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So, I would have put the human rights issues front and center, the genocide against the Kurds, the destruction of the whole way of life of the Marsh Arabs, the attacks on Shiites in the South, on and on. Read Samantha Power's book on genocide for the details. Here the just war formulations of St. Thomas Aquinas would come to the fore very quickly, given his arguments about the "repression of wrongdoing," applied to the offensive as well as the defensive use of force. A passive toleration of massive injustice and wrongdoing in the name of "peace" is, for Aquinas, a serious offense.
In theory, it would be nice if one could count on the UN to act. But in the last 50 years, the UN has only chosen to act three times under the collective security rubric. It defaulted in Bosnia, where people were beaten and hauled off never to be seen again as "peacekeepers" stood by and where folks flooded into un-declared "safe havens" and were there shot to pieces. The European community, in whose backyard this was taking place, failed to act as well. The UN defaulted in Rwanda, as did we. It defaulted in Kosovo. Clearly, some tough thinking needs to go on about collective security arrangements, perhaps regional alliances, as an alternative to the UN. Security Council vetoes pretty much guarantee that there will be future instances when people are being slaughtered with impunity as the "world community" stands down.
In the debate over Iraq, then, you see a continuation of the failures you discuss in your book, Just War Against Terror.
Exactly. Again and again, we're given false alternatives. Americans, we're told, must plant themselves implacably in the face of a cowboy president and a cabal of arrogant, hawkish advisers hell-bent on world domination; the only alternative is to be a craven apologist. Or, from the other side, the notion that any criticism of the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq is tantamount to giving aid and comfort to our enemies. These false choices provide no ground to say, "I'm going to take these issues case by case, look at what we are doing in this circumstance and why we're doing it and how we're doing it," and respond accordingly.
It's the perennial problem that I learned about as a young political theorist—the problem of dirty hands and concrete action. As Bonhoeffer says, "you may incur guilt." Free responsibility may bring a measure of guilt along with it, because when you act, there is rarely a way that is an absolute pure and true pathway. The ways in the world are always fraught with peril; there are always unintended consequences of your actions. To acknowledge this is not to preemptively dismiss criticism! Yet one is called upon to act. Otherwise, you retreat into private virtuousness, and I'm afraid there is a lot of that going on.
You are critical of the rhetoric of peace, especially as employed by church leaders. Why?
Again, there is a tendency to offer crude alternatives—it's peace or it's war. And Christians must be for peace. Much of this rhetoric rests on a vision of peace that will be available only in the eschaton. It's a vision that equates peace to unruffled harmony and assumes that you can actually have on this earth such a peace. The only thing that stands in the way, in the minds of many, is that the powerful are too powerful and so on. Somehow, we're just not trying hard enough. And that ignores human fallenness and sin—ignores our fundamental condition. We must reflect critically on war, but we must also reflect critically about peace and what's being passed off as peace. There's a difference between an unjust peace and a just peace.
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