in the elections and now the ongoing political process there.

2) Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister, is now vying for that position in the provisional government that will be chosen by the new constitutional assmebly. This story is important for two reasons: (a) Allawi is very forthright in sayiing that his party, while dominated by Shiites, is a secular party and openly expressing a preference for a more secular government than the one likely to be formed by the majority Shia party; (b) the jockying for position among various Iraqi parties and leaders is politics. There is real politics (as distinct from just war) going on in Iraq now.

3) Saudi Arabians who voted in the recent local elections there are evincing real enthusiasm for just voting aand this could perhaps be the beginning of a larger push for reform of that exceedingly corrupt oligarchy.

4) The new cabinet appointed by the Palestinian authority seems to be dominated by people who reject Yasir Arafat's brand of politics, which is an extremely hopeful sign for the future of any stable, moderate, representative government in an eventually sovereign palestinian state.

5) Add to these items David Ignatius's column from yesterday's Post, which quotes the leader of the Lebanese Druze militia, Walid Jumblatt, as saying "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.... The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

Bush may be wrong and the strategy may yet fail, but these all seem to me to be hopeful signs.

This is in part a response to John O'Callaghan's last post, but goes a bit beyond that. John thinks it was unfortunate that WMD was the main public justification for the invasion of Iraq, since we had ample justification in Iraq's violation of the 1991 cease fire terms. It seems to me that there were at least three main justifications, each emphasized by some part of the administration at various times: (a) the violation of the cease-fire (not used that extensively, but it was given as a reason by some); (b) the presence of WMD as (i) a specific violation of the cease-fire terms, (ii) a violation of the various UN resolutions concerning Iraqi WMD, and (iii) a general threat to the United States and its allies; and (c) the more grandiose regional strategy of democratizing the Middle East. While WMD was, I think, the most influential justification with the public and with the President (I cite again Bob Woodward's book, Plan of Attack, which emphasizes Dick Cheney's constant concern with the WMD issue). However, the democratization issue became increasingly visible in the president's speeches, leading finally to its central place in his Inaugural Address.

The democracy plan seems to be based on these premises: (a) terrorists who threaten the US mainly come from the Arab world; (b) the root causes of terrorism are political (not essentially religious) and stem from the fact that most Arab countries are tyrannies where political islam becomes attractive as a vehicle of opposition to tyrants seen as secular in addition to just being oppressive, and to a more generalized sense of injustice and inequality; (c) the solution to this is economic development and political reform--both tied to democracy; (d) Iraq is the best place to jump-start such a program, since (i) we have a reason to go in; (ii) Iraq is already more secular than other Arab countries; (iii) Iraq has a relatively more educated population, (iv) Iraq is big and centrally located and can thus be a center from which democratic ideas can spread out.

One can quarrel, I suppose, with all these premises, but they are not crazy. They constitute a geopolitical strategy that transcends the war itself, the immediate aim of which was simply to remove Saddam and end the WMD programs. The big question then concerns the possibilities for success of the larger strategy. And, can we see such a larger strategy as a just cause of war?

This post is in response to Brad's post of 1/28. As always Brad, a fine and clear analysis. Your account of the WMD question seems to me to be corrrect. However, I think it was unfortunate that the administration went in that direction in arguing for military operations to the American people. I think it was done for domestic political reasons. The judgment was made that the American people were satisfied with the status quo, and needed some self interested reason to resume military hostilities. Americans have a long history of isolationism. This assumption about the American people, however true, was unfortunate since it led to the impression that we were going to war, and the application of Just War theory pertained to the conditions of jus ad bellum.

But then I come back to the first part of your essay. I do not understand how anyone could think we were not in a continuous state of war with Iraq from 1991 on. They were in violation of the conditions of the cease fire, which cease fire was not an end to the war but a cessation of major military operations. Even though this war was not being conducted by major military operations, we were, as you note, certainly engaged in military operations controlling the sovereign airspace of Iraq. By any legal standard, to control the sovereign airspace of another country against its will is an act of war. As you note we were being fired upon and firing upon. However, the most significant feature of the war we were waging against Iraq was the economic sanctions supposedly justified by its not meeting the conditions of the cease fire. I am of the opinion that the use of such sanctions on the scale we were using them constitute in principle unjust means in war (jus in bello). In principle they target the economy of a nation on such a scale that it constitutes targeting the civilian population. If various nations imposed such massive sanctions on our economy, I have little doubt that we would conclude that those nations were waging war on us by other means than military. And of course, let us remember that it was our military power that was to a great extent used to enforce these sanctions. Starvation at the point of an unfired but loaded gun looks like a military act to me. It does not cease to be a military act because it is unjust. But even if one could make the principled argument that sanctions on that scale are a just means of warfare, it was clear de facto that they were not meeting the conditions of proporitionality in war. I am too lazy to go back and look it up, but if memory serves, in the year 2000 the World Health Organization estimated that as a direct result of the sanctions the infant mortality rate in Iraq had doubled to the tune of 50,000 more infants dead a year throughout the previous decade. That result, de facto, is manifestly unjust. And it does not even consider other aspects harmful to the health and welfare of the civilian population of Iraq. Again, if other countries imposed sanctions on us that had that effect, there is little question we would conclude they were waging war on us by siege and consequent starvation.

One of the more disturbing features for me of the debate that took place leading up to the return to major military operations was the extent to which those who opposed such a return relied upon sanctions as a satisfactory solution to the problem. They quite often argued that the sanctions should be allowed to stay in place, though perhaps they needed to be tightened and "really enforced," and they would over time solve the problem. Given the manifestly unjust character of our sanctions, I was amazed to hear public figures calling for their continuation, indeed for a more draconian enforcement of them. So it strikes me that in fact the question was not about the just conditions for going to war, jus ad bellum. Those had either been met or not when Kuwait was invaded. On the assumption that they had been met, the question then was whether we were meeting the conditions of justice in war, jus in bello, over the decade of the 90s. I think manifestly we were not. That situation left us with two possibilities. We simply cease to wage the war altogether, which may well have been advisable. Or we return to just means of waging that war, namely, the use of the military to attack just military targets. We did not have that debate because by and large the American public, and certainly those most vocally opposed to military operations were satisfied with the status quo of the manifestly unjust means of siege and starvation we were employing to wage war against Iraq in the 90s.

Just my opinion,
John

ps. The question of WMD, and the excellent point you make, does seem to me to bear upon the question of whether it was just for us to continue to wage the war, ad bellum, through the 90s. Had anyone known then what we know now, it seems to me that one could have argued we should simply have stopped waging war on Iraq at whatever point we became cognizant of that fact, again assuming that the original decision to go to war on behalf of an ally who had been attacked was just ad bellum.