Osama bin Laden “Justice” and “True Grit”
I’ve heard a number of people talk about “justice being done” in regards to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. As I was listening to someone say this on an NPR program the other day, my thoughts wandered to the film “True Grit.” [spoiler alert]
Mattie Ross is a feisty young girl who sets out to capture the man who killed her father, Tom Chaney. After tracking him for days with Rooster and LaBoeuf, she finally has the chance to kill him. And she does. And he falls off the cliff. And she falls back from the power of the gun, down into a hole with snakes, is bit, poisoned, and almost dies. As an audience, you have no time to celebrate his death. It’s completely anti-climactic.
In many ways, this feels similar to the death of Osama bin Laden.
Here’s what we’ve paid so far to kill Osama bin Laden:
- Our way of life as a country has forever changed, in ways we can’t even remember. We live in constant fear of a possible terrorist attack. As a result, our quality of life has decreased.
- We have “spent” over $1 trillion on the wars, some of which my children will be paying for in years to come.
- Thousands of American soldiers have lost their lives 9/11 – almost 6,000 to date.
- Thousands of American soldiers have sustained physical injuries (approximately 32,000). As of the first few months in 2010, 178,000 soldiers had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. It is estimated that 30% of all soldiers have developed mental health problems. This will cost the American public for many years to come in lost wages, productivity, homelessness, medical care, and the loss of the quality of life for all of those soldiers.
- Thousands of Iraqi (8,000-194,000), Pakistani, and Afghan civilians (almost 3,000 killed by pro-government forces alone) have lost their lives.
- One estimate of the financial cost in the search for bin Laden came out today – $3 trillion over the past 15 years.
- Thousands of soldiers lives have been changed in indescribable ways – long-term physical injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, divorce, night terrors, etc. Thousands of parents, grandparents, children, partners/spouses have lost loved ones physically and emotionally. They bear a burden bigger than any financial or lifestyle burden than those of us who have not suffered those losses will ever bear.
And this is justice? Scripture shows a very different picture of what justice looks like:
1 Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD rises upon you.
2 See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the LORD rises upon you and his glory appears over you.
3 Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
(Isaiah 60)
This is what God says will happen to Israel when they begin to act justly. While not directly applicable to the United States, which is not a theocracy, God’s measure of justice should be our only measure of justice as a church. So it begs the question: Is light shining upon this nation as a result of this action? Are we radiant (v. 5)?
In God’s Kingdom, justice is not an expense. You don’t have to count bodies when Biblical justice occurs. You don’t have to cut needed supports to those in poverty to pay for justice. Justice is the presence of something – rightness, goodness, integrity, fairness. Humans flourish when justice is present.
Looking at what we have so far paid on catching bin Laden, are these things present?
To me, it looks more like the death of Tom Chaney than justice. Yes, he’s dead. But we’re in the snake pit.
Just War and Our Wars: Part v, Limited Means
By Austin
So far we have dealt with three criteria for just war: right intention, right authority, and just cause. These three are duty-based requirements, meaning they respond to a violation of someone’s else’s duty (not to be aggressive), and also follow certain non-negotiable duties. The next three criteria have to do with consequences of war.
The requirement of limited means is that the war must not produce more evils than it sought to redress – universally (for both sides). This is a fancy way of saying the a) means must be in proportion to the threat; b) the aim must be to restrain the enemy; c) civilians must have complete immunity; d) it must be shown that the lasting effects of the war are less evil than the status quo.
Like any criteria based on consequences, this is very difficult to determine beforehand. Things are ambiguous, uncertain. How do you account for these conditions? Just War theory is not concerned about that, because it is meant to limit your blood lust in the first place. It makes you fully think through the action – like any good decision-making your mom made you do as a kid!
a) Proportional means: using just the right amount of force to stop the aggression is a fine balance. In Afghanistan U.S. forces did pretty well with this, using Special Forces and local forces and targeting military, communications, and supply areas. Iraq is a different story – “shock and awe” by definition is overwhelming force, and throughout the history of conflict, would never fit this criteria – think Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the German Blitzkrieg, Viet Nam carpet bombing. While Iraq was not near the level of those others, there was plenty of indiscriminate and uncertain bombing, and the levels of destruction went beyond what was necessary in order to defeat the regime.
b.) The aim of restraint: one of the things people are confused about when it comes to the aim of a just war is the goal. According to the tradition it cannot be beyond redressing the wrongs of the government, i.e. it cannot destroy the government or state. In other words – no regime change. Since this was our clearly stated intent in both Iraq and Afghanistan they both fail this test.
c.) Civilian Immunity: this seems simple enough. You shouldn’t target civilians, right? Yet the reality of modern warfare makes this much less simple. The most conservative estimates on the number of dead civilians in Iraq (95,888-104,595) and the deaths in Afghanistan are enough to show that this is not met in either place.
Many will say that it’s not the U.S. that caused these deaths, because both al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban started the insurgencies. Yet Just War theory is not about one side versus another – it’s about the universal consequences of a war. It does not matter who is responsible. This is why insurgency and counter-insurgency is never acceptable according to just war. If there is any possibility an insurgency would occur it would not be justified. And Iraq and Afghanistan are prefect places for this to occur. According to the Rand report on Counter-Insuregncy Operations (COIN) in 2006, it had long been theorized that insurgencies happen in areas where modernization has produced a gap between traditional society and modern power structures that can be exploited by alternative agents – like terrorists. In Iraq it was similar, and Afghanistan exactly the same – a vacuum of power exploited by various groups. This is knowledge that had been there in our defense community, and so it should have been expected in both places (and, as the report says, the U.S.’s superior military has actually created this situation – no enemy sees a viable way to fight us unless they engage in an insurgency).
d.) Lasting Effects: the last requirement is that the lasting consequences of the war are less evil than the status quo. As Andrew Bacevich reports on the most recent Rand report, things indeed are worse, and not just for Iraq, but the entire region. Afghanistan is not much better. Undoubtably there have been good consequences – the Taliban was brutal, as was Saddam. No one would deny that. But this criteria is strict – if it appears that there is a chance of a more evil outcome, it should not happen.
I realize that many conservatives would argue with some of this – David Frum, for one, continues to say things are better after Saddam (apparently he hasn’t read that Rand report – which is a tad more educated on these matters). Moreover, there were some real rosy glasses going into the wars from Bush et al, who assumed these consequences wouldn’t happen. But ignorance is not an excuse according to Just War theory. While no one can see the future, we have an entire intellectual defense industry that did indeed warn of the dangers (not to mention Colin Powell in the administration!).
Just War theory is quite demanding, as can be seen in this criteria. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan meet it. But this is the church tradition. We may want to jettison it to fit our national goals – but we would need to be honest about it.
Just Wars and Our Wars: Part iv, Just Cause
By Austin
So far we’ve looked two criteria of Just War: good intention and legitimate authority. Now comes the real controversial part – just cause.
This is controversial because there is one basic ambiguous criteria for a just cause. This defines a “just cause” as a nation committing aggression in violation of someone else’s rights. There are two components that need clarification:
a. Aggression: the use of armed force violating someone’s rights.
b. Rights: for states, the right to territorial integrity and sovereignty; for individuals within a state, the right to a minimal of peace, security, and self-empowered decision-making.
Aggression is sometimes spoken of in terms of “immanent” threats, i.e. sometimes the aggression is not quite happening, but is expected to happen with virtual certainty in the near future. In the lead up to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we did not have virtual certainty they would be a threat to other country’s rights even if, as the Iraq War Resolution said, Iraq constituted a national security threat. Most just war theorists argue that aggression must be happening for action to be taking place. But if we speak of immanent threats, it must be really immanent. Neither the Taliban nor Saddam Hussein had the capability to imminently threaten the U.S., and despite the “smoking gun” rhetoric, not even the Bush administration had certainty. A “preventative war” is not a part of just war theory.
Yet in terms of rights, both wars might have something going for them. A state has a right to territorial integrity and sovereignty, but it must be a legitimate state. It is legitimate if it does not violate the minimum standards of rights for individuals, rights mentioned above. It could be argued that at the time, both Afghanistan and Iraq were committing aggression against its own populations, and therefore had given up its rights as legitimate governments.
But how do you account for all these minimum standards? Did women in Iraq have less minimum peace and security than a black single mother in Baltimore, or a young black man who’s chances of jail time are disproportionate despite whites committing just as many crimes? And what about the many other nations around the world who were even more aggressive than the Taliban, who at least provided security from warring factions, or Hussein, who despite his repression and near-genocide against the Kurds had presided over a more stable nation than Nigeria, or Sudan? Why have we not decided they are worth invading?
The criteria for what countries are legitimate to attack or not seems, in these two cases, much too subjective to fit a rigorous test of the criteria of just cause. You can do it – and some just war theorists even have – but it seems a bit disingenuous when there are much clearer violations happening around the world, and we seem to have little interest in those. At the point of Iraq and Afghanistan, they would seem more like rhetorical smoke-screens for pure self-interest.
In summary: in terms of a “clear and present danger,” Iraq did not present any case for an immediate threat. Afghanistan may have, in a sense, except that its government did not actually attack us – a non-state actor did. A Just War theorist would perhaps justify the cause by appeal to both government’s aggression toward its own people, but to do so would be the criteria more rhetoric than substantive – after all, what do you do about other countries with similar or worse violations?
So the third criteria – just cause – is ambiguous, and a just war theorist should be careful to put too much weight on it.
Just War and Our Wars, Part III: Authority
Continuing this series on Just War and Iraq and Afghanistan, we come to the third criteria. This states that those engaged in the war must be a legitimate authority – not a group of bandits, not a private vendetta, but a legitimate government.
This criteria is strange, and a bit difficult to apply. Obviously the U.S. is a legitimate government, since it has a constitution, a rule via representative democracy, etc. A majority of the population gave authority to George Bush at the start, and while perhaps the polls were ambiguous about full “support”, that really matters little. Bush had the authority handed to him by the people’s representatives in congress, and he went with it.
But is this really legitimate? According to Just War theory, yes. No matter what international law says (as many in fact thought the wars “illegal”), Just War does not really account very well for competing authorities. When is an authority legitimate? When are “bandits” more than bandits but legitimate movements, such as the contras supported by the U.S. in Nicaragua, or by Iran in Lebanon?
Whatever the complications, though, it’s clear that both Iraq and Afghanistan fit this second criteria. Some may not have liked how it went down, whether there were “lies” or not, still, from a Just War perspective, there is no problem.
Just War and Our Wars: A Serial Reflection, part I
By Austin
Two stories lately have forced me to think about an issue Christians do not seem to be talking much about. Glenn Greenwald’s post over at Salon on the latest false claims by NATO concerning civilian deaths in Afghanistan, and Kathy Kattenburg on The Moderative Voice on Obama’s assassination program, telescopes the issues Christians face in support their government’s “War on Terror” (side note: it’s strange to have a war on a metaphor – but that’s for another post!).
So I’ve decided to do a series on comparing the classic criteria for a “Just War” with this war. Most Christians believe in “Just War” and so it’s very curious that there has been little reflection about our current wars in these terms. Perhaps they are just too long for us, and we’re fatigued. Perhaps the conflict is too complex, so we assume our government knows what it’s doing. Or, perhaps we think the menace, the terrorists, are somehow different, requiring new methods. Yet something terrible is going on in our world, and we are all a big part of it – for good or ill.
So, by way of introduction: Just war theory is the one of three basic positions Christians take on the issue of war. They are:
a. Pacifism: the position of the early church, rejecting war. This is based on passages such as Matthew 5 and Romans 12, against the use of evil to resist evil. Tertullian famously said that when Jesus told Peter to put away his sword on the night of his arrest, he sheathed all swords. Mostly Anabaptists take this position now.
b. Holy War: a position taken by the church under Constantine and Theodosius, and later in the Middle Ages. Modelled on someone like Joshua (although grossly misunderstanding this model), it led to the crusades and various other wars of Christian domination. This is not a real viable position for most denominations now, although it’s clear that a good portion of Christian functionally believe Holy War is appropriate.
c. Just War: this was developed once the Empire had become “Christianized” (although not Christian!), and Augustine was the first major Christian thinker to develop it. It began as a limiting idea during the Holy Wars the Christianized Empire engaged in. It was basically taken over whole-cloth by the Reformers, ending up as confessions in the Augsburg Confession (Lutheran), the Thirty-Nine Articles (Anglican), and the Westminster Confession (Reformed). If you asked a Christian on the street, they would say this is their position…
…except that most Christians have no idea what the position entails. There are six criteria, and this series will examine each criteria, and see whether or not our current wars fit.
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