This just in: Mark thinks he’s been “overly snippy [in] the last few weeks”. An occupational hazard of full-time blogging, I suppose. Daily visits of Mark’s blog will resume forthwith. However, the point about just war remains valid.
Mark Shea continues his snide attacks on Iraq war supporters on a near-daily basis, which has caused me to discontinue my daily visits to his site. He, and many other faithful Catholics, continue to question the motivations behind removing Saddam Hussein and his merry band of sadistic murderers.
I must ask: does 61,000 dead people in Baghdad count for anything? Between 300,000 and 1,000,000 people were executed under the previous regime. Do they count, either?
Mr. Shea, a man whom I respect, and at least one of whose books I own, comments, “Yes. Saddam is a monster. So as long as the country in question is ruled by a monster, Just War questions can be dispensed with and we can simply invade?”
The just war theory — it’s not doctrine, keep in mind, it’s a theory, as Shea himself has reminded us — must have room in it for a foreign power to intervene in the case of genocide. If it doesn’t, then it needs to accomodate it. The theory is useful because it describes the circumstances under which a state may use military force to restore justice. If it is used to make excuses for inaction in the face of a crime that shrieks to God for intervention, then there’s something wrong with it.
I don’t happen to think that there’s anything wrong with the just war theory, and I think it does cover instances where a foreign state is not the wronged party, yet acts with force. This isn’t the time to go through it, as others have, and it’s past my bedtime. I simply want to point out that saying, “So what about the tens of thousands of dead? There aren’t any weapons of mass destruction found yet” is perverse. Human lives are less important than observing the just war theory? How Christian is that?
BONUS LINK: to a story about all the great work civil affairs soldiers are doing in Iraq. As a civil affairs Marine, I wish them well and pray for their work & their safety.
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I too respect Mark Shea, and I’m as frustrated as you are in this regard, Eric.
I think you’ve done a pretty good job of putting a “human face” on Iraqis here.
All jibes aside, there’s no doubt that Mark has his heart in the right place. I just feel as if sometimes he prefers to deny Cold, Hard Realities by painting them over with a “Kumbaya” sentiment that helped to drive me away from liberal ideologies when I was an undergrad.
Maybe it’s the Seattle air?
I don’t know, Josh. He seems to be letting his critics on the right get the best of him. I mean that: at his best, he’s a fair-minded apologist for the Faith. When he gets drawn into political discussions, he gets sarcastic and uncharitable. I left a comment a couple of months back, protesting that he was painting with a rather broad brush, and he assured me that he was talking about other people.
Shea like baiting several groups of people, including:
1. Supporters of Israel (he thinks that country treats Palestinians “like shit,” in his words.)
2. Supporters of the Iraqi war (he feels duped, because he supported the war based on the presence of weapons of mass destruction, and he won’t grant that the war could have been legitimate on any other grounds).
There are other people he likes to tweak — radical gays, feminists, secularists — but Shea seems to reserve a special portion of invective for the two groups mentioned above. I don’t know why. Maybe because they’re inclined to agree with him on other issues, and there’s no more bitter quarrel than a quarrel among friends.
For one nation to go to war with another nation, not for self-defense, but to doll out retribution for a previous crime (in this case a decade old crime) against its own people is vigilante justice by definition.
My sympathies are with Mark…and I’m guessing that if any of us could see the crap that lands in his e-mail box, we’d understand his touchiness a little more too. He’s been called a traitor, disloyal, and accused of being sympathetic to terrorists, mass murderers, and tyrants.
I have many of the same reservations Mark has. I also have found that many of my friends are not actually as open to free and open discussion as they’ve claimed in the past. People that I thought were Catholics first have turned into knee-jerk Republican apologists – and maybe they always were, and I never saw it before because I never disagreed with them before. They can’t even begin to accept the possibility that their party might be wrong – and I don’t mean they just don’t agree with me, I mean they refuse to even discuss it.
And when all you want is answers, its really darn hard to be attacked for your questions, or given the same answers that didn’t satisfy you the first time over and over again.
What about pre-emptive self-defense? That seems pretty reasonable to me.
The true consequences of Pres. Bush’s strategery will not be known for many years. I fear his critics continue to misunderestimate him. But one thing is clear: the world of the terrorists, and the land where they take shape, knows that he is a man of action, not just “firing a ten-million-dollar missile into a ten-dollar empty tent and hitting a camel in the butt.”
I’m still willing to give the Pres the benefit of the doubt. Mark Shea seems to think the same newspapers he derides for their coverage of cultural issues contain the Full Gospel Truth of the war and aftermath in Iraq. We have to wait and see what has actually happened, and even then the military folks who are *actually there* will be a much better info source than any media outlet – even Fox News or NRO.
I don’t know who put the bee in Mark’s bonnet about this war, but I wish he would get down off his high horse. It’s getting annoying. And don’t even get me started about the Israel thing — God promised Abraham a much larger chunk of the land there than modern Israel is currently defending. “From the desert of the Egyptians even unto the Euphrates” is the cite, if I remember correctly. The Hosts of Mordor are surrounding them, slavering and lusting for Jews’ blood, and I don’t really see a whole lot of moral equivalence.
Eric,
Mark has responded to you. Go check it out.
Jonathan,
Israel is as secular and immoral on things like abortion as we are. What happened to ancient Israel when it embraced false gods and gross immorality?
Coward: again, I say that to stand by while tens of thousands of innocent people are being slaughtered, when the means to intervene are within our power, is unjust. We not only have the right to protect the weak and the innocent where it is possible, we have the duty to protect them. It may be imprudent or impossible to intervene — and those can be legitimate objections. But to say that a state cannot ever protect human life outside its own borders, for people who are not its citizens, is something I reject utterly, and does not seem consonant with divine justice.
Kate: I’ve been called many bad names too, starting when I was in college and had a column in the school newspaper. Given the emotional immaturity of the average college student, and the widespread inability of debating anything without the argument turning personal, you can imagine what they said. I was compared to a weasel; several students insulted my girlfriend (now wife) to her face about dating a sexist bigot like me; one woman fantasized in print about smashing my testicles with a brick. Those are just some of the highlights.
If you’re going to write publicly, you have to put up with libel and slander. It comes with the position. If you’re going to be thin-skinned and react badly to sustained, unfair criticism, maybe a forum such as a blog isn’t the best medium for you.
Also, Mark is not simply “asking questions.” He provides snide, sarcastic comments on his critics’ positions — “another kumbaya liberal” and the like. Does that really convince anybody? And does it help his vocation as a Catholic apologist?
Eric,
Saddam was killing tens of thousands of people when we went to war?
Eric:
Since I am a supporter of Israel myself, I must have a special vendetta against me.
Seriously, I don’t “bait supporters of Israel”. I do, however, challenge utterly uncritical supporters of Israel who, at the end of the day, believe Israel has never ever ever done anything wrong to Palestinians and who back that up by saying “Either we ignore the beatings of innocents and theft of property perpetrated by Israelis against Palestinian Catholics or we favor pushing Israel into the sea.” (And yes, I have readers who have actually agreed to that proposition.) Sorry, but Israel does not have carte blanche to do whatever it likes. And appeals to the need for repression due to “security reason” are garbage when they try to paint the bulldozing of a Palestinian olive grove and confiscation of the land so that American Jews can have condos to summer in as “security”.
As to satirizing the “kumbaya liberal” trope, Josh has helpfully applied it to me (and he’s not the first. So when I note, tongue in cheek, the Newt Gingrich is not exactly a kumbaya liberal–as I am not–my point is that such labels are not serious attempts to address the points being made by people (like myself) who just don’t think the war is measuring up to Just war criteria and who (in my case) think so because I’m Catholic, not because I’m a leftist dissenter from the Faith or a some ninny from the Peace n Justice People’s Front.
As I’ve said on my blog, part of my work is to try to think with the Tradition even when it violates the easy prejudices of my own tribe of conservatives. The fact is, the Church has repeatedly suggested there are grave concerns with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and particularly Palestinian Catholics, for whom the Church is especially responsible. We Americans don’t like to hear that, but the more I get to know about Palestinian Catholics, the more I can see the Church’s point. That does not mean I don’t support Israel. It merely means I don’t support Israel unquestioningly and uncritically, much as I recognize a bishop’s authority, but don’t support him when he chooses to cover up a rape.
Eric
I agree with you on the issues you raise in this post. I have only a slight quibble. It seems to me that Iraq was openly supporting, especially militarily, Osama and the Taliban and Al-Quaeda(sp?). These groups have attacked the United States and, therefore are our enemies, we are at war with them. If that is true, I believe we were completely justified to attack Iraq in order to disable/disarm a military enemy of the United States. This was necessary to preserve the safety of American citizens and “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. In other words, I think we were, indeed, the wronged party and had every right, even a duty, to do what we did.
People seem to have trouble understanding that, on September 11 we were attacked in exactly the same way we were attacked on December 7, 1941. It was not by conventional military means, it “looked” different, but it was carried out by folks who intended no less than the military defeat of the United States.
Perhaps a minor point, but, I think, an important one.
Paz y bien
Ron M
Ron,
If Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, they did not have the capacity to inflict massive harm on us through their terrorist connections. Their normal military was a joke.
Coward asks: “Saddam was killing tens of thousands of people when we went to war?”
As the title of the post says: “Is there a statute of limitations on genocide?” You figure Saddam had repented as of March 20, 2003? Have you seen how many innocent Iraqis the Baathist thugs have murdered recently?
Ron: I don’t think that defending the Iraqis, particularly the Shia, is the only justification for removing the prior regime, it just happened to be the one I was commenting on. That Iraq was a state sponsor of terror against Iran, and a safe harbor for Abu Nidal and other notorious terrorists, is beyond dispute.
Mark: as I said in my comment on your blog, my problem isn’t so much with the substance of your criticism as the tone and approach. I don’t hold Israel above reproach, and you’re doing the Lord’s work when you place the Tradition above mere politics. Just don’t let yourself get drawn into the nastiness, and people like me won’t get turned off.
Eric,
I too have ceased my daily stops at Mark Shea’s blog mostly because I’m tired of hearing the snide sarcastic tone. I had a creeping suspicion that Mark wanted to prove he wasn’t a lock step conservative, so he had to show how balanced he was by taking an opposing position on the war. That is just my unproven and unsubstantiated gut feeling on the whole thing.
As a New Yorker, I have personally and deeply experienced the attacks of September 11th. I trust President Bush. I voted for him because I felt he was a sincere, honest and moral man. He knows more than I do about the situation in the Middle East. If I trust his leadership I will stand behind his decisions. Time will tell what was going on behind the scenes. The journalists, and, yes, even the Vatican big wigs, do not know all of the intelligence and underground information that the President has. Least of all blog authors!
The Pope pretty clearly stated that one can only undertake a war with grave knowledge of the consequences. He didn’t say “don’t go to war”. Because I trust President Bush, I believe that he understood the grave consequences and felt that this action needed to be taken anyway. I think that maybe the critics should give the President some slack and wait and see. He doesn’t make decisions based on public opinion (thank God). As a New Yorker, I am grateful we have a president who is taking action and not waiting for the next attack. I don’t want to see more friends slaughtered.
Coward: again, I say that to stand by while tens of thousands of innocent people are being slaughtered, when the means to intervene are within our power, is unjust.
As the title of the post says: “Is there a statute of limitations on genocide?” You figure Saddam had repented as of March 20, 2003? Have you seen how many innocent Iraqis the Baathist thugs have murdered recently?
If the tens of thousands weren’t being killed when we went to war, then we wouldn’t be “standing by while tens of thousands of innocent people are being slaughtered” would we? There is a fundamental difference between intervening while or just before a genocide is being carried out and intervening after the fact.
Eric,
One more thing: Statute of Limitations implies a legal context, but the US does not have the moral authority to act as a court for the world.
Coward: Ask the Shia in southern Iraq if they were subjected to an ongoing, genocidal campaign against them. When I was there, they said there was, and since Saddam murdered thousands of them annually and we have the corpses to prove it, I’m inclined to agree with them. There was a pause in the repression before the war, true, but only because Saddam and his cronies were more concerned about saving their own sorry hides, not because they had sorrowfully abandoned mass murder as a tool of governance.
The U.S. doesn’t pretend to be the “court for the world” — the International Criminal Court pretends to be that.
Instead of the sniping, Coward, why not explain why you don’t think a state can ever intervene on behalf of the oppressed in another state? You might want to start by explaining why Britain was wrong to go to war for Poland in September 1939, when it wasn’t attacked or even threatened by the Nazis. Indeed, Hitler hoped that the ethnicly Germanic English would come to his side, and didn’t seem eager to attack Britain until they declared war.
Eric:
I am sorry if my tone has been hurtful. Often what is intended to be light can be seen as sarcastic.
Please understand that I’m trying to be fair. Honest.
Eric,
Then why don’t you explain why the US hasn’t intervened in Africa, Cuba, or North Korea, where genocide goes on an even grander scale?
The US didn’t go to war in Iraq to prevent or avenge genocide; the stated reason was tht threatr of WMD. Now that it seems that threat was not legit, you’re shifting to “avenging genocide.”
And the fact that Saddam had stemmed his genocide in the face of inspections is evidence that war was not the only way to achieve ending the genocide, which is a pillar of Just War Theory that I’m not so cavalier about dismissing.
Mark, I know you’re trying to be fair, and I know that the tone of someone’s writing can be misinterpreted. It’s hard to write when nobody else is editing you — from my participation here, I’ve learned that quite well. Last year, I posted a very short account of an encounter I had with a panhandler near my office in downtown D.C. The guy was asking for money, I offered to give him my dinner instead (a hot sandwich and a carton of soup), and he said no thanks, he had just eaten.
I thought it was funny, because obviously the guy couldn’t have been destitute since he was rejecting free food. A lot of people said I was being mean and callous toward the poor. You can’t win sometimes!
John: I’m not attempting to establish the principle that the United States must intervene, always and everywhere, when people are oppressed. You’re arguing that because we haven’t intervened militarily in the places you mention, therefore no intervention can be legitimate. But consistency isn’t the measure of whether a particular act is good or bad, nor does the failure to act correctly in one circumstance preclude acting correctly in a future circumstance.
Humanitarian motives were certainly a part of the president’s decision to invade Iraq, and he said so from the beginning. I’m not “shifting” to any position (and even if I were, I’m not a public official, and I don’t bear any particular responsibility for the instigation or conduct of the war.) For me, humanitarian motives were the strongest reason to invade Iraq. Before the war, I liked the idea of liberating the oppressed; I enjoyed playing my tiny part in their liberation, and meeting the formerly oppressed; and looking back on it, I’m proud of what we did. I don’t think I’ve personally done any shifting.
Finally, Saddam didn’t curtail his killing because of the threat of “inspections.” It was from the threat of massive force.
Frankly, a lot of Mark’s postings of late have not only seemed snide, but have also appeared to be bearing false witness, which I believe is a sin.
Erasmus:
Help me out. Give me examples. I don’t want to bear false witness.
Let’s not turn this into a “dump on Mark Shea” thread. I was offering constructive criticism, as well as commenting on the just war theory, not attacking Mark.
Mark’s subsequent posts do well to answer my objections, I think.
Thanks for the gracious responses, Mark.
God Bless.
It’s the liberal Seattle air, folks.
And Mark Shea and I are choking on it.
There have been a number of encyclicals beginning with Paccem in Terris which address war. All of these suggest that just war criteria only come into play when there is an invasion by an agressor and even then only, in some certain limited circumstances, a defense may be justified. The circumstances suporting a just war are very narrow if the teachings are read with an open heart.
The Church recognizes that evil and injustice accompany every war. CCC2707. In that sense, there is no “just war” and the hurhc doens’t use that terminology. War involves the killing (even accidentally and unavoidably) of large numbers of innocent people. When we undertake war with Iraq we knew a large number of innocent poeple would be killed. We are not in a position to claim that killing a fewer number of innocent poeple that Saddam Husein did justifies removing a despot. The Vatican commentary (Cardinal Ratzinger for example)is that when there is overwhelming international isolation of a despot, the removal often occurs without war. Nicaragua, Iran, The Soviet Union, The Phillipines, Uganda are many such examples. I don’t find it surprising that the Church concluded that there were other options for the removal of Saddam Husein.
I also add that just war theory is not a “doctrine” but the Church doesn’t use that terminology anyway. The teachings of the Catechism and the Papal encyclicals *are* doctrine and are not just a theory. Their reliance on interantional cooperation and community through such structures and regional defense organizations and the UN are legitmate interpretations of the Gospel message, and a re given short shrift here in the US.
Even so, none of this applies to Catholic members of the armed forces. Those who have served patriotically and bravely deserve our profound thanks and respect. They are not in a position to evaluate the just war criteria.
Joe, we tried just about every option short of war to get rid of Saddam, including the encouragement of a domestic uprising. He didn’t go anywhere. Look, I’m not saying that we can achieve perfect earthly justice through military action. Castro will die in his bed, and has been one of the worse despots in recent history. The pope and the bishops have the obligation and the authority to speak on specific public matters, but their judgments are not de fide or binding on the conscience. I say that not to diminish their ministry, but to place their words in the proper context.
I disagree that just war arguments don’t apply to Catholics serving in the armed forces (and I appreciate your kind words about them.) If I were asked to serve in an unjust war, I pray that I would have the courage to refuse to serve in it, and suffer the consequences.
From what I’ve been reading it seems that Poland might well be justified in invading the US (or Australia for that matter). The horror of millions of abortions of human beings would justify such an act? Oh no, of course not – they don’t account when it comes to terms such as “genocide” or “massacre” or “slaughter”. Sorry.
Under what circumstances would it have been a just war, since Saddam would only have used his putative WMD on people other than us? Who were we to defend others from a moral theology point of view.
I’m unclear on this.
Of course, I think that Just War theory is more or less special pleading and has been since the Middle Ages – but then I’m a medievalist and not a theologian. I tend to think of APPLICATION rather than THEORY — for instance, the institutional Vatican’s (as opposed to the Catholic Church) attitude toward war in Italy from the 8h through the late 19th century and wonder if “doctrine” is the right way to describe something so splendid, so new. Perhaps it has developed suddenly along with the secular powerlessness of the popes (a post-1870 phenomenon).
Now you see, I’m actually all in favor of limited violence for all sorts of reasons. I’m willing to submit on the capital punishment rulings — though it’s also pretty splendid and new.
So if we’re going to start behaving according to someone’s Just War doctrine can you promise me it’s going to have to be coherent and convincing? Was Kosovo a just war or not? Why? What about Rwanda, where some of the participants in the genocide seem to have been religious? When should we intervene? Is the Catechism really the Paperback Guide to All Behavior? I mean, I’ve got a copy, but I keep finding it harder to apply than some people — kind of like scripture.
When terrorists killed 3000 people in New York they did it without WMDs and it was either just luck or pure providence that they didn’t kill 50,000. What if Rick Resorla hadn’t gotten nearly all the Merrill Lynch people out by practicing monthly since the 1993 bombing? I’m commenting on the proposition that without WMDs Saddam’s people couldn’t really hurt us. Of course they could. And they are still trying.
Further ever since the first Gulf War we had planes flying over Iraq and taking fire. Seems like continuing war to me. And the only way to stop it (and get ourselves out of Saudi Arabia in the bargain) was through Iraq. Freeing the people there, not from evil since humans can’t do that, but from the particular evil they were experiencing seems to me well worth the cost. And since my nephew is over there and has been under fire I’m not whistling through my hat.
Finally, the abortion argument is just nonsensical. Just war theory demands that there be a chance of success and if Poland invaded the US to stop abortion there would be less than zero chance of any good outcome whatever.
Jane,
The main arguement for Iraq providing a threat to us was that they could pass along WMDs to terrorists. Without WMDs, was there sponsorship of terrorism really that much more likely to lead to a successful attack of significant size than any other terror supporting country in the mideast or elsewhere?
I don’t think that was the main argument. I think that Osama went around for years saying he was going to take down the World Trade Center. He tried twice and succeeded. After that we can’t sit around and say, yes, Saddam *says* he’ll do terrible things to us but we don’t have to listen. After 9/11 we have to listen. And we did have soldiers nearby in Saudi Arabia who were at risk (and who were bombed by no-one knows who) and we did have all those pilots doing flyovers and Saddam did target them for example. But on your other point, Victor Davis Hanson had an article about how Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and even Iran (at the moment) all respond to various kinds of diplomatic pressure and manage to stay away from all out disaster, even if they stand on the brink once in a while. Saddam had a 30 year track record which VDH detailed, of failing to understand where he should pull back. All of which says, that WMDs aren’t the only way to get badly hurt. But it is also true that we have not found *even what the UN said* Saddam had in January in the way of various weapons. That’s not an idea calculated to reassure.
Jane,
Do you remember what publication the VDH article was in and when? A link would be great if it’s online.
Right and Wrong
Eric Johnson and Mark Shea have been involved in a hearty discussion about the war in Iraq. It has been one of the most polite and Christian of discussions that I have seen on this topic in just about any…
To TPFKAAC, I’m hunting for it but I don’t remember the date… JM