Chapter 13 - JUST WAR THEORY IN A NUCLEAR WORLD
Roger Ray, D.Min.
So, yes, I came to a conclusion that war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told. And if we think that there are good wars and that, therefore, well, maybe this is a good war, I wanted to examine the so-called good wars, the holy wars, and -- yeah, and take a good look at them and think again about the phenomenon of war and come to the conclusion, well, yes, war cannot be tolerated, no matter what we're told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place. It's not that we're going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we'll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably -- inevitably -- the indiscriminate massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children.
So it's not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. Anyway, all this -- all this was simply to make us think again about war and to think, you know, we're at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we're sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that.
We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that's how movements start.
Howard Zinn speaking at Boston University on November 11, 2009
In the 1997 film, Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon plays a young genius named Will Hunting who was working as a janitor at MIT. At one point he is required to see a therapist, played by Robin Williams who sees the huge potential that Will has. To open the young man's eyes to the reality of the world, the therapist suggests that Will read Howard Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States, because, he promises, it will really blow your mind.
Matt Damon's character may have needed an introduction to Howard Zinn but Matt Damon didn't. Damon actually grew up living next door to the famous historian and he volunteered to be the voice on recorded version of the book. I have met a lot of famous people in my life but I treasure the memory of hearing Zinn in person, first at Missouri State, then at Drury and finally at Harvard where I had the chance to meet him.
When we started Community Christian Church in 2008, the first group study we did was this same book. We spent nearly a year discussing because we wanted to ground our shared life in the painful reality of the nation we have inherited. Zinn died while we were still reading his book together.
The progressive movement doesn't really have a cannon of saints but if we ever do, I want to place the late Howard Zinn's name in nomination. If, as I have suggested, the mission of the church is to speak truth to power, Zinn is certainly the best modern example of doing just that.
I have been saying that there are four primary arenas of concern for the progressive church in the 21st century. The first is poverty and social justice. The second is related to ending racism and prejudice. The third is a renewed concern for caring for the environment. The fourth has to do with advocating for peaceful resolutions of international problems and the avoidance of war.
For centuries any religious conversation about a just cause for war begins with the thinking of St. Augustine as formalized by St. Thomas Aquinas. It is always unfair to try to condense the thought of either of these two giants of church history but for the sake of time, I will boil the tradition of just war to these three points:
1) The war must be waged as a last resort and only by a sovereign nation.
2) The war must have a just provocation and not be motivated by the prospect of gaining profit or power.
3) Finally the war must be fought with a reasonable expectation of success and it must end in peace.
Every war that our nation has been involved in has been sold to the American people as having met these criteria. We always posture ourselves as either acting in self-defense or we are carrying out a police action that stops the abuses of a tyrant. The particular genius of Howard Zinn is in taking a serious historical look at those claims and helping us to see how we have been lied to and manipulated in almost every case.
In his last major address, quoted above, Zinn talks about the use of the belief in a kind of "holy war" to gain public approval or at least acquiescence to our modern military adventures. He describes the American Revolutionary War, the Civil War and WWII as our "holy wars" whose virtue is beyond question. And then he goes on to question the historical memory of each.
We then use those holy wars to justify subsequent wars by comparing, for example, the Nicaraguan Contras to the freedom loving Revolutionary War soldiers of our history or comparing Saddam Hussein, or Manuel Noriega or anyone we decided to stop paying to work for us as being the same as Adolph Hitler.
Zinn points out that, yes, the Revolutionary War gave us independence from Great Britain but was that war really about equality, freedom and independence?
It wasn't for the black slaves, indentured servants, or the women or the landless poor. No matter what high sounding ideals were articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution is a document that established a white, male aristocracy in the former British colonies.
And yes, slavery was ended by the Civil War but was that war really fought to give American blacks liberty and equality? Did they get liberty and equality at the end of the war..... or a generation later, or two, three or four generations later?
WWII did end with the defeat of fascism. So, do we believe that fascism is now defeated? Even our most defensible wars have a much more tarnished halo than we like to believe. You have been told that we dropped atomic bombs on Japan to avoid the greater casualties we would have experienced by having to invade Japan. That is an absolute lie. We had killed a hundred thousand Japanese in Tokyo with conventional bombs just before dropping the atomic bombs. No one ever talks about that and I suspect that most of you didn't know it.
Japan was defeated and ready to surrender before we dropped those atomic bombs. We dropped them to show the Soviets that we had this terrible weapon and that we had the will to use it. Do you believe that everyone in Hiroshima was an enemy to freedom and liberty?
We killed 600,000 Germans with conventional bombs, a 100,000 of whom died in a single night in Dresden. Were all of the residents of Dresden Nazis? The women, the children, the elderly? Were they all Nazis?
We like to think of ourselves as liberators, defenders of justice.... We want to be that city on a hill but, in the wise words of Yoda, it is a very rare thing when wars make a nation great.
At the time the United States launched a war against Iraq, a majority of Americans had either been tricked into believing or they had tricked themselves into believing that Iraq was responsible for the 9-11 attack on the United States.
There was no connection, of course, nor were our weapons inspectors mistaken in their repeated attempts at telling the Bush administration that there were no WMD's hidden in Iraq. It is true enough that Hussein was a bad guy but any kind of intellectual honesty compels us to acknowledge that he wasn't killing Iraqis at the rate that we did for a decade nor can we claim to have, on average, much improved their circumstances.
Earlier this month, Curtis Reeves, a 71 year old retired policeman, shot and killed Chad Oulson in a Florida movie theater because Chad wouldn't stop texting during the movie. Now, you know how annoying it is to be sitting beside someone in a theater, or in class, or in church while they are starring at their phone and texting but whatever punishment may be appropriate for this annoyance, we're all pretty clear that lethal shooting is insane.
Somehow, we are not able to be similarly clear about when our use of military force is an insanely out of bounds response to provocation.
On September 10, 2001, there were "What Would Jesus Do" rubber bracelets being sold on the counters of book stores and gas stations all over Springfield. In an entirely uncoordinated but massively hypocritical gesture, every one of those bracelets disappeared on 9-11 because no one wanted to ask that question anymore nor would they tolerate any corollary questions like, "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"
The moral problem for Americans was that we were not attacked by a nation. If any country could actually have been reasonably blamed, it would have been Saudi Arabia but their government was not directly responsible. Any reasonable military response to 9-11 would have been police action going after terror cells and training camps.
I said at the time and I am repeating now, more than a decade later, that our wars in Afghanistan an Iraq were not wars on terrorism. They were wars of economic opportunity. The waging of war makes some people very rich.
The flow of resources to military industrial corporations slows down when there is not a hot war or at least the threat of one. There are thousands of examples of individual and unit courage, valor, genius and sacrifice from the battlefield. No one should ever fall prey to the ruse that admiration for the contribution of any individual soldier must also necessitate supporting the politicians who made the decision to put that soldier in harm's way.
You will be told that if you support the troops that you must not question the war and that is an outright lie. Sure, if I lost a loved one on the battlefield or if I had left my legs or my sanity on foreign soil then you want to believe that this sacrifice was made in cause of defending freedom.... Who wouldn't want his or her sacrifice honored with such accolades..... but what we want doesn't change the facts.
The inconvenient truth is that most wars are an economic scam. We were told that the proceeds from the oil fields of Iraq would finance our military action there but that was never really the plan. Already, nearly $200 billion in contracts have been given to the corporations that are involved in Iraq, with the largest winner being Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton. Some very sober estimates place the actual eventual costs of these two wars at about $2 trillion.
Did we, with this huge expenditure of human life, financial and natural resources, bring an end to the threat of terrorism?
Again, in any honest estimate, we not only did not put a dent in terrorism, we have succeeded in aggravating the problem and virtually assuring ourselves of future terrorist strikes for the rest of our natural lives.
Probably every peace advocate in the world knows by heart the warnings given by President Dwight Eisenhower against the threat of our own military industrial complex. Most of the time, people mistakenly put together pieces of two speeches delivered by the 5 star general who had become president of the United States. Shortly after he took office in his first term, Joseph Stalin died.
It was then that he delivered a speech about the prospects for world peace in which he said that, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."
Eisenhower was no idealistic peacenik. He was not advocating disarmament or pacifism. But he was pointing out that every dollar we spend on military hardware keeps us from spending that dollar on food, medicine, education and housing.
It was eight years later that the President shocked the world by delivering a farewell speech that concentrated on a warning against the irrational military spending of a coalition between congress and the corporations that build military hardware. He saw this threat growing larger during his presidency as the cold war sent military spending through the roof. He saw it, but he failed to stop it.
Since Eisenhower, Republican and Democratic presidents have both found themselves incapable of reasonably curtailing the power of a congress that is controlled by military industrial interests.
Where has the church been in the midst of all of this? Who are our prophets? There have been a few and some of them were absolutely of biblical stature. But for the most part, the church of the United States has been as much of a silent partner to immoral and illegal wars as were the churches of Italy and Germany during WWII.
As Thomas Jefferson famously said:
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own." (Thomas Jefferson Writings Vol. XIV p. 119)
So here is what I have to say to the progressive church of the twenty first century. Don't ever play the part of a whore for any despot, tyrant or lying chief executive every again. Don't every play dumb or remain indifferent during a time when someone is trying to sell our nation another war.
And even more importantly, we must ask ourselves what peaceful measures can be taken to avoid the kinds of international hostilities that end up in war. Wars are very rarely ideological in nature. They are almost always economic. Beyond all talk about radical Islam, Communism, Socialism or Fascism there is, simply, poverty.
We currently deploy an army of around 200,000 people at a cost of between one and two million dollars per year per soldier, depending upon where they are deployed. We deploy this army to help foster global peace and stability.
Let's just imagine, just for conversation's sake, that we cut that military deployment by 75%. We close all of the bases that were built to fight WWII, pull back weapons that we will never need and radically move our priorities away from the threat of violence and towards creating stability.
Rather than deploying 200,000 soldiers, we could deploy nearly as many teachers, agricultural specialists, doctors and engineers. What if we make it our goal to raise the literacy rate of the world over 90%, make safe water and food universally available and to wipe out malaria, AIDS and polio? It is reasonable to suggest that we could accomplish all of these goals for about one fourth of what we spend on the military so that we could cut our military spending in half, transform the world into a stable and safe place and still have the strongest military in the world for those instances when only a military action can do the job.
There are always people who get very rich off of wars and so the proposals I have just enumerated would not be popular on Wall Street or on Capitol Hill but if they can't find traction in our churches, synagogues and mosques then religion really is a fraud. The program I am suggesting, of diverting military resources to medicine, education, agriculture and infrastructure is not only a workable goal that could create global stability and peace in less time than we have had troops in Afghanistan but, frankly, we would have to be crazy not to do it.
