A Catholic Debate Mounts on the Meaning of ‘Just War’
Written by Peter Steinfels for the NY Times
For over four years, George Weigel, staunch supporter of President Bush and biographer of Pope John Paul II, has never ceased to insist that the war in Iraq meets all the traditional moral criteria for a just war. And most leaders and thinkers among Mr. Weigel’s fellow Roman Catholics, along with many non-Catholic proponents of just-war thinking, have never ceased to disagree.
Now there is a fresh surge m this debate, with combat concentrated not only on how to apply these venerable moral principles to this particular war but also on how the principles should be understood in the first place. Mr. Weigel delivers the latest rendition of his case in the April issue of First Things, an interreligious neoconservative monthly. At sharp odds is an editorial in the April20 issue of the liberal Commonweal, edited by Catholic lay people (where this writer was an editor in the 1980s).
Still another view is offered by Msgr. Robert W. McElroy, a pastor in San Mateo, Calif., who is the author of “Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs,” published by Princeton University Press in 1992. His article is scheduled for publication in the April30 issue of the Jesuit-edited weekly America.
(The Commonweal editorial and America article, both obtained in advance, will be posted on the magazines’ Web sites next Monday and Friday, respectively.)
Just-war theory considers a war morally justified only if it is fought for a just cause as a last resort by a legitimate authority acting with good intentions. The war must have a reasonable chance of success and of not doing more harm than good, and it should be conducted by moral means, avoiding, for example, deliberate attacks on civilians.
Mr. Weigel’s elucidation of this moral tradition has been notable for two emphases. For years, he has scolded the Catholic bishops and other just-war proponents for claiming that the teaching begins with “a presumption against war.” On the contrary, Mr. Weigel has argued, the “classic” doctrine treated war not as a moral anomaly that had to run a gantlet of moral tests before it could be justified but as “a moral category,” a neutral instrument of statecraft that could be used for good or ill. The tradition should never be removed from the obligation of nations (like the United States in Iraq) to assure security, justice and freedom.
Second, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Weigel insisted that religious leaders should exercise “political modesty” in the public debate, recognizing that government officials “are more fully informed about the relevant facts.” Employing the term “charism,” usually associated with saints who founded religious orders, he proposed that government officials enjoyed a “charism of political discernment” that was “not shared by bishops, stated clerks, rabbis, imams, or ecumenical and interreligious agencies.”
The thrust of these emphases was of course to undercut the moral objections of many religious leaders about the potential human and political costs of invading Iraq.
In his latest essay, Mr. Weigel grapples with~ the fact that those costs have become painfully evident, and the larger concerns of security, justice and freedom increasingly elusory. Now his case for war scarcely mentions the earlier suspicion of weapons of mass destruction but stresses a need to defeat jihadi terrorism and establish responsible government and peace throughout the Middle East.
He laments “mistakes made by analysts and U.S. policy makers,” who remain unidentified except for the “convenient scapegoat,” Donald H. Rumsfeld. Finally, he defends the administration’s latest strategy against an alternative that he defines simply as “we’re out.”
In all this, he merely alludes to his earlier critique of the “presumption against war” and makes no mention of the “charism Of political discernment.” But his animus toward antiwar religious leaders is unabated.
Which is what struck the editors of Commonweal, who have consistently opposed the war. In contrast to the second thoughts of many liberals originally convinced of the Iraq war’s necessity, the editors note, “no such admissions of error, or even regret, have been issued by outspoken Catholic neoconservatives.” Does Mr. Weigel’s long list of American miscalculations, they wonder,
“cast doubt on his claim” about the government’s “charism of political discernment”? Reviewing the prudential warnings and moral qualms by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “it is hard not to conclude,” the editors write “that the bishops’ charism, rather than the president’s, has better served the nation.”
Both Commonweal and Monsignor McElroy in America magazine, deny that given the potential destructiveness of modern warfare, just war teaching has been deformed by making a “presumption against war” its starting point. To reject this development, Monsignor McElroy writes, reduces “a living, breathing moral tradition” to “a historical artifact.”
“One implication of this strong presumption against war,” Monsignor McElroy adds, is that “moral scrutiny of the decision to wage war should take place not merely at the beginning of a conflict, but at every stage of its duration.”
He examines, for instance, how the Iraq War’s stated cause has shifted from the imminent threat posed by an aggressive dictator’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction to “transformational democratization,” whether limited to Iraq or extended (as in Mr. Weigel’s vision) to the whole Middle East. “But transformational democratization falls outside the criteria of the just cause as it has been formulated in the modern age,” he writes.
Looking at the traditional criterion of proportionality, Monsignor McElroy notes that supporters of the invasion once emphasized how “the complexities of war and geopolitics” made it impossible to predict whether the evils of war would outweigh good. But now, he writes “these same advocates” cast aside “epistemic modesty” and insist with certainty “that American withdrawal would be a catastrophic blow to peace and just order in the world.”
For Commonweal, the record has thoroughly discredited Mr. Weigel’s version of just war thinking. For Monsignor McElroy, “any effort to apply rigorous just-war thinking”— presumably not Mr. Weigel’s — dictates moving immediately “toward a measured and prudently crafted American military withdrawal.” For Mr. Weigel, such notions amount to an abandonment “the mantle of moral seriousness.”
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