Asymmetric Warfare and the Conservation of Morality

There's this concept I've been toying with for a while, which I'm tempted to call, after the Second Law of Thermodynamics "the conservation of morality". The idea is basically that sin tends to beget sin, virtue tends to beget virtue, such that when people do evil to others, there tends to be equal evil done back, unless someone intervenes in the cycle by some act of heroic restraint and love. Reading Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace about the war between the French and the forces of anti-colonial Arab nationalism in Algeria, it's been striking me that one of the purposes of "asymmetric warfare" is to amp up that "conservation of morality" by committing acts of such unspeakable evil that it causes the entire situation to become vastly more polarized and driven by hate.

Horne is talking about the Philippeville Massacre (not bothering to link to Wikipedia because the article is uselessly vague) in August of 1955. Up until this point, the war between the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale -- Arab nationalist liberation forces) and the French had been fierce but comparatively low level. On August 20, 1955, in a mining village in which relations between colonists and Arabs had previously been fairly good, the FLN staged an attack on the entire European population of the village that killed 123 French colonials, most of them civilians. Only six colonials survived -- people who'd barricaded themselves in a house and held off attackers with heavy fire. When the French military arrived, they found a slaughter of such unremitting savagery that it radicalized nearly all of the European population of Algeria. It wasn't just that women and children had been killed. There were cases of 70-year-old women who had their limbs hacked off and were left to bleed to death. A mother has horribly mutilated, her five-day-old child slashed to death, and the child then put back into her slashed-open womb. When French soldiers arrived they found ordinary members of the local Arab population so drunk with the slaughter that in one case a soldier wrote about in his diary, he and another solder found two young boys so intent on kicking in the skull of a dead old woman who lay in the street that the only way they were able to stop the boys was by shooting them dead.

The goal of the attack had been the radicalize the conflict, and according to the nature of asymmetric warfare, the attackers didn't care whether this resulted in excessive "blowback" towards their side so long as it resulted in total war. It was as if they had dropped an atomic bomb on the "conservation of morality". When the French army showed up and found that nearly every single French person in Philippeville had been killed, they went mad with anger, and in response they killed nearly every single Arab person in the town. The town had been 90% Arab, so this mean that in retaliation for 123 Pied noir killed, over 1,000 Arabs were killed -- many shot in the street, then hundreds mored rounded up as "prisoners" and machine gunned before being bulldozed into mass graves.

In the twisted logic of asymmetric warfare, this counted as a victory for the simple reason that it massively escalated the scale of the conflict. In the fact of what they had seen, neither French nor Algerian nationalists were likely to back down. Too many people knew of too many "like them" who had been brutally killed, and the level of hate and violence had been increased exponentially. Such is the logic of asymmetrical warfare, and it is brutally effective in creating violence, if not in any other objective.

Drone Killings and the Slippery Slope

There have been worries expressed on both sides of the political spectrum about the use of drone killings against Al Qaeda, and more especially so as it's come out that the Obama Administration has a secret "kill list" which even includes American citizens who are working with Al Qaeda overseas (as was the recently killed Anwar al-Awlaki).

It seems to be that there is a legitimate worry here. In a sense, drones are the modern American equivalent of pillars of the Victorian British Empire such as Charles "Chinese" Gordon -- gallivanting about the world to put down disturbances wherever they occur. However, they're also relative unobtrusive and cheap. Thus, I would imagine that there is more danger of them being used to embroil us in conflicts that we really don't want to be in. (Which, come to that, is more or less what Gordon managed to do for the British Empire on an occasion or two.) While I think that US hegemonic power, like that of others such as the British and Romans in the past, is generally a positive force in the world, power is often a temptation to over reaching. Putting international intervention only a joystick away, without any need for congressional approval or oversight, seems to put just a bit too much power in the hands of an already imperial presidency.

At the same time, I don't find myself all that persuaded by that slippery slope claims which many have made in regards to drone attacks. The argument often goes: If the president (or some secret committee not even overseen clearly by the president) can order the killing of US citizens by drone strike without trial, are we still a republic of laws? Are we suddenly just one step away from a semi-dictatorship in which political opponents and other undesirables are assassinated at will? Do we need to worry about when drones come for us?

It seems to me that this glosses over the fact that drones are essentially a battlefield tool, albeit one that allows us to enter battlefields without deploying soldiers. When American citizens get mixed up with forces that the US military has been deployed to fight, there's never been any hesitancy to treat them the same on the battlefield as any other enemy soldier. As such, I don't think that the use of drones against Al Qaeda puts us on a slippery slope to some future president using drones against his political enemies any more than the long held ability of the president to order air or missal strikes against specific targets puts us on a slippery slope to the present bombing his opponent's party convention.

The worries that we should have over drone strikes have to do with their making it too easy to go to involve ourselves thoughtlessly in regional conflicts, not that it puts us on a road to some sort of military reign of terror.

A Classicist's Memorial Day

As MrsDarwin mentioned, we've been listening to an audio book of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad while driving in the car lately. By chance we heard one of my favorite sections of the Iliad this weekend, and it struck me especially on this weekend when, in the American civil calendar, we recall those who have served our country and especially those who have died in its service.

One of the things one quickly notices reading acient works is how many of the oldest works that survive, from a range of cultures, focus on war. The Iliad and Odyssey, of course. Gilgamesh and Beowulf both focus on great heroes who struggle to defeat supernatural monsters. The Nibelungenlied centers on an extended feud that becomes a veritable bloodbath. Etc.

Some might observe, somewhat cynically, that this is simply because all of these originate in cultures ruled by warrior elites, and that it was natural for this audience to patronize storytellers to fill their leisure hours and equally natural that their favorite topic should be the exploits of their own kind. This may be true to an extent, but I think there's an explanation rooted much more deeply in human nature than that. So much of our greatest fiction, today as in the ancient world, centers on conflict, violence and death because these things bring the ordinary dramas of human life into much greater urgency and import. A man may go to work every day because he wants to provide for and protect his wife and children, but if the day comes when he's summoned up to risk his life in battle to protect them, the sense in which he is ready to sacrifice himself for them is thrown into sharp relief. Similarly, the terrors of war make all the more precious the blessings of peace. In Homer, this is often expressed through extended references to times of peace, juxtaposed with the incredible violence of bronze age battle. For example:

There the screaming and the shouts of triumph rose up together
of men killing and men killed, and the ground ran blood.
As when rivers in winter spate running down from the mountains
throw together at the meeting of streams the weight of their water
out of the great springs behind in the hollow of the stream-bed,
and far away in the mountains the shepherd hears their thunder;
such, from the coming together of men, was the shock and the shouting.
(Iliad 4: 450-456, Lattimore trans.)

Though overall I didn't love the book, I was struck by a similar example of war's power to make us long for peace in Ian McEwan's Atonement where he has something along the lines of (quoting from several years memory, since I don't have the book at hand): How many thousands of children were conceived in mind on the roads to Dunkirk, as countless men offered God their bargains: "I'll marry her as soon as I get home. And buy a cottage, and take care of her, and stay home at nights, and we'll have three children and take them to church every Sunday, if only you'll let me reach the sea alive."

This section comes from Book 6 of the Iliad, as Hector returns briefly from the field of battle to the city to ask the women of the royal household to offer sacrifices to the gods that the Trojans will be successful in the current battle. Before going out again to fight, he seeks out his wife, who has been watching from the walls.

Keep in mind as you read it, as the Greek audience would also have known ahead of time, that before much longer (though not this day) Hector will indeed be killed in battle, and that when the city is taken his young son will be hurled from the walls of the city to his death, and Andromache made a slave and concubine to the son of Achilles, the man who had killed Hector.

Hector left the house by the same route he’d come,
through the well-built streets, across the mighty city,
and reached the Scaean Gates, beyond which he’d go
out onto the plain. There his wife ran up to meet him,
Andromache, daughter of great-hearted Eëtion,
who’d included a large dowry with her.
Eëtion had lived below forested Mount Placus,
in Thebe, king of the Cilician people. She’d become
married wife to Hector of the shining helmet.
Now she met him there. With her came the nurse,
holding at her breast their happy infant child,
well-loved son of Hector, like a beautiful star.
Hector had named him Scamandrius, but others
called him Astyanax, lord of the city,
because Hector was Troy’s only guardian.
Hector looked at his son in silence, with a smile.
Andromache stood close to him, weeping.
Taking Hector by the hand, she spoke to him.

“My dear husband, your warlike spirit
will be your death. You’ve no compassion
for your infant child, for me, your sad wife,
who before long will be your widow.
For soon the Achaeans will attack you,
all together, and cut you down. As for me,
it would be better, if I’m to lose you,
to be buried in the ground. For then I’ll have
no other comfort, once you meet your death,
except my sorrow. I have no father,
no dear mother. For lord Achilles killed
my father, when he wiped out Thebe,
city with high gates, slaying Eëtion.
But he didn’t strip his corpse—his heart
felt too much shame for that. So he burned him
in his finely decorated armour
and raised a burial mound above the ashes.
Mountain nymphs, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus,
planted elm trees all around his body.
I had seven brothers in my home.
All went down to Hades in a single day,
for swift-footed lord Achilles killed them all,
while they were guarding their shambling oxen
and their white shining sheep. As for my mother,
who ruled wooded Thebe-under-Placus,
he brought her here with all his other spoils.
Then he released her for a massive ransom.
But archer goddess Artemis then killed her
in her father’s house. So, Hector, you are now
my father, noble mother, brother,
and my protecting husband. So pity me.
Stay here in this tower. Don’t orphan your child
and make me a widow. Place men by the fig tree,
for there the city is most vulnerable,
the wall most easily scaled. Three times
their best men have come there to attack,
led by the two Ajaxes, the sons of Atreus,
famous Idomeneus, and Diomedes,
Tydeus’ courageous son, incited to it
by someone well versed in prophecy
or by their own hearts’ inclination.”

Great Hector of the shining helmet answered her:

“Wife,
all this concerns me, too. But I’d be disgraced,
dreadfully shamed among Trojan men
and Trojan women in their trailing gowns,
if I should, like a coward, slink away from war.
My heart will never prompt me to do that,
for I have learned always to be brave,
to fight alongside Trojans at the front,
striving to win fame for father and myself.
My heart and mind know well the day is coming
when sacred Ilion will be destroyed,
along with Priam of the fine ash spear
and Priam’s people. But what pains me most
about these future sorrows is not so much
the Trojans, Hecuba, or king Priam,
or even my many noble brothers,
who’ll fall down in the dust, slaughtered
by their enemies. My pain focuses on you,
when one of those bronze-clad Achaeans
leads you off in tears, ends your days of freedom.
If then you come to Argos as a slave,
working the loom for some other woman,
fetching water from Hypereia or Messeis,
against your will, forced by powerful Fate,
then someone seeing you as you weep
may well say:

‘That woman is Hector’s wife.
He was the finest warrior in battle
of all horse-taming Trojans in that war
when they fought for Troy.’

Someone will say that,
and it will bring still more grief to you,
to be without a man like that to save you
from days of servitude. May I lie dead,
hidden deep under a burial mound,
before I hear about your screaming,
as you are dragged away.”

With these words,
glorious Hector stretched his hands out for his son.
The boy immediately shrank back against the breast
of the finely girdled nurse, crying out in terror
to see his own dear father, scared at the sight of bronze,
the horse-hair plume nodding fearfully from his helmet top.
The child’s loving father laughed, his noble mother, too.
Glorious Hector pulled the glittering helmet off
and set it on the ground. Then he kissed his dear son
and held him in his arms. He prayed aloud to Zeus
and the rest of the immortals.

“Zeus, all you other gods,
grant that this child, my son, may become,
like me, pre-eminent among the Trojans,
as strong and brave as me. Grant that he may rule
Troy with strength. May people someday say,
as he returns from war, ‘This man is far better
than his father.’ May he carry back
bloody spoils from his slaughtered enemy,
making his mother’s heart rejoice.”

He placed his son in the hands of his dear wife.
She embraced the child on her sweet breast, smiling
through her tears. Observing her, Hector felt compassion.
He took her hand, then spoke to her.

“My dearest wife,
don’t let your heart be sad on my account.
No man will throw me down to Hades
before my destined time. I tell you this—
no one escapes his fate, not the coward,
nor the brave man, from the moment of his birth.
So you should go into the house, keep busy
with your proper work, with your loom and wool,
telling your servants to set about their tasks.
War will be every man’s concern, especially mine,
of all those who live in Troy.”

Having said these words,
glorious Hector took his plumed helmet in his hands.
His beloved wife went home, often looking back,
as she went, crying bitterly. She quickly reached
the spacious home of Hector, killer of men.
Inside she met her many servants and bid them all lament.
So they mourned for Hector in his own house,
though he was still alive—they thought he’d not come back,
he’d not escape the battle fury of Achaean hands.
[Iliad 6:390-502 from Ian Johnston's online translation of the Iliad.]

Distance and Truth

As I mentioned a while back, I got drawn into a group providing adult catechesis lectures at our parish. This evening I went down to hear another member of the group, a middle-aged immigrant from Lebanon, give a talk on commandments 5-10.

After several other topics under the heading of "Thou shalt not kill", he moved into the Church's teachings on just war, and put up the standard four bullets from the catechism which those familiar with online Catholic debates of the last eight years are so familiar with. Those sorts of topics always draw questions, and sure enough one woman raised her hand pretty quickly and asked, "So what should a Catholic soldier do, if he's in Iraq right now but he thinks that we hadn't tried everything, that war wasn't a last resort for us."

He launched into an explanation of how a soldier has certain duties to follow orders, but must do the right thing in each situation in which he finds himself, and how leaders of a country have a responsibility to make sure they do not send soldiers into a war without need. For many people this would have been a brief and perhaps somewhat awkward explanation. It is the natural human response of the unpracticed speaker to sound apologetic and qualified when addressing a topic on which he knows people hold strong feelings. But in this case, the explanation was long, fascinating, and intensely personal -- because he was talking about his experiences being drawn into the civil war in Lebanon: Becoming a soldier at the age of 13. Being wounded by a sniper's bullet at 14 and again by a mortar shell at 16. About people being stopped at roadblocks, walked around the corner, and shot. And about how -- as a battlescarred teenager he'd begun to study his faith for the first time.

All this personal history, relayed in the strongly accented and sometimes ungrammatical English of someone who grew up speaking French and Arabic, made the doctrinal points about casus belli and jus in bello come alive in a deeply compelling fashion. Much more so, I think, because of the language barrier. There's a pain, sometimes, in hearing truly harrowing experiences expressed too plainly. We need that slight layer of distance to allow us to listen and soak it all in without our minds wincing away and closing in on themselves.

The points about just war and just soldiering would not, I think, have sunk in if they'd come from somoene who'd been a civilian all his life. And at the same time, hearing of such harrowing experiences from a more fluent English speaker would, I think, have caused people to stop listening. It would have been too personal. Sometimes we need distance to see truth.

Just War and Proportionalism

A friend emailed me a question posed to her by a non-Catholic friend:

Her general point was that the Just War theory is an example of proportionalism and, if proportionalism was allowed in this case, why not, to quote her, "allow people to use condoms in Africa"?

She stated that "the Catholic Church was just avoiding calling the Just War theory proportionalist because then they would have to (as I quoted before) allow people to use condoms in Africa", another example of proportionalism. It came from the fact that I had stated that it was an absolute that one may not do evil that good may come. Was I incorrect on that?

The first question, I think, would be to be clear on what we mean by "proportionalism". Following upon that, we should see how both just war theory and "allowing people to use condoms in Africa" are or are not examples of "proportionalism".

I think we might say that proportionalism lies somewhere between an approach to morality based on notions of "objective good" and "objective evil" and a pure utilitarianism. In the former (which I shall take the liberty of calling traditional Catholic morality) the morality of an act is determined by the nature of the act itself, and whether that nature is good or evil. (To be clear, conscience comes into the issue of guilt/culpability, not whether the act itself is good or evil. If I do something evil under the illusion that it is good, I may not be culpable for the evil I have committed, but the act itself was still evil.) In the latter (utilitarianism), the good or evil of an act is measured strictly by it's results.

Proportionalism tries to bring a bit of utilitarianism into a traditional Christian understanding of morality, by saying that certain acts are evil by nature unless their effects are sufficiently good to outweigh the evil of the act. Proportionalism has a long history of being rejected by Christianity -- ever since the gospel writer blamed the pharisees for deciding that "it would be better for one to die for the good of the people".

Alright, so the Church says that it's against proportionalism (John Paul II condemned it in Evangelium Vitae), but how is the just war doctrine not proportionalism? Isn't the case for war basically one of "war is bad, but if it achieves something good enough, it's worth while"?

No.

According to just war doctrine, it is not wrong to use war in order to defend against certain grave injustices. Now, there is an element of proportion that comes into just war doctrine: the injustice being defended against must be sufficiently grave to justify warlike means to resist it -- and the means of war employed must be no greater than is necessary to end the injustice. (Thus, if Country A is invaded by Country B, the citizens of A may well resist by waging war, and even invade B in order to bring the war to a conclusion. But massacring all the military age inhabitants of B is unacceptable, because it is more violence than is required to end the war.)

However, these considerations of proportion are used in order to determine what acts are just within a war context and what acts would involve the defender in turn becoming an unjust aggressor. Just war doctrine is not based on the idea that acts of war are inherently evil, but justified if they result in a good greater than the evil involved.

Perhaps one of the things that would lead people to think that acts of war are necessarily evil is that war is certainly a massive occasion of sin, even for combatants who are involved in a just cause. Another issue is when people take it that killing is always wrong. According to Catholic teaching, it is not. Killing in self defense, just war or just capital punishment is not an evil act. Murder (the unjust killing of another) is an inherently evil act, but murder is a subset of killing, not the whole of it.

Now what of the use of condoms in Africa? The Church holds that using contraception when having intercourse is always wrong -- that it is an inherently wrong act. Because of this, even the apparent good of preventing the spread of AIDS is not seen as making the use of condoms right. (It's also a bit of an odd discussion, since there wouldn't be an issue with the spread of AIDS if people were obeying the Church's teaching that sex is only acceptable inside of marriage anyway.)

Is Fighting in an "Unjust War" Evil?

One thing one runs into a great deal among religious opponents of the war in Iraq (and I assume among non-religious ones as well -- it's just that the context within which I normally run into anti-war discussion is religious) is a fury that more soldiers have not gone AWOL or declared themselves conscientious objectors rather than go to Iraq.

Michael Iafrate of Vox Nova states:

The Church’s views on this war are well known, and less than 1% or Catholic soldiers have the ___s to do what is right. This statistic indicates to me that few soldiers take the Church’s teaching seriously.

[blanking is present in the original text]

Fellow Vox Nova author Henry Karlson concurred:

Here is a question. How many soldiers willingly said no to their commanders when Church officials said the Iraq war is not a just war? How many of them didn’t care and cared more for what their orders were? The truth of the matter is you find the soldier’s true master when they are pressed in such situations, and they go with the flow. This is the problem historically. It’s how the Nazis were able to get people to follow their evil. “Well, the Church is wrong. We are the authority.” And the thing is, people dare teach the Church moral law and argue with the Church on just wars, saying the Church has no authority to declare a war unjust. Viva nationalism.

Iafrate is the same author who some time back was deeply indignant that the pope had appointed a new archbishop to the US military archdiocese, saying among other things:

The Church has no trouble denying communion to those who are theoretically in favor of the unjust killing of persons through abortion, but follows persons who participate in unjust killing [in war] around with the ciborium!

Clearly, we're seeing a strong belief here that the only right choice for a Catholic soldier is to refuse to participate in any war which does not meet just war criteria. At first glance, this might seem to be an obvious conclusion. Given that people tend to think in dualities, one would at first think that any war that was not a "just war" was obviously an "unjust war", and that therefore it would be "unjust" and wrong to participate in any way.

Is that so?

This is not a new question. Shakespeare addresses it in Henry V, which remains one of the great meditations on war, leadership and soldiering in the English language:

KING HENRY V
...methinks I could not die any where so
contented as in the king's company; his cause being
just and his quarrel honourable.

WILLIAMS
That's more than we know.

BATES
Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know
enough, if we know we are the kings subjects: if
his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes
the crime of it out of us.

WILLIAMS
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place...

Shakespeare puts the moral weight of deciding if the war's cause be just upon the king, leaving the soldiers responsible only for their own personal conduct as they render their lives up unto Caesar.

We have no king. We live in a fairly democratic republic, and so in some sense all citizens bear the responsibility for the state's actions. And yet, this is not a direct democracy. No one imagined in November of 2000 that which candidate he voted for would determine whether and how two wars would be waged. Nor, indeed, do any of us have any idea what Gore would have done had he been in the Oval Office during those years (though I can't help suspecting we would have seen more of the alternating indecisiveness and high altitude bombing with which the Clinton White House dealt with foreign crises.) Thus, while we as a people chose the leaders who brought us through the last eight years, we did not in any direct sense choose the course of action that our country took.

So we find ourselves, I think, with two questions:
1) Is it in some cases true that soldiers are responsible only for obedience and their own personal conduct, while their rulers are responsible for the justice of the cause?
2) If the above is sometimes the case, is it still the case in a semi-democratic polity such as our own?

At this point I think it's appropriate to turn to specific Catholic teaching. The Catachism of the Catholic Church talks about Just War doctrine and about morality in regards to military service in its section on the Fifth Commandment, under the subheading Safeguarding Peace. The quote is a little bit long, but I think it's worth not snipping at all in order to avoid any appearance that I'm cherry-picking through the text:

2308 All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war.

However, "as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed."105

2309 The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

- there must be serious prospects of success;

- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

2310 Public authorities, in this case, have the right and duty to impose on citizens the obligations necessary for national defense.

Those who are sworn to serve their country in the armed forces are servants of the security and freedom of nations. If they carry out their duty honorably, they truly contribute to the common good of the nation and the maintenance of peace.106

2311 Public authorities should make equitable provision for those who for reasons of conscience refuse to bear arms; these are nonetheless obliged to serve the human community in some other way.107

2312 The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict. "The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties."108

2313 Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely.

Actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles are crimes, as are the orders that command such actions. Blind obedience does not suffice to excuse those who carry them out. Thus the extermination of a people, nation, or ethnic minority must be condemned as a mortal sin. One is morally bound to resist orders that command genocide.

Usually, small snippets of this section get quoted on their own, but I think it may be illuminating to look at the section as a whole. First we get the criteria that define a war as "just". We are then told that "evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good". Who are those who have responsibility for the common good? It seem to me that many different people and groups hold responsibility for it in different ways, but clearly a war can only be declared by the rulers of a country. And indeed, we hear more about their responsibilities in regards to war immediately: "Public authorities, in this case, have the right and duty to impose on citizens the obligations necessary for national defense." And lest there should be any doubt whether these "obligations" include soldiering, we have: "Those who are sworn to serve their country in the armed forces are servants of the security and freedom of nations. If they carry out their duty honorably, they truly contribute to the common good of the nation and the maintenance of peace."

The catechism then moves from jus ad bellum (justice of a war) to jus in bello (justice in war) and reminds the faithful that war does not mean a suspension of the normal moral laws. Non-combatants, prisoners and the wounded must at all times be treated with fairness and compassion. It also states the limits of military obedience, "Actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles are crimes, as are the orders that command such actions. Blind obedience does not suffice to excuse those who carry them out." It goes on to specifically list obeying orders to commit genocide as being a mortal sin and always unacceptable. Although not specifically mentioned, the language seems to clearly say that other actions which are clearly against the laws of nations and the moral law (mistreating prisoners, refusing medical care to the wounded, intentionally targeting civilians, theft, rape, unnecessary destruction, etc.) must not be engaged in even under orders.

In this, it seems to me, the catechism is following in much the same line as Shakespeare: The rightness of the cause is the moral responsibility of a nation's leaders, while soldiers are responsible only for the rightness of their own actions.

Does this mean that it is morally right for a soldier to serve in any nation's military at any time, no matter what the purpose of the war it is engaged in, so long as he refuses to engage in the sort of personal immoral acts mentioned under jus in bello?

Perhaps not. It seems to me that there might be cases in which serving in a specific war or under a specific regime might in and of itself be considered to fall afoul of the statement about never following orders that command, "actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations." However, it seems that in many other cases, one might doubt whether one or more of the four points of just war criteria were met, and yet the cause could well be just enough that it would not be engaging in "actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations" for a soldier to obey his military oaths and go to war.

A consideration of the saints is often in order when looking at moral questions. In this case, I imagine one person who would be brought up is the recently beatified Franz Jagerstatter. Jagerstatter was executed by the Nazi regime for his principled refusal to serve in the Wehrmacht.

Jagerstatter was convicted in a military trial at which he explained that if he fought for the nationalist socialist state, he would be acting against his religious conscience. He had reached the conviction that as a believing Catholic he could not perform military service. Jagerstatter, however, offered to serve as a medical orderly. The court did not respond to his request.

It seems to me that Jagerstatter would be a clear case of thinking that fighting for a particular regime at all would constitute "actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations". And, as if working directly from the catechism which wouldn't come to be for another fifty years, he acknowledged that he was "nonetheless obliged to serve the human community in some other way" by offering to serve as a medical orderly instead. (An offer which the Nazi regime unjustly refused.)

I would tend to be sympathetic towards those who were forcibly drafted into the Werhmacht and the Nazi state's various paramilitary organizations, but regardless of whether or not Jagerstatter's path was the only possible one that avoided grave sin, he clearly provides a heroic example of principled conscience.

A Military Pacifist

A career military man writes about peace in a post well worth read. Check the comments as well. While I don't necessarily share in the author's disillusion with the purposes of the Iraq War, I think he strikes the perfect Christian balance on understanding war and peace, and the place of the individual Christian with respect to them.

Pastor of Souls/Pastor of Soldiers

Quite a discussion raged over the last couple days over at Pro Ecclesia in the comments of a post in which Jay criticized a post at Vox Nova in which "Catholic Anarchist" (that sound you heard was G. K. Chesterton rolling over in his grave) Michael Iafrate expressed disappointment with the Vatican for appointing a new archbishop to the US military archdiocese.

Iafrate (a paradoxically combative pacifist) opined:

I was secretly hoping that the Church would use the opportunity to quietly get itself out of the business of serving as chaplain to the American war machine.

No such luck.

He went on to describe the chaplaincy as,

[I]n effect supporting the war effort through sacramental means

And perhaps the kicker:

What is the Church to do in the case of unjust wars? Deploy their warrior shepherds right along with the Catholic faithful who decide to participate in such wars? In these cases, if the Church DOES offer chaplaincy services, then the Church's message of peace and her judgment on particular wars is undermined.... The Church has no trouble denying communion to those who are theoretically in favor of the unjust killing of persons through abortion, but follows persons who participate in unjust killing [in war] around with the ciborium!

Now the fact is, that almost any foolish position one can conceivably imagine has been taken stridently by someone, somewhere on the net. Why, one might ask, bother to highlight this particular example, especially when much of the author's ire stems from an elsewhere stated complete pacifism and rejection of 1700 years of Catholic "just war" doctrine -- a viewpoint which will doubtless result in different conclusions than others might draw.

As I thought about it, though, I realized there was a deeper issue going on here, which underlined one of the very human aspects of Catholicism.

The US Military Archdiocese has a brief history of chapliancy throughout Christendom on its website. John the Baptist and the Apostles counseled soldiers who came to them to be just and merciful, but are not recorded to have asked them to leave the military profession, even under the institutionally pagan Roman empire. The presence of a number of Roman soldiers among the lists of early martyrs shows that Christians continued to serve in the Roman military throughout the period of persecution up until the 4th century, and then under the Christian empire, priests were specifically brought along with the legions to serve the spiritual needs of the troops.

One section of which particularly struck me as underlining something about the nature of the Church's understanding of ministering to soldiers was from the section dealing with the Catholic chapliancy during the US Civil War:

Volunteer units from various states often had a preponderance of Catholics and were accompanied by their local priests. It seems that about forty priests served as chaplains with the Union Army (probably about twenty at any given time). Approximately six hundred chaplains served with the Confederate troops and, of these, twenty-eight were known to be Catholic....Faculties were given to priests by their own bishop for their own diocese, and further faculties had to be requested in each diocese through which the army traveled. So, for example, Archbishop Kendrick of Baltimore delegated Archbishop Hughes of New York to sub-delegate faculties to the chaplain of the N.Y. Irish Brigade. And Navy chaplains would need new faculties from port to port. A re-script from Pope Pius IX for both Union and Confederate chaplains extended chaplains' faculties beyond their diocese, at least temporarily, and granted a variety of practical concessions that civilian priests did not enjoy. But the Holy See did not intend a canonically independent and permanent chaplain corps; it merely provided overlapping jurisdiction for the duration of the war.

With significant numbers of Catholics serving on both sides of the war that consumed more American lives than all other wars we have fought combined, the pope's concern was to assure that chaplains were able to provide the sacraments to men close to death on both sides of the conflict: not to pick which side to provide "sacramental support" to.

I imagine that any student of American history has his own ideas on which side in the Civil War was right, and yet for many of the individual soldiers who fought and died in that (or any other) war, their service was determined not by a dispassionate examination of the issues behind the war, but rather because they lived in a particular place (North or South) and they were called up to go and fight in that region's army.

Far be it from me to suggest that there is not a "right side" in most wars, but the fact that the leaders of the "wrong side" were wrong to start a war for the reasons that they did does not necessarily mean that all those soldiers serving in their armies share fully in their guilt. At an individual level, war is often a vast human tragedy, and the Church has historically recognized the importance of providing priests to provide the sacraments to the soldiers and urge them towards justice and mercy within their duties as soldiers.

Perhaps no where is this better underlined than in the Great War, when (as the modern nations of Europe were locked in a death struggle that resulted in death at a previously unimaginable level) the Catholic Church sought to make sure that Catholic soldiers in all armies had chaplains available to them. According to the military archdiocese history page, "The Holy See, therefore, set out to appoint a bishop for each country to be the Ordinarius Castrensis, or Bishop for the Military."

One of the elements of Catholicism which sets it apart from our Protestant bretheren is its emphasis on sacraments as channels for grace, and thus salvation. This emphasis (and particularly the importance of absolution and last rites for those in danger of death) led Catholic chaplains into the thick of battle to minister to their men. Unarmed, moving about the battlefield under enemy fire to provide help (both sacramental and also at times medical) to men in danger of death, military chaplains provide a vivid image of the sense in which Christianity is "not of this world". (One such was Fr. Vincent Capodanno, a chaplain killed while ministering to men on the battlefield in Vietnam, for whom a cause for sainthood has been opened.)

One other very interesting article I found in reading up about military chaplains was this paper by a student a US Santa Barbara, which examines the experience of Catholic chaplains in the German army of WW2. The paper draws heavily on the personal diaries of two priests Fr. Perau and Fr. Tewes, both of whom were drafted into the German army and became chaplains, in which capacity they ministered to troops on the Eastern Front throughout the war. The author observes that in these priests' dairies (as in others) it is clear that their loyalties were first to the Church, then to their men, and lastly (if at all) to the Nazi state. Both priests were revolted by Nazi anti-semitism and made efforts to help both Poles and Jews they came in contact with through their ministry, including providing sacraments (against orders) to Polish prisoners and civilians.

The paper is worth reading in that it underlines the conflicts that these chaplains felt in serving the German army in any capacity, and yet at the same time their conviction that making sure that the sacraments and Catholic moral teaching were available to Wehrmacht soldiers, many of whom themselves were conscripts serving against their will. Fr. Tewes wrote in his diary:

Suppose an ambulance comes to the corner where you are standing, with badly wounded men inside, some lying in their blood on the floor and you call for a doctor to help. What would you do if the doctor said to you "I will only provide medical assistance once the question of guilt is completely resolved." The situation of that doctor is my situation.

I bring the Wehrmacht example up not to make any moral equivalence between the US Military Archdiocese which Iafrate objected to and the WW2 German army, but rather to underline the importance of ministering to all Catholics. There's a certain immanentizing character which infects certain more activist forms of Christianity (often "progressive" but certain kinds of "conservative" as well) which sees the Christian mission as to achieve a specific worldly end-state as soon as possible: end poverty, establish the right government, enact just laws, etc., etc.

These are not unworthy goals, but the central Christian message is much simpler than that: save souls. Wherever men and women are in the midst of suffering an death, there the Church and her priests should be to minister to those souls and prepare them for the last things. In that sense, the purpose of chaplains is not at all to support one side in a war by sacramental means. Their purpose rises above all sides and touches upon that which unites us all as humans: our immortal souls, our sin, and our need for the graces of salvation.

A 'Pacifist' on the Iraq War

Someone who claims to place a great premium on peace and justice posted the following in a discussion of just war (whether there is such a thing) in the comments at Vox Nova.

I read The Guardian, Le Monde (in French) Haaretz and Al Jazeera in English, as well as The Economist, the London Times and The Times of India. In addition, I read several blogs of servicemen in Iraq. I found them through AndrewSullivan.com, which links to them regularly. I have not trusted the Main Stream American media in over a decade.

The consensus of most writers at ALL these organs of media is that the war is lost, the people of Iraq want us gone so that they can pursue the sectarian civil war that they've been hankering after for centuries.

It is not our "white man's burden" to tell them they may not have that civil war, what form of government or what church-state relations they want. THAT is colonialist, racist patronizing posing as benevolent nation-building. All we are doing by staying is making our own relationships with these countries poisonous for generations to come.

We must leave, and leave sooner rather than later, so that the Iraqis, Kurds and Sunni Arabs can get on with the bloody business of "nation building."

During the American Civil War, Johnnie Rebs who had no material interest in preserving the South's "peculiar institution"--who were themselves dirt-poor and who had never thought to own a slave--were asked by their Union jailors why they kept fighting for the Confederacy with such relentless zeal. The Confederate prisoners of war answered, "Because you're here, where you have no business being." Why can't we understand that this is a natural human response, which the Iraqi people have EVERY RIGHT to feel.

The only way that act of international terrorism called Bush's war in Iraq would EVER have had any chance of "success" would have been if we had invaded Iraq, deposed and imprisoned Saddam, sent him to the Hague to be tried, and LEFT.

There is a certain honesty about this, though I can't say it's refreshing. And people say that "warmongers" are heartless...

Compare that set of opinions motivated by "peace" with Michael Yon's dispatch about traveling with the first convoy of food from Baghdad to Baqubah in a number of months. I think in this case, there's more hope and care for humanity on the war side than the peace side.

The point of the original post on Vox Nova (which I think is rather more sentimental than thoughtful, and thus wanders astray a bit, but more on that later) is that if Christians are forced into war, they must still love their enemies even as they seek to defeat them. What strikes me in some of the more frank anti-Iraq-war rhetoric is that those in favor of an immediate and absolute pull-out seem to care much less about those who live in Iraq than those who advocate seeing things through to a point of relative stability.

Wise War vs. Just War

Burrowing back through a chain of links the other day, I found myself on the blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, on there I found a post which quoted a post by "a poet and humanities professor" who had written on "Why I don't 'Support The Troops'":

The phrase is a cliché & buried in the cliché are a pair of pernicious ideas: 1) That individual soldiers are without moral, existential, responsibility for their acts; 2) that to argue the Iraq war is wrong, misguided, ill-conceived, badly managed, stupid, indecent, horrifying, & damaging to U.S. interests is to somehow wish harm to 'the troops.' Each 'troop' is a moral agent & though we make certain allowances for individuals acting under military orders, one of the benchmarks of civilization is that we hold soldiers to a moral standard of responsibility. ... I hate the war & I understand those fighting it to be participating in an immoral undertaking; that does not mean I wish them harmed. On the contrary, I wish that they would come to their moral senses.

(His original blogpost is linked to on the Chronicle post should you wish to read the rest.)


Now first off, while I strongly disagree with this guy, I think there's a basic consistency to what he's saying. If one believes that the war in Iraq is clearly and obviously wrong at a moral level, than one necessarily believes that it is sufficiently wrong that the troops should realize that and make known or act on their realization. (This doesn't mean I agree with or even respect his position all that much -- but given his assumptions he's being consistent.)

Two things struck me reading this, the one following upon the other.

First off, I found myself wondering if the author supported "doing something" about Darfur. It seems terribly fashionable right now -- one of those rare occasions on which the fashion of the world seems to have things right. However, while I myself would strongly support "doing something" about Darfur, I often wonder if those who call for such things have thought much about what "doing something" would require.

Our experiences in Bosnia and Rwanda have both underscored the difficulties of intervention which does not seek to decisively defeat one side of a "situation". One either tries to place oneself between the warring parties and ends up (if one has the courage to stay put) absorbing the blows of both, or (if as on key occasions in both Rwanda and Bosnia, the peace keepers are ordered to step back when things get hot) one simply ends up herding all the victims into one place and thus making them easier to wipe out. Nor did the approach of high-altitude-bombing-as-peacekeeping seem to be very successful, unless someone out there considers bombing the Chinese embassy a success...

If we were to intervene in Darfur and be any use, we would essentially have to do the same sort of thing we're currently engaged in doing in Iraq: try to identify the small bands of bad guys causing trouble and then kill or capture them. Why exactly would doing this in Darfur be so much more PC than doing it in Baqubah Province I'm not entirely clear. But I do have a theory: Liberals and conservatives in our current body politic are often typified by different feelings as well as different ideologies. I think that the idea of invading a country and getting rid of its brutal dictator seems inherently "bully-ish" and "mean" to people of a sort. However, swooping into an equally foreign, sovereign country to protect the weak from the strong (especially if there are no stated political objectives of getting rid of the regime that allowed this to occur in the first place) is seen as noble.

This in turn brought to mind something about the question of when waging war is right that I've been turning over in my mind for some years. Back when I was trying to get into the Air Force Academy (mid nineties) Bosnia was still the war of the day, and not a popular one with many conservatives. The argument was not so much that trying to end the fighting there was in inherently bad idea. Rather, the claim was that going in with no clear objectives would neither serve our interests nor help the locals.

In the process of thinking that over, I tentatively came to the following conclusion: there are many occasions when a head of state (whether king, congress or president) might be wrong to enter into war for a host of reasons (unlikely to succeed, situation might be resolved by other means, none of that country's business, etc.) and yet the aims of the war itself might in fact be good, and thus not unworthy of individual soldiers' efforts.

This is where I think the author above goes clearly over the line in suggesting that our soldiers in Iraq need to come to their moral senses and refuse to serve. Clearly, one can have reach varying conclusions as to whether or not it was the business of the US to invade Iraq. One can argue as to whether the aims we are trying to achieve are worth the suffering that has resulted from the destabilization of the region. (On the same principle, one could could question whether overthrowing communism was really a good idea in some countries, given the suffering that has resulted in the power vacuum created.)

However, it does not seem to me that one can reasonably content that getting rid of Hussein's dictatorship and defeating the Al Qaeda and radical Shiite/Iranian militia groups which have been causing trouble since are not inherently worthwhile things to strive to achieve by force of arms. Without denying that there have been individual wrongs done (some of them pretty appauling) by some individual soldiers and groups of soldiers at given times, the actual things that they are striving to accomplish on the ground on Iraq seem to me to be pretty clearly good.

It seems to me that this may be particularly important to keep in mind in some of the conversations that go on in Catholic circles about the morality of the war, where the phrase "unjust war" is thrown around a lot. In the context of the moral theology in question, a war might be "unjust" in the sense that -- given proper weighing of the proportionality between suffering likely to occur, the good being sought, the likelihood of success, etc. -- it is determined that declaring war would not be a right decision for the ruler to make. However, this is not necessarily the same thing as the war actually being waged to achieve unjust aims.

This, I think, is where the changes some people have made in the weight that they assign likelihood of success and proprotionality of good sought versus suffering caused have got ahead of the terminology that is traditionally used. And I think it would be a good thing for people to keep in mind in regards to such debates.

The Just War That Will Never Come

Neither Benedict XVI nor John Paul II have been hesitant to assert that they don't approve of the Iraq War, and that they would much rather see peaceful means used to resolve the troubles in that perpetually troubled region. This has led some Catholics in the anti-war camp to start loudly demanding to know when those Catholics who support the war (of which for the record I am one) will make themselves obedient to "the clear teaching of the magisterium on the Iraq War".

I think that one point that is worth making in this regard is as to what can be a magisterial teaching, versus what can be an individual (however well informed and wise the individual may be) prudential judgement. The Church has a set of magisterial teachings regarding the relations between nations and the nature of just war. However, judgements as to a particular war are necessarily not magisterial in and of themselves. They are applications of magisterial teachings.

However, looking at the Vatican's record on the conflicts of the last fifteen years, it looks to me like recent popes' judgements on specific wars primarily stem from a development in their basic assumptions that serve as inputs in making an analysis of whether a war is just. I suspect that this goes back as far as World War I, but since I know more about the events I've been around for, I'd like to particularly take a look at the first Gulf War in 1991.

You would think this would be a pretty basic moral judgement in regards to just war. A larger country with a rather infamous dictator announces that it is going to enforce it's long-standing territorial claims against a much smaller neighbor and invades. The allies of the conquered country first issued ultimatums, then build up military forces, then finally expel the invader. All done in a highly multi-lateral fashion with the blessing of the UN.

However, John Paul II spoke repeatedly against any attempt at a military liberation of Kuwait. I'm not saying that John Paul II should have been going medieval-papacy on the situation: hurling forth excommunications and interdicts and demanding that all able-bodied men take up cross and sword and go forth to right injustice. However, it seems to me that the pope went far beyond simply calling for all possible diplomatic routes to be tried first, and decrying the indiscriminate suffering that has, throughout history, been caused by war. His statements seem strongly to suggest that he believed that war was simply not an acceptable solution to the problem period -- that trying more diplomacy would always be preferable even if months dragged into years and the likelihood of success approached even closer to zero than it already was.

But if it is possible, though force of arms, to expel an invader from a conquered country quickly and decisively, and yet that situation does not meet just war criteria, one is left to wonder: what does? If even expelling an invader is not just, it starts to suggest that no war could ever be just.

Now, I don't actually think that John Paul II (and Benedict XVI following in his footsteps) was a pacifist in the sense that he literally believed that war was in itself never just and could never be morally waged. However, I do think that he held a position which approached de facto pacifism in that (perhaps quite rightly given his life experiences in Eastern Europe in WW2 and the Cold War) he weighed the negative effects even of success in war as being so great that no real world situation was ever likely to justify them in a just war analysis.

Recall that two of the elements in just war morality, as in self defense, are likelihood of success and proportionality. Thus, if one weighs the likelihood of "success" (as in, producing a result any more just than the current situation) as near nil, and the suffering caused in the process as near infinite, then clearly you're never going to find in favor of military action in any given analysis.

Now honestly, I think it's probably a good thing to have our religious leaders holding us back from war rather than urging us on. If our religious leaders were cheerleading military action, who exactly would tell us to think carefully about the suffering about to be unleashed?

And yet, I think that before someone declares the pope to have made the only possible Catholic analysis of the justice of taking military action in a given circumstance, it's important to remember that (based on his experiences living in Eastern or Central Europe during the 20th century) he is using a set of assumptions that makes it virtually impossible to see any military action as justified.