On Just War, Religious Groups Still Divided

c. 2006 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly (UNDATED) At Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., students in professor Brian Stiltner’s class on faith and justice marked the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq still arguing about whether the war was morally justified. “I think we are there for a good purpose,” argued one student. […]

c. 2006 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

(UNDATED) At Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., students in professor Brian Stiltner’s class on faith and justice marked the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq still arguing about whether the war was morally justified.

“I think we are there for a good purpose,” argued one student. “Something is getting done, even though it’s taking a long time.”


Another student disagreed. “We went in with the wrong intentions, and us being there now _ it’s just making the situation worse.”

Stiltner admitted his own ambivalence. “I personally took an ethical position in favor of the war at the beginning,” Stiltner told the class, “but have since had serious misgivings and think it was ethically not justified.

“I’ve been wrestling with those issues,” he added. “I think part of ethics is wrestling.”

As U.S. and Iraqi casualties continue to mount and some fear the conflict may slip into civil war, ethicists and theologians continue to assess the military action, debating whether a pre-emptive war can be a just war and what ethical principles should guide the decision of when to leave Iraq.

Three years later, ethicists remain just as divided over whether the Iraqi conflict constitutes a “just war” as when the U.S. invaded Iraq.

“I think it’s really important with this complex war and long engagement to keep looking back at what we knew then, what we know now, and asking whether we’d have made the same decision,” Stiltner told the PBS program “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.”

The widely accepted moral framework for the discussions is the just war tradition, a set of teachings that began with St. Augustine in the fourth century and were further developed by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.


In order for a war to be considered just, it must meet the following criteria: There must be a just cause; it must be declared by the proper government authority; there must be a right intention, and a probability of success; war must be a last resort; and the means used should be proportional to the desired ends.

Three years ago, the Rev. Richard Land, head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, supported an attack against Iraq, saying it met the criteria for a just war. Three years later, he stands by that judgment.

“You have to have a just cause,” he said. “Our cause was not to conquer Iraq but to liberate it. It was to defend ourselves and our allies from the possibilities of future attacks from a man who has shown a willingness to cooperate with and to train tens of thousands of terrorists, and to give them safe harbor.”

Land believes the benefits being achieved in Iraq morally outweigh the destruction being caused. “I think it’s one of the nobler and finer things we’ve done as a nation, and I think that it’s going to, in the end, produce a government in Iraq and a society in Iraq that is far more conscious of human rights, and far more conscious of human freedom,” he said.

Ethicist Shaun Casey of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., disagreed with Land then, and continues to disagree with him now.

“I think the facts on the ground have confirmed those of us who felt like the war in fact would not be just,” Casey said.


“They (proponents of war) said our cause was just, and they argued under a global war on terrorism that there were weapons of mass destruction, that there were links to terrorism, which we now know are not true,” Casey said.

William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, also argued against the war three years ago. He now says the failure of events to bear out the Bush administration’s case for going to war has created “a loss of moral credibility, and therefore of moral authority, and therefore of operational capacity in future foreign policy.”

Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago Divinity School says for her, the fact that weapons of mass destruction have not been found “is not a trump card that obliterates all the other moral and ethical considerations that I think we need to keep in the mix.” She supported the war three years ago and still believes it was morally justified.

She said at the time of the invasion, not enough emphasis was given to “what we loosely call `humanitarian intervention.”’

“In the classic just war teaching, it’s protecting the innocent from certain harm,” she said. “The data on what was going on in Iraq (under Saddam Hussein) was horrid and overwhelming.”

Elshtain acknowledged the casualties of the war are “a terrible cost” but insists proportional good has been won. She said she would reassess her position if the situation doesn’t stabilize.


A key element in the debate has been the Bush administration’s embrace of what it calls “pre-emptive war.” Galston said there is an important distinction between a pre-emptive war and a preventive war.

“A pre-emptive war is justified when there is a demonstrable, imminent threat,” he said, adding that there is “a long history of just war theory” that supports the right of a nation to act against threats of that sort. He said, “There is very little theory or modern moral argument that supports a preventive war when the threat is more distant in time and more speculative,” as he believes was the case with Iraq.

But Elshtain argued if the just war tradition is about sparing the innocent from certain harm, “that means you’ve got to act before the harm comes. And that means prevention in certain situations.”

Countered Casey, if “the threat or the enmity between two nations was in fact just cause” for war, “then the entire globe becomes a bloody sea of chaos.”

Less certain in the just war tradition is how to end the conflict and what to do afterward. Elshtain believes the tradition needs to be expanded to include what she calls a “just occupation.”

“I think that our obligation as an occupying power is to do our very best to see if we can leave Iraq with something like that (a peaceful, ordered society) … knowing that it finally, to sustain it, is not going to be our job over the long run. That has to be their job,” she said.


There is vigorous debate about the ethics of exiting Iraq. Some analysts believe the U.S. presence in Iraq is the only thing keeping the country from civil war, while others argue that it’s actually fueling the violence.

Galston said he did not know which of the two claims was the case, but said “our policy-makers have an urgent duty to assess the credibility of those claims and to shape their actions in accordance with them.”

According to Land, the Iraqis play the key role in the decision. “If they told us to leave, we’d leave. They don’t want us to leave,” he said, adding that the U.S. has a “moral obligation” to continue standing with the Iraqi people.

Casey said the just war ethic requires an occupying power “to minimize your footprint there. You want to get out as soon as you can, whenever you intervene.”

(A version of this story first appeared on the PBS program “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.” This article may be reprinted by RNS clients. Please use the Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly credit line.)

KRE/PH END LAWTON

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