The problem, of course, is that so many – and neoconservatives, Catholic or otherwise, are some of the worst offenders in this regard – find it impossible to examine an issue with openness and objectivity rather than with mindless partisan loyalty. A political system and climate that enabled Catholics and others of good will and common sense to approach issues without pigeon-holing their perspectives into pre-approved positions would go a long way towards restoring some sanity to Anglo-American political life. Phil Berryman, writing in the Philadelphia Catholic Peace Fellowship newsletter, was driving at just this when he wrote (speaking of the “red-blue,” left-right divide) that “the 'red' worldview that divides the world into 'enemies' and 'friends' and elevates the United States to a privileged position above the other 95% of humanity is profoundly un-Catholic [But] I am not saying that Catholicism is simply equated with a 'blue' worldview. We are poorly served by a political process that simplifies complex issues into overall ideological packages.”
CHAPTER
23
The Iraq War and the Vatican
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Mark and Louise Zwick
THE MOST CONSISTENT and frequent promoter of peace in our time was Pope John Paul II. Specifically, from Iraq War I to Iraq War II, he has echoed the voice of Paul VI crying out before the United Nations in 1965: War No More, War Never Again!
John Paul II stated before the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States that this war would be a defeat for humanity which could not be morally or legally justified.
In the weeks and months before the war began not only the Holy Father, but also one Cardinal and Archbishop after another at the Vatican, spoke out against a “preemptive” or “preventive” strike, declaring that the just-war theory could not justify such a war. Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran said that such a “war of aggression” is a crime against peace. Cardinal Renato Martino, who used the same words in calling the possible military intervention a “crime against peace that cries out for vengeance before God,” also criticized the pressure that the most powerful nations exerted on the less powerful ones in the UN Security Council to support the war. The Pope spoke out almost every day against war and in support of diplomatic efforts for peace. Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, at the time President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity and the highest ranking U. S. prelate in Rome, sharply criticized the U.S. government's push for military strikes on Iraq, saying the war would be morally unjustified and a further alarming example of increased global use of violent force. Vatican officials suggested that such a war would be illegal. John Paul II sent his personal representative, Cardinal Pio Laghi, a friend of the Bush family, to remonstrate with the U.S. President before the war began. Pio Laghi said publicly at that time that such a war would be illegal and unjust. The message: God is not on your side if you invade Iraq.
After the United States began its attacks against Iraq, on one of the few occasions in which the U. S. secular media picked up the comments from Rome, FOX News reported the immediate comments of the Holy Father made in an address at the Vatican to members of an Italian religious television channel, Telespace: “When war, as in these days in Iraq, threatens the fate of humanity, it is ever more urgent to proclaim, with a strong and decisive voice, that only peace is the road to follow to construct a more just and united society,” John Paul said. “Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of man.”
As talk escalated about a U. S. attack on Iraq, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, began stating unequivocally that “the concept of a 'preventive war' does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” His comments had been published as early as September 2002 and were repeated several times as war seemed imminent.
Cardinal Ratzinger recommended that the three religions who share a heritage from Abraham return to the Ten Commandments to counteract the violence of terrorism and war: “The Decalogue is not the private property of Christians or Jews. It is a lofty expression of moral reason that, as such, is also found in the wisdom of other cultures. To refer again to the Decalogue might be essential precisely to restore reason.”
Cardinal Ratzinger noted that the preparation of a new shorter, simpler version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church would probably include revisions to clarify the section on just war, as the official version had done against capital punishment in a civilized society. Ratzinger heads up the Commission to write the new catechism. In an interview with Zenit on May 2, 2003, the Cardinal restated the position of the Holy Father on the Iraq war (II) and on the question of the possibility of a just war in today's world:
There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a “just war.”
Americans were largely unaware of the depth and importance of the opposition of Church leaders to an attack on Iraq, since for the most part the mainstream media did not carry the stories. In the same way, many Americans were unaware that Pope John Paul II spoke against the first Gulf War 56 times, since media in the United States omitted this from the coverage on the war.
In the past few years, Catholic neoconservatives have been attempting to develop a new philosophy of just war which would include what they called “preventive war.” George Weigel has published major articles defending this position since 1995. First Things magazine published his articles and editorially agreed with this point of view. The George W. Bush administration used these writings to defend the strike against Iraq.
Shortly before the war began, through the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, President Bush sent Michael Novak to Rome to try to justify the war to the Pope and Vatican officials. Since with one voice Rome had already publicly rejected the argument for a preventive war, Novak took the approach that a war on Iraq would not be a preventive war, but a continuation of a “just war,” which was Iraqi War I, and actually a moral obligation. He argued that it was also a matter of self-defense, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was an unscrupulous character, and therefore it was only a matter of time before he took up with al-Qaeda and gave them such weapons.
Novak did not succeed in convincing Church leaders – in fact, some commentators reflected that his efforts might have had the opposite effect. Novak's credibility in this argument was perhaps undermined by his employment at the American Enterprise Institute, heavily funded by oil companies, some of whom began advertising in the Houston Chronicle for employees to work in Iraq even before the war began. Administration officials denied for months that the goal of the war on Iraq was related to oil. On June 4, 2003, however, The Guardian reported the words of the U.S. deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz (one of the major architects of the war). Wolfowitz had earlier commented that the urgent reason given for the war, weapons of mass destruction, was only a “bureaucratic excuse” for war. At an Asian security summit in Singapore he this time declared openly that the real reason for the war was oil. Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where weapons of mass destruction had not been found, the deputy defense minister said: “Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”
One eloquent, perceptive commentator described the neoconservatives' new just-war theory as corruption, rather than development, of dogma, noting that there was some considerable irony in the Pope's biographer and trusted confidant, George Weigel, arguing against the Pope that a war on Iraq would be just according to new “developed and extended” just-war principles, while the “rebellious,” ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X, using old, undeveloped and unextended just-war principles, argued that a war against Iraq would not be just. Those who had carefully read Weigel's papal biography, however,
would not have been surprised at his opposition to John Paul II's unflagging efforts toward the avoidance of a war that would cause so much suffering to the Iraqi people and the deaths of many American soldiers, as well as further inflame mistrust and hatred of the “Christian” West. In what was in many ways a glowing biography, Weigel delivered a devastating attack on the Pope for his diplomatic failure to join forces with the first President George Bush and the United Nations in conducting the Gulf War. In his book Weigel declared that both the Holy Father and the Vatican had lacked the “rigorous empirical analysis” to present and apply the just-war theory to that particular war, and dismissed the repeated appeals for peace immediately before and during the war as “not meeting the high standards set in the previous twelve years of the pontificate.”
Violations of just-war principles in the attack on Iraq abounded. Bombing included such targets as an open market and a hotel where the world's journalists were staying. While most television and newspaper reports in the United States minimized coverage of deaths and injuries to the Iraqi people, reports of many civilian casualties did come out. CBS News reported on April 7 stories of civilians pouring into hospitals in Baghdad, threatening to overwhelm medical staff, and the damage inflicted by bombs which targeted homes: “The old, the young, men and women alike, no one has been spared. One hospital reported receiving 175 wounded by midday. A crater is all that remains of four families and their homes – obliterated by a massive bomb that dropped from the sky without warning in the middle afternoon.” The Canadian press carried a Red Cross report of “incredible” levels of civilian casualties from Nasiriyah, of a truckload of dismembered women and children arriving at the hospital in Hilla from that village, their deaths the result of “bombs, projectiles.” Only much later would the scandal of the abuse of prisoners of war by U. S. soldiers be made public. Reportedly, many of those prisoners had simply been swept up off the streets of Iraq, another example of the suffering of innocent bystanders during the war.
John Paul II sought to distance the Catholic Church from George W. Bush's idea of the manifest Christian destiny of the United States, and especially to avoid the appearance of a clash of Christian civilization against Islam. Zenit reported that in his Easter Sunday message of 2003 John Paul II “implored for the world's deliverance from the peril of the tragic clash between cultures and religions.” The Pope also sent his message to terrorists: “Let there be an end to the chain of hatred and terrorism which threatens the orderly development of the human family.”
At the Ash Wednesday Mass in 2003 John Paul II referred to the root causes of war and terrorism, emphasizing the theme that peace comes with justice, as he had so often pointed out before: “There will be no peace on earth while the oppression of peoples, injustices and economic imbalances, which still exist, endure.” He insisted that changes in structures, economic and otherwise, must come from conversion of hearts: “For the desired structural changes to take place, external initiatives and interventions are not enough; what is needed above all is a joint conversion of hearts to love.” On several occasions the Holy Father mentioned that in order to address the scourge of terrorism world-wide, there must be progress in peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestinians.
Catholic World News quoted the Latin-rite Bishop of Baghdad, Bishop Jean-Benjamin Sleimaan, as saying in the Italian daily La Repubblica that the Pope's high-profile opposition to a war on Iraq has helped to avoid a sort of Manichaeism that would set up an opposition between the West and the East, in which Christianity is linked to the West and Islam to the East.
The success of John Paul II's efforts to distance the Catholic Church from any “crusade” against Islam or clash of civilizations was apparent in al-Sadr's request that the Vatican mediate talks with the United States in the August 2004 standoff between U. S. forces, together with those of the provisional government the U. S. had set up in Iraq, and Shiite Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's militia at the holy shrine in the city of Najaf. The United States government apparently rejected this idea, continuing to present al-Sadr as a radical who was unreasonable, refusing to recognize that there might be any validity to his opposition movement which rejected a government which was not democratically elected and inadequately represented the Iraqi people. As it turned out the revered Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was apparently able to solve the crisis.
In his 2004 World Day of Peace message the Pope called for a reform of the United Nations to strengthen it in order to avoid war. That message expressed the heart of his philosophical and theological perspective on war and peace: “The end never justifies the means.” Even the traditional just-war theory had been construed and misrepresented by many governments to justify wars over the centuries. The “end” in so many cases has been power, domination, and increased wealth, achieved through the means of violence.
The Vatican has made very clear its tremendous commitment to peace and its sound rejection of the idea of expanding the just-war theory. The statements of the Holy Father against war especially give Catholic Workers much encouragement in their pursuit of the means of nonviolence. The Holy Father falls into the tradition of Dorothy Day, and one can only imagine her joy.
THE EDITORS' GLOSS: On September 12, 2002, President Bush asked the UN General Assembly, in reference to Iraq: “Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? … We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced.” A year and a half later, when it was more than clear that the WMD and al-Qaeda charges were essentially devoid of substance, neoconservatives like George Weigel scrambled to piece together a persuasive justification for the war in Iraq. On April 21, 2004, he asked himself this hypothetical question: “… if you knew then what you know now, would you have made the same call?” His answer:
We know some things now that we also knew then. We know Saddam Hussein was in material breach of the “final” UN warning, Resolution 1441; his formal response to 1441 was a lie. We know he had the scientists, the laboratories, and the other necessary infrastructure for producing weapons of mass destruction [WMD]. We know he was seeking long-range ballistic missiles (again in defiance of the UN) to deliver biological, chemical, and perhaps nuclear weapons.
This obsession with UN requirements is hypocritical at best, given the willingness of both Bush administration officials and its supporters (like Weigel) to ignore the more binding statues of the UN: that is to say, its founding Charter. References to resolution after resolution (not to mention the oil-for-food “scandal” which sent neocons into orbit because Saddam and others allegedly had the temerity to ignore the requirements of a UN-managed program) ring a little hollow when regime-change advocates ignore the Charter's Article 2, which reads: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” As international law scholars Nicole Deller and John Burroughs make perfectly clear (in this expanded and updated iteration of an article originally appearing in the Winter 2003 Human Rights), it is the Charter that governs relations between nations that have signed and ratified it, and the force of any Security Council resolution must always be understood in light of the document of positive international law that gives those resolutions whatever force they possess.
So how credible is it for Bush and Co. to run roughshod over the UN Charter and then maintain that their regime-change operation was based upon their unilateral enforcement of UN decrees? “Hypocrisy” is not even the half of it.
CHAPTER
24
The United Nations Charter and the Invasion of Iraq
………
John Burroughs, J.D., Ph.D., and Nicole Deller, J.D.
THE UNITED STATES' formal claim that the invasion of Iraq complied with international law relied on United Nations Security Council resolutions. In a March 20, 2003, letter to the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte asserted that coa
lition forces had commenced military operations in order to secure Iraq's compliance with disarmament obligations laid down by the Security Council in a series of resolutions beginning with resolution 687 of April 3, 1991, and culminating in resolution 1441 of November 8, 2002.1 The underlying, substantive rationale for the war was the emphatic U.S. articulation of a novel doctrine of self-defense articulating a right to take preemptive military action against threats arising from possession or development of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons coupled with links to terrorism, “even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack.”2
Taken on their own terms, both U.S. rationales have been fatally undermined by the post-invasion failure to discover significant programs to develop nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and missiles, stocks of chemical and biological weapons or materials, or Ba'athist regime links to global terrorism.3 The collapse of the factual underpinnings for the rationales should not obscure an essential, larger point: the doctrine of preemptive war, and the related assertion of a right to enforce Security Council resolutions on disarmament, are contrary to international legal constraints on use of force, traditionally known as jus ad bellum, and now embodied in the United Nations Charter.
The UN Charter is a treaty of the United States, and as such forms part of the “supreme law of the land” under the U.S. Constitution.1 The Charter is the highest treaty in the world, superseding states' conflicting obligations under any other international agreement.2 Adopted in the wake of World War II and proclaiming the determination “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” the Charter established a prohibition on the use of force to resolve disputes among states. Article 2(4) bans the threat or use of force (1) against the territorial integrity of a state, (2) against the political independence of a state, and (3) in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. The Charter contains two exceptions to the prohibition, authorizing the Security Council to use force on behalf of the United Nations to maintain peace and security, and recognizing the right of self-defense against an armed attack. These are the only bases for legitimate use of force generally accepted in present-day international law.
Neo-Conned! Again Page 50