Rev. Donald Sensing on Opposing the Iraq War: Part Two

The Rev. Donald Sensing, a United Methodist pastor and retired Army officer, blogs at One Hand Clapping. In the interest of considering diverse viewpoints on the war, I ask him to respond to some questions about the War in Iraq. Here is a second installemt of his reply:

Late last month, Dean was kind enough to publish my answer to his question on whether I was serious about my claim that peace protesters do not have good intentions, and that peace is actually not on their agenda. That posting is here.

I understood Dean’s question to be focused on the organized demonstrators such as those sponsored by ANSWER and affiliated groups, and that is how I wrote my response.

In this post I want to move away from “demonstrators” per se and examine whether the invasion Iraq could have been opposed beforehand with good intentions. The issue of what to support (or oppose) now that we are in Iraq is not part of this essay. Dean has asked me to write about that also but in this essay I will look back at the situation leading up to the invasion of March 2003.

Again I will distinguish, as did Dean’s question to me, the invasion of Iraq from the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even the United Metrhodist Church’s Council of Bishops endorsed the Afghanistan campaign, albeit grudgingly.

I pointed out previously that demonstrators against the Iraq war consisted basically of only two types: those who oppose America no matter what, of which the streets have been full, and those who oppose not America but the current president of America. The demonstrators, almost without exception, have consisted of these two factions, the anti-America and the anti-Bush/anti-Republican groups. There have been a few demonstrators who oppose the war who are by no means anti-American and are indifferent to Bush or the Republicans themselves, but they are very few of the marchers.

So there was (and still is) opposition to the Iraq war from purely ideological and political motivations. The question for this essay is whether one could have opposed the then-looming Iraq war in 2002 and 2003 from a basis that was neither ideologically anti-American nor overtly partisan-political.

Christian pacifism would fit this bill, of course. The American Society of Friends (the Quakers) and the Mennonites have been historically pacifists but no reasonable claim can be made that their opposition to the Iraq war was anti-American or partisan political. I happen not to believe that pacifism is a morally sustainable position, but that’s a topic for another essay, perhaps.

So on what other basis could “loyal” opposition to the Iraq war have been made? Let me state what I am sure there will be universal agreement on: that the decision to go to war is not a “default” decision, but one that must be taken only after meeting a very high burden of evidence in its favor. Going to war is not simply one option among many, but an option of severe consequences and very grave import. As I have written on my own site, embarking on a war is like entering a dark room blindfolded.

Yet to say this is not to say that opposition to the Iraq war had no case to make. The debate was not and should not have been judicial in nature, in which the entire burden of proof rests on one side and none at all on the other. If it was true that the administration needed to make an exceptional case to go to war, it is also true that opponents of going to war needed to make a positive case for addressing the legitimate security concerns of the country by means short of war.

This was exactly the moral and religious conundrum that the authors of Sojourners magazine found themselves in. Before the invasion, Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall wrote there that given the realities of Saddam and his regime, “anyone who opposes U.S. military action to dethrone him has a responsibility to suggest how he might otherwise be ushered out the backdoor of Baghdad.”

In my view, the case for making war against Saddam’s regime had to meet both of two criteria:

1. The traditional criteria of Just War theory of historic Christian thought, and

2. Demonstrate that the national-security interests of the United States would be served in a way that not toppling the regime would not serve.

I believe that the war did and does meet both criteria, but (begging your pardon for saying this again) that is a topic for another post Dean asked me to write. Here I want to point out that non-ideological, nonpartisan opposition to the Iraq war was also made on one of those two bases.

First, there were some who claimed that no adequate casus belli has been demonstrated for which war against Iraq was justified. Since one of the strong tenets of Just War theory is that war may be undertaken only for justified causes, the lack of adequate casus belli would undercut the war’s justification. There were others who claimed that even with just cause, the war would not be fought justly, that the destruction of innocent lives would be so great that it would overwhelm even the justice of the cause or the outcome. And finally, there were others who based their opposition on anticipating that the outcome of the war would prove unjust. These were oppositions based on Just War theory and such objections should be soberly considered by Christian people.

Second, there were some who claimed that the strategic interests of the United States would be ill served by invading Iraq and that Saddam’s threat could be contained in other ways. However, it was very rare that any of these objectors could describe those other ways, even when they included leading figures of previous Democratic or Republican administrations.

I want to explicate more on strategic thinking and how Just War theory relates to it – the “metaphysic” of the process – before dealing with the specifics of how the invasion of Iraq met both Just War and strategic criteria, but to honor Dean’s request for reasonably short essays I’ll stop here. The main thing I wanted to relate here was that it was possible reasonably to oppose the invasion of Iraq without allying oneself with America’s enemies or being an anti-American or anti-Bush ideologue. In the future I will write about why those objections fell short of persuasiveness and why I think the administration met the criteria test.

Comments

[Douglas Asbury]

Don,
Yes, I would be interested in reading an essay by you in response to the contentions of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas that those who propose the use of violence must necessarily have a higher burden of proof than those who eschew its use. I won't include here all of Hauerwas' (brief) argument in that regard from his seminal book "The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics," but one paragraph presents his conclusions:

(Presenting the argument to which he will respond he writes:) "Such action would not be a question of using violence to be 'in control,' but simply to prevent a worse evil."
"Although I have sympathy with this position and though it certainly cannot be discounted as a possibility for Christians, the problem with these attempts to commit the Christian to limited use of violence is that they too often distort the character of our alternatives. Violence used in the name of justice, or freedom, or equality is seldom simply a matter of justice--it is a matter of the power of some over others. Moreover, when violence is justified in principle as a necessary strategy for securing justice, it stills the imaginative search for nonviolent ways of resistence to injustice. For true justice never comes through violence, nor can it be based on violence. It can only be based on truth, which has no need to resort to violence to secure its own existence. Such a justice comes at best fitfully to nation states, for by nature we are people who fear disorder and violence and thus we prefer order (even if the order is built on the lies inspired by our hates, fears, and resentments) to truth. The Church, therefore, as a community based on God's kingdom of truth cannot help but make all rulers tremble, especially when those rulers have become 'the people.'" (114-115)

As a hypothetical example of an "imaginative search for nonviolent ways of resistence to injustice," what would it have been like, prior to the Iraq war, for the Administration to say, "We want Saddam to stop harming Iraqis and to quit threatening his neighbors, especially Israel. Since Don Rumsfeld was friendly with him during the Reagan Administration, and since we were Saddam's ally against Iran then, how can we restore a sense of alliance between our two nations that will give us some capability to address his human rights violations within his own country as well as his threats to others of our allies?" I haven't even a clue as to how such a question could have been answered in a way that would have produced a non-violent strategy that would have worked in that situation; but what I hear Hauerwas suggesting is that it is likely no such question was asked or, at least, given any serious consideration, because nation-states don't often deal in such subtleties. (Nixon and Kissinger opening up relations with China might be the most recent example of the use of non-violent strategy to reduce a threat to our national well-being, and though we hadn't conducted a war with China, per se, we had fought against North Korea and North Vietnam, both of which China had supported.)

So at least there is evidence of a dearth of imagination, not only in the Bush White House but also in the Clinton one before it, and, arguably, in any White House that employs war on account of it not having employed non-violent strategies prior to going to war that might have precluded the need for violence.

[Rev. Donald Sensing]

Doug, I agree completely that solutions other than war should be sought. But, based only on what you have commented, ISTM that Hauerwas et. al. make a common but very elementary mistake: that the absence of war equals the absence of violence.

In fact, there was no possible non-violent resolution of the problems with Iraq. Violence was already present, with Saddam's regime killing and torturing thousands of Iraqis per month. His armed forces continued to fire upon Coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones, zones that he had agreed to honor in 1991. He was known to have possessed and used poison gas and Hans Blix's teams confirmed in 2002 and early 2003 that while they did not find actal WMDs, there were definitely active WMD programs in Iraq.

I would like to see how Hauerwas & Co. would respond to very left-wing Manchester Univ. Prof. Norman Geras, who wrote,

There was no persuasive moral case against the Iraq war. There were creditable moral reasons for entertaining doubts about it; and some people have articulated such doubts in a creditable way; but this is something different from a compelling case that the war was wrong. Speaking from my own experience of the debates, both before and since the war the majority of those who opposed it, or at least the majority of its most vocal opponents, opposed it in anything but a creditable way.

Whatever subsidiary reasons could have been - and in fact were - given for the war to get rid of the Saddam Hussein regime, the most powerful reason in its favour was a simple one: the regime had been responsible for, it was daily adding to, and for all that anyone could reasonably expect, it would go on for the forseeable future adding to, an immensity of pain and grief, killing, torture and mutilation. It's been said before, including by me, and so I won't labour the point too much here; but this was not merely an unpleasant tyranny amongst many others - it was one of the very worst of recent times, with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on its hands, to say nothing of the lives torn and wrecked by it. Other things equal, there is no other moral option than to support the removal of such a regime if a removal is in the offing.

(Italics added.) Now just where was to be found a "non-violent" solution to Saddam's regime?

You overstate the so-called "alliance" of the US with Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war. It's true the US gave intelligence support and tactical advice to the Iraqi army. It's not true that Rumsfeld was "friendly" with Saddam. They met, but certainly were not pals. The Soviets were Iraq's principal weapons supplier with France supplying high-tech systems. In fact, the US principally assisted Iran, not Iraq, until 1986, and after that date the USA's support of Iraq was mostly political, working through the UNSC to gain Iran's withdrawal from Iraqi land, not military.

The reason no such course of action as Hauerwas proposed (or whomever proposed it originally) never gained roots in 2002-2003 is because, frankly, it is fantasy, not sober, serious thinking. It presumes that Saddam - a declared enemy of the US who had gone to war with us rather than obey UN resolutions in 1900 and 19991 - had some profound common interests with the US that would lead him to form an alliance with us (when we were still at war with him!) that served only our interests and none of his interests.

Saddam proved over a period of 12 years that disarmament, human rights and discontinuing support of terrorism were simply not on his agenda for any reason.

For Hauerwas to fault the administration for not asking the question shows not the inadequacy of the administration's thinking but the breathtaking incapability of Hauerwas to analyze the topic in a credible way. If he accuses the administration of "a dearth of imagination" on their part, there is nothing but imagination on his part, and not very creative imagination at that.

In Moral Man in Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr explained that while individual persons live generally moral lives, high morality is difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups as a whole. Very rarely does a group of persons comport itself better than individuals do in personal relationships. When human beings engage in collective activity, Niebuhr said, they are overwhelmed by an inability to be moral. The larger the group, the greater this inability is.

Therefore, Niebuhr concluded [in "Must We Do Nothing?" in The Christian Century, 3-30-1932], "The hope of attaining an ethical goal for society by purely ethical means, without coercion . . . is an illusion" of the "comfortable classes" of society. There never will be enough love and unselfishness among nations to resolve the conflicts of history only by ethical means, even though there may be occasional successes now and then. It is part of humanity's "moral conceit" to think that human sin will not overwhelm individual morality when persons act as a collective.

Until the return of Christ, human societies will never be able to conform purely to the ethic of Christian love. In the interim, we must structure our world based on justice, as best we can, even though communities of justice are inferior to communities of love. The best justice human societies can attain will only roughly correspond to divine justice. Human justice will always involve contests of power because different groups make opposing claims that they consider rightful. However, "no contending group can have all it wants . . . and hence must [sometimes] be restrained by force."

This state of affairs is not God's ideal for human community; it is simply the best we can do until the Kingdom of God comes in power. Hence, Niebuhr concluded that coercion is not to be automatically avoided to achieve justice. The ethical goals of human society must not be sacrificed "simply because we are afraid to use any but purely ethical means. To say all this is to confess that the history of mankind is a perennial tragedy, for the highest ideals" that we can imagine are exactly ones which we "can never realize in social and collective terms."

American liberationist theologian James Cone agreed that in the fallen world we inhabit, justice is sometimes tragic, prevailing only because of deadly coercion. He pointed out that for Christians opposing oppression, the choice is not between violence and non-violence because violence is already present. The Christian must decide whether violence to overcome the oppression is a greater evil than the violence of the oppression itself. Unfortunately, Cone says, there are no absolute rules to decide the answer with certainty. Therefore, each case must be decided on its own merits.

[Rev. Donald Sensing]

Oh, I meant to mention that I explored "ending Saddam's regime without war" as a three-part series in September 2002.

Therein I cite a Sojourners Online article entitled, "With Weapons of the Will - How to topple Saddam Hussein - nonviolently," by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall.

Mr. Asbury's comment summarized one of Prof. Hauerwas' observations thus:

Violence used in the name of justice, or freedom, or equality is seldom simply a matter of justice--it is a matter of the power of some over others.

I wonder how Hauerwas would respond to Ackerman and DuVall, who wrote that non-violent measures to resist oppression,

. . . does not typically begin by putting flowers in gun barrels and it does not end when protesters disperse to go home. It involves the use of a panoply of forceful sanctions - strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, disrupting the functions of government, even nonviolent sabotage - in accordance with a strategy for undermining an oppressor's pillars of support. It is not about making a point, it's about taking power. (italics added)

[Rev. Donald Sensing]

Oh, I meant to mention that I explored "ending Saddam's regime without war" as a three-part series in September 2002.

Therein I cite a Sojourners Online article entitled, "With Weapons of the Will - How to topple Saddam Hussein - nonviolently," by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall.

Mr. Asbury's comment summarized one of Prof. Hauerwas' observations thus:

Violence used in the name of justice, or freedom, or equality is seldom simply a matter of justice--it is a matter of the power of some over others.

I wonder how Hauerwas would respond to Ackerman and DuVall, who wrote that non-violent measures to resist oppression,

. . . does not typically begin by putting flowers in gun barrels and it does not end when protesters disperse to go home. It involves the use of a panoply of forceful sanctions - strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, disrupting the functions of government, even nonviolent sabotage - in accordance with a strategy for undermining an oppressor's pillars of support. It is not about making a point, it's about taking power. (italics added)

[Douglas Asbury]

Just to clarify, the hypothetical was mine, not Hauerwas'.

[Nancy Smith]

Don,

My first reaction is possibly one of style. You begin by stating that "demonstrators against the Iraq war consisted basically of only two types..."

Such an either/or dichotomy is almost always factually wrong, and a red flag to me no matter who sets it up. You then concede in reluctantly recognizing Christian pacifism, which you eliminate from consideration because you "happen not to believe that pacifism is a morally sustainable position."

When you make an argument that from the beginning eliminates a valid -- and perhaps the most compelling -- opposing point of view, you weaken your own argument significantly.

Which of the two views that you choose to argue against DO you believe to be morally sustainable?

I understand the need to narrow the focus of the essay, since people have argued pacifism vs. just war for centuries, but a dismissive manner of doing this distracts from your thesis and, I think, weakens it.

Getting past all that, your discussion assumes a just war position and a pressing need to protect U.S. interests. (This would have been a good place to start.)

I'm sure there are many dictators who are a danger to the interests of the U.S. and of the world. Does "just war" theory give us permission to eliminate all those regimes?

I was not personally convinced that Saddam was worse than many others -- EXCEPT for the supposed presence of WMDs. Now it is evident that the arguments presented to convince us that Saddam had to be eliminated were not based on truth at all. Does that have no bearing on justice, especially given that this is not all hindsight. There were those who argued at that time that we had no proof of WMDs and/or the ability to deliver them.

This brings us back to my question of the previous paragraph: How many other dictators should we eliminate, based on your own arguments?

I am interested in understanding more of your just war point of view. My own position is one of "wannabe-pacifism." But since I was too young to remember Hitler and he is the strongest argument brought to me against pacifism, I don't claim the pacifist label. I have opposed every war in my adult life.

[Donald Sensing]

Nancy, thank you for your comments. You asked,

"I'm sure there are many dictators who are a danger to the interests of the U.S. and of the world. Does "just war" theory give us permission to eliminate all those regimes?"

Yes, it does. So does the UN Charter.

"How many other dictators should we eliminate, based on your own arguments?"

All of them.

Your questions are non sequiturs because they do not distinguish between the morally/legally required and the actually possible. In fact, we should take active steps (not always or even primarily military) to topple the regimes of tyrants around the world. I consider it a Christian duty to bring liberation and self-determination to the oppressed. But it is not possible for us to do so for all the oppressed, so of necessity we have to pick and choose. And the basis for picking and choosing will never suit everyone.

Suppose you see a tourist cruise boat sinking on a local river, endangering the lives of all 200 aboard. You happen to have a motorboat in which you can carry four persons. Do you decline to rescue the four because you can't also rescue the 196?

"I was not personally convinced that Saddam was worse than many others -- EXCEPT for the supposed presence of WMDs."

Yes, we should have left him alone because he was merely as bad as other murderous dictators. We mustn't take action against tyrants unless they surpass the atrocity levels of the past. Is this your position?

"I have opposed every war in my adult life."

Including Bill Clinton's invasions of Haiti and former Yugoslavia? Just curious.

I did not expand on my comment that pacifism is morally unsustainable because Dean didn't ask me to write about pacifism and I won't use his blog as my soapbox on topics he didn't bring up. But I have written quite a bit about it on my own blog. For example, "The pacifist fallacies" and "The problem with pacifism is pacifists."

I invite you also to consider the ethics of "Gang rape and Christian duty.

[Douglas Asbury]

Don,

Which of the following principles do you interpret as giving the US the right to eliminate a dictator who is "a danger to the interests of the U.S. and of the world"?

Principles of the Just War
A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.
A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.
A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see point #4). Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.
A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.
The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.
The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.
The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
From http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/justwar.htm

And which provision of the UN Charter gives that authority? I couldn't identify one.

[Nancy Smith]

Thanks, Don. It's been many years since I studied philosophy and I never took a course specifically in logic, but I can't see how my question about all the other dictatorial regimes was a non sequitur. Perhaps I didn't make my question clear: I was asking whether you thought it would be morally justifiable to invade and overthrow, by military force with whatever collateral damage might occur, all such governments. The possibility or plausibility of doing that was not part of my question -- just your ethical view. I understand your answer to be "yes."

I read your article on Gang Rape. To me, that's an irrelevant example. Yes, I would use force; probably I wouldn't have to *kill* all the rapists to rescue the victim. Even an example of an axe-murderer in a stocking cap on his way to my grandmother's bedroom or to my child's bedroom -- would I shoot him? Sure. I'd try to shoot to wound rather than shoot to kill, but I would defend my family. And I would defend the stranger being raped on the pool table.

Now as a 66-year-old grandmother with two artificial hips and lymphedema in one arm who never fired anything more lethal than a BB-gun, the idea of my physically defending anyone is somewhat humorous, but I sure would! Just don't you think about trying to snatch one of my little grandchildren away from me in the mall!

To me, those examples are totally unrelated to the justification of war.

Doug, thanks for posting the criteria of a just war -- that is what I was looking for (having forgotten that I have a list of such articles on my own website)!

[Tomsinhinna]

Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little
more time for dreaming.
-- J. P. McEvoy

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