CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

# 153 Bernard F. Swain, Ph.D. www.CrossCurrents.us

All Out of Proportion

Sometimes common sense catches up with theory – and we seem to be reaching that point on the War in Iraq.

The news in recent weeks has been depressingly discouraging, and more and more Americans are beginning to share the unanimous view of the Catholic Bishops throughout the world that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a mistake doomed to cause more harm than good.

First there was news that the body count during July and August was averaging 5000 deaths a month. Then there was the scandalous controversy over new laws on detainees – laws that virtually eliminate traditional protections for citizens accused of crimes.

Then came the intelligence report which concluded that the war in Iraq has had the horrendous side effect of making our other big war – the war on terror –even worse than it was before, by creating a dangerous new breeding ground for fundamentalist terrorism in a country which prior to invasion, under Saddam Hussein, was a brutal but secular dictatorship that did not threaten us in any way.

Next we witnessed a parade of U.S. intelligence and military officers outlining the bleak prospects ahead in Iraq, and even admitting that civil war is already underway.

Last week, the bad news kept coming. First was the report from public health experts at Johns Hopkins University estimating the total war deaths in Iraq. Knowing that no “body count” really covers all of war’s damage, these experts used the same standard methods public health officials use anywhere to estimate the impact of natural disasters – the same methods that the British health journal The Lancet used two years ago to conclude that 140,000 Iraqis had already died. The new estimate is truly horrendous: these experts tell us that approximately 650,000 more people have died in the three and a half years since the U.S. invasion than would have died in Iraq under normal, pre-invasion conditions.

And finally the Iraqi government has postponed its planned reconciliation conference because conditions are simply too unsafe to proceed.

People with any common sense at all are beginning to take the obvious lesson: whatever justification their might (or might not) have been for going to war is now clearly outweighed by the consequences of that war.

Catholic moral teaching on warfare has a much better track record on this than U.S. foreign policy does. The Catholic “Just War Theory” (which George Bush invoked to justify the invasion in 2003) has always employed several criteria. Only some of these criteria can be used to justify going to war; the rest must be used to justify the conduct and consequences of that war while it is still going on. And one of the most important of these criteria has always been something called “the principle of proportionality.”

This principle demands that those responsible for conducting war must always weigh the good they hope to accomplish against the damage they are actually causing. The moral logic here is simple: war can never be justified, however noble the cause, if it actually causes more harm than good.

I have always thought of this “principle of proportionality” as the moral time bomb embedded inside every war policy. What I mean is that in the moral struggle for a just war, time is never on our side. War always begins with a particular goal or motive: the restoration of peace is always supposed to yield a post-war situation that is better than the pre-war situation.

But the problem is that war is by definition a destructive and death-dealing enterprise. The longer it goes on, the worse its consequences. And while the original motive for war promises a finite and fixed benefit, the destruction of that war continues to mount over time. The benefit is a constant, but the damage is a variable. This is a moral time bomb because, inevitably, that destruction will eventually grow to be greater than the original good cause. You can almost imagine a graph where the flat “goal” line is finally surpassed by the rising “damage” line.

This is exactly what happened to the American Bishops regarding the Vietnam War. Given the long history of trying to accommodate Catholicism to U.S. culture by proving that Catholics could be as patriotic as – or even more patriotic than – other Americans, the U.S. Bishops were reluctant to criticize the Vietnam War. Moreover, they tended to subscribe to the anti-communist, cold-war rhetoric (like the “domino theory”) used to justify that war.

But by 1968 the U.S. commitment had cost too many lives, and the U.S. Bishops finally concluded that the war was violating the principle of proportionality – that the harm being caused was all out of proportion to any good that could be accomplished. And so they finally went on record opposing the continuation of the war in Vietnam.

Now, in Iraq, the moral time bomb of proportionality has been ticking for more than three years. Of course, if we try to compare the original “cause” and the current “consequences,” we run into the obvious problem that the rationale for this war was never very clear, and has changed several times over. In fact, the people trying to explain this war got American so confused it’s become difficult even to tell the difference between the war in Iraq and the war on terror—almost as if they were the same thing all along!

But if the motive for this war has become incredibly unclear, what is clear is that no one has invented a reason for this invasion that can keep moral pace with the destruction it is causing. None of the supposed threats to be found in Iraq –not Saddam Hussein, nor the WMDs, nor the insurgency, nor the terrorists –can match the moral evil of more than half a million humans killed already by this war.

People who follow the “Just War theory” (including the Vatican, the U.S. Bishops, two Popes, and virtually every Bishops’ conference in the world) saw this coming in Iraq even before the invasion. But now millions of Americans have come to the same conclusion by relying on nothing but common sense.

So now the war-supporters argue we have no choice but to stay. They claim that leaving will only lead to worst disasters.

Let’s suppose they’re right about the strategic consequences of what they call “cut and run.” Where does that leave us morally? What is the right thing, the good thing, for Catholics to support?

From a moral point of view, the dilemma is this: if we continue to make war, the imbalance between harm caused and good achieved will become worse and worse the longer we stay. But if we leave, we risk enabling even greater death and destruction in our wake.

From the moral point of view, this is the classic choice between “the lesser of two evils.”

I do not personally believe there are no other choices. But let’s suppose we accept the necessity of choosing “the lesser of two evils.” In that case, we should be perfectly honest about what this means (whether we rely on theory or common sense): whichever choice we make, it will be an evil choice, an immoral choice. Between two evils, choosing even the lesser is still choosing evil.

This is the shameful truth embedded in the headlines: we Americans are paying taxes for (and thereby supporting) a policy that has already killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians –and the only options our leaders offer us both require us to fund more death.

We should not be in this position because we should have known better. Shame on us Americans for not learning the common sense lessons of Vietnam. And shame on us US Catholics for not learning the thought-through lessons of our own faith-tradition and leaders.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2006

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com

Dr. Swain’s opinions do not represent the views of this parish or any other official body.

Bernie Swain has devoted more than 30 years to adult spiritual formation in dioceses in the US, Canada, and France. Since 1991 he has maintained a private practice as trainer, teacher, and consultant to leaders in parishes and other religious organizations. He holds degrees in theology and political science from Holy Cross, Harvard, The University of Paris, and The University of Chicago.

His writings include Liberating Leadership (Harper & Row, 1986) and more than 200 articles in periodicals such as The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, The Miami Herald, The Catholic Free Press, The Pilot, Harvard Theological Review, and Liturgy.

A lifelong layperson, he lives in Boston with his wife and three children. Visit his website at:

http://www.CrossCurrents.us

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