Back On

So I decided to start blogging again today. We'll see how this goes.

Debating ‘just war’ 60 years after Hiroshima

A version of this article appeared in the July 29 edition of the Pittsburgh Catholic.

Sixty years ago this August 6, an American bomber nicknamed the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. In bringing an end to the Second World War, atomic weapons forever changed how we think about war and peace.

September 11, 2001 was also a watershed moment. With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States encountered a foe that didn’t flinch from killing civilians and used hatred as a rationale for such killing. That morning, Americans awoke to new kind of war.

The years since have seen American troops fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, and American Catholics, along with Christians and non-Christians the world over, have thought deeply and argued passionately about national security and the appropriateness of fighting wars in a modern age.

The debate isn’t over, nor should it be. But the Catholic just war tradition can offer a starting point for the road ahead.

Talking about war
In the millennium and a half since Saint Augustine started thinking about the Christian response to war, Christians have debated how, if ever, war could be just. More recently, thinkers of other traditions and perspectives have joined the “just war” tradition, resulting in an incredibly complex mix of positions.

Some thinkers on war, particularly since Hiroshima, believe that war is so intrinsically bad that no argument or situation can ever justify it. This perspective, called “pacifism,” advocates non-violent means of conflict resolution.

At the other end of the spectrum, “realists” see war as a part of the human condition. In a world of rogue states and lawlessness, realists emphasize power and pragmatism in dealing with threats. They reject pacifism as ineffective, and they may also tend to see the rights of others as irrelevant to a state’s need to protect itself.

The just war tradition strikes a delicate balance between pacifism and realism, and this balance is reflected in church teaching. “Respect for and development of human life require peace,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, but “peace is not merely the absence of war, and it is not limited to maintaining a balance of powers between adversaries” (2304).

Like pacifists, Christians working from just war theory pursue peace, but like realists, they also understand that they shouldn’t seek peace at any price. Just as there can be unjust wars, where states aggressively destroy their neighbors, there can also be unjust peaces, where a state stands by as innocent lives are destroyed.

Just war theory believes that peace requires Christians to work and struggle for justice, and it offers guidance in that struggle.

What makes a just war?Just war theory is based in prudence, or the virtue of thinking practically in the light of faith and reason. Instead of taking a blanket, yes-or-no approach to war, just war theory works by giving a series of conditions nations must meet before, during and after hostilities.

By using conditions and principles, just war theory helps Christians evaluate the real conditions in front of them and make practical decisions that have the best chance of protecting the common good.

Christians using just war principles can come to support some conflicts but not others. For instance, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops believed that the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan was justifiable but has strongly questioned the war in Iraq.

Though Christians of goodwill may disagree about how just war principles should be applied in a given case, just war theory provides a practical, yet faithful framework for understanding war.

Because just war theory believes that war should be avoided, the criteria for breaking the peace are rigorous and complex. Though the exact number of requirements can vary depending on the framework used, a nation typically has to meet six conditions.

The cause must be just. Just wars must have legitimate reasons, such as self-defense or protection of the innocent.

The nation must have the right intent. Just wars must be fought to keep the peace and further legitimate ends.

The nation declaring war must do so with proper authority. Just wars must be declared by governments that have the legitimate support of the people.

War must be the last resort. Just wars can occur only when every other avenue has failed.

The war must have some probability of succeeding. Just wars must have clear objectives that are attainable and understood at the outset.

The war must not make matters worse. Just wars must have real benefits that outweigh the costs in casualties and human suffering violence causes.

During war, warring nations must meet other requirements. They must be able to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants, and they must respond proportionately to their enemy. Once hostilities have ended, the only acceptable peace is a just peace, and warring nations should also provide humanitarian and other assistance to deal with the effects of violence.

At least, that’s what the ideal just war looks like on paper. Nevertheless, even nations that meet the tests of just war can find themselves in situations that push the boundaries.

New world, new realities
Beginning with the First World War, the realities of modern war have tested the limits of just war theory. Poison gas, biological warfare, nuclear weapons, “asymmetrical” guerilla wars and rising civilian death tolls have each, in their own way, challenged just war theory’s neat categories.

For many, the war on terrorism throws the categories of just war out the window or at least requires major revisions to the theory. The reasons behind their positions, however, vary depending on their political outlook.

Some Catholics will modify just war theory to defend a thoroughly pragmatic approach to the war on terror. Terrorists don’t play by just war’s rules, they argue, and adhering too strongly to the traditional just war principles is simply too dangerous for national security.

Others, pointing to John Paul II’s repeated denunciations of war, also tend to reject just war theory, but for opposite reasons. Citing the “culture of life” and the indiscriminate terror of modern war, they argue that pacifism, or at least an extremely stringent approach to just war, is the only legitimate Christian course.

As always, just war theory offers a middle road. But in the new war on terror, the road isn’t always clear.

Preemptive wars, like the current conflict in Iraq, are an outstanding question. Though it may seem necessary, what are the conditions that make preemptive war just? Even if a nation’s initial intentions are good, do good intentions outweigh the suffering war causes if the military intelligence is wrong? What if a preemptive war makes things worse?

Legitimate authority is another issue. Though the Catechism leaves the evaluation of a war’s justice “to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good” (2309), does it then give the government a “blank check” to pursue whatever course it deems necessary? What is the role of public opinion, or even international opinion, in recognizing a war’s legitimacy?

Catholic thinkers and others continue to wrestle with these and similar questions to craft a theory of just war that meets the post-September 11 reality.

“In this debate, the middle may turn out to be the cutting edge,” Jesuit Fr. Drew Christiansen, the editor of the Jesuit magazine America, has observed. “It is there we find people wrestling with the complexities of church teaching, rather than simply overthrowing the tradition or using theology to bless war as an instrument of policy.”

Post-Mortem

It's official: The Democratic Party does not understand political discourse.

Note what I said. I'm not saying that they don't understand issues. Or media theory. Or public relations. Or grassroots organizing. I'm suggesting that amidst the recriminations and soul-searching, the Democratic Party needs to think about more than their strategies. They're going to need to do some thinking about how they communicate and what their communication needs to do.

What I'm suggesting requires a level of abstraction in thinking about the relationship between politics and culture. Communication creates culture. Politics generates communication. Politics shapes culture by communicating. That is why we study political messages and speeches, also called "political discourse."

One of the important things to understand about political discourse, though, is that it includes more than Crossfire or the editorial page of the New York Times. As University of Colorado professor Gerard Hauser has argued, political discourse is often "vernacular," meaning that occurs constantly and everywhere, from shopping malls to bumper stickers, as people come to terms with the events in their lives.

Of course, pollsters tell us that average Americans don't care about politics, except every four years or so, when they are coaxed up to the polls like so many sheep. Hauser, though, argues that the disengagement pollsters find comes from the fact that they only look at polls. His "vernacular voices" don’t speak in statistics.

When we step away from the polling, he says, and we look at homes and churches, Internet chat rooms, talk radio, Weblogs and scores of other situations, we find politics happening. Howard Dean understood this, but his campaign couldn’t translate it into action because the people he found weren’t reliable voters.

Nevertheless, Hauser’s disenfranchised publics are important. For decades, they have been arguing in barber shops about their leaders, like neglected children quarrelling over adults who ignore them. If they can be located and tapped, they represent an extraordinary reserve of political power.

This election spoke in a deeply vernacular voice. Here in Pittsburgh, I heard stories of people whose political yard signs were stolen and whose cars were vandalized because they had the wrong bumper sticker. Near the election, two boys were suspended for changing the sign in front of their school to support John Kerry. While rebellious, these stories reflect a passionate political sentiment we often miss. In a way, those petty crimes were politics in disguise.

It's not that campaign commercials and newspaper endorsements aren't important. Hauser argues that they are. It's just that, from Hauser's perspective, media events become artifacts regular people interpret alongside their conversations with the people they know. John Kerry's performance in the debates was important, but as it turned out, it was not enough because it spoke to the needs of the media elite and the educated classes who enjoy nuance, not the plain middle of America, who want to be spoken to simply.

George W. Bush's rhetorical strength is his ability to speak to plain people plainly. This ability is crucial because it is the language his public uses everyday. They are simple people who work and live and die in small towns with strong and simple values. They live by common sense.

I do not mean that Bush's supporters are unintelligent, nor do I mean that political discourse should speak to the lowest common denominator. Political communication, from the days of Aristotle, has always aimed at helping people make decisions about important, but often complicated, things. Rhetoric makes the ideal concrete, and the best rhetoric deals with complexity in ways regular people understand and experts respect. This is difficult, but not impossible. If the elite left finds Bush incapable of making a coherent argument, it could be because Bush is a rhetorical one-trick pony. It could also be because he isn't talking to them and never will.

Bush's public forms around values issues like abortion and homosexuality because those issues are incredibly concrete. Unlike economic issues, which seem these days to be like predicting the weather, abortion and gay rights deal with real people and real situations. Terrorism reflects real fear.

Kerry's strongest issue was the Iraq war. Iraq, at least in my conversations with the people I know, presented an extremely difficult problem, and if there wasn't a sense of unease at the beginning, there was one as time went on. This was also an incredibly concrete issue, and it will continue to be one as more and more Americans come to know people who are fighting and dying there.

The problem, though, was that Kerry never spoke about the war or anything else in a concrete way. Moreover, his silence and fumbling on moral issues--his incomprehensible response to the abortion question at the end of the second debate reflected this problem--also prohibited him from crystallizing into a candidate that people could understand and talk about. From the start, the campaign was a referendum ON Bush and ABOUT Bush but never FOR Kerry.

Early this summer, some friends asked me what Kerry needed to do to win. I said that he needed to tell an alternative story to the one that Bush was telling. Bush's campaign told a story of warfare against terrorism and other moral forces threatening civil society. His story percolated into a variety of forums: A prominent local pastor, I heard, preached that the election was a struggle for the fate of Western civilization and suggested that a vote for Kerry was essentially a vote for the anti-Christ.

Kerry's story had to deal with the same issues and deal with the same past. But it needed to move into a new direction toward hope. Now, I know that Kerry and Edwards both proclaimed that "Hope Was On The Way," but they never told anyone what that hope actually was. Hope was a term standing out there in space, a Platonic form caught in the ether. It lacked critical power. It never crystallized around an image that allowed them to address terrorism in a realistic way while dealing with education and fiscal responsibility and that still made us want to get out of bed in the morning. It never spoke any of the values of justice and equality that drove the Democratic Party throughout the middle of the twentieth century.

Instead, we got a media blitz featuring a tired hero from a war we would rather forget. Kerry based his campaign around an image shattered by Karl Rove in about five minutes, no matter how much lying took place. When the image was gone, there was nothing more to do, and Kerry's campaign sat in stunned silence for three months as Bush redefined him. Only Bush's poor performance in the debates deterred his reelection, but only among independents. Bush's plain-speaking public always distrusted those smart-talking Yalies anyway.

The issue for the Democratic Party in the next four years is to recover a sense of purpose and a sense of story. What are you for? Not what WERE you for, but what ARE you for? What is your vision of the future? How does this vision fit with the past? What are its roots in the present? What values do you offer? How to you integrate these values into an increasingly conservative culture? And how do you speak this plainly to people? How do you put this in people's hands so they can touch it and feel it? How do you make people passionate for you again?

I am not suggesting something pie-in-the-sky. The issues are already there: terrorism, freedom, poverty, racism, jobs, fair wages, the environment. The question now for the Democrats is finding a way of putting those problems together in a concrete way that makes sense to people, elites and non-elites alike.

I am, however, describing something incredibly difficult, which is probably the reason why the Democrats haven't been able to do it. Organized labor is in trouble. People have lost faith in Progress. The religious coalition that drove the civil rights movement and gave Democratic politics its moral high ground has been abandoned. Our society is far more conservative than it was twenty-five years ago. The budget deficit puts significant limitations on what we can actually do. And the leadership has no answers. Recent Democratic candidates have gotten by on co-opting Republican principles and renaming them as their own. Democrats who live out the stories of the past risk becoming things of the past.

Yet, the past has examples. I think of William Jennings Bryan, who talked to farmers about economics by talking about silver and gold. I remember reading about a Depression-era farm girl whose prized possession was an FDR button, because hearing his voice on the radio gave her hope. I think of JFK and RFK, who were able to give people a sense that their problems could be solved.

Heady stuff. Instead of polls and electioneering, the Democrats need to put the art back into political science. It's the vision, stupid. But it's more than a vision. It's a way of looking at and living in the world. It means finding the highest ideals of society and making them live again.