The Question of War

Forum, St. Matthew’s
Jan 20, 2008

When you look solely at the 1990’s, of the casualties of war around the world, there were 2 million dead in Afghanistan,,,, 1.5 million dead in Sudan;  some 800,000 butchered in 90 days in Rwanda; half a million dead in Angola; a quarter million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria; 10’s 0f thousands lost in a border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the fighting in Colombia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, southeastern Turkey, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and the Persian Gulf War (where perhaps 35,000 Iraqi citizens were killed).  In the wars of the 20th Century, no less than 65 million citizens have perished, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed.  Are these figures inevitable?  Are they justifiable? Or are they lamentable? Shameful?

In other words what do you think about war? As a human being? As a Christian?

I cannot tell you what to think or how you ought to think.  That is not my purpose.  I simply want to raise the question and stimulate some conversation.

I cannot even tell you what the Church thinks, because the Church thinks with no one unanimous view about a subject such as this.

As to what I think as a human being, I think that war is usually the result of conflicting interests.  In other words, I do not think t6hat it is a matter of conflict of ideas or ideals.  To reduce it to a simple scale, look at two children.  One of them has a toy.  The other one is inordinately fascinated by the toy.  He decides that the toy is the one thing above everything else in the created universe that he wants and he goes out to get it.  If the other child will not give it to him,. And he normally will not, the child who wants it proceeds to take it, and some sort of fight will ensue until mother or father comes to the rescue and separates the two combatants.

The same thing happens on a larger, national scale.  A large nation, for example, wants the products of a dependent country, say oil, because it is in need of such resources.  So long as that country is in some sense dependent upon it, that resource becomes a priority.

On the other hand, the smaller nation wants independence.  It wants to stand on its own two feet.  It doesn’t want to be told what it must do.  There is a conflict of interest, and it is settled either by negotiation or in some cases by war.

In our own case it wars settled by war in 1776.

Interests, not ideas or ideals, are at the bottom of most wars.  I am not saying that ideas and ideals are never involved, because they are.  In 1095, Pope Urban urged Christendom to go to war for the Holy Sepulcher.  It was then in the hands of the Turks.  They desecrated the holy place and pilgrimages to it were almost impossible.  Western Christendom responded with all its eleventh century religious devotion, and I am sure that was perfectly sincere and honest; to rescue the holy place from infidels was a real incentive to hundreds who left their homes in the West for the Holy Land.  But there were other factors involved  The Byzantine emperor needed help from the West against the Turks who were threatening him.  The Italian cities were looking for new markets in the East.  The lords and nobles of the West were looking for territorial expansion, and the ordinary man was looking for relief from boredom, and the excitement of travel and loot induced more than one person to set out on a Crusade for Christ.  It was interests, not ideals, which were at the bottom of the Crusades.

That is what I think as a human being and, to my way of thinking, it is essential to straight thinking about war to get it separated from the idea of holy wars, religious wars, of which there are none.  That doesn’t mean that religion doesn’t play a part in some wars.   We have this element called jihad which many groups of terrorists are calling for as a rationale for war.  But don’t forget, we, too have an element of jihad.  President Bush is not shy  about warning other nations that they stand with the U.S. in the war against terrorism or be counted with those that defy us.  This too is jihad.  We find ourselves going to war not against a state but a phantom.  The jihad that we have embarked upon is targeting an elusive enemy.  The battle is never ending.
A friend of a friend of mine in Vero Beach, Fla. commented in an editorial about this type of religious fundamentalism.  He said, “ religious fundamentalists whether Islamic or Christian seem to have little moral difficulty using political power to force others to live by their rules and at the extreme even justifying the use of force (including deadly force) against those they believe are the enemies of their god.  Regrettably the link between religious fundamentalism and terrorism is not all that surprising if we look at the history of religion, particularly in the Western world.

I want to be clear about the way I use ‘terrorism’ because it is easy to get carried away with imagery and dilute the full impact that word should bring to mind.  I mean it in its most precise meaning – the use of deadly force against others in an attempt to achieve political GOALS, FREQUENTLY UNDER THE COVE OF A RELIGIOUS OR OTHER IDEOLOGICAL RATIONALE.”

It is when the interests are clothed in royal robes of ideals that they become deceptive and dangerous.

As a Christian, I think that war is wrong.  I think that it is evil.  Not because one of the commandments says, Thou shall do no murder, although I take that commandment seriously.   Not because Jesus says that it is wrong, because there is no place in the New Testament where he says in so many words that war is evil.  Put up your sword, he says in one situation;  I came not to bring peace, but a sword, he says in another.  I think it because the Christian life will not tolerate it.  In the Christian view of life, the human race is a family.  It is a difficult family, to be sure, like all families that are large, with many recalcitrant, rebellious members, but it is a family.  Every member of the family is a child of God for whom Christ died and, if you look at the human race from that point of view, the idea of war as a way of handling our conflicting interests by wholesale slaughter is immediately outlawed. 

As a Christian I think that war is evil because the Christian view of life will not and cannot include it.  War is wrong, always.  As a way of settling a conflict of interest, or defending an ideal, it is wrong.  It is evil.

As a Christian, I would go on to say that wrong as it is, war is unavoidable at times.  Evil is much more mysterious than we think.  We talk about the problem of evil, but we seldom talk about the mystery of evil.  Evi9l, and I am not talking about evil that is initiated by people like us, not by diseases, droughts, famines over which we have little control, evil is sometimes not the deliberate intention of any one person or any group of people, but the accumulation of mistakes and failures. 

On September 14th, 3 days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Congress granted the president the right to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks.”  The senate passed the resolution unanimously.  There was in the house, only one dissenting vote, from Barbara J. Lee, a democrat from California, who warned that military action would not guarantee the safety of the country and that “as we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.”

Joan Chittister, Benedictine nun and author, said in an interview about Congress’s resolution.  “I was not happy about that.  I know the Democrats in Congress were outvoted on the war, but they could have spoken against it.  They should have been out in the streets with placards.  They should have gone home to small towns across the nation and expressed their deep opposition to what was happening.  Instead they repeated that silly old saw ‘We have to get behind our president in time of war.’  We do not elect a Congress ‘to get behind a president.’  We elect Congress to get behind the Constitution.  I know of no other period in the history of this country when Congress abdicated its role the way it has over the last 6 years.  Before George Bush was elected, I would have argued that something like this couldn’t happen in American politics.  But it has happened.  We have dismantled the checks-AND-balances system.”

Her interviewer asked her, “Why do you think that the Democrats in Congress capitulated?”

She responded: “I believe you’ll find corporate greed and political lobbyists at the bottom of it.  I think there was a great desire to move into Iraq to control it.  Why?  First, we wanted to make sure that Iraq’s oil did not go any place we didn’t want it to go, even if we weren’t going to take it all.  Second, we wanted a military foothold in the region so our troops could reach all points in the Arab world at any given moment…So here we are with big basses in the Middle East now, from which fighter planes and supply planes can take off in an instant and within a half an hour reach any country in that part of the world.  Do you think that doesn’t make Arab countries nervous, given what they’ve seen happen in Iraq?”

War is not always the deliberate intention of any one person or any group of people, but it is the accumulated mistakes, in judgment, in decisions, and if left to go on, the result is disaster on a worldwide scale.

In 1941 , soon after we entered WWII, Blayton Morrison wrote in the Christian Century: “Our country is at war.  Its life is at stake.  It is our necessity, our unnecessary necessity, therefore a guilty necessity……Our fighting, though necessary, is not righteous.”

From my point of view , war is unavoidable at times, but it is never pardonable, and this is a paradox that some find impossible to grasp.  But it is a paradox that I accept in regard to all the rest of evil in the world; no matter how tender-hearted I may be toward those who have been the cause of evil, I still can’t tell them what they did was right and I still wish that we could learn to avoid such things in the future.

As a Christian, I can express my opinion both in public and in private.  It6 is my duty to do it.  If I do not agree with what the Administration is doing, I can exercise my influence in the polls.

I can refuse to fight, but I cannot disassociate myself from the nation.  There are many things that the nation does that I do not approve. This is inevitable.  My Christian faith gives me the courage to look at things realistically; not only in reference to this question of war but to all questions; and in this particular question to see clearly that the basic issue of war is a matter of conflict of interest and not a conflict of ideas or ideals.

My son, Jesse, found himself in a situation in which he considered disassociating himself.  He presently is in Sri Lanka as part of a development team to build a free broadcasting network.  There is a war going on there between the Sinhalese and the Tamil Tigers (we get very little in our news about this conflict) He met with some Islamic officials, mosque elders, in the North where most of the conflict is and wrote in his blog: “ I felt a little sheepish telling them I was an American, in fact, I wanted to say Canadian.  I also felt compelled to apologize for my government, my country and lots of things.  This island is such a world apart that some of the animosities I would guess are present in the Middle East do not factor in here.  Guilt is a weird thing, and sometimes it just shows up without any explanation.  I think I haven’t dealt with my own misgivings about what the U.S. has been up to in the last 8 years and beyond.  And I think it is easy to say, well, it’s not like I did those things.  But as I get older and I see more of the world, and my country’s affect on it, I kind of feel more and more like, I am responsible.  If we don’t think about our footprint, personally and collectively, then I think we are all to blame in a sense.  In turn we are all capable of doing something positive too.