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.