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Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World by Jean Bethke Elshtain Basic, Rev. Ed., 2004 251 pp., $14, paper  The Just War Revisited by Oliver O'Donovan Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004 139 pp., $19.99, paper |
How would you begin a book called Just War Against Terror, written in the aftermath of 9/11? Jean Bethke Elshtain begins by recalling a novel written in the aftermath of World War II: Albert Camus' The Plague, published in French in 1948 and in English translation a year later. As Elshtain reminds us, Camus' allegory, set in the Algerian city of Oran, examines the psychology of "'humanists' … who see themselves as living in a reasonable world where everything is up for negotiation." They see what they want to see. "There are no rats in Oran," they reassure themselves, even as disease-bearing vermin are overrunning the city. "Why?" Elshtain asks. "Because there cannot be. That sort of thing does not happen anymore." Seduced by a complacent modernity, "unwilling or unable to peer into the heart of darkness," these infinitely reasonable people "have banished the word evil from their vocabularies."
Alas, as Elshtain suggests, the lesson of Camus' allegory is abiding. Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan: is there really any doubt about what will happen when radical evil goes unchecked amid hemming and hawing and principled equivocation? And yet answers to the questions raised by such crises—questions for lay persons, educators, politicians, and policymakers alike—are not transparent. Should we intervene? Why or why not? And by what criteria and in what measure? Do various types of intervention—for example, against genocide or egregious human rights violations by a non-democratic regime—call for different kinds of moral criteria?
What is the proper relationship between the church and the world? Between Christ and Caesar? Why should we not intervene preemptively to prevent potential mass murder when it looms?1 Do nations presently lack the will to oppose genocide? Is pacifism as it is preached today—in the academy and from the pulpit—the authentic expression of Christian charity in the face of political-moral evil? The ancient question "How can the use of force serve just purposes?" loses none of its bite today. But to consider its relevance will mean the messy business of applied justice in a sin-sick world, where oppression and the denial of basic human rights flourish and where moral judgments will need to be made. Such, it goes without saying, supremely tests the Christian community's ability to do moral theology within the bounds of the great tradition.
Happily, three recent books, each inspired by the exigencies of contemporary geopolitical developments, locate themselves within the parameters of historic Christian reflection. Together, their unified witness is that force indeed can serve just purposes when it is constrained by the moral strictures of just-war thinking.
In Just War Against Terror, Jean Bethke Elshtain wrestles with the complexities of war and the just use of force in the face of the terrorist threat. Self-consciously anchored in an "Augustinian realism," Elshtain ponders the obligations of justice in a violent world. For her, the wisdom of the past sheds critical light on the urgencies of the present. Entering military conflict may be a legitimate expression of Christian charity as a response to attacks on innocent life, since protecting the innocent is an expression of neighbor-love.
When God Says War Is Right by Darrell Cole Waterbrook, 2003 176 pp., $10.99, paper |
Elshtain painstakingly confronts the question "What does justice require?" Hers is a response that seeks to navigate between "corrupt inaction" and "action motivated by revenge." For Elshtain, as for generations of Christian moral thinkers, justice in the face of evil implies responsibility. Precisely what responsibility does civil society have to prevent the slaughter of innocents, whether at home or abroad, when it has the power to do so?
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