Iraq: a "Just War?"

As biblical scholars keep reminding us, considerable differences of outlook sometimes separate Jesus of Nazareth from the church that ministers in his name. One big difference is over their respective understandings of the end-time. For Jesus, it was not very far off. For the church, it is long delayed. The latter outlook is especially important to what the Christian tradition as a whole has had to say about war and peace.

For Jesus, the real wars are taking place on a transcendent rather than mundane plane; they will be of short duration; and in them, God is overcoming evil forces in the cosmos that are beyond human control. For the rest of us, very earthly threats to human well-being have been plaguing humanity for a long time, before and after Jesus' brief sojourn on earth, and the innocent still need our protection from them. And so, though the peace that passes understanding is surely on the way, we will be continuing to deal with the wars and rumors of war all around us.

But how? The church's main answer to this question has been that though war is only a last resort for settling problems, it can be an acceptable last resort under certain conditions. Respecting these conditions can make war, if not desirable, at least "just." Typically, the conditions are stated in terms like these: (1) A war must have a very limited purpose, confined to protecting the innocent from harm; (2) The definition of its goals and strategies must be clear enough to permit unambiguous determination of whether and when the goals of the war have been met; (3) There must be a broad consensus of opinion supportive of the view that going to war is the only way to settle a particular conflict; and (4) Strategic decisions and actions must minimize harm to non-combatants on both sides.

One of the most disturbing sides of the war in Iraq is how little we have heard from self-proclaimed Christian political leaders --- Republican and Democrat --- about our decisions and actions from the standpoint of the "just war" theory itself, and about why this way constitutes a better way of looking at warfare in general than the way of either naïve pacifism or aggressive jihad. Thinking hard in "just war" terms can be an important corrective to the we-are-right, go-it-alone mentality that has already lost us most of the world's trust and is making everyone on the planet less safe as a result.

Is America's war on Iraq a "just war?" Condition (4) above gives us at least a little encouragement in this regard, some of our aberrant interrogation practices notwithstanding. Condition (3) clearly does not. Simply put, practically nobody abroad agrees with us on our unilateral invasion of Iraq, and our unwillingness to give credence to this fact, even as we tout "globalism" as the way of the future, should be bothering our leaders us a lot more than it is.

Conditions (1) and (2) are inseparable; without a clear understanding of why one goes to war in the first place, one cannot determine the proper time and circumstances to wrap it up. The war with Iraq was initially justified by the claim that bringing Saddam Hussein down would make the world safe from his weapons of mass destruction. On the basis of this definition, the "exit strategy" was obvious: we would leave when the weapons were no longer a threat. But when the weapons turned out to be non-existent, so did the exit strategy. To cover this embarrassing state of affairs, the primary purpose of the war had to be re-defined, this time in terms of making Iraq a democratic nation, whether it wants to be one or not.

From a geo-political standpoint, making the world safe for democracy may still be a plausible foreign policy goal. But as more than a few commentators have said, working with Saudi Arabia, North Korea, or Iran might have been more productive for openers than invading Iraq. From a Christian standpoint, though, the whole idea of actively promoting American-style democracy looks suspiciously like just one more form of converting people by force and brooking no opposition in the process. What makes the idea especially ominous nowadays is that Islamic leaders have learned their lessons from old Constantine just as thoroughly and well as Christian leaders have.

As Election Day approaches, one thing that Christians can start demanding from both political parties is a lot less posturing about who had the bigger war record way back then. The phallic quality of this "debate" is utterly dis-grace-full. What we need a lot more of, instead, is careful and painstaking thinking about what a "just" solution to the Iraqi conflict would look like, right now.

The Economics of Apocalypse

It is frustrating to watch liberal Christians become their own worst enemies by twisting an important biblical principle into an absurd political ideology. The principle is that in God's eyes, the needs of the poor and the oppressed come first. The ideology is that God loves poor and oppressed people more than (she) does anybody else.

Conservative Christians ideologize differently about economics and theology, but no less one-sidedly. Their starting point is promising: God helps those who help themselves. But then they confuse matters with the decidedly unbiblical notion that God helps the poor best through the rich. That is when things really begin to get weird.

Unlike the rest of us, the very rich are not having to help themselves at all; others who aspire to be so are doing it for them. They have already secured disproportionate tax cuts for the upper-upper classes along with the repeal of their estate tax obligations; they have gotten their cronies on corporate boards; and they are well along the way toward privatizing Social Security and health care, as well as reconstructing Iraq with eyes fixed fondly on their companies' bottom lines. God is hardly in these equations at all.

This latter does not seem to have troubled either liberals or conservatives all that much. Perhaps it is because both groups have convinced their followers that they have had at their beck and call a divinely prescient economist standing in God's stead. Surely it is time for both groups to rethink their idealization of a man whose wisdom is anything but God-like.

Remember when Alan Greenspan said all those nice things about how things were going in the really, really big Bull Markets? Later on, he got worried about the resulting and long predicted surpluses in the federal budget, and jumped on the tax cut bandwagon, assuring the soon to retire that nothing bad would ever happen to their Social Security benefits as a result. The cuts --- along with a couple of wars --- have not only wiped out the surpluses; they have encumbered the government with huge deficits that Mr. Greenspan now recommends dealing with not by reversing tax cuts for the wealthy, but by --- you guessed it --- cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Has God finally fallen out of the equations altogether?

Perhaps not. The more I talk with self-proclaimed conservative Christian friends about both their theologies and their economics, the more I see behind their views a decidedly apocalyptic view of life in this world. One friend is very clear about this: Leroy, none of us is going to be here for very long, you know. And when Jesus comes back, and it's going to be soon, it won't matter whether we're rich or poor. All that will matter is whether we have believed in him. When I asked my friend how he was doing with divesting himself of his assets and giving them all to the poor --- for that is the way the earliest Christians went about preparing for the End --- he stared at me as if I had started speaking in tongues. After he recovered, he said something to me that still leaves me with chills: You're not getting it Leroy; Jesus won't count my holdings against me, so I can keep on holding them. When I stammered out, And even increase them?, he said, with an ever wider grin on his face, Of course!

Now, I do get it. While we wait around for Jesus to return, we can keep on granting a few privileged people the right to take advantage of everybody else, because at the literal end of the day, what they pile up for themselves in the interim will not be counted against them. And neither will the enjoyment they receive from it. Since there will never be enough to go around anyway, why shouldn't at least a few people get some good out of life before time runs out for everybody, themselves included? And if Armageddon is even slightly delayed, maybe at least some of the rest of us can grab enough for ourselves to make our own transition to the next world a little easier.

This kind of thinking is what a lot of Republicans and Democrats have been engaged in these past few years, making what Paul Krugman calls "the great unraveling" of America a truly bi-partisan effort from first to last. It takes a lot to get politicians to agree on almost anything. But against this unraveling, there are few protesters. Too many people have been too busy championing the cause of the winners, the richest, and the most powerful instead of that of the last, the least, and the lost.