Loving Your Enemies: New Zealand's Catholic Bishops Come Out In Support Of The Iraq Deployment.

Cry Havoc! For the first time in many years a major New Zealand Christian denomination has come out in support of military action. But have the Catholic Bishops interpreted their Church's "Just War Doctrine" correctly? (Graphic: Warmonger by John Carroll.)

“WE CAN NO LONGER watch from the sidelines as the Islamic State continues to inflict immense suffering and brutality.” John Key? Mike Hosking? Fran O’Sullivan? John Roughan? No. These are the words of the Catholic Bishops of New Zealand. Alone among the other major Christian denominations, the Catholic Church has come out in support of the National-led Government’s troop deployment to Iraq.

 

“If by providing training to the Iraqi Army we can assist them to stop the aggressor in their land,” write the Bishops, “then as a matter of promoting the common good we should provide that assistance.”

 

Released on 24 February, in the form of a letter to their congregations, the Bishops’ message argues strongly that the people of Iraq “must not be left to face such unjust aggression on their own.”

 

Pope Francis, himself, write the Bishops, has said that it is “licit to stop an unjust aggressor”.

 

The Catholic Church’s senior cleric in New Zealand, Cardinal John Dew, softened the bishops’ position (if only slightly) by adding that: “Substantial humanitarian support should also be part of New Zealand’s involvement in Iraq.”

 

It has been a long time since any of New Zealand’s major Christian denominations spoke out publicly in favour of a military engagement. Indeed, the reconciliation of Jesus’s injunction to “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you”, with support for any kind of warfare requires some very fancy philosophical and theological footwork.

 

Before attempting such a challenging ethical tap-dance the Catholic Bishops would have checked out Paragraph 2,309 of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, which lists four strict conditions for “legitimate defence by military force:”

 

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

2.      All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

3.      There must be serious prospects of success;

4.      The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

 

Few would argue that the First and Second Conditions have not been met in full. For the unfortunate souls who find themselves living in Islamic State, the likelihood of suffering “lasting, grave and certain” damage at the hands of its fanatical soldiers and clerics is all-too-real. Moreover, almost all of the numerous attempts to prevent or mitigate that damage, whether by negotiation or exhortation, have failed. If these were the only preconditions for the use of military force, then the Bishops would have their episcopal slippers on some pretty solid ground.

 

Where their position becomes decidedly unsteady, however, is when the Third and Fourth Conditions are applied to the Iraq Deployment.

 

Very few experts foresee the Western intervention against Islamic State having any serious prospects of success. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Caliphate could not have been born, nor could it have survived, had the armies of the Christian West not attacked and occupied Iraq, and the Shi’a regime, installed on the points of those armies' bayonets, not unleashed a murderous campaign of terror, murder and theft against the Sunni population.

 

The current Iraqi government, characterised by its American sponsors as more moderate and inclusive than its vicious predecessor, is in fact beholden to precisely the same constellation of religious, military and economic forces. For the Sunni Muslims of Iraq and Syria, the present evils of al-Baghdadi’s Caliphate are, sadly, preferable to the much worse evils that await them should the Shi’a militias prove victorious.

 

International relief and refugee agencies are already preparing for the flight of up to a million Sunni citizens from the city of Mosul should it be in imminent danger of falling to the Shi’a dominated (and soon to be Kiwi trained!) Iraqi army. Few Sunni Iraqis doubt the intensity of the Shi’a desire to be avenged upon the “butchers” of Islamic State. The mutilated bodies of Sunni citizens dumped on Baghdad’s rubbish heaps by Iranian-backed Shi’a militiamen have been every bit as effective, as brutal, flesh-and-blood propaganda, as any of Islamic State’s gruesome videos.

 

The better our Kiwi soldiers train these Shi’a extremists, the graver the evils and disorders they are bound to produce. In attempting to eliminate the evil of Islamic State, the New Zealand Defence Force could very easily become an accessory to the bloody sacking of Iraq’s second-largest city.

 

Are the Catholic Bishops really content to be associated with the slaughter and rape of innocent women and children? The torture and summary execution of thousands of Islamic State fighters? And the burning and looting of a great and ancient city?

 

St Thomas Aquinas wrote that: “Three things are necessary for the salvation of Man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.”

 

With St Thomas’s words ringing in their ears, New Zealand’s Catholic Bishops should think again.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Tuesday, 3 March 2015.

A Professional Engagement

Somebody's Son: There is a world of difference between deploying professional soldiers to kill the State's enemies and shipping out the conscripted sons (and nowadays daughters) of its citizens. The Vietnamese, unlike the Japanese and the Germans, posed no imminent and/or existential threat to the United States, which is why the decision to send tens-of-thousands of young conscripts to fight and die in its paddy-fields proved to be such a huge historical mistake. (Photo: Horst Faas/AP)

 

NEW ZEALAND’S PARTICIPATION in the war against Islamic State has already prompted angry criticism from the Left. This country boasts a pacifist tradition extending back at least 100 years, to the First World War and the persecution (among many others) of the conscientious objector, Archibald Baxter.

 

Less honourable, perhaps, and certainly less grounded in the pacifists’ profound ethical objection to the taking of human life, is the Far Left’s historical opposition to “imperialist wars”. Significantly, their protests against these conflicts were generally organised on behalf of “the victims of capitalist aggression” – whose victories in such “wars of national liberation” were eagerly anticipated. These were the unabashed revolutionaries, who, in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, chanted: “One side right, one side wrong. Victory to the Viet-Cong!”

 

Somewhere in the “middle” of the Left stand those who are willing to accept that in some circumstances (World War II being the most cited example) the taking up of arms is not only an urgent, but also a profoundly moral, necessity. This idea of the “Just War” goes all the way back to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, whose arguments are still drawn on by members of the UN Security Council whenever decisions have to be made about whether or not to authorise the use of military force.

 

The greatest anti-war movement of the last century was undoubtedly the international movement against the US involvement in Vietnam. All three of the great anti-war traditions: the Christian prohibition against waging “unjust war”; the revolutionary socialists’ objection to “imperialist war”; and the pacifists’ uncompromising opposition to the taking of human life; were intermingled in the global “mobilisations” against the Vietnam conflict.

 

What elevated the anti-war struggle in the United States to a cultural watershed, however, wasn’t opposition to US imperialism, or even the appalling loss of life, although both of these considerations played a part. No, what really transformed the anti-war protests into a genuine mass movement was conscription. Overwhelmingly, the young men sent to fight and die in South-East Asia were draftees – conscripts whose “number” had, quite literally, come up.

 

Not In My Place: American university students whose call-up had been 'deferred' strove to rescue their conscripted brothers by ending the war in Vietnam.

 

One of the few ways to avoid the draft was to enrol in a course of university study. It is only when one grasps the importance of “deferment” that the crucial role played by university students in the American anti-war movement makes any historical sense. As the number of American soldiers in Vietnam began to escalate, those whose service had been deferred felt an increasingly urgent obligation to bring the conscripts home. Young working-class Whites, Blacks and Hispanics were literally dying in their place – and for no good reason. The US wasn’t battling Hitler in Vietnam, it was napalming and carpet-bombing peasants whose only crime was an iron-clad determination to rule themselves.

 

America’s experience in Vietnam brought home to its leaders the huge risks entailed in fighting what came to be seen, increasingly, as an unjust war with conscripted citizens. If a government’s intention is to use its military resources for any other purpose than national defence against an imminent and existential threat, then it is best that the soldiers, sailors and air personnel employed are professionals – not draftees.

 

Doing Their Job: New Zealand's highly professional special forces personnel in Kabul, Afghanistan.

 

A professional standing army, precisely because it is not composed of the voters’ conscripted sons and daughters, may be deployed in relative political safety for any number of purposes (many of them, these days, decidedly dark). The usual left-wing suspects will complain – but with considerably less effect than during the war in Vietnam.

 

Professional soldiers look forward to war. Fighting for their country is exactly what they signed-up to do. Should they fall in battle, their families, their comrades and their country’s leaders will mourn and honour them, but at the back of everybody’s mind will be the thought: “They knew this might happen, but they weren’t deterred. They died doing the job they’d always wanted.”

 

Try making an anti-war movement out of that!

 

True pacifists are few and far between. Anti-imperialists almost always have a dog in the fight. And unjust wars, providing the “enemy” is rendered sufficiently terrifying, and providing the participating military forces are made up of highly-trained professionals just itching to get amongst it, are unlikely to cause the governments that wage them very much in the way of serious political bother.

 

Few Kiwis will march in the streets for Islamic State.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 November 2014.