A Just War?

People don't see men and women in uniform all the time, and so it is not uncommon to get a little stare when I am waiting in line at a checkout, or gas station.  Sometimes people will even initiate conversation.  It's always fun to see where it leads.  I get the "thanks for serving" lines (which I always appreciate), but I also get a few strange looks followed by a line of questioning that goes something like this:

"Are you in the military?"

"Yes, I am in the Air Force."

"Why are you wearing a cross on your uniform?"

"I am a chaplain."

"Do you agree with what our military is doing overseas?"

"Yes."

"How can you be a religious man and support the taking of human life?"

"Well, that's not an easy question to answer.  Do you have a couple minutes?"

For centuries, moral philosophers, military commanders, political leaders, and religious thinkers have wrestled with the ethical problems of waging war.  Is war moral, immoral, or amoral?  Are all wars the same ethically and morally?  Can a Christian participate in war?  Once engaged in conflict, what are the legitimate tools a nation may employ to defeat the enemy?  All of these questions must be answered before the clash of arms.

Christians come to a variety of conclusions concerning these issues.  Just like many other topics, the biblical passages relating to warfare are open to various interpretations (Eccl. 3:1-8; Mt. 5:44; 24:6-7; Acts 10:1-23; Rom. 13:1-7; 1 Tim. 2:2; 1 Pt. 2:13-17).  There is no passage in scripture clearly spelling out a doctrine of war; therefore, believers across the centuries have held positions ranging from pacificism to crusading. 

Just War Theory (JWT) is a moderating position between these two extremes.  As a doctrine of war it has been developed over hundreds of years.  Great Christian thinkers like Ambrose, Augustine, and Aquinas have influenced its formation.  The purpose of JWT is to judge the appropriateness of going to war (just ad bellum), and to govern the conduct of forces in war (just in bellum).  The first five of the following seven principles define the criteria for going to war, while the last two limit how such a war should be fought.

1.  Last resort:  A just war can only be waged as a last resort.  All non-violent options, such as diplomacy and economic pressure, must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.

2.  Sovereign authority:  The resort to war must be undertaken as a public act by a duly constituted authority (a government) on behalf of a community that has been attacked.  Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals, terrorists, mercenaries, or militias.  These entities do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and the outsiders to the society deem legitimate.  A declaration of war ensures there is a consensus of the nation's people.  A nation should state its intentions and the conditions acceptable to end hostilities.

3.  Right intentions:  A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered.  For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see #4).  Other causes which justify war are:  to protect the innocent from unjust attack, to repel force by force, to restore rights wrongfully denied, to stop massive abuse from human rights, and to re-establish an order necessary for decent human existence.  This admits the possibility of justifiable revolution.  Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions:  the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress injury; vengeance, cruelty, or hatred are not legitimate motives.

4.  Just cause:  All aggression is condemned.  Participation in war must be prompted by a just or defensive cause.  No war of unprovoked aggression can ever be justified.  Only defensive war is legitimate.  A war can only be justified if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success.  Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.

5.  Limited objectives:  The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace.  More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.

6.  Proportionate means:  The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered (this is why the phrase "just nuke 'em" is out of bounds).  States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.

7.  Noncombatant immunity:  The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants.  Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians.  The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.  Civilian and cultural property, such as buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, hospitals, and monuments, are not considered to be legitimate targets unless they are being used for some military purpose.  General Douglas MacArthur:  "The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed.  It is the very essence of his being and a sacred trust."

It is easy to read these principles, but much harder to apply them.  You should be reassured by the fact that your military community studies these principles of warfare and works hard to operate within their constraints.  However, there is no guarantee these guidelines will be heeded by all combatants.  JTW is broken at some level in every conflict; however, JTW plays three vital functions:  1) to limit the scope of war, 2) to provide a common framework for diplomacy in matters relating to war, and 3) to give ethical and moral guidance to nations and individuals as they shape national policy and personal conviction.

Paul exhorts us to live at peace with all men (Rom. 12:18), and to pray for those who rule over us so that we may lead peaceful lives (1 Tim. 2:20).  But when the drums of war sound, and peace flees over the horizon, we have a duty to respond to war in a way that is honoring to God at every level, both public and private.  As with most things in life, it requires hard thought and diligent application.  Give it a try yourself.  Consider the current conflict in Iraq and walk through each principle.  It's not easy, but I believe it is possible, even necessary, to wear a uniform and a cross.

For an extensive bibliogaphy and list of online resources see here. 

For a contrary view see here.

Comments

[Matt]

That is quite the checkout line conversation!! Do the people behind you every get angry?

[jon]

Well, they usually stay with me until I start in on the bibliography. Seriously, I am amazed at how little thought people have really given to issues like this. We have a tendency to make decisions at an emotional or political level, and just assume that politicians or those in the profession of arms do the same. There is a foundation of western philosophical thought that our culture is built upon. Unfortunately, few people know, or care to know, about it.

[Joel]

CS Lewis has a good little piece called Why I Am Not a Pacifist. It is in The Weight of Glory. He's always thoughtful.

[Phil]

An excellent short summary on JWT. Before the current work in Iraq, our church studied this on Wednesday nights for several weeks. I have since moved to another city and some of the details were slipping from my mind. Thanks for reminding me.

[Dawn]

Excellent post, though I'll have to respectfully disagree with your conclusion. The US's sovereign authority in Iraq is questionable, and even if we had just cause to be in Iraq, we haven't handled the aftermath very well. From what I can see, we haven't done a good job of bringing peace and incidents like Abu Garib, Guantanamo Bay, and the other 12 soldiers convicted of inproper treatment of prisoners undermine our stated purpose of freedom and respect for the Iraqi people.

[Scott M]

The difficulty I have is in applying these principles retroactively to past wars that we typically consider to be just wars. Many of the military conflicts in the Old Testament seem at face value to be nothing less than aggression (howbeit God-ordered aggression). I'm thinking specifically of the Israelite's siege of the promised land. You could argue that they were just reclaiming the land that was originally promised them. But would you use that same logic if Native American tribes banded together and waged a revolution against the U.S. government for illegally seizing their homeland hundreds of years ago?

A more modern example also comes to mind. The decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan in WWII seems to have broken the proportionate means and noncombatant immunity rules. However, I have heard many historians justify Truman's decision based on the fact that it brought a swift end to the war and protected America and its allies from further losses. I agree that "just nuke 'em" isn't the right call. But I wonder if we are overly cautious when it comes to collateral damage in modern warfare. It seems we let the anti-war lobby and mainstream media rule our military policy. Can you imagine any US president in this day and age daring to use nuclear weapons (even tactical nukes) against an enemy that is armed only with conventional weapons? It would never happen... even if that were the most effective option.

[jon]

Dawn--I deeply regret the atrocities committed by our troops at A. G. and other places, but the exception proves the rule. While most of the media focuses on a handful of misfits, tens of thousand of US soldiers do their jobs honorably every day. They do so because the vast majority of them have a moral foundation upon which to work. Do not buy the media spin on this war.

Thomas Sowell had an excellent article on this topic today in the Baltimore Sun. I'll quote it here in full:

THERE ARE still people in the mainstream media who profess bewilderment that they are accused of being biased. But you need to look no further than reporting on the war in Iraq to see the bias staring you in the face, day after day, on the front page of The New York Times and in much of the rest of the media.

If a battle ends with Americans killing a hundred guerrillas and terrorists, while sustaining 10 fatalities, that is an American victory. But not in the mainstream media. The headline is more likely to read: "Ten More Americans Killed in Iraq."

This kind of journalism can turn victory into defeat. Kept up long enough, it can even end up with real defeat, when support for the war collapses at home and abroad.

One of the biggest American victories during World War II was called "the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" because American fighter pilots shot down more than 340 Japanese planes over the Mariana Islands while losing just 30 American planes. But what if our current reporting practices had been used back then? The story, as printed and broadcast, could have been: "Today, 18 American pilots were killed and five more severely wounded as the Japanese blasted more than two dozen American planes out of the sky." A steady diet of that kind of one-sided reporting and our whole war effort against Japan might have collapsed.

Whether the one-sided reporting of the war in Vietnam was a factor in the American defeat there used to be a matter of controversy. But in recent years, high officials of the Communist government of Vietnam have admitted that they lost the war on the battlefields but won it in the U.S. media and on the streets of America, where political pressures from the anti-war movement threw away the victory for which thousands of American lives had been sacrificed.

Too many in the media today regard the reporting of the Vietnam War as one of their greatest triumphs. It certainly showed the power of the media - but also its irresponsibility. Some in the media today seem determined to recapture those glory days by the way they report on events in the Iraq war.

First, there is the mainstream media's almost exclusive focus on American casualties in Iraq, with little or no attention to the often much larger casualties inflicted on the enemy. Since terrorists are pouring into Iraq in response to calls from international terrorist networks, the number of those killed is especially important, for these are people who will no longer be around to launch more attacks on American soil.

With all the turmoil and bloodshed in Iraq, military and civilian people returning from that country are increasingly expressing amazement at the difference between what they have seen and the one-sided picture that the media present to the public here.

Our media cannot even call terrorists "terrorists," but instead give these cutthroats the bland name "insurgents." You might think that these were like the Underground fighters in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.

Real insurgents want to get the occupying power out of their country. But the fastest way to get Americans out of Iraq would be to do the opposite of what these "insurgents" are doing. Just by letting peace and order return, those who want to see American troops gone would speed their departure.

But the real goal of the guerrillas and terrorists is to prevent democracy from arising in the Middle East.

Still, much of the Western media even cannot call a spade a spade. The Fourth Estate sometimes seems more like a Fifth Column.

[jon]

Scott--Israel was a tool of God's judgement on the idolatrous nations inhabiting Palestine prior to their arrival. The wickedness of the land was so great that God ordained the death of every living man, woman, child, and beast. We don't like to think of God in those terms.

WW2--It's my understanding that you are correct about the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--the cost of invading Japan was deemed far greater.

Precision guided munitions--the care and expense that the US military takes to put "bombs on target" is incalculable. Often at the risk of our men and women in uniform. The way we have waged war over the last couple of decades is a tribute to morality in warfare. The very fact that such a reading list as the one I posted above is found on a US military website is commendable to our military.

I realize my bias in this post (I realize we make mistakes, have errors in judgement, and are sometimes dead wrong), but I am convinced no nation on earth has done more to wage warfare in a moral way than America.

[Dawn]

Jon, I agree with you about the reporting on Iraq, primarily as far as the fatalities are concerned--we have lost surprisingly few in the war, and for the media to ring out weekly death tolls in the tens or less seems ridiculous. This should be a trimuph, as relatively few lives have been lost.

However, high-profile incidents like AG have cost a great deal in terms of public support and international respect; they may be somewhat isolated, but when combined they show a flaw in the way our military works. It may be small numerically--and I do believe that the vast majority of our soldiers are honorable and I respect their sacrifice--but the incidents themselves and Bush's statement to the effect of "according to the Constitution I have the legal authority to suspend Geneva, although I choose not to exercise that authority at this time" reveal that something is wrong in the system. And that does worry me, especially when we are supposedly the bringers of peace and ethical warfare. When it comes down to it though, it's our politicians who have been making dubious decisions and our military that pays the price.