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"Eleven Concerns About the Justice of the Afghan War"
By Robert Waldrop
Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House in Oklahoma City
Published here with permission
Click Here for a printable version in MS Word format
- There was a rush to military action and a refusal
to negotiate a peaceful resolution prior to resorting
to armed force. Peremptory demands have been made by
our government, backed by the threat of overwhelming
military force, but we have consistently refused to
negotiate with our enemies and did not follow standard
international procedure for extradition of criminal
suspects. In much of the discussion of whether this
war is just, the focus has been on the "right to
retaliation;" somehow the failure of the US government
to thoroughly exhaust peaceful means is often ignored
as if there was some kind of "American Exception" to
the traditional teachings on just war.
- The war is being fought with a conspicuous lack of
proportionality. Five thousand US citizens have been
killed, and several large buildings damaged or
destroyed. As grave as this evil was, in response the
US has put more than seven million people at risk of
starvation and death this winter, and that is not a
proportional response. We have gravely hindered an
effective aid campaign and to cover our sins, have
resorted to a propaganda aid campaign that is almost
insulting in its utter inadequacy in the face of the
need. Will we feel better once we kill seven million
Afghan non-combatants because of our quarrel with
their government?" We dishonor the memory of those
heroes who lost their lives on Sept. 11th and also our
heritage as a free people by putting the Afghan people
in such terrible danger.
- The US is waging a propaganda campaign of
deliberate demonization and depersonalization against
our enemies. "We can't negotiate with them because
they are evil." A similar campaign is also being
wielded against those who disagree with the present
war policy. It is said that pacifists are allies of
evil and cooperators with wickedness. People opposing
the war are referred to as traitors and disloyal. The
anti-war position is regularly distorted and ad
hominem attacks on anti-war commentators and
personalities are commonplace. If the pro-war folks
are in possession of the truth in this matter, they
should not need such crude propaganda tactics to
support their position. Truth does not need to be
defended with lies and demonization; such are more
commonly found to be defenders of falsehood.. This
situation suggests a government which is unsure of the
depth of support in the population for this war.
- It is debatable whether our military strategy and
tactics have a serious possibility of success.
Afghanistan has not been successfully conquered since
the days of Alexander the Great. The US leadership
seems possessed with an arrogant hubris reminiscent of
some of the more tragic episodes in the annals of
government. The connection between putting the Afghan
civilian population at risk with a bombing campaign
and finding and arresting Osama bin Laden has not been
fully established by the US government and its allies.
It is also not at all clear how this bombing campaign
provides protection to US civilians here in the
national homeland.
- Civilians may never be morally targeted, but as we
destroy the infrastructure of Afghanistan, we are
effectively targeting the civilian population,
whatever our stated intentions may be. The waging of a
version of modern "total war" - which is to say,
destruction of dams, water treatment systems,
electrical generation and telecommunication
facilities, bombing of roads and bridges - is the
deploying of a weapon of mass destruction against the
civilian population because they are dependent upon
that infrastructure for their lives. If roads and
bridges are destroyed, food cannot be moved from farms
to markets and thus to people. If water systems are
destroyed, disease will run rampant in the civilian
population. I do not see justice in these tactics, but
rather oppression.
We cannot find refuge in the argument popular with
adolescents, "I was forced to do this," although this
seems to be the sum total of the US government's
position. We are the most powerful nation on earth,
nobody forces us to do anything. If we destroy a
country, it is because we with calculation and
deliberation decided to do this.
As we began the bombing of Afghanistan, we knew what
the effect of our military campaign would be on the
existing humanitarian assistance campaigns, and yet we
went ahead with our military action, international law
forbidding interference with such programs and the
protests of aid organizations notwithstanding. Some
have noted the complicity of others in this developing
catastrophe, but here again the sins of others do not
justify our conduct. The fact that others cooperate
with us in committing evil does not make our actions
good when our national policies have in fact often
been gravely objectively disordered. We should know
better.
- There is no excuse for taking an innocent life.
None. Under any circumstances. By anybody. Anywhere.
No exceptions. Not even for Americans. Yet, every day
we kill the innocent in Afghanistan. In response, the
general attitude of the population and the government
seems to be, "war is hell, therefore, collateral
damage is regrettable but inevitable." But - are we
not supposed to be America the Beautiful - the
richest, most powerful, and smartest nation on earth?
Do we not claim to be God's special friends? Is not
our land covered with churches, temples, mosques, and
synagogues of every possible description and creed?
Does not all this lay a heavy burden of moral
responsibility upon us? The teaching of the Church is
utterly clear and without any ambiguity: the outbreak
of war does not repeal the moral laws of God and there
is no excuse for taking innocent lives.
It was wrong for Al Queda to attack the World Trade
Center and kill all of those innocent people, none of
whom deserved to die that awful day. But it is equally
wrong for the US to attack and kill civilian
non-combatants in Afghanistan, none of whom deserve to
die because of our quarrel with Osama bin Laden or the
Taliban government. If our leaders cannot find a way
to not kill civilians in Afghanistan, they do not
deserve their positions of power and should resign or
be impeached so that others who are more competent can
take their places.
- The US has completely evaded any examination of our
national conscience before commencing this war.
Indeed, the suggestion that this is necessary is
viewed as somehow disloyal or even treasonous. "Now is
not the time to talk about those things," we are told.
The Catechism clearly teaches that governments have a
grave responsibility to pursue peace, yet questions
can and must be raised about the objectively
disordered basis of many of the foreign and economic
policies of the United States government. The
President says to the world "all terrorist camps must
be closed," yet we continue to operate the School of
the Americas at Ft. Benning, whose graduates are
collectively responsible for the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of innocent civilians, including many
Catholic priests and nuns such as Archbishop Oscar
Romero of San Salvador. In one country alone -
Guatamala - 200,000 innocent civilians have been
killed at the behest of the United States government,
included in this toll are many children. Their blood
is a bright scarlet badge of shame on our national
honor and it speaks poorly of our personal and
national commitment to morality that we refuse to
acknowledge this wickedness, repent, make reparations
for these national sins - and then change our
behavior.
It is a matter of public record that students of the
United States Army's School of the Americas were
taught to harass religious and labor leaders, to
arrest the relatives of "inconvenient" witnesses in
criminal proceedings, to blackmail government
opponents, to torture their captives, and to kill
political opponents. Sauce for the goose is sauce for
the gander, as they say, should not those responsible
for these terrorist crimes be arrested and tried and
punished? Do we not hear the cries of their victims
for justice and remembrance?
Behind the scenes, there are often "secondary" or
"indirect" terrorists, who by their concrete personal
actions help create the objective circumstances that
make terrorism possible and attractive. There is no
resolution to the problem of terrorism that
concentrates solely on the direct terrorists and
avoids scrutiny and justice for the indirect or
secondary terrorists. Here we should listen to Pope
John Paul II when he speaks of the dangers of
"structures of sin" in the world.
The politically correct response to all this is that
the events of Sept. 11th were an ahistorical
interruption of normality by an anomalous random evil.
There was no chain of causality leading to the
attacks, or so we are told. But wisdom tells us,
"those who do not learn from the mistakes of history
are doomed to repeat them." Without denying the moral
faculties or the personal guilt and responsibility of
any of the direct perpetrators, we are fools if we do
not examine the events that led to the attacks: the
more of this we understand, the better our chances of
avoiding such evil in the future, and also, our
chances of countering the ideological appeal of
fascist terrorism.
- This war seems likely to provoke even greater evils
and disorders than the one it proposes to resolve. I
have already mentioned the seven million civilians at
risk of starvation, there is also the real possibility
of the further radicalization of Islamic countries,
the spread of war throughout the Middle East, and the
development of this conflict into a grand clash of
civilizations and desperate battle for declining
resources. Both sides are threatening to use nuclear
weapons, thus destroying the "fire-break" which has
endured since the last use of nuclear weapons in
combat over Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War
II.
- There is a persistent suspicion that this war is
not simply a war against terrorism, that it is in fact
the latest episode of a decade long undeclared war for
control of the oil reserves of the Middle East. With
only 6% of the world's population, the United States
uses 25% of the world's annual oil production.
Domestic production peaked in 1970, and has been
declining ever since, and nothing is going to rebuild
that domestic production because the oil simply isn't
here to be found and exploited. Thus, we must import
60% of our annual oil consumption. As domestic
production will continue to decline, the proportion of
our consumption which must be imported will increase.
The center of gravity of world oil production is thus
shifting towards the Middle East as fields in
Venezuela, Nigeria, and the North Sea age and begin to
decline. Every year for the rest of the 21st century
we will be more dependent upon this unstable part of
the world for our petroleum supplies.
Yet, there is no national conservation program
designed to reduce our dependency upon these
authoritarian regimes for our national prosperity,
even though we know that some of the funding for the
Al Queda terrorist network is ultimately oil money.
Rather than do the heavy work of abandoning our
dependency upon fossil fuels, we seem to prefer to use
our military to secure our access to oil, thus
subsidizing with blood our gluttonously wasteful
patterns of oil consumption. Afghanistan has no oil,
but it sits astride promising pipeline routes that
could bring oil from the Caspian sea to markets in the
west, and Osama bin Laden himself is Saudi Arabian. If
we weren't so dependent upon oil, the affairs of that
region would not be a matter of national interest to
the US. Here one can sense the behind the scenes
influence of corporate money advocating its special
interests even though this puts the common good at
grave long-term risk.
More importantly, where can we find in the teachings
of the Church any moral justification for waging war
to ensure cheap access to an industrial commodity and
thus to subsidize and encourage gluttony and greed -
two of the "seven deadly sins"? Where can we find a
"right" to build our prosperity on the blood of
others? Do we think that because we are presently
rich, we therefore have the right to kill other people
in order to ensure that we stay rich? All of the oil
in the Middle East is not worth the life of one
innocent child, but we have already killed a half
million kids in Iraq, and are poised to add to our
toll in Afghanistan. Where is the justice in this?
- It has been said that the government is obligated
to respond with force to protect its legitimacy, and
indeed, civil protection is a grave responsibility of
government. Yet, it is not at all clear how bombing
the civilian population in Afghanistan makes us more
secure here at home. And if it is the responsibility
of the government to defend the nation; we do well to
raise questions about the effectiveness of the Afghan
War as a defensive tactic for the US national
homeland.
The events of Sept. 11th were a terrible indictment
against those responsible for defending this nation
"against all enemies, domestic and foreign." American
taxpayers pay more than $350 billion per year for
"defense" and "intelligence," and have born such heavy
expenditures for many decades, yet, an enemy is even
so able to wreak such havoc right in the middle of two
of our major cities. Where was the Air Force? The
Navy? They weren't at home, protecting the United
States, they were off somewhere else at the behest of
a long line of presidents and congresses possessed
with an urge to meddle in the affairs of other
nations. We hear that the CIA and the FBI don't work
well together, and neither of them trust local law
enforcement. What can we say about public servants who
put bureaucratic turf battles ahead of their duty to
protect and serve?
Shouldn't we start asking questions about the prudence
of our aggressive forward deployment of military
formations, as well as our financing of authoritarian
regimes, dictators, and corrupt local elites who have
cozy relationships with US corporations? We financed
Osama bin Laden, and look where that has gotten us.
Why is there no call to domestic accountability for
those elected and appointed officials who have failed
in their duty?
Questions also must be directed towards the airline
industry. There has been much discussion since Sept.
11th about how the purpose of airport security in the
past has been to reassure customers, not to actually
find weapons. Here we see corporations putting profits
before people, with terrible consequences for the
entire world. Why is there no call to domestic
accountability for those who have put corporate
profits ahead of safety and security and their duties
to the nation? Where were those responsible for
regulating the behavior of these corporations?
- Jesus' teaching in the Gospels seems rather plain
and unambiguous. "Love your enemies, do good to them
that hate you." Over the centuries, much ink has been
expended in a perpetual explanation of how Jesus
really didn't mean what he said in this Gospel. But
Jesus did not say, "Love your enemies, unless of
course you need their oil or their land, in which case
it is OK to kill them." No, he simply said, "Love your
enemies." I do not see any love for our enemies in the
present bombing campaign against Afghanistan.
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