Moral Obligations: Living Out Catholicism in Today's War

In the wake of 4000 deaths in Iraq, it is clear to all of us that the upcoming election will bring a president who will make changes, whether it be Barack, Hilary, or John. Each candidate has his own ideas about what Bush did wrong and how we can fix what is happening in Iraq. The question is: who do you trust to take care of Americans and Iraqis, and to do so in a Catholic, moral way?

Let's focus, for a moment, on Obama and McCain. In Peter Wehner's article, Obama's War, he traces the history (from his apparently conservative, but quite researched, point of view) of Obama's comments about this war. (Because the article is lengthy, I picked out a lot of quotes for you all, as well as used some bold print to help out rushed readers.) Wehner begins by reminding us of the candidate's insistence that he has been 100% consistent on this issue, and responds:

Obama was not yet in the Senate, and the Senate had not yet voted to authorize the war, when, in a speech delivered in Chicago on October 2, 2002, he announced his view of the matter. Granting forthrightly that the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein had “repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity,” and that he “butchers his own people,” Obama nevertheless held that, despite all these well-proven crimes, Saddam posed no “imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors.” What is more, he added, “I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”

Thus, we see an early difference in opinion from his current war policy. I don't want to spend too much time discussing this inconsistency (a minor point, for this post's subject), but I will quickly show you more of Wehner's research on the matter:

Almost as soon as the war began in March 2003, Obama had second thoughts about his opposition to it. Watching the dramatic footage of the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, and then the President’s speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, “I began to suspect,” he would write later in his autobiographical The Audacity of Hope (2006), “that I might have been wrong.” And these second thoughts seem to have stayed with him throughout the entire first phase of the occupation following our initial combat victory. As he told the Chicago Tribune in July 2004, “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage.”

He inched toward a somewhat bipartisan, and in a sense, "open-minded" view, when Obama, "in September 2004, in the heat of his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama said (according to an AP report) that even though Bush had 'bungled his handling of the war, 'simply pulling out of Iraq 'would make things worse.'"

In fact, he began to speak like Gerard Powers, former director of the Office of International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (of America Magazine's FANTASTIC article, Our Moral Duty in Iraq), when Obama "re-stated his belief that, having gone in, we had an obligation to 'manage our exit in a responsible way—with the hope of leaving a stable foundation for the future, but at the very least taking care not to plunge the country into an even deeper and, perhaps, irreparable crisis.'”

Powers, speaking from a Catholic perspective, says: "The Iraq intervention may have been an optional, immoral war; but given the U.S. government’s shared responsibility for the ensuing crisis, its continued engagement is not an optional moral commitment."

Obama's brief statement, and Powers well-written article, state well my concerns about this candidate's (and his current female foe's) war policies. How are we to trust a president who is willing to walk out on a country that Bush's America left unstable and dependent on U.S. protection, when it is clear we now have an obligation to help these people?

Whether or not we, as individuals, agree with the war, it is happening, and now that we are in, we have a responsibility to deal with it. Period. Walking out on the people of their country is selfish and unCatholic, in my humble opinion. What about their need for protection? Do you, as a Catholic, trust a president who is willing to send troops home (yes, to their struggling American families- my Dad's a vet too) at the expense of the lives of the unstable Iraqi people? And to what purpose does this bring the deaths of the 4,000?

Rather than flee with relief that war is over, we need to consider the morality of our presence and our possible departure. Powers' article articulates this far better than myself:

Others calling for U.S. withdrawal acknowledge the ethics of exit, but give too much weight to an ethic of efficacy (Is U.S. intervention working?) over an ethic of responsibility (What do we owe Iraqis?).

Efficacy must be part of any moral analysis of Iraq. At a forum sponsored by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute, the ethicist Michael Walzer, a vocal opponent of the Iraq intervention, argued that “we are consequentialists for the moment. Neither staying on nor leaving Iraq is a categorical imperative”.

Unlike many in the debate, Walzer is clear about the breadth of moral obligations that exist in Iraq and thus the range of consequences that matter morally. According to Walzer, “We have to figure out a strategy that produces the least bad results for the Iraqi people, for other people in the Middle East, and for American soldiers."

Arguments for withdrawal tend to give most weight to what is good for U.S. soldiers (and, I would add, U.S. interests). It would be morally irresponsible not to take into account legitimate U.S. interests, not least our moral obligations to the small percentage of Americans who are helping to shoulder the burden in Iraq, and the moral costs of spending more than $2 billion per week on the war while other pressing needs go unmet.

Moral clarity about what we owe ourselves is often not matched by moral clarity about what we owe Iraqis. The Catholic Democrats and presidential candidates who rally antiwar support by equating a withdrawal of U.S. troops with “ending the war” in Iraq define the “ought” mostly without reference to the Iraqi people. Proposals to de-authorize and stop funding the war and to set strict timetables for redeployment might “end the war” for Americans. But would they end the war between Sunnis and Shiites? Would they end the insurgency, the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks or the widespread criminality in Iraq?

Powers, the Catholic writer, also comments on the efficacy of Barack and Hilary's plans:

The leading Democratic presidential candidates are clear that protecting civilians is not a U.S. obligation, despite abundant evidence that Iraqi security forces cannot do it alone. The inadequacy of such minimalist goals is clearer when tied to early deadlines for withdrawal. Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, argues that such deadlines would force Iraqis “to look into the abyss” of a civil war.

Instead, he says we have four responsibilities, which have not been addressed by the Democrats candidates we remains nameless or by the current president in practice:

(1) not to end all political violence, but to ensure that an Iraqi government can maintain a reasonable degree of security for the whole country and minimize the threat of chaos or civil war;

(2) not to impose a Western-style democracy, but to facilitate establishment of a stable, fairly representative government that respects basic human rights, especially minority rights;

(3) not to promote a U.S.-style capitalist economy, but to restore Iraq’s infrastructure and a viable economy that serves Iraqi needs, not U.S. interests, especially not U.S. oil interests; and

(4) not to stay without the consent of a legitimate Iraqi government, or, lacking that, the United Nations.

He best summarizes his ideas in this way:

The United States has seriously failed Iraq; but past failure need not beget future failure, nor does it absolve us of our obligations. Given what is at stake, the Bush administration (and its successor) must do more to put Iraqi interests first, to commit the necessary resources (especially for protection of Iraqi civilians and for reconstruction), to engage Iraq’s neighbors and the international community, and to pursue new approaches that offer a better chance of meeting U.S. obligations.

Thus,

Those who say that it is too late and too costly to fix what we have broken must not forget what we owe Iraqis, lest they too readily impose on Iraqis alone the risks of a serious humanitarian, security and political crisis if the U.S. withdraws too soon. The antiwar position must find a better balance between an ethics of efficacy and an ethics of responsibility, between meeting U.S. needs and interests and Iraqi needs and interests.

And Powers ends his article:

The moral question is: What policies and strategies best serve the interests of the Iraqi people?

Thus, now that we are immersed in this lesser publicized "Catholic viewpoint" on the war, Wehner continues discussing this subject, quoting Obama, then commenting in his own words:

"As commander-in-chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad."

To wonted illogic this added both ignorance and disingenuousness. By his statement Obama may have intended to project a certain tough-mindedness in dealing with new threats, but as Senator John McCain pointed out in a devastating riposte, al Qaeda is already in Iraq. That is why its forces there are called “al Qaeda in Iraq” (or, to use the terrorist organization’s own nomenclature, “al Qaeda in Meso-potamia”). What is more, if Obama had had his way in 2007, our troops would have been out of Iraq by March of this year, leaving it naked to its enemies. If we were to withdraw them in the early months of an Obama presidency, al Qaeda in Iraq could be counted on not only to form “a base” but to take over large swaths of the country. Having overseen such a withdrawal, and having thereby unraveled all the gains of the surge, Obama would face the prospect of ordering them to return under far more treacherous conditions of his own making.

A frightening thought? Taking into account even Wehner's quite unnecessary biases (I think it weakens his trustability-which, by the way, is not a word), it seems clear to me that American foreign policy under Obama is not as safe and peaceful for the American and, in particular, the Iraqi people as we might think when we watch (and yes, sometimes giggle) at his "O-BAM-A" commecials, his celebrity endorsements, and his hopeful and inspiring speeches.

Put simply, the war is not that simple. We can't "just leave" because we are "so sick of it," as we hear so often. There are lives at stake, especially the lives of innocent people in Iraq who are at risk, whether due to Bush or their own leaders' policies, and as Powers established, we are morally responsible for helping these people out. Of course, this does not mean staying in a war for decades, and I don't think McCain, despite out-of-context misquoting and rumors, plans this either.

It means voting for a president that you believe actually knows what he or she is doing, someone we trust to pull soldiers out after creating a more stable place for the Iraqi people. Is this dreaming? Perhaps. But among the three candidates, we must pick one who will be "Catholic" and serve Iraqis with a sense of solidarity and preferential service to those most in need.

Wehner goes on:

The columnist Charles Krauthammer once characterized this disposition as the “broken-telephone theory of international conflict”—i.e., the belief that if nations fail to get along, the fault is to be found in some misunderstanding, some misperception, some problem of communication that can be cleared up by “talking.” In Obama’s case, the syndrome is compounded by unfeigned confidence in the power of his own personal charm to bridge whatever differences may separate us from those who hate us.

Thus, when it comes specifically to Iraq and its implacably hostile neighbors, he refuses even to entertain the possibility that diplomacy might fail, or to consider what steps would be necessary should that in fact happen. [.....] Such willful innocence, in a President, can be lethal.

This piece speaks for itself, I think. We have a responsibility, and we have to live it out, or lives will continue to be lost. Finally, like Powers, he makes a liberal concession:

It is perfectly legitimate to argue, as Senator Obama does, that the war to liberate Iraq was ill-conceived and has cost us much more than it has been worth. It is also perfectly legitimate to argue, as Senator McCain does, that the war was eminently worth waging but that the Bush administration massively mishandled the phase following the ousting of the Baathist regime.

It is another matter entirely to argue that because the decision to go to war was wrong, we should now simply withdraw and wash our hands of Iraq in hopes of starting over. There is no starting over in world affairs. We are where we are, and the next President will have to play, one can only hope wisely, the hand he will have been dealt.

So, as Catholics interested in leading moral lives, the question is: which president is ready to play his or her cards right?