Was the Iraq war just?

The upcoming election in the United States is the business of Americans. What politicians Americans choose to elect is not for anyone else to decide, although we will all be interested in the outcome.

What I do feel is open for discussion, however, is a decision the sitting President made to invade Iraq. What any country does in the world internationally is the business of everyone worldwide, because we all have to share this globe. As most people who know me can tell, I filter just about everything I observe through a patina of my Christian faith, and I intend this essay to do just that to the question of the Iraq war.

The Christian scriptures contain passages that, in general, express a preference for peacemaking, but do show specific instances where a war appears to be sanctioned. The reason for this of course is that the Bible is an extremely complex scripture, crafted over a thousand years, including periods of time when Israel and Judah were at real risk of being extinguished by the great kingdoms of the Iron Age.

But you can look to faith for guidance on this issue. There is a traditional approach to understanding whether a war can be considered just in Christian tradition. It draws on scripture as well as the didactic thinking of some of Christianity's greatest minds, in particular St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. This approach is called the Just War doctrine.

1. the damage inflicted by the aggressor (ed: the party upon which war is to me made) 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. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition" (CCC 2309)

1. the damage inflicted by the aggressor (ed: the party upon which war is to me made) on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

There can be little doubt Saddam could once have been seen as a threat of this magnitude. Shortly after nearly devastating Iran in the 1980s, Iraq declared that Kuwait was a province of Iraq, and conquered it. Since the cold war, the world community has made it a matter of simple international law that no country can just go in and conquer a county for spoil. And yet this is exactly what Iraq did.

However, the first Gulf War and the aftermath clearly ended this threat. Iraq's Republican Guard was destroyed by that war, and weapons inspectors that came in after the war emasculated Iraq's ability to create and work with illegal weapons of mass destruction. Although the administration at current claims it was unaware that Saddam had lost this WMD capability, the administration's own statements belie this claim. In February, 2001, Colin Powell said, “And frankly (the UN sanctions) have worked. (Saddam) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”

Did this intelligence change on September 11, 2001? It is unlikely. No reliable information has ever demonstrated that Iraq had involvement in that terrible day, and there is even less evidence to suggest that the terrorist attack mysteriously improved Iraq's military capabilities; quite the contrary – with Iraq under increased scrutiny, Saddam could not sneaze without it being noticed.

In short, the threat to either America or the world community was nearly non-existent, and, despite the hype that followed, known to be so. Iraq was certainly a minor irritant to Israel. Iraq provided pensions to the widows of terrorists who suicide-bombed Israelis. But an issue of such local scope should have been Israel's to resolve. Thus, in my opinion, theBush administration fails this first Just War test.

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

The war began in March, 2003 after only a preliminary weapons inspection report in February, 2003 by Hans Blix. The Anglo-American coalition did not wait for the final report of the weapons inspector, because they did not want to wage a war in the scorching summer heat. In short they timed the war for the most convenient time to fight it. They did not wait to see if diplomacy and inspections would resolve the Iraq issue. They pressed ahead when it was logistically most feasible.

In the runup to war, Condoleeza Rice complained that the cost of keeping troop pressure on Iraq during the inspections process could not be maintained indefinitely. So money was a factor in the decision to go in as well (especially since the neo-conservatives pressing for war were convinced Iraq would be an easy victim that would roll over and quickly free up the troops for other activities.)

In short, the call to go to war did not come as a last resport. “All other means” were not waited out - the war was waged before it ceased to be convenient. Test two of the Just War doctrine fails.

3. there must be serious prospects of success;

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not like conventional war strategies; as he planned the war with his CENTCOM generals, he continued to challenge them to come up with less costly ways of winning the Iraq war. General Eric Shinseki had told Congress an Iraq occupation would require hundreds of thousands of troops, but the civilians in charge of the Department of Defense were not spending much time on what would happen after the war – they wanted to come up with innovative ways of fighting the war itself, and seemed to consider the aftermath question to be a boring puzzle they could handoff to the military afterwords, perhaps.

As we now know, the war itself was won easily. However, the coalition did not have enough troops to occupy Iraq, because clever planning and tactical skill can't make up for the raw manpower needed to own and run a country. Immediately after the war, Iraq's museums, containing much of the history of humanity's original civilization in Mesopotamia, were looted, including the historical ten commandments (Hammurabai's code.) It was the worst archaeological and historical loss since looters burned Alexandria's famous library two thousand years ago. Within months, an insurgency was bombing at its pleasure, striking even inside the Green Zone. That continues to this day. The lack of security in post-war Iraq has negated any intangible “freedom” benefits the Iraqi people have allegedly gained. Women are at tremendously increased risk of rape. Families are shot and killed at checkpoints by demoralized and nervous troops. And the unsteady provisional government may not be able to run elections throughout Iraq as planned, because it does not control the entire country. Insurgents have retaken or destabilized about 20% of Iraq's area.

The DOD's own experts were telling the civilian leadership that they needed to do some postwar planning, and that they needed the troop strength to do it. Instead, ideological decisions were made, such as disbanding the entire Iraqi government and throwing them out of the street, robbing the coalition of needed governing expertise and creating new insurgents. The experts were not listened to, and a less than successful quagmire resulted. Test three of the Just War doctrine fails.

4. the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

The coalition, much as it vaunted its smart bombs, was not particularly humane. Smart bombs or not, death still fell from the sky, dropped from the safety of out of reach airplanes.Ten thousand civilians died in this war, more than three times the casualties of September 11, 2001. The number who died in the war was greater than the number Saddam would have persecuted in the same time. And Iraq may continue to be unstable for years, something it would not have been under the authoritarian rule of the Baath party. Potable water and electricity remain issues. Considering how little evil was actually eliminated, given the dearth of WMD, can we really say the Iraqi people deserved to have such suffering inflicted on them? Test four fails.

In conclusion, the risk proposition posed by Iraq was far from lasting, grave, and certain. all other means of putting an end to the threat had not been exhausted, and in hindsight were more effective than thought. Despite the early military victory, the war in Iraq has brought more chaos than success, and the war has resulted in more evil (in terms of the insurgency and aforementioned chaos) than would have been the case if peaceful means had been pursued. Every single test of Christianity's traditional Just War doctrine was failed by the Bush administration.

Christian voters have many different issues to consider when they go to the polls. Concerning the war, they should consider how fall short of the Christian ideal this administration fell, when they enter the voting booth.