Iraq: The Moral Reckoning by Craig M. White (Lexington Books, 2010) is a book I’ve been waiting to read for quite some time. I’ve had the good fortune of meeting its author at my FB site and have gathered enough about his impassioned defense of Aquinas & Catholic intellectual tradition to venture to engage with him on the topic of American “just war” policy in the George W. Bush White House. Very few things in recent memory have angered me more than George W. Bush’s Iraq war, in my view a senseless, barbaric act that’s left most of the Middle East in political and social ruins. It’s the purpose of Craig M. White’s excellent monograph to critique the Iraqi invasion on principles of “just war” theory inspired and justified by Thomas Aquinas.
I believe, however, there’s been a willful conflation of historical and classical conditions that don’t strengthen White’s criticisms of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq as much as the historical grounds alone would. The latter seem to detract from the author’s own conclusions. So why does White refer to Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas at all? Citing the authority of classical authors is, in my view, a suspicious conceptual move the author makes only in order to show any American government wrongdoings must be the result of a failure to conform to a ‘transcendent’ source .“Just war” has been relegated to the status of eternal verity. White says, “In his characteristically organized and compact way, Aquinas...lays out three conditions that must all be met for a war to be just: (1) sovereign authority, (2) just cause, and (3) right intention.” Compelling historical facts must mesh with Thomistic first principles in order to justify the “just war”.
White considers whether the case for “just war” (jus ad bellum) can be met.Like a skillful debater, he offers terms, principles and a clear road map for any discussion of the proper cause and limits of the just war. The first three conditions he names “deontological” (the “morality” of “just war”), the remaining three, “prudential” (its practicalities). The conditions to be met (citing James Turner Johnson), namely, “(1) sovereign authority, (2) just cause, (3) right intention (including “the aim of peace”),(4) proportionality of ends, (5) last resort, and (6) reasonable chance of success” have each to be analyzed and defended as relevant (or not) to America’s decision to invade Iraq. The purpose is to address each of the conditions by examining their legitimacy and offering fair-minded analysis of whether they help anybody to make the “just war” claim. The conclusions of White’s detailed survey of stated principles and actions show him to be a pretty severe critic of Bush’s war.
The deontological or “primary” conditions for “just war” are, to begin, never without objections. For example, the claim that United States as a nation-state is a “sovereign authority” entitled to act as it did when Congress “transferred its authority to the President” is questionable. White says, “According to the currently almost universally accepted understanding of authority in the United States system of government, the action followed the approved forms.” And though White says the first is the only one of the six conditions to have been met yet he also admits that the Iraqi invasion was not an official “declaration of war” and seemed to contravene UN policy in regards to its monitoring of rogue states and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). That Saddam was an irrational “state actor” who’d supported terrorists in the region, claimed to possess WMD and shown “reckless and aggressive behavior” was ill-founded from the beginning. ”The “sovereign authority” condition is so problematical on its face that White--to his credit-- offers three very detailed supplementary chapters in which to address the difficulties attendant upon the correct interpretation of a potentially even more problematical “just cause” stage of the case for “just war”.
None of the “just cause” claims have been met, with each of the assertions for the authorization of full retaliatory measures against Iraq--such as “material breach”, “truce violations”, “UN legal authority”, opinions of the UN Secretary-General or that of experts, etc.,-- being logically dismantled by White. He’s identified not just faulty logic but the spurious appeals that were also being made continually by politicians, State officials and media to such things as unstable political actors, preemptive strikes and even satellite images. I’m tempted to think that, in consulting the historical records at least, a distinction perhaps along Humean lines is being drawn between ‘matters of fact’ and ‘opinion’; between UN policy and resolutions within the context of ongoing global conflicts and the ‘judgments’, ‘interpretations’ and ‘intentions’ of those to whom the decision-making has been entrusted; between, in other words, “visible facts” (of Iraqi hostility or noncompliance) and “invisible motives” (of correct UN interpretation and policy).
Furthermore, if this ‘fact’ (is)/’opinion’ (ought) distinction is (as I think) White’s chief rhetorical strategy, that not only makes the classical appeal irrelevant but perhaps even otiose. White’s contention that the U.S. government-led invasion of Iraq did not meet the “just war” criteria could have been successfully made without invoking Aquinas at all. And, in fact, he makes the case rather well on the basis of UN, American government and expert opinion alone. The classical and contemporary viewpoints rather than meshing actually seem to work at loggerheads. The “right intention” condition was, for example, nicely disproved by using little more than a very convincing analysis of pre-war intention and post-war reality. Discrediting the pro-war opinions of a Bernard Lewis could have been as effective as appeal to Aquinas’s “intention of the end” and “volition of the means” distinction. Again, the classical allusion seems (in my view) to discredit “classic just war theory” itself. I see no appreciable (certainly no logically significant) correlation between the Thomistic formulation of “ right intention” and the facts on the ground in post-war Iraq. The very integrity of “just war” theory seems to be breaking up even as White continues to invoke it.
The consideration of the remaining “prudential” factors in White’s book serve as the beginning of a deconstructive reading of the “just war” thesis. By that I mean the “deonotological” has been suspiciously privileged over the “prudential”. If the “prudential” considerations had failed to guide policy and policy-makers it wasn’t a case of misdirected application to moral obligations: there was, in my view, no such moral authority to begin with. That Bush actually uses the language of “just war” theory in his addresses is proof enough of that. White’s actually helped this deconstructive reading along by making the last of the deontological conditions into a “kind of bridge between the first and second groups of criteria.” If the decision to invade Iraq is conceptually unjust (by the terms of the first three “just war” conditions) then, of course, in real world terms it must be deemed to have been been the wrong course of action to take. The practice will be shown to have been a violation of conceptually sound first principles. But it’s not the conclusion to which White and critics of “just war” theory are entitled to make in regards to Iraq and any war. There’s no sense in which the facts have violated any “just war” criteria, whether the classical or contemporary version. We can have left them out entirely without too much damage to the anti-Iraq war thesis. A kind of Humean skepticism baked into the very notions of “deontological” (conceptual) and “prudential” (practical) has turned “deontological” into a fiction.
If the realities of invasion hadn’t meshed with deontological principles (viz. sovereign authority, just cause and right intention), it’s because, in White’s view, the motives, assessments and strategies had been impure to begin with. The bar hadn’t been set high enough. Any remaining prudential or cautious assessments, unsupported by conceptual foundations, will topple like dominoes. In White’s account they do just that. “Proportionality of ends” alone, for instance, or the “risks of war” and “post-war planning” invited radical, liberal, conservative “realist”, paleoconservative and pro-war conservative criticisms! Moral principles shouldn’t be this rife with contradiction. If “proportionality of ends” failed it was not because of a lack of good (moral) intentions to which the facts on the ground had failed to conform: it was rather due to a much more troubling tendency to coldly calculate goods and evils as if in terms of “benefits and costs”, wins and losses. White himself says, “Realism calls for a look at the recent past, the present, and the near future. Let us posit, not as a hard and fast rule, that a realistic calculation should generally be limited to five years in the past, and five years in the future... In other words, the calculation should deal with evil and good in the past, ongoing evil and good, and likely evil and good in the next five years.” How does White not see the disconnect between his classical sources and the sort of impersonal calculus of “evil and good” he actually employs?
Perhaps the violation of the “Last Resort” and “Reasonable Chance of Success” criteria were the most egregious because of their particularly close ties to historical and geopolitical realities. And disagreements over “just war” theorists themselves over the wording of doctrine--covered in the book’s lengthiest chapter-- are likewise tied to strictly socio-historical realities in the Middle East (for the reasons White’s given). Everywhere “just war” theory’s failed abysmally to align plans and intentions to reality. White’s verdict is clear: “Unfortunately for the United States, starting a non-defensive, unjust war is equivalent to aggression. This is in fact an extremely grave crime, both in international law and in terms of morality. It is one of the ugliest acts that can lie on a nation’s conscience.” The dominoes fell under the weight of “visible fact”and not because of any transgressions of moral law. That the Bush administration had used as one of its reasons to invade Iraq the moral reprehensibility of Saddam’s character is laughable. The President’s managed to make a silly caricature of the deontological claims and of himself as well. And that the horrendous costs in deaths, civilian casualties and property damage--let alone the dormant religious and ethnic tensions-- the war’s created hadn’t been properly foreseen, if at all, is cause enough to treat any discussion of the “just war” with derision.
