Month: January 2007

An Unjust War II

Iraqwathiqkhuzaiegetty

One moral aspect of the Iraq war that seems to me to have been under-estimated is the ultimate, moral responsibility of the United States for the thousands of civilian Iraqis murdered under U.S. occupation. Yes, obviously, the vast majority of these deaths were not at the hands of U.S. forces. Yes, obviously, Iraqis – Sunni and Shia – bear responsibility to some extent. But the laws of warfare – the moral guidelines for just warfare – insist that an invading and occupying army is responsible for the basic security of the population under its care. We broke it; we own it. The violence that has taken so many did not happen immediately. It grew slowly, with forewarning. It took off after the bombing of the Samarra mosque last February. All of it was foretold; and many urged passionately for more troops to maintain order from 2003 onward. The president and his war-criminal of a defense secretary heeded not a word. They sent no more troops. They allowed one of the most brutal civil wars in modern history to gather pace under America’s watch. The blood of 34,000 Iraqi civilians last year therefore finds its way onto the hands of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. By refusing to fight a serious war, to commit enough troops for security, and to adjust as circumstances shifted, they let these innocent people die by the thousands, and they have abandoned those who risked their lives for us to scenes from Hieronymus Bosch.

The damage the conduct of this war has done to America strategically is profound. But to my mind, by far the deepest damage has been to the idea of America, to the decency of America, and its reputation for responsibility in world affairs. From authorizing torture to the acquiescence in mass murder, this president has stained the honor of this country and the West. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said days after the invasion, as the chaos first emerged. Wrong. In a country with a serious government or occupying power, stuff doesn’t happen. And it is a total abdication of morality and responsibility to say it does.

(Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty.)

Debating Sam I Am

Sanddune

Today, I'm responding to the first post in a blogalogue with Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith" and, most recently, "Letter To A Christian Nation." You can read his opening joust here. Money quote:

Given my view of faith, I think that religious "moderation" is basically an elaborate exercise in self-deception, while you seem to think it is a legitimate and intellectually defensible alternative to fundamentalism.

Read the rest here. My response:

Dear Sam,

First off, same back at you. I found your book, "The End of Faith" to be an intellectual tonic, even when I strongly disagreed with it. It said things that needed to be said – not least because many people were already thinking them – and it said them without cant or bullshit. I was and am grateful for that. And I wrote the religious passages of my own book, "The Conservative Soul," with some of your arguments in mind.

We agree that Islamic fundamentalism is by far the gravest threat in this respect (because of its confort with violence); and that the core feature of what occurred on 9/11 was not cultural, political, or economic – but religious. We agree that a large part of the murder and mayhem in today's Iraq is also rooted in religious difference, specifically the ancient rift between Sunni and Shia. We also agree, I think, that the degeneration of American Christianity into the crudest forms of Biblical inerrantism, emotional hysteria and cultural paranoia is a lamentable development. But we differ, I think, on why we find these developments discouraging.

The reason I find fundamentalism so troubling – whether it is Christian, Jewish or Muslim – is not just its willingness to use violence (in the Islamist manifestation). It is its inability to integrate doubt into faith, its resistance to human reason, its tendency to pride and exclusion, and its inability to accept mystery as the core reality of any religious life. You find it troubling, I think, purely because it upholds truths that cannot be proved empirically or even, in some respects, logically. In that sense, of course, I think you have no reason to dislike or oppose it any more than you would oppose my kind of faith. Your argument allows for no solid distinctions within faiths; my argument depends on such distinctions.

I'm struck, in other words, by the difference between Christianity as it can be and Christianity as it is expressed by fundamentalists. You are struck by the similarity between my doubt-filled, sacramental, faith-in-forgiveness and fundamentalism. We Christians are all as nutty as one another, I think you'd say. And my prettifying up religion as something not-so-crazy or unreasonable therefore may be more irritating to you than even the profundities of Rick Warren or Monsignor Escriva. At least, that's where I predict you will aim your next rhetorical fire. I'm braced.

Here's the nub, I think. You write:

I think that faith is, in principle, in conflict with reason (and, therefore, that religion is necessarily in conflict with science), while you do not.

Agreed. As the Pope said last year, I believe that God is truth and truth is, by definition, reasonable. Science cannot disprove true faith; because true faith rests on the truth; and science cannot be in ultimate conflict with the truth. So I am perfectly happy to believe in evolution, for example, as the most powerful theory yet devised explaining human history and pre-history. I have no fear of what science will tell us about the universe – since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator. I do not, in other words, see reason as somehow in conflict with faith – since both are reconciled by a Truth that may yet be beyond our understanding.

But just because that Truth may be beyond our human understanding does not mean it is therefore in a cosmic sense unreasonable. As John's Gospel proclaims, in the beginning was the Word – logos – and it is reasonable. At some point faith has to abandon reason for mystery – but that does not mean – and need never mean – abandoning reason altogether. They key is with Pascal: "l'usage et soumission de la raison." Or do you believe that Pascal, one of the great mathematicians of his time, was deluded into the faith he so passionately and simultaneously held?

Cheers,

Andrew

An Unjust War?

Here’s a Catholic lawyer’s take on the occupation of Iraq and the execution of Saddam:

[I]n the end, we must live with the reality that our government—acting in our names—managed the execution of Saddam from beginning to end. We invaded. We overthrew the Iraqi government. We dissolved Iraqi institutions. We destabilized the country. We wrote new laws, appointed new judges and prosecutors. We created the legal system that would try him and hear his appeal. We failed to protect Saddam’s defense lawyers—three of whom were assassinated during the trial. We handed Saddam over to a government that we have known to be infiltrated with brutal killers.

My depression and sadness over the execution of Saddam remain. Surely, he was no innocent. But neither are we. We bear responsibility for this latest affront to human dignity.

Gaming The Surge

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One of the fresh tragedies of the Bush Iraq debacle is that the military team now finally preparing to try to calm Baghdad is, by all accounts, superb. I’ve tried to get a variety of experts to say something bad about Petraeus, but to no avail. He has swiftly assembled a team to help him succeed; the new defense secretary is not a flaming asshole, which makes a change from the last six years; the counter-insurgency doctrine championed by Petraeus has already met success in Mosul. If this team had been put together in 2003, we could be looking at a totally different scenario in Iraq today.

But this is not 2003, alas. It isn’t even December 2006, when the advocates of a surge spoke of 80,000 more troops. There is, moreover, no viable national government upon which to premise any serious counter-insurgency effort. Above all, there is no commitment to a serious, indefinite, long-term counter-insurgency effort. Both secretary-of-state Rice and defense secretary Gates have signaled a desire to draw down U.S. troop levels by the late summer; and the Sadr militias can read the papers. As the surge advocates were saying not so long ago: a new push with too few troops and a swift deadline is the worst of all possible options, however talented and well-intentioned the commander.

Petraeus may meet some success, of course, and we should all be praying he does. One perfectly possible scenario is that the violence ebbs in Baghdad in the next few months, as the militias and other insurgents melt away and bide their time in the face of more U.S. troops. Sadr City wil be left largely unmolested. After this lull, the president will declare something that isn’t obvious defeat. And when the U.S. troops depart, we will go back to the chaotic status quo ante. Which is why, I fear, this entire effort is less about the future of Iraq than a short-term domestic political gambit by the president and what’s left of his party. I still want a miracle to happen, of course. But what Bush is devising is the appearance of a miracle, rather than the reality. And he’s using the lives of young Americans to conjure it up.