JUSTIFYING WAR
March 1, 2005

by Joe Sobran

     War is bad. Everyone agrees on that, so why do wars 
keep happening?

     Because man keeps thinking up ingenious 
justifications for them. In the first act of 
Shakespeare's HENRY V, the king of England contemplates 
invading France to stake his claim that he's the rightful 
king of France too. He asks the Archbishop of Canterbury 
to judge his claim, warning him to judge scrupulously, 
because a war would mean the deaths of countless innocent 
people. This is sheer hypocrisy on Henry's part, because 
he has already decided to make war on any pretext he can 
come up with; but never mind that for the moment. His 
words are excellent, even if his motives are rotten.

     A wave of democratization in the Middle East -- in 
Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Iraq -- is now 
encouraging supporters of President Bush's Iraq war. "The 
president has been vindicated," they say; "his critics 
were wrong. He has indeed brought democracy to the Arab 
world, just as he said he would. When will the opponents 
of the war admit it?"

     But this misses the point. Spreading democracy was 
only one of the reasons Bush gave for war, and he offered 
it rather late in the game. The chief reason he cited was 
the "threat" posed by Iraq under Saddam Hussein, who 
turned out to be further from having nuclear weapons than 
the other two members of the "axis of evil," Iran and 
North Korea.

     And since when is imposing democracy a justification 
for war? The Founders of this country never suggested 
such a thing; neither did the Christian thinkers who 
formulated "just war" theory, nor any of the great 
political philosophers. The idea originates in modern 
propaganda.

     Countless Iraqis, tens of thousands at least, have 
been killed by American forces. The dead posed no threat 
to us at all. If the war was wrong in the first place, it 
isn't made just by the fact that surviving Iraqis are 
voting. Assuming that democracy is a big improvement on 
dictatorship, it remains true that the end doesn't 
justify the means. If mass murder results in free 
elections, it's still mass murder.

     War is chiefly an abstraction to most Americans, who 
have never lived in a city where bombs were falling, 
children were killed and maimed, water and electricity 
were disrupted, most families had lost sons in combat, 
and normal life was only a memory. How can elections 
warrant inflicting such evils? Would Christ have blessed 
this war? The answers are only too obvious. "Render unto 
Caesar" doesn't exempt Caesar from the law of God -- even 
if Caesar is a professed Christian.

     Let's suppose that Henry V, "the mirror of all 
Christian kings," was in fact the rightful king of 
France, and even that an ancient document had turned up 
to validate his claim. Would that have justified him in 
committing the evils he clearly foresaw -- creating many 
thousands of widows, orphans, bereaved mothers?

     Somehow the numbers themselves obliterate the 
horror. If we knew the name and saw the face of a single 
actual child who would die in the event of war -- let's 
call her Fatima, age six -- we'd find it unbearable to 
wage it. But if we know that thousands of unseen Fatimas 
will die, we ask only whether the war can be justified 
abstractly, in utilitarian terms. As Stalin said, "One 
death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

     It's endlessly frustrating to reflect on, but 
civilized people tolerate in government acts that, if 
committed by individuals, they would condemn as crimes -- 
not only murder, but robbery, extortion, counterfeiting, 
and fraud. The stupendous national debt is only one index 
of the government's habitual criminality.

     When we talk about government, we are usually, 
whether we realize it or not, talking about organized 
crime. Will "society" benefit from higher taxes, new 
programs, even killing innocent people overseas? How 
rarely policy questions are recognized as moral 
decisions. How rarely we see ourselves as implicated, by 
government, in collective immorality.

     Whether a war succeeds in its stated goals isn't the 
right question. The real question is seldom asked: What 
could possibly excuse the deliberate destruction of 
thousands of lives? The modern state itself is a "weapon 
of mass destruction."

     As long as we glorify the wars of the past -- 
particularly the American Civil War and World War II -- 
we can look forward to still more wars, supported by an 
insensate population.

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