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The War in Iraq
How Catholic conservatives got it wrong

H. Richard Niebuhr once wrote that the first question of ethics is not “What should I do?” but “What is going on?” The Baghdad version of that principle might be, “What the hell is going on?” It is a question that comes to me when I wake up to a car bomb or fall asleep to the sound of mortar fire. I was asking it when a Kurdish colleague took me to see the memorial at Halabja, where Saddam gassed five thousand villagers. I asked it again last March when 223 Shi’a pilgrims died in Karbala. And again when, in the late afternoon of August 1, there were two loud thuds and the hotel shook and I saw the plumes of smoke rising over the buildings north of my balcony, buildings occupied by people I work with. I was asking it the next morning when I discovered that two more car bombs had exploded next to a Christian seminary, killing ten, leaving professors and students shaking and looking in vain for loved ones, and burnt car parts spotting the lawn.

Perhaps my confusion and fear were something like what Tolstoy’s Count Bezukhov was feeling in War and Peace when he surveyed the carnage at the battlefield of Borodino. I don’t know. Maybe it is more like the terror felt by a nine-year-old Iraqi friend who for weeks spent the nights crouched by her window, waiting for the U.S. soldiers to come again, heavy metal blasting from their Humvees, blowing up doors to drag her brothers from their beds and take them off to Abu Ghraib. ...

...Until the October 2004 issue, the last time Neuhaus addressed Iraq was August-September 2003. Even after American soldiers had stood by as Baghdad was looted, he wrote:

Leading up to the invasion and even after its rapid military success, critics were predicting a quagmire, a Somalia-like debacle, a rising of the Arab “street” that would be “a storm from hell,” and, of course, another Vietnam. With reference to civilian casualties, some protesters spoke about a “Middle East holocaust.” None of that happened. In view of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam’s murderous regime, the war probably saved innumerable lives. So the critics were abysmally wrong on almost every point. That must be clearly established on the public record.

I will point to several such statements by Neuhaus and Weigel. The point is not to play “gotcha.” I remain an admirer of their work. Yet it is precisely as a theologian and a reader-and more broadly as a citizen-that I want answers to questions raised by the arguments Weigel and Neuhaus made in support of the preemptive war in Iraq. Those arguments were made in the public square that First Things, especially in light of last month’s presidential election, has done so much to open up to religious language. What I am most concerned with can be reduced to four points. First, Neuhaus and Weigel, like the administration they support, failed in the summer of 2003 to see that the war was far from over. Second, their faith in the competency of the Bush administration, and their contempt for religious leaders who disagreed with them, can now more easily be recognized for what it was: an attachment to a particular brand of neoconservatism overwhelming their attachment to the just-war tradition. Third, their scant attention to how the war was actually conducted (jus in bello), and their disdain for those who pushed questions about noncombatant deaths and proportionality, suggest the need for a reappraisal of the value they placed on the just causes (ad bellum) of the war. Finally, I would argue that their silence since the fall of Baghdad is more disturbing than their mistakes before and during “major combat operations.” The issue is not only, or not simply, that they were wrong. Perhaps they think they were right. The issue, especially in light of President George W. Bush’s re-election, is their current “moral muteness in a time of war.” ...

...For religious leaders to raise questions about civilian casualties and Muslim reaction was, according to Neuhaus, “badgering.” Concerned religious leaders were taking up the politicians’ valuable time. It was as if the only thing for religious leaders to do was to get out of the way and let the responsible parties do their thing. Even Neuhaus and Weigel weren’t really needed. They were simply agents of the ground clearing, trying to minimize the influence of those whiny pacifists so that Bush and the neocons could have a clear and unobstructed path to war. What is striking here is Neuhaus’s apparent faith in the “competent parties,” the same faith proclaimed by Weigel when he wrote of the politicians’ “charism of responsibility.” But sentiment-“I trust my government to try really hard”-is not any kind of argument. “Nobody knows what will happen” is not an alternative to so-called nervous handwringing. Cheerleading is not an alternative to badgering.

The possible consequences of war had in fact been considered day and night for many months. (See, for example, James Fallows, “Blind into Baghdad,” the Atlantic Monthly, January-February 2004.) The competent parties were the Army and the State Department. Their conclusions were rejected, their committees silenced. Of course, we know now not only that the Pentagon ignored the conclusions of the Army (which was preparing for conditions predicted by those naive hand-wringing ecclesiastics), but that the whole invasion and occupation were based on a set of dubious claims, if not outright lies, about weapons of mass destruction and the link to Al Qaeda.

So, what was functioning-like a badly manufactured pair of eyeglasses-for these two Catholic theologians who take rightful pride in their otherwise often clear-eyed view of things? Can there be any doubt that what blurred their perception was their faith in the current administration? Weigel and Neuhaus are right to remind us that there are many things religious leaders don’t know that the government does know. But the lack of resources among those outside of government is, finally, obvious. What is not at all obvious is why this disparity in access to information is a reason for trust instead of skepticism, or even mistrust, toward even democratic governments. If the events and revelations of the last sixteen months have not been enough to tilt the balance toward mistrust, there are also good old-fashioned theological reasons to side with skepticism, and not just toward this administration or other Republican administrations. Still, I remain curious why Weigel and Neuhaus are so oblivious to some other good reasons why conservatives should question what their government says. Since when are conservatives not suspicious of government? Since when is a deep mistrust of state bureaucracies not a defining characteristic of conservatism? ...

...What about Abu Ghraib? There was little that was contingent, in Weigel’s sense, about the abuses that happened there. Those abuses were the predictable result of massive random arrests, denial of fair trials, poorly trained guards, and power shrouded in secrecy. The laws and mechanisms of inspection instituted by the Geneva Conventions are not primarily meant to detect abuses after they have happened. They are meant to foster an environment of transparency and accountability that discourages abuse. They are meant to make impossible the sort of Newspeak spouted by the lawyers of the Justice and Defense departments explaining why Bush’s “inherent constitutional authority” over war made the obligations of the UN’s Torture Convention “inapplicable.” The policies of the officials in charge of military prisons from Guantánamo to Baghdad-random arrests, denial of fair trial, secrecy-are jus in bello issues about which we should have a great deal of clarity. Shouldn’t Christian theologians have great clarity about the injustice of such methods? Contrary to Weigel, that clarity must come before questions concerning the just conduct of war. Or, at the least, the debate about the rules governing the treatment of prisoners suggests that there can be no clear line between the questions of just cause and just conduct. Weigel calls the question of “competent authority” an ad bellum criterion. But one of the lessons of the war in Iraq is that the Bush administration was and is an incompetent authority because of its disregard for the customary rules governing the conduct of war. The refusal to appoint an independent inquiry into prisoner abuse is further proof of this administration’s disregard for just-war teaching....