

### Forging Swords into Plows:

### A Twenty-first Century Christian Perspective on War

George Clifford

Published by Ethical Musings at Smashwords

ISBN: 9781301805198

Copyright 2012 George M. Clifford, III

All rights reserved.

Cover photo © iStockphoto.com

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgements

Ron Numbers, Barry Talley, Mark Smith, Darrell Wesley, and Phil Cato each kindly read and commented upon drafts of part or all of this work. I appreciate their time and thoughts; any remaining errors are entirely mine. Marcia Talley graciously designed the cover, creating a better product and saving me much time, effort, and aggravation.

This book would have been impossible without the generous and unfailing support, encouragement, and love of Susan, for whom I am ever grateful.

# Table of Contents

List of Figures

Introduction

Chapter 1: Holy Wars and Crusades

A. Holy wars and crusades

B. Not a Christian option

Chapter 2: Pacifism

A. Peace and rationales for Christian pacifism

B. The history of Christian pacifism

C. Assessing Christian pacifism

D. Conscientious objection

Chapter 3: Just War Theory

A. Background and development

B. Part I: Jus ad bellum

C. Part II: Jus in bello

D. Part III: Jus post bellum

E. Gulf War I: A just war theory analysis

Chapter 4: Jewish and Islamic Views of War

A. The Jewish view of war

B. A brief introduction to Islam

C. Islamic extremism, jihad, and war

Chapter 5: Gulf War II: Invasion and Occupation of Iraq

A. Historical context

B. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello

C. Jus post bellum

Chapter 6: Afghanistan

A. Historical context

B. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello

C. Jus post bellum

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Author

List of Figures

Figure 2.1 — Stages in the History of Conscientious Objection

Figure 3.1 — Jus Ad Bellum and Jus In Bello Criteria

Figure 3.2 — Jus Post Bellum Criteria

Figure 3.3 — The Just War Theory Model

Figure 4.1 — Jewish Categories of War

#  INTRODUCTION

_May the Lord bless his people with peace!_ (Psalm 29:11)

In early January 2002, I visited the horrendous, massive hole in the ground where New York City's World Trade Center had once stood as a proud symbol of American prosperity and economic power. Four months after the attack, wreckage was still widely evident; some neighboring buildings remained empty; their windows, broken by the catastrophic explosions, still unrepaired. Dust covered everything, the air smelled of destruction, and the place was eerily quiet — apart from the occasional and unsettling sounds of metal grating against metal and creaking cables as crews continued to excavate the massive mounds of rubble.

Then I walked over to St. Paul's Chapel, the small Episcopal church adjacent to the World Trade Center. Rescue workers had found sanctuary in the Chapel from their work and the crowds of gawkers, grabbed a few moments of precious rest, eaten hasty meals, and sought some sense of hope before returning to what they euphemistically called _the pile_. The Chapel's nave had become a living memorial. Quilts, posters, and children's crayon pictures expressed grief and gratitude for those who had died, for those who heroically sought to help others, and for those who now labored to bring closure to the grieving.

I was in New York because the Rt. Rev. George Packard, then the newly consecrated Episcopal Bishop for Federal Ministries, had invited me, along with other Episcopal priests who were senior U.S. military chaplains, to a planning conference. The location of the Bishop's office in lower Manhattan had unexpectedly thrust him and his staff into the front lines of the recovery effort, caring for workers on the pile. Several of my military chaplain colleagues at this meeting had been in the Pentagon when the terrorists attacked it on 9/11. We knew that life had changed for us as Americans and as military chaplains. What we did not, and could not, anticipate were all of the ways in which the attacks on that fateful day would change our perceptions of the world, our understandings of how twenty-first century Christians can best live out their faith, and the challenges that lay ahead in the quest for peace.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 awoke the United States to both the deep hatred that some foreigners have for the U.S. and its vulnerability to attack by foreign terrorists. Although foreign terrorists in the previous two decades had exploded a bomb in the subbasement of the World Trade Center, attempted other attacks in the U.S., and successfully attacked U.S. embassies and military personnel overseas, 9/11 was a wakeup call. That day shattered the somnolent American illusion of invulnerability created by its geography and status as the world's only superpower. For better or worse, 9/11 instantly became a defining moment in U.S. history.

Less than a month after September 11, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush declared a Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). He wanted to act decisively against the nation's enemies, seeking to restore U.S. prestige and to prevent future attacks. At his direction, the United States invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq. More than a decade later, in spite of having elected a new President, the U.S. continued to occupy Afghanistan and did not repatriate all of its troops from Iraq until the end of 2011. Victory in both countries, as well as in the larger GWOT, remained frustratingly elusive.

Some Christian leaders and scholars, like ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain, quickly joined the public conversation, endorsing President George W. Bush's actions. Other Christian leaders and scholars, like ethicist Stanley Hauerwas and philosopher Cornel West, took the opposite position, criticizing President Bush's actions as inconsistent with a Christian perspective. Who is right? Presuming some measure of peace is possible, what moral values or ethical concepts can help guide people in general and Christians in particular in the struggle to establish peace?

After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan but before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Osama bin Laden, the infamous founder and nefarious leader of the al Qaeda terrorist network, scathingly indicted the United States in his November 24, 2002 "Letter to America:"

1. The United States targets Muslims for attack, e.g., in Palestine and Somalia;

2. The United States oppresses Muslims;

3. The United States is hypocritical and godless.

He followed that indictment with a call: (a) for everyone in the United States to convert to Islam; (b) for the U.S. to stop its aggression against and oppression of Muslims; (c) for the U.S. to cease all debauchery and immorality; and (d) for the U.S. to acknowledge its hypocrisy and end its support of Israel and other governments that oppress Muslims. The U.S. should, he continued, promptly exit all Muslim lands, ending its economic presence and withdrawing all military forces from those nations. The U.S. should also stop supporting corrupt leaders in Muslim lands and begin to interact with Muslims as equals.

If the United States failed to comply with his call for change, then the U.S. should, bin Laden warned, prepare to fight with the Islamic world. In his letter, he characterized the world of Islam as confident that Allah will give it victory and its people as desiring death more than people in the U.S. desire life:

If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice and the goodness, guidance and righteousness that we call them to, then be aware that you will lose this Crusade Bush began, just like the other previous Crusades in which you were humiliated by the hands of the Mujahedeen, fleeing to your home in great silence and disgrace. If the Americans do not respond, then their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.

Some Christian fundamentalist leaders responded to bin Laden with their own inflammatory rhetoric. Founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, former presidential candidate, and host of the _700 Club_ , Pat Robertson boldly asserted, "Islam is not a religion of peace" but intent on world domination. He characterized Muslims like bin Laden as satanic and motivated by demonic power. Jerry Falwell, a Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority, said in an October 2002 CBS _60 Minutes_ interview, "I think Muhammad was a terrorist. I read enough of the history of his life written by both Muslims and non-Muslims, [to know] that he was a violent man, a man of war." Although Falwell subsequently apologized for his remarks, his comments triggered Muslim-Hindu rioting in India the following Friday that killed at least five people. Many Christians agree with Robertson and Falwell; the two fundamentalist preachers are far from alone in demonizing Islam and believing that Islam and Christianity are engaged in a global conflict.

For bin Laden and his sympathizers, for those who agree with Robertson and Falwell, and for many Jews, Christians, Muslims, and people of other faiths or no faith, the conflict between Islamist terrorists and the West appears to be a religious war. What is the truth? Are Islam and Christianity at war, locked in an inevitable struggle to the death? Does bin Laden speak for Islam in declaring that everyone in the United States, and by implication, Europe and other non-Muslim nations, must convert to Islam or die? Do Robertson and Falwell speak for Christianity in their denunciations of Islam? What do Islam and Christianity really teach? What is a Christian perspective on war? How does that compare to a Muslim perspective on war? When and how, if ever, can a nation, from a Christian perspective, morally wage war?

On September 11, 2001, I was an active duty as a Captain in the U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps. For months after that pivotal day, people — sailors and Marines, their loved ones, and other chaplains — asked me those kinds of questions almost daily. They wanted to understand the religious perspective on what was happening in the world and what constituted a Christian response to those events. In 2002, the Navy transferred me to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, to serve as the school's senior chaplain. My duties there included teaching ethics to several thousand mid-career officers from all branches of the U.S. armed forces. Warriors — individuals in the armed services — who identified themselves as Christians wanted to know what their faith had to say about war and terrorism. Warriors of all faiths and no faith inquired whether the GWOT was really a religious war. Almost all, anticipating orders to Iraq or Afghanistan after their studies, wanted to understand their likely foe better. Civic organizations, as well as civilian Jewish and Christian congregations, extended speaking invitations to me, concerned about the same issues.

Since my retirement from active duty in the U.S. Navy at the end of 2005, other economic, social, and political issues compete for media attention, diminishing the nation's focus on war and terrorism. Some news commentators now describe both Iraq and Afghanistan as "forgotten wars," waged by America's all volunteer force out of the spotlight of public attention. Yet the questions linger; people wonder about the efficacy and ethics of the U.S. GWOT, the invasions, and the prolonged occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is the product of my efforts to understand the issues and to provide honest answers rooted in the Christian faith to important questions about war and peace.

In the course of its two thousand year history, Christianity developed and in varying degrees subscribed to three mutually exclusive views about the morality of war. Crusaders believe that God sometimes instructs Christians to wage war. They typically describe a war that God has commanded as a holy war or crusade. Does God ever order Christians to wage a holy war or crusade? If so, what does Christianity teach about such wars? Chapter 1 answers both questions with an uncompromising negative: holy wars and crusades are always inherently incompatible with Christianity. No threat justifies profaning God's name by claiming to wage war in God's name.

Christian pacifists hold a position diametrically opposed to that of crusaders. Pacifists contend that Christians should never engage in warfighting under any circumstances, that warfighting is inimical to the Christian goal of peace. What do Christians mean by _peace_? What is pacifism's message in this age of terrorism and nuclear weapons? Must a Christian pacifist object to all war or can Christianity justify selective conscientious objection, i.e., recognizing the necessity of lethal force in some situations but not others? Chapter 2 addresses those questions, highlighting the ongoing importance of the pacifist witness as a check on rampant militarism and of non-violent peacemaking in a broken world. Yet pacifism, by itself, is an insufficient response to horrendous evil. The chapter concludes by developing a Christian rationale for selective conscientious objection, an essential but widely neglected correlate of Just War Theory.

Christian Just War Theory advocates have sought a via media, a middle ground, one that affirms the primacy of non-violent peacemaking but also acknowledges that Christians, on occasion, rightly respond with lethal force to end a greater evil. Chapter 3 outlines Just War Theory as broadly understood within the Christian tradition and then explores two important issues. What, if any, updating of Just War Theory does the post-Cold War era require? And, how does the first Gulf War in 1991 measure up against Just War Theory standards? Answering the first question entails developing a third paradigm, jus post bellum, in a manner that is analogous to and complementary of Just War Theory's existing jus ad bellum and jus in bello paradigms. An analysis of the first Gulf War then demonstrates the model's utility, demonstrating that the first Gulf War was an unjust war with an unjust ending.

The world's three major monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — collide violently not only in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but also as a subtext of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many Muslims and Christians, as already noted, attribute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an inherent incompatibility between Islam and Christianity. Too often public debate about these conflicts occurs without any real knowledge of what the three religions teach about war and peace, preventing meaningful and constructive dialogue. Thus, Chapter 4 briefly presents both Jewish and Islamic perspectives on war. The age of electronic communication and increased global migration makes learning about other faiths imperative. Understanding the three major monotheistic perspectives on war can help to avoid demagoguery that needlessly inflames as well as diminishing support for well-intentioned but misguided public policies that exacerbate instead of ameliorate conflict. Christians, Jews, and Muslims should be allies in forging swords into plows, sharing a common commitment to peace and largely overlapping ideas about war and warfighting.

Symbolizing the importance of interfaith conversation and its potential contribution to the global quest for peace, the scriptural quotations that begin each chapter are from the Jewish Bible. Christians incorporated that Bible into theirs; Muslims venerate both the Jewish and Christian Bibles in addition to the Holy Koran. In spite of deep, sometimes violent, abiding conflicts, the world's three great monotheistic religions have much in common. Choosing selections from the Jewish scriptures emphasizes that commonality in a way otherwise not possible. The translation (the New Revised Standard Version), however, is a Christian translation, reflecting my identity as a Christian priest.

Globalization and the United States' status as the world's economic behemoth and only superpower have eliminated most of the U.S.'s historic isolationist tendencies. Increasingly, globalization affords the U.S. no realistic alternative to continuing its engagement with other nations and peoples. However, since World War II, a growing militarism has shaped much of that engagement, arguably often escalating rather than reducing global conflict. Teddy Roosevelt's metaphorical big stick remains highly visible and threatening, eclipsing other foreign policy instruments. When an international crisis develops, one of the first questions, if not the very first question, a U.S. President asks is, Where are the aircraft carriers? President Bush's response to 9/11, invading first Afghanistan and then Iraq, certainly fit this pattern of an immediate and primary reliance upon the military to deal with foreign problems.

Chapter 5 focuses on the second Gulf War (GWII), the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The first section reviews the historical and cultural context that led to Saddam's rise to power. This affords an indispensable preface for the rest of the chapter, evaluating how GWII measures up against the Just War Theory standards. Was GWII a just war from a Christian perspective, a war in which Christians could have fought with a clear conscience? Does adopting a Muslim ethical perspective on GWII lead to a different assessment? In spite of President Bush having declared an end to major combat operations in 2003, fighting erupted almost daily for years in numerous places across Iraq. The incessant conflict killed thousands and degraded the quality of life for Iraqis. What moral obligations, if any, did the United States and its coalition partners incur when they invaded Iraq? How, from a Christian perspective, can the U.S. best fulfill any such obligations? What might a more just ending to GWII have looked like?

The U.S. had invaded Afghanistan two years before Gulf War II and remains enmeshed there even after withdrawing its military forces from Iraq. From a Christian perspective, was the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan morally justified? Did Just War Theory criteria effectually shape combat between the Taliban and the U.S.? After sketching the war's context by summarizing Afghanistan's troubled history, Chapter 6 answers those questions and then analyzes the extended occupation of Afghanistan by the U.S. and its NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies from a Christian perspective. Does the controversial occupation represent genuine progress toward peace? Or, has the occupation caused additional alienation and suffering? In other words, has the Afghanistan war forged swords into plows or plows into swords? Is the world a better, safer place because the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan? From a Christian moral perspective, what policies should shape future U.S. and NATO efforts in Afghanistan? Answering those questions requires examining U.S. reliance on risk-transfer tactics and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); both tactics may appear at first glance to offer benefits but, upon closer examination, both pose significant ethical difficulties. The analysis concludes by drawing lessons from a comparison of the U.S. war in Vietnam to the war in Afghanistan.

Unlike books on war and peace that approach the subject through a single, narrowly-focused lens, this volume provides a view through a single lens (i.e., Christianity) but with a wide angle focus, integrating experiences and insights from personnel in the armed services, military science, history, ethics, Islam, and Judaism. Too often, Christians operate with tunnel vision, seeing only the Christian tradition and its religious resources. That narrowness embodies a dishonest hubris, the presumption that Christianity contains all of the answers to all of life's questions. In fact, the best information and insights from every field of knowledge inform a genuine Christian perspective, which then charts the way forward by the light that Christians believe God manifested in Jesus of Nazareth. Using this type of wide-angle lens, Christians engage the world knowledgably and realistically without compromising their Christian identity.

Examining GWII and the Afghanistan war using Christian Just War Theory with a wide-angle lens shows why both wars were unjust and both have sown the seeds of future discord and conflict rather than moved the world closer to peace. Hopefully, one positive legacy of these wars will be an increased wariness among Christians toward crusades and militarism. The sword, even when necessary, never brings peace. Thus, Christians will do well to emulate the commitment of their pacifist brothers and sisters to just peacemaking.

Shared commitments to peace and Just War Theory's broad outlines transcend the three great monotheistic religions, inviting interfaith cooperation in forging swords into plows. Just War Theory's jus ad bellum paradigm can help Christians (and others) to identify those occasional times when war is necessary to prevent the triumph of evil and provide an argument against war at other times. The jus in bello paradigm provides warriors guidance on how to fight justly and citizens an ethical framework for advocating limits on unnecessary violence. Perhaps most importantly, the jus post bellum paradigm offers a practical, proven model for forging the swords of war into the plows of peace.

#  Chapter 1: Holy Wars and Crusades

Blessed be the Lord, my rock,

who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle;

my rock and my fortress,

my stronghold and my deliverer,

my shield, in whom I take refuge,

_who subdues the peoples under me._ (Psalm 144:1-2)

Like all new U.S. Navy chaplains, I spent my first six weeks of active naval service attending the Chaplain Basic Course. The course taught us about the Navy and began the process of transforming us from civilian priests, ministers, and rabbis into chaplains and military officers. My most disturbing experience during the course was discovering that one of my thirty-four colleagues, a fundamentalist Baptist minister, prayed daily for the battle of Armageddon to begin. Based on his reading of the Bible, he believed that an epochal battle between good and evil — the battle of Armageddon — would herald Christ's second coming and the establishment of his one thousand year reign on earth. My colleague was convinced that this battle would occur in Palestine when the Soviet Union invaded Israel.

Twenty years earlier, as a youth just out of high school, this Baptist had served as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam. He relished recounting his exploits as a waist gunner in Marine helicopters where, in his words, he had "killed commies for Christ." This new chaplain repeatedly professed his desire to serve only with the Marine Corps (chaplains assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps, a component of the Department of the Navy, are in fact Navy chaplains). Although military chaplains are noncombatants, prohibited under the Geneva Conventions from carrying weapons, my colleague hoped desperately that he and the Marine unit to which he was attached would be in Israel when the Soviets invaded so that he could once again kill commies for Christ.

Before I met this man, I had naively thought that Christians no longer believed in holy wars and crusades. Since then, I have discovered to my dismay that many Christians continue to believe that God sometimes commands people to wage war. Holy war is not a uniquely Christian phenomenon, as shown in Chapter 4's discussion of Judaism and Islam. In this chapter, an examination of the broad category of holy wars and its important sub-category of crusades shows why both are incompatible with Christianity.

## A. Holy wars and crusades

The Oxford English Dictionary defines war as "a state of armed conflict between different nations, states, or armed groups." The noted German theoretician of war, Karl von Clausewitz, defined war as "a continuation of political commerce... by another means." Holy war constitutes a distinct category of wars, theoretically continuing not only political commerce but also divine-human commerce. Although scholars have proposed more detailed holy war paradigms, at its simplest a holy war is a war fought at God's behest, for God, and by or with God's help. This discussion of Christian holy war utilizes that framework to examine the three functions of holy war in the Old Testament, considers an inter-testamental example of a holy war, and finishes by exploring Christian attitudes toward holy war in the New Testament, the early Church, and since.

Christians have traditionally regarded the Old Testament record of the wars Israel waged to conquer the Promised Land as the primary prototype for Christian holy wars (cf. Joshua 1-12. Scriptural references illustrate Biblical themes and are not an exhaustive list of passages in which a theme appears.). However, accepting the Biblical narrative as a prima facie accurate historical record requires ignoring common sense. For example, consider the scriptural account of Israel's exodus from Egypt. The six hundred thousand male Israelites that Moses allegedly led in the exodus from Egypt (Exodus 12:37; Numbers 11:21), walking ten abreast, would form a line approximately thirty-four miles long. Assuming each male had a wife and two children triples the number of people in the exodus, producing a column about one hundred miles long, or one third of the distance between Egypt and the Promised Land. Egypt's population at the time of the Exodus was roughly three million people. Six hundred thousand Israelite slave families would have totaled more than half of Egypt's population. In that case, revolt in situ would have made more sense than embarking on a long, arduous journey into the unknown. Absolutely no historical data exist to indicate a depopulation of Egypt approaching anything near that magnitude. Indeed, archaeologists have found no evidence that Israel's exodus from Egypt actually occurred. The lack of historical evidence is unsurprising. In an era long before the advent of printing presses, the electronic news media, and the internet, a group of slaves running away was hardly an event of which any overlord would want to keep a lasting record.

Historians hypothesize that Israel's conquest of Palestine was a slow process. A loosely connected group of Semite slaves, led by a man named Moses, may have cooperated in order to escape from their Egyptian masters. That shared experience bound them together, uniting people from multiple clans and tribes. Their wanderings eventually brought them to Canaan. They arrived during a period spanning several decades or longer, when other Semite nomadic tribes were also encroaching upon the Canaanites. These nomadic herders, alone and in conjunction with the former Egyptian slaves, infringed first upon Canaanite grazing lands or empty territory, then slowly conquered or dominated Canaanite settlements. This process strengthened the invaders' ties to one another. Eventually, all of the Semitic settlers in Canaan adopted the exodus story as their story, a narrative that gave them a common history, common deity, and common identity.

Understanding that the Biblical account intends to create a common national identity rather than to record a factual record of historical events explains the Bible containing contradictory accounts of Israel's possession of Canaan. For example, the book of Joshua depicts a holy war version of conquest in contrast to the slow, gradual process of occupation described in the book of Judges.

This less romanticized version of Israel's roots and occupation of the Promised Land coheres well with a careful reading of Scripture. Israel, according to the Scriptural narrative, did not conquer Jerusalem, Canaan's capital, until David was Israel's king, over a century later (2 Samuel 5:6-10). According to Scripture, God gave Israel, the people of the covenant, the laws in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament that contain the narrative of Israel's history prior to the conquest of the Promised Land. These laws generally presume that Israel is no longer a nomadic people. Among other topics, these laws concern plowing, reaping, buying, and selling houses in cities, administering justice at the city gates, etc. The various law codes in the Pentateuch notably do not address specific aspects or problems unique to nomadic life, raising questions about why nomads would write down (or preserve via oral history) instructions irrelevant to their lives.

Correctly understanding the process by which Israel developed as a nation and then inhabited the Promised Land greatly diminishes the significance of holy wars for Christian theology. Old Testament holy wars of conquest were literary devices intended to consolidate Israel's identity as a nation and justify its possession of Palestine. These holy wars are not a model for how God commands Christians (or anyone else) to oppose evil. Furthermore, this corrective avoids mistakenly juxtaposing a New Testament image of God as love with, or in some theologies even subordinate to, an Old Testament image of a warrior God. The varying concepts of God found in the different chronological layers of Scripture point to a complex, evolving image of God rooted in both justice and mercy.

Recognizing that Old Testament claims of God giving the land of the Canaanites to Israel in perpetuity and God commanding God's people to wage war on another group or nation are at best historical anachronisms, and perhaps even human projections onto the deity, emphasizes the importance of viewing similar, contemporary claims with equal skepticism. Those who assert that they speak authoritatively for God often do so rashly and time proves the putative prophet to have been a false prophet.

United States history would be very different had the European Christians who settled the North American continent taken that warning to heart. Inspired by Israel's identity as God's chosen people, these settlers for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created and embraced a narrative of manifest destiny (sometimes known as _American exceptionalism_ ). The U.S. was the land of freedom, the land of the new Israel, the land to which people emigrated to build new and better lives for themselves and their families. That narrative included tragic, evil corollaries. Settlers ignored and devalued Native Americans, people of color, and people from non-European nations. The Indian wars, slavery, and the banana wars all partially resulted from the widespread, uncritical acceptance of this narrative of manifest destiny. Claims about God's will, whether voiced three thousand plus years ago or today, require careful scrutiny before one obeys.

If people cannot wage war with an unshakable confidence that they do so at God's behest (the first element of a holy war), then fighting for God (the second element of a holy war) becomes a much more tenuous endeavor. If the fighting was not at God's behest, what assurance can anyone have that God desires the combat to occur or that God desires the spoils of victory? The Scriptural precedent of killing all captives (Deuteronomy 7:2; Joshua 9:24; 1 Samuel 15:3; 1 Samuel 15:8) and destroying all plunder (Judges 6:4) because both belong to God presumes that God actually won the victory and the Israelite army was merely the visible instrument of, or perhaps even incidental to, God's victory.

What evidence is there that Israel fought battles or wars by or with God's help (the third element of a holy war) as promised in the Pentateuch? Scriptural accounts of God dramatically giving victory to Israel (e.g., in causing the walls of Jericho to fall down (Joshua 6) or the sun and moon to stand still (Joshua 10:12-14)) reflect the development of a common, nation-building narrative by Israel rather than actual historical fact. For the sun to appear stationary in the sky, the earth would have to stop rotating on its axis. That cessation would immediately have dramatic consequences for tides, weather, and other geo-physical forces. The moon can appear stationary only by ceasing its orbit around the earth, effecting not only tides and weather, but also causing earth's gravity to pull the moon into the earth because the moon would have lost its counterbalancing centripetal force. No evidence that any of those consequences occurred exists.

What other type of evidence might prove that holy wars were fought by or with God's help? Suggesting that in a holy war God provides individuals with the courage, strength, or wisdom to achieve victory precludes objective analysis. How can one prove that any measure of those qualities comes from God or simply results from the exigencies of particular a situation? For example, Elisha may not have literally seen God's heavenly army ready for battle on the hills surrounding besieged Samaria. Alternatively, Elisha's report may refer to wishful thinking, a dream, or to a metaphorical seeing intended to bolster courage and flagging spirits (2 Kings 6:15-19). Scientific research has shown that reports of "super-human" strength in times of crises, once attributed to God's assistance, result from an adrenalin rush and other normal, human, biochemical functions.

Scriptural assertions that God fought alongside or for Israel, such as the violent rainstorm or flood that the Song of Deborah celebrates as vital to Israel's victory over Edom (Judges 5:4, 20-21), also pose questions about God's character. If, as Christians believe, God created and loves all people equally, why would God relish the victory of one people over another? After all, what offense or wrong had Edom done to Israel? What type of God is it who would create only to destroy? Theologically sound explanations of _chosen people_ avoid alleging that God loves Israel better than other nations or, by extrapolation, that God loves Christians better than God loves other people.

Moreover, the checkered history of Israelite defeats and victories in holy wars that the Bible records calls into question all three aspects of a holy war's definition. Given the Biblical narrative's purpose of creating the nation of Israel through a shared history, albeit one more rooted in myth than fact, the paucity of evidence for defeats within the narrative is not surprising. However, that the narrative includes any evidence of defeat suggests that whatever wars Semites fought in order to occupy Canaan had more of a mixed scorecard of success than the Bible records.

Does defeat in a holy war mean that the alleged holy war was not actually an act of obedience, but perhaps fought for reasons such as the pursuit of glory or wealth? Or, did defeat result from fighting the holy war fought with too much self-reliance and too little dependence on God? Or, did God command the Semites to wage a holy war and then punish their subsequence disobedience by allowing their enemies to be victorious? Contemporary holy war advocates must answer these questions, explaining the defeats that Israel seems to have experienced in waging holy wars in a way that confidently assures modern warriors that God will help them to be victorious in any future holy war. In all instances, fighting at God's behest presumes that those who engage in a holy war believe, with a high degree of confidence, that they do in fact correctly know God's will. In other words, holy wars are a deontological approach to war: the rule (or duty) is to wage war in obedience to God's command.

During the period of the monarchy in Israel and Judah, the holy war concept acquired a second, more complex function within the Old Testament narrative. The prophets declared that these later holy wars were military actions in which God used other nations to punish Israel or Israel to punish other nations. This broadened holy war concept reflects a significant development in Israel's theology. God is no longer only the God of Abraham but also the God of all the earth's peoples. From this new perspective, world events such as war and famine reveal God at work in the world. The hermeneutic — the interpretive principle — for understanding those events, Israel believed, was God's covenant with Israel given in the Pentateuch and elaborated by the prophets, when they truly spoke the word of the Lord.

Like its predecessor, this new connotation of holy wars — wars God employs for purposes other than the conquest of Canaan — does not provide any assurance that people will correctly discern God's will. For example, the Old Testament reports that Israel's King Aram approached Judah's King Jehoshaphat, proposing that they unite in making war against Ramoth-gilead. Before agreeing, Jehoshaphat wanted to confirm that this war was indeed God's will. He therefore consulted the prophets, four hundred of them, all of whom encouraged the King to embark on the war, assuring him that God would give him victory. Still uneasy, Jehoshaphat consulted one more prophet, Micaiah, the son of Imlah, who told the King not to go. For unknown reasons, and perhaps for as simple a reason as the weight of an overwhelming majority opinion, Jehoshaphat ignored Micaiah's advice and launched the war. Subsequently, in the war's major battle, the enemy killed Jehoshaphat and defeated his army.

As with all holy wars, any claim that one fights for God and with God's help depends upon correctly knowing that God wills the war. If God used Israel and Judah's war with Ramoth-gilead as a holy war to punish Judah or its king, then both Israel and Judah were wrong in thinking that they fought for God and with God's help. Presumably, the people of Ramoth-gilead and their leaders thought they worshipped a god other than the God Israel and Judah worshipped, making them oblivious to any role they played as God's agent in the war.

A third understanding of holy war appears in the Old Testament apocalyptic literature, among the last parts of the Old Testament written. These authors framed their concept of holy war in terms of their general, apocalyptic worldview. A final, great war would usher in history's concluding phase, an everlasting period of God's rule and peace on earth. A non-canonical example of apocalyptic Jewish thought in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls describes a cosmic battle between the sons of light and sons of darkness in which the children of light permanently vanquish the forces of evil and the fullness of God's kingdom is established on earth. Obviously, this battle has yet to occur. When it happens, God's warriors must correctly discern God's will about when to fight, who constitutes the forces of evil, and how God intends to assist God's warriors in combat. My fundamentalist Baptist colleague in the Navy's Chaplain Basic Course held a Christianized version of this apocalyptic understanding of holy war.

A growing discomfort with images of God as a warrior developed among Jews in the second half of the first millennia BC. Sometime between 300-200 BC, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, in a version known as the Septuagint, a name derived from the number (seventy) of scholars who supposedly collaborated on the translation. By then, Jewish discomfort with the image of a warrior God was sufficiently great that translators changed four Hebrew texts that called God a warrior to "one who destroys war." This emerging Jewish discomfort with the compatibility of war and living in relationship to God warns Christians against too literal an interpretation or appropriation of Old Testament holy war ideas. The Jewish discomfort with war also hints that Jewish attitudes toward war (cf. Chapter 4) may differ from Christian interpretations of holy war in the Jewish Bible (i.e., the Christian Old Testament).

In the middle of the second century BC, Judas, the third son of Mattathias and nicknamed Maccabeus (derived from the Hebrew word for _hammer_ ), led the Jews in revolt against their Seleucid rulers. The Seleucids, who ruled for three centuries, had carved their empire out of Alexander's at his death. Antiochus IV Epiphanes' decision to place images in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem for the public to worship was the catalyst for this Jewish revolt against Seleucid rule. Judas Maccabeus led Israel to victory over the Seleucids and established Judah as an independent kingdom that lasted from 166-37 BC. The Jewish festival of Hanukkah commemorates one purportedly miraculous event during the revolt: a lamp in the Jerusalem Temple did not go out for eight days in spite of there being only enough oil to keep the lamp burning for one day. However, Christians, not Jews, preserved the four books of Maccabees.

The Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids is a good example of both a holy war that appears to satisfy all three holy war criteria and a holy war that the Christian tradition embraces. The Jews fought the war at God's behest: idolatry was anathema for Jews and the practice of idolatry in the most sacred spot within Judaism clearly conflicted with their understanding of God's will. The Jews fought for God: although the successful revolt resulted in Jewish independence from foreign rule, rejecting idolatry was the revolt's precipitate and primary cause. The Jews fought by or with God's help: some people may accept the story of the Temple lamp miraculously remaining lit for eight days as historical fact; others may regard the story as a metaphorical depiction of God's help in enabling the Jewish victory. Seleucid weakness, impossible to assess accurately two millennia later, may have contributed more to that victory than God's direct intervention. However, the historical records do show that Judas and those who fought alongside him believed that they did so with God's assistance. As with any alleged holy war, actually proving that God directed the war's initiation and that God fought, or helped to fight the war, is impossible.

New Testament attitudes toward war are less obvious and more convoluted than are Old Testament ideas about war. Indeed, war apparently was not a central concern for Jesus. Scholars and ethicists debate what, if anything, the sayings and acts attributed to Jesus imply about the morality of war. Among his alleged sayings and acts at the center of these debates are:

\- Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. (Matthew 5:39)

\- But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. (Luke 6:27-28)

\- Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. (Matthew 5:9-11)

\- Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's. (Matthew 22:21)

\- Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. (Matthew 10:34)

\- Jesus' cleansing of the Jerusalem Temple, cited as an example of Jesus employing violent means to achieve his purposes (Matthew 21:12)

\- Jesus in his conversation with a centurion is not recorded as asking the centurion to give up his military profession in contrast to Jesus asking the wealthy to give up their possessions (Matthew 8:5-13)

Like all of the Gospel sayings and reported incidents that figure in debates about Jesus' attitude toward the morality of war, these excerpts do not explicitly address the subject of war. Biblical scholars, ethicists, and everyone else must draw their own speculative conclusions about what the authors of the Gospels thought Jesus' attitude towards war was. The next chapter's discussion of pacifism explores this issue more fully.

In any event, Jesus does seem to have rejected war as a means of ushering in the Kingdom of God, i.e., the fullness of peace. The Gospels indicate that some of those attracted to Jesus were apparently Zealots, advocates of armed revolt against Rome. That is not surprising. Most first century Palestinian Jewish messianic expectations featured hope for a warrior who would successfully lead the Jews in rebellion against Rome and reestablish David's Kingdom. In Luke's Gospel but not the other three, Jesus implicitly directs his disciples to arm themselves before they and he proceed to the Garden of Gethsemane, the location of his arrest (Luke 22:35-38).

All four Gospels record someone near Jesus lopping off an ear of a servant of the high priest in an apparent attempt to prevent Jesus' arrest. Jesus stops the person, and presumably all of Jesus' other followers, from offering further resistance. John's Gospel names Peter as the swordsman and Malcus as his victim. Luke's Gospel, concerned to show Jesus' mercy, reports that Jesus healed the wounded man (Matthew 26:51-52; Mark 14:47; Luke 22:49-53; John 18:10-11, 36). Irrespective of the historicity of these details, the compilers of the narratives clearly believed that Jesus, at least in this incident, rejected warfighting as the way to achieve his goals.

Tellingly, although the details are inconsistent in the various Gospels, the incident appears in all four Gospels. Jesus' rejection of violence as the way to build God's Kingdom clearly left a lasting impression among his immediate disciples. For us in the twenty-first century, the dissonance between the violence of war and Jesus' self-understanding as a suffering servant who rejected violence establishes a high burden of proof for Christians to overcome before concluding that holy war, or any war for that matter, is a morally acceptable Christian option.

The Revelation of John contains more warfighting imagery and references to war than any other New Testament book. Following the general Old Testament apocalyptic pattern, the Revelation employs martial images to depict a cosmic conflict between God and evil in which God eventually triumphs. Some contemporary scholars suggest that John intended his use of war images (e.g., the sword and battles) metaphorically rather than literally. These scholars read the Revelation of John in a way that supports Christian pacifism. In the Revelation, the Lamb (an image for Jesus) never engages in warfare but achieves victory in solidarity with those "who are called, chosen, and faithful." Even if one rejects this metaphorical interpretation of the Revelation, the text provides no guidance, pro or con, regarding wars in the interval between the present and the eschaton, the culmination of the divine plan for the cosmos.

During the New Testament period, the Church adopted a spiritualized understanding of war. Especially noteworthy in this vein is Paul's use of military imagery to describe Christian spirituality. Christians are to put on the whole armor of God: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of God (Ephesians 6:10-17). Throughout my three-year tenure in Annapolis as the Naval Academy's senior Protestant chaplain, a large painting of a Christian warrior, based on Paul's images, adorned the stairway leading to the chaplains' offices. Like much Christian teaching on this passage, that painting, with its implied message for those student warriors that they too will fight for God and with God's help, blithely ignores Paul's worldview, which informed his use of military metaphors. Paul wrote that the Christian contends not against enemies of flesh and blood but against the cosmic powers of this present darkness and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Paul's meaning, in other words, has nothing to do with military combat, but refers to spiritual strife. Following Christ's example, Christians are to seek reconciliation rather than overcoming in their relationship with other people (2 Corinthians 5:16-21).

John Cadoux's _The Early Christian Attitude to War_ is probably the most extensive and exhaustive study of his subject. Cadoux convincingly argues that the mixed nature of early Christian attitudes about war has furnished both sides in the continuing Christian debates about the morality of war with ample evidence for claiming that early Church practices support their position. In the Church's first decades, small, scattered Christian congregations were not in a position to wage war of any kind. Even with the growing numbers of Christians and their congregations in the second and third centuries, questions about the legitimate use of violence remained peripheral. Few Christians served in the Roman military because military service usually required acts of obedience to a deified emperor, acts Christians perceived as idol worship. No known Christian author from those centuries explicitly endorsed military service by Christians. Conversely, the Church did not excommunicate every Christian in the Roman army simply because the person served in the military. Thus, both Christian pacifists and non-pacifists can find evidence to support their position regarding military service by Christians.

Furthermore, the army was the Empire's de facto police force. When not at war, service in the Roman army was more analogous to service on a modern police force than in the military. This important reality makes sweeping generalizations based on what a particular Church father wrote impossible; they, like any writer, wrote from a particular place and point in time that shaped their view.

In general, the early Church was silent about Christians serving in the military. Unfortunately, that silence has sometimes created the impression that early Christians understood Jesus' teachings as strictly pacifist. That impression rests in large measure upon a logical fallacy, an argument from silence. The moral legitimacy of Christians using military force was simply not on the agenda of most early Christians.

Powerless, often poor, and numerically inconsequential these early Christians adopted a spiritualized view of war. They believed that they could discern a cosmic, spiritual battle occurring between God and evil. They also recognized their need for reconciliation with others. Not until Constantine legalized Christianity did the question of the compatibility of military service with Christianity acquire any real poignancy or urgency.

Similarly, a relative handful of Christians serving in the Roman military without being excommunicated does not justify interpreting their military service as the Church's implicit endorsement of the moral legitimacy of Christians using military force. Evidence of the limited number of Christians in the Roman army comes from just a few geographic areas, casting doubt on whether a broad Christian consensus about the appropriateness of Christians serving in the military existed.

In the medieval period, Christians called holy wars by a new name, _crusades_. The first crusade was probably the one that Pope Urban II initiated in 1095 when he solicited help for eastern Christians, who faced unrelenting pressure from Seljuk Turk expansionism. Beginning with this eleventh century crusade and continuing through the fourteenth century, historians count another six or seven crusades, depending upon how one enumerates them, all launched by European Christians against the Turks. These crusades were promoted as saving Christian holy places and relics from Muslims, making Christian pilgrimages to the Holy City of Jerusalem safer, a step towards the reunification of eastern and western Christianity (they had split when the Roman empire divided into eastern and western halves), and beneficially eradicating heresies. The Crusades ultimately failed to achieve any of these purposes.

One reason that the Crusades failed was that many Crusaders had mixed motives. Crusaders, some of them children, embarked on a crusade not only for religious reasons but also out of wanderlust, greed, and lack of opportunity for advancement at home. Another reason the Crusades failed was that it is easier to declare war at God's behest and to claim to fight for God than to know in advance if God would fight or at least provide sufficient assistance to enable victory. Many of Crusaders, particularly those with primarily religious motives, lacked the equipment, training, and skills necessary to prevail in combat.

As with any holy war, incontrovertible evidence of God's intervention on behalf of those waging the crusade for God does not exist. However, unless one posits that God's assistance was ineffectual, the disastrous results of most of the Crusades suggest that the Crusaders wrongly claimed to fight at God's behest. For example, the Children's Crusade of 1212 ended with many youths of fervent religious conviction drowning at sea and rescuers selling the survivors into slavery in Egypt.

Respected Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington has characterized all U.S. wars prior to the Korean War, except the Indian wars, as crusades. The Civil War for many in the North was a crusade to end slavery and for many whites in the South the War Between the States (a southern name for the Civil War) was a crusade to protect state sovereignty. World War I was popularly conceived as the war to end all wars. Dwight D. Eisenhower titled his memoir of World War II European theater operations, _Crusade in Europe_.28

Other U.S. wars, such as the Latin America banana wars and the Spanish American War, expressed the nation's belief in its manifest destiny as the new Israel, God's chosen instrument, for bringing Christ and civilization to the world. "Manifest destiny was China's Mandate of Heaven with an American aura." Early proponents of manifest destiny included John Adams, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. Other prominent proponents include Herman Melville, Senator Albert J. Beveridge, and President Ronald Reagan. President George W. Bush frequently expressed this theme in his speeches, without labeling it manifest destiny, proclaiming the U.S.'s responsibility to bring freedom and democracy to oppressed people. In his September 2004 speech accepting the GOP Presidential nomination, Bush declared, "I believe that America is called to lead the cause of freedom in the new century." Bush's presumption of American uniqueness underlies that assertion. American Protestants widely embraced this ideology in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, a commitment many evangelical Christians still hold.

Abraham Lincoln, with typical humility and wisdom, referred to Americans as "God's almost chosen people." He also warned, "Like all God-fearing men [sic], Americans are never safe 'against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire.'" Most non-evangelical Christians, now acutely aware of the difficulties and disasters that American hubris has caused rightly reject the idea that the U.S. has a manifest destiny as God's chosen instrument. Instead, these non-evangelical Christians (and some evangelicals) emphasize God's love for all people and the equal dignity and respect that Christianity accords to everyone regardless of nationality, race, or religion. Only strong support among evangelical Christians makes American militarism and crusading possible.

## B. Not a Christian option

Mark Twain set his "War Prayer" during a Sunday morning Protestant worship service in a nation rapt with patriotic war fervor. The local troops are ready to depart for battle the next day. The pastor has just concluded the principal prayer of the service (sometimes known as the Pastoral Prayer or Prayers of the People) in which he has asked God to keep the nation's troops safe, to embolden and to strengthen them, and to grant them speedy victory in crushing the enemy. Then an aged stranger enters the nave, strides down the center aisle, pushes the pastor aside, and tells the congregation that he will now offer the prayer that was the unspoken part of their pastor's prayer:

Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle—be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, strain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Twain's poignant satire paints with great clarity the incongruity of believing that a loving God ever calls Christians to wage holy war or to embark on a military crusade.

The holy war tradition confronts Christians with the reality of an ongoing conflict between good and evil, an unpleasant truth some proponents of positive Christianity would prefer not to acknowledge. Evil exists in this broken world and, unless defeated, grows perniciously and unrelentingly in influence and reach. The holy war tradition emphasizes God's opposition to evil and God's call to God's people to join that fight. Christians have a moral duty to oppose evil.

Unfortunately, some Christians, like some non-Christians, have a propensity, or even fondness, for waging war that distorts what they hear God calling them to do in the struggle against evil. Each of the three elements that define a holy war presents a profound, insurmountable barrier for Christians who want to wage a holy war or crusade. No Christian group has an inerrant, authoritative oracle from which they can know God's will. The Apostle Paul underscored this point when he wrote to the Christians at Corinth, "now we see through a glass darkly" (1 Corinthians 13:12). True humility involves recognizing that Christians all too often misunderstand God's will and thus will prudentially refrain from declaring that they fight any war at God's behest.

Christians who wish to wage war at God's behest will do well not only to study U.S. history and the medieval Crusades but also the long and tragic list of wars fought in God's name that time has revealed were anything but God's cause. Most recently, President George W. Bush initially responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks by announcing a "crusade... against a new kind of evil." Response to Bush's remark was so intense and negative that he had to drop the crusade language within four days of his comment. Nevertheless, Bush did not change his basic thinking and others from the evangelical Christian right — including Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, and Pat Robertson — echoed the crusade rhetoric over the next couple of years, intensifying Muslim anger at U.S. hubris and international ineptitude. Similarly, twentieth century apartheid Afrikaans Churches taught that God had created the state and therefore Christians had no option but to support state policies of racial discrimination and apartheid.

Claiming to fight for God is problematic when one is mindful of all of the evil that religion has caused. Too often, both sides in a war have claimed to fight for God. Protestant and Roman Catholic ideologues in Northern Ireland have both made that claim. Christian theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr viewed Abraham Lincoln as the model statesman and the American president with the greatest religious insight, even though Lincoln did not belong to any particular Christian denomination. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln recognized that both sides in the Civil War claimed to fight on God's side:

Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayer of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

Lincoln's remarks stand in even starker contrast to theological partisanship when viewed in conjunction with his conviction that the U.S. had to abolish the horrendous evil of slavery. Even that great cause was insufficient for Lincoln to characterize the Civil War as a holy war or crusade.

Finally, fighting a war with or by God's help provides no practical guidance for God's human allies. What types of weapons are permissible? Chemical? Biological? Radiological/nuclear? All types? The holy war paradigm offers no basis for placing any of these weapons, or any other weapon, off limits. Similarly, the holy war concept includes no guidance about permissible strategies and tactics.

The Christian Crusaders who captured Jerusalem during the first Crusade in the Middle Ages slaughtered seventy thousand Muslims, slashing open the abdomen of many in order to extract their intestines to search for any gold that the person may have swallowed. Other Crusaders engaged in cannibalism, killing Muslims warriors and then cooking and eating them. The Crusaders justified this slaughter by citing Old Testament holy war precedents in which the Israelites killed all who worshipped a foreign God. The Crusaders conveniently ignored another aspect of those precedents, destroying all of the vanquished foe's possessions because they belonged to God.

Most military historians agree that the firebombing of Tokyo did little or nothing to defeat the Japanese and convince them to surrender. Yet the crusade paradigm provides no criterion for evaluating the morality of that firebombing, even though the allies should have anticipated negligible results since bombing Dresden had been equally ineffectual in defeating Germany. Indeed, Christian ethicist Joseph Allen characterizes crusading as a morally simplistic approach to war that incorporates a monolithic view of the enemy as evil.

Christians who wish to diminish Christianity's potential for future evil acts will reject, explicitly and definitively, the possibility of a Christian holy war or crusade. Apart from such a rejection, atheists and other opponents can continue to proclaim, with some justification, that Christianity causes more war and destruction than peace and justice. An absolute renunciation of holy war and crusades will not end anti-Christian propaganda but can eliminate the factual basis of such allegations.

Wars, including holy wars by any name, never produce peace, i.e., the fullness of human flourishing and well-being. Wars produce death and destruction. Two decades ago, a ship I was riding steamed past Iwo Jima. I was eager to see this eight square mile, pear shaped rock for which so many had fought and for which so many had died (six thousand U.S. Marines and twenty-one thousand Japanese). Today, about one hundred Japanese live on this remote, barren island. A few rusting ship hulks were visible offshore as were a few desolate buildings ashore. The tiny island is a stark, now almost forgotten testimony to the futility of war as a path to peace. Defeating evil may at times require lethal force, but victory in war is not synonymous with building a lasting and just peace. Abraham Lincoln also recognized this:

With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

The challenge of building peace in the aftermath of war comprises an essential element of any Christian moral justification of war.

#  Chapter 2: Pacifism

I will both lie down and sleep in peace;

_for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety._ (Psalms 4:8)

My second Navy assignment was as chaplain for the U.S. Marine Corps' Officer Candidates School (OCS). Marine OCS has a different mission than do Army, Navy, and Air Force OCS, all of which train future officers. Marine OCS screens and evaluates officer candidates seeking to ensure that each candidate has the requisite qualities to become a Marine officer. Following OCS, freshly commissioned Marine officers attend The Basic School for six months to begin learning their new profession.

OCS is a high stress environment. Many officer candidates dream for years about obtaining a commission as a Marine officer. Yet during my tenure, the Marines typically commissioned fewer than fifty percent of the candidates who began the ten-week program. Any candidate could leave voluntarily after completing six weeks — if you do not want to be a Marine officer, the Marines do not want to commission you. Most, however, left involuntarily, disenrolled by the Marines for lacking what the Marines believe it takes to be a Marine officer.

I frequently had a long line of officer candidates waiting to talk to me. Their concerns ranged from the personal to the spiritual, touching upon self-image, vocational choice, family expectations, fear of failing, the meaning of life, etc. The day following their first bayonet exercise was always different. On those days, my counselees almost invariably wanted to discuss the morality of killing. The bayonet drill required them to fix their bayonet on their weapon, then rush a straw dummy dressed to resemble a human, yell _Kill!_ and drive the bayonet into the chest at the supposed location of the dummy's heart. For most candidates, the bayonet exercise transformed the idea of killing from a remote hypothetical into a very real personal possibility.

Most militaries, including that of the United States, exist primarily for defense, a goal best achieved by deterring aggression and avoiding the need to fight. If deterrence fails, the military's mission becomes warfighting. Simply stated, the U.S. Marine Corps' combat mission is to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy. Killing, whether up close and personal with a bayonet, standing farther off with an M-16 rifle, or even farther off sitting in the cockpit of a Harrier jet, is integral to warfighting.

Is warfighting — the unleashing of intentional death and destruction — moral? Pacifism, the second of the three Christian perspectives on war, answers that question with a decisive _No!_ This chapter analyzes the Christian understanding of peace and several rationales for pacifism, briefly summarizes the history and status of the Christian pacifist tradition, and then assesses the value of pacifism for contemporary Christianity. The chapter's final section considers conscientious objection, a key expression of pacifism in action.

## A. Peace and rationales for Christian pacifism

The word _pacifism_ means _making peace_.47 The principal Hebrew word for peace, _shalom_ , denotes wholeness, health, and completion. Peace is not simply the absence of armed hostilities but a healthy creation enjoying the completeness of prosperity and well-being. The words for peace in the other Semitic languages, including Arabic, have the same root and a similar meaning. Because real peace is possible only when sustained by justice, adding the phrase _with justice_ to peace is redundant.

The English word _peace_ translates three Greek words. One of those, _homonoia_ , means _concord_ or _harmony_ and does not appear in the New Testament. A second, _galene_ , refers to calmness in nature and appears only in the Gospel accounts of Jesus calming the stormy Sea of Galilee (Mark 4:39 and parallels). The third, _eirene_ , is the Greek word for _peace_ used elsewhere in the New Testament. _E_ _irene_ primarily emphasizes peace between people, building upon and extending the Old Testament's concept of _shalom_.

The Gospels record Jesus giving peace to those whom he healed, to those whom he forgave, and designating his disciples as people of peace. A post resurrection account in John's Gospel portrays Jesus giving his disciples the gift of peace and sending them out as the Father had sent him out (John 20:19-23). The peace of which Jesus spoke is not a calm, Stoic acceptance of suffering. Instead, the Gospel authors understand peace as a metaphor for the wholeness that individuals and the world receive from God when transfigured in Christ.

The Apostle Paul similarly emphasized the importance of peace, referring to the God of peace, the peace of God, and the peace of Christ. Peace, according to Paul, is a fruit of the Holy Spirit and a constituent element, along with righteousness and joy, of God's kingdom. He wrote to the church at Ephesus, "Christ is our peace," and instructed his readers to proclaim the gospel of peace (Ephesians 2:14).

In sum, _peace_ in both the Old and New Testaments is a metaphor for how God wants people to live. Furthermore, it captures in a single word the aim of Christianity's missionary impulse, an enterprise that embraces the salvation of people and the transformation of the world. Indeed the root of the English word _salvation_ is a Latin word that means _wholeness_ or _healing_. Jesus taught his disciples to pray to God, _Your_ _kingdom come_. New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has insightfully quipped, "Heaven's in great shape; earth is where the problems are." God's kingdom on earth is "what life would be like if God were king and the rulers of this world were not." Hence, genuine peace signifies both justice and the fullness of peace for all creation.

A popular misconception, derived from a close homonym for _pacifism_ , is that pacifists are passive, e.g., pacifists "refuse to resist evil directly through action." Some pacifists prefer to describe themselves as _non-violent resisters_. That term, however, better describes a tactic or aspect of pacifism rather than pacifism itself. The best-known twentieth century pacifists were Mahatma Gandhi (a Hindu), the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (a Christian), and Archbishop Desmond Tutu (another Christian). All three became newsworthy and achieved results through their unrelenting activism rather than passivity, leading campaigns for social justice in India, the United States, and South Africa. Pope John Paul II reminded us: "Peace is not just the absence of war.... Like a cathedral, peace is constructed patiently and with unshakable faith." Founder of the evangelical Sojourner's Community, the Rev. Jim Wallis, makes the same point, but perhaps more memorably: "Jesus did not say, 'Blessed are the peace lovers.' He said, 'Blessed are the peacemakers.'"

Pacifists are convinced that viable paths to peace involve rejecting the use of lethal violence. A Christian pacifist who fully incarnates the pacifist ideal will use every available means, even sacrificing his or her own well-being or life, to end violence and to stop evil. News reports of the 1963 Birmingham Civil Rights marches featured shocking images of police officers using fire hoses and police dogs against unarmed men, women, and children. Those images helped to transform a nation and powerfully convey the essence of pacifism: its intransigent refusal to cooperate with evil and its non-violent insistence on justice.

Pacifists generally believe that God has called them to a ministry of peacemaking, a ministry at least demanding as any incumbent upon Christians who adopt either of the other two Christian perspectives on war. Historic peace Churches, like the Quakers and Mennonites, have had active peacemaking ministries in most centuries, continuing into the present. Christian pacifists draw encouragement from the author of Matthew's Gospel recollection that Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God" (Matthew 5:9). Christian pacifists also know that the non-violent tactics of pacifists have achieved impressive results, successfully overcoming totalitarianism and other serious injustices, e.g., the 1986 overthrow of Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the monumental twentieth century U.S. progress in civil rights. Pope John Paul II attributed the collapse of the Soviet Union to "the nonviolent commitment of people who ... learn to fight for justice without violence, renouncing class struggle in their internal dispute and war in international ones." Those gains required pacifists to give time and money, as well as to become vulnerable targets for unjust persecution, prosecution, and violence.

Yet the cost of Christian pacifism frequently extends beyond the costs directly associated with pro-active peacemaking. Because Christian pacifism since the fourth century has represented a minority opinion among Christians, other Christians have often accused pacifists of shirking civic responsibilities, cowardice, or even sympathizing with the enemy. During my years in the Navy, I met Christians, mostly evangelicals, in or around the military, and even some civilian clergy and military chaplains, who held one or more of those harshly judgmental attitudes towards pacifists.

Each of the three broad Christian approaches to ethics — rules (deontology), results (utilitarianism), and virtue — has birthed at least one rationale for pacifism. Rules-based pacifism relies on biblical texts like these:

\- The sixth commandment, _Thou shall not kill_ (Exodus 20:13, from the King James Version; the New Revised Standard Version reads _Do not murder_ , with a footnote that the verse's translation may also read _Do not kill_ )

\- Jesus, in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, commands his disciples, _Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you_ (Matthew 5:43-48; Luke 6:28, 35)

\- Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount reports that Jesus said, _Turn the other cheek_ (Matthew 5:39)

\- Disciples shall be called children of peace (Luke 10:6; Acts 10:36)

Those texts, especially the ones attributed to Jesus, constitute a strong, prima facie case for Christian pacifism. Many Christians from the historic peace Churches (the Brethren, Mennonites, and Quakers), pacifists who seek fidelity to Christ in all that they do, rely on a rules-based path to peace to justify their position.

Some Christian theologians and ethicists have tried to refute the prima facie case in support of Christian pacifism. Augustine, for example, contended that Jesus' instruction to turn the other cheek when hit referred to insults and not to all violence. After all, slapping someone on the cheek physically symbolizes an insult and not an effectual attack. He concluded that Jesus' intent was not to proscribe violence in general but to teach his disciples to avoid unnecessary conflict. Paul Ramsey, a prominent twentieth century Christian ethicist, while rightly skeptical of Augustine's interpretation notes that in one sense Augustine was correct: the New Testament teachings of Jesus focus on individual rather than group or national relations. Jesus emphasized what Ramsey terms a preferential ethic of protective love for one's neighbor, citing the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) as an example of this active ethic in operation.

In spite of unresolved debates about specific texts, the Gospels clearly depict a Jesus who expects people to adopt pacifism when they become his disciples. The early Christian author Tertullian (ca. 153-230) wrote, "Christ in disarming Peter ungirt every soldier." At a minimum, those texts emphasize a presumption by Christians against the employment of lethal force.

Rules-based pacifists who are uncomfortable with the idea that the Christian concept of God developed over the millennia must reconcile the image of Jesus as Prince of Peace with the Old Testament image of God as warrior (Exodus 15:3; Isaiah 42:13; Jeremiah 20:11; Zephaniah 3:17). Early Christians found this problem particularly acute since their Bible was the Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament). Some early Christians argued that the Old Testament era ended when Jesus was born. In this new age, God no longer commands people to wage war. Others, like Origen (185- ca.254), allegorized the Old Testament warfighting passages as symbolizing spiritual warfare. Still other rules-based pacifists have focused on elements of the prophetic tradition, emphasizing passages like those that speak of beating swords into plowshares and carnivores laying down at peace with their prey. Pennsylvanian Quaker Edward Hicks' painting, "The Peaceable Kingdom," which hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, powerfully captured and popularized that Old Testament image (Isaiah 11:6; 65:25).

In marked contrast to rules-based rationales for pacifism, the Christian case against pacifism often relies on a results-based (utilitarian) analysis, asserting that if all Christians were pacifists, evil would triumph. However, a few Christians have articulated a utilitarian rationale for pacifism because they believe that adopting Jesus' non-violent approach to life offers the better alternative when compared to war and violence. Jesus seems to warn against succumbing to the temptation of relying upon conventional wisdom and practices, for the path along which he leads his disciples is a very different path (Matthew 10:5-15). During the Cold War, results-based pacifism gained fresh momentum attracting Christians who regarded nuclear pacifism as the only prudent course for ensuring human survival. Many nuclear pacifists, like Billy Graham and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, gravitated to that position believing that nuclear weapons could never meet Just War Theory tests of proportionality or respect for noncombatant immunity.

Two virtue ethics rationales perhaps offer the most provocative and strongest arguments for Christian pacifism. The first views Jesus, the Prince of Peace, as the moral exemplar for Christians. Jesus' gifts to his disciples are the Holy Spirit and peace (John 14:26-27). Even though the New Testament acknowledges that Jesus did not come to bring peace on earth, as his ambassadors, Christians are to live as people and emissaries of peace. Jesus could have rallied his disciples and supporters to battle the Romans. Many first century Jews were ready to take up arms; known as Zealots, they avidly sought a leader who would deliver them from Roman domination. At least one of Jesus' twelve disciples, according to the New Testament, was a Zealot (Luke 6:15). Jesus' warm welcome on his final entry into Jerusalem, an event Christians commemorate on Palm Sunday, suggests that many of Jesus' contemporaries had invested their hope in him as the anticipated messiah who would lead the Jews to victory over the Romans. Even in that moment of triumph, Jesus chose to enter Jerusalem on a donkey, symbolizing that he had chosen a different way: "Historical or not, the story of Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem riding on a donkey is typical: not the victor's white horse, not an animal symbolizing dominion, but the mount used by the poor and powerless."

The New Testament depiction of Jesus' arrest similarly addresses popular expectations of armed revolt. At a minimum, the Gospel writers and New Testament compilers wanted to portray Jesus as a man of peace; arguably, they also wanted to show that Jesus desired his followers then and now to avoid relying on violence. Jesus warns the swordsman in Luke's version of his arrest by the Romans, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52). The cross, not the sword, defines the path of life for those who seek to follow the Prince of Peace and model their lives on his. Clearly, Jesus rejected the Zealots' aims and methods. In the words of the second century Christian apologist Tertullian, "Only without the sword can the Christian wage war: for the Lord has abolished the sword."

The second virtue ethics argument for the necessity of Christian pacifism emphasizes that Christians belong to the Church, receiving a new identity in Holy Baptism that indelibly changes individuals into members of Christ's body. Community identity then trumps individuality. Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, perhaps the foremost proponent of this position, has written, "The church is our alternative to war." Hauerwas contends that narrative shapes community; for the Christian community, the Bible tells the definitive narrative, the story of the Prince of Peace, whose death on the cross determines history's destiny.

Ideally, from this perspective, the Church's influence is so strong that it precludes other communities, including ones that advocate relying upon military power, from defining any part of a Christian's identity. Christians who derive part of their identity from their citizenship in a nation that relies upon military might for its national security limit the possibility of realizing the fullness of peace. The future depends on God, not people or nations, acting. War wrongly preempts God's sovereignty, as humans rely upon their own resources rather than trusting God. Christians who engage in warfighting also disrupt their own moral development, for only by unswervingly engaging in Christian practices can a person mature into the fullness of the new life that God promises to Christians. In the words of Hauerwas' mentor, theologian John Howard Yoder, "[Christians] guide their lives not so much by 'How can I avoid doing wrong?' or even 'How can I do the right?' as by 'How can I be a reconciling presence in the life of my neighbor?' From this perspective, I might justify firm nonviolent restraint, but certainly never killing.'"

During a lecture on pacifism, I heard Hauerwas illustrate his theory of moral development and faithfulness to God by arguing that the Jews had survived centuries of persecution not by relying upon their own military might but by drawing their identity from their study of the Torah. In response to a question about the Holocaust, he brushed aside the possibility that the Nazis might have completely exterminated the Jews. He insisted that the salvation of the Jews as a people depended upon their identity as God's chosen people, an identity shaped and defined by the Torah. Only community can create the vulnerability essential for keeping people honest and accountable. God will, if not preempted by humans, intervene supernaturally to establish justice and the fullness of peace. If that expectation is false, Hauerwas asserted that Christian pacifism is immoral, wasting innocent lives in a vain attempt to justify Christian convictions. Faithfulness to God, he concluded, is the only human act that ultimately matters; God will fulfill God's purposes in God's time.

## B. The history of Christian pacifism

Setting Christian pacifism in its historical context provides essential insights for assessing the merits of arguments in its favor. Prior to Christianity, pacifism found expression among some of the Greek Stoics and in scattered other places. However, historians have found no evidence of anyone executed for refusing military service. Christian commitment to pacifism represented a new development in terms of the breadth and depth of pacifist commitment.

The New Testament contains contradictory indications about early Christian attitudes towards war and pacifism. In addition to attributing pacifist leaning sayings to Jesus, the Gospels also portray a Jesus who recognizes a government's claims upon its citizenry (he pays his taxes) and who instead of confronting a military officer about the morality of serving in the army praises the officer's faith. If Jesus considered all use of military force evil, then "This encounter with the centurion must be viewed as extremely curious!"

Similarly, in the first Petrine epistle we read, "For the Lord's sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right" (1 Peter 2:13-14). The author of 1 Timothy enjoins his readers to pray for kings and all in high positions of authority (1 Timothy 2:1-2). Not only did John the Baptist baptize soldiers, the Apostle Paul apparently did so as well (Luke 3:7-17; Acts 16:25-34). On the other hand, although the New Testament does not expressly address the issue of pacifism, the New Testament authors, other than the Gospel authors, spiritualize the military imagery they use.

During Christianity's first three centuries, the Roman Empire sought to unify its ethnically and racially diverse peoples through the strength of its army and universal devotion to the emperor's deified person. Emperor worship became a vehicle for promoting state unity, sustaining good morale in the army, and mobilizing popular support for wars.

The Romans had long exempted the Jews, a small and, for the Romans, very troublesome, obstreperous race, from all requirements to worship any god other than the Jewish God. Nonetheless, Rome occasionally attempted to install one or more Roman deities in the Jerusalem Temple, efforts they would quickly abort before the inevitable Jewish furor erupted into open rebellion. By 66 AD, tensions between the Jews and Romans had risen to the boiling point. Then Nero ordered Palestine's Roman governor to send the contents of the Temple treasury to Rome. The Jews responded by massacring the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, the final catalyst for the first Jewish-Roman War (66-70). That war culminated with the victorious Romans destroying Jerusalem and the Temple. Researchers have not found any evidence that Christians fought in either the first Jewish-Roman war or the second (132-135).

First century people generally regarded the early Christians as a Jewish sect. Few in number and enjoying the Jewish exemption from the most objectionable aspects of Roman rule including military service, these early Christians had no need to address the morality of a Christian using military force. This remained largely true until the time of Constantine.

However, the growing number of Christians and the two Jewish-Roman Wars brought Christianity increased visibility. Christian intransigence about the central tenets of their faith (e.g., uncompromising monotheism) and their missionary zeal made Christianity a convenient target of opportunity for Romans seeking a scapegoat to persecute. The Emperor Nero, for example, blamed Christians for burning Rome when more than likely he caused the fire. Relatively powerless in the face of Roman might, the available historical evidence suggests that the early Christians did not offer armed resistance to repeated and vicious persecution. Ample first century evidence depicts Christians, including Roman soldiers, willingly accepting martyrdom, a few actively seeking martyrdom, and, at some times and places, large numbers abandoning the faith.

Second century church discipline manuals insisted that a soldier who converted to Christianity had to leave the army. Celsus, a pagan critic of Christianity in the second half of the second century, attacked Christians for their pacifism, arguing that if all did the same as Christians that the Roman Empire would "fall into the hands of the wildest and most lawless barbarians." On the other hand, a Christian, Tertullian, refutes Celsus in 197 by pointing to the presence of Christians in the army. Although early Christian writers seem to have been unanimous in their opinion that military service was incompatible with Christianity, some accepted the idea of Christians serving in the military if their service was in a law enforcement role and did not involve shedding another person's blood.

By the beginning of the fourth century, Christians in many places served in the Roman army with tacit approval from Church authorities. Tombs of Christian soldiers inscribed with the soldier's faith and profession prove that at least some local Christian communities did not regard military service as incompatible with Christianity. In 303-304, the persecution of Christians by the Emperor Galerius sought to rid the army of Christians, some of whom died for their faith. The numbers of Christians then serving in the military was probably relatively small; a sane emperor facing constant threats of invasion would not intentionally deprive himself of a tenth or even a twentieth of his army.

Christian opinion about the propriety of Christians serving in the military remained divided, however. Martin of Tours, venerated as the patron saint of chaplains and many others, perhaps typified fourth century attitudes. While still a soldier, one day he encountered a cold, shivering beggar at an Amiens' city gate. Martin spontaneously divided his military cloak with the beggar; that night, in a dream, he saw Jesus wearing the cloak. A Roman Catholic priest later accompanied Frankish kings into battle carrying remnant of Martin's cloak, _cappa_ in Latin. The etymology of the English _chaplain_ is from the Latin _cappellanus_ , the custodian of St. Martin's cloak. Martin stayed in the army for two years after converting to Christianity. Then, on the eve of a battle, he left the army disgusted by violence: "It is not lawful for me to fight." To prove his sincerity, Martin offered to face the enemy holding a cross as his only weapon.

By the fifth century, when Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion, the weight of Christian opinion had turned against pacifism and refusing to serve in the military as the normative Christian positions. The threat of barbarian invasions and the need for law enforcement, both Roman army responsibilities, were the catalysts for that reversal. This change, coupled with Constantine's vision of the cross as the sign by which he would conquer, quickly transformed the cross from a symbol of peace into a symbol of earthly power.

Even before establishment as the Empire's official religion, Constantine tore down probably the biggest barrier to military service by Christians, new recruits having to perform rituals at an altar dedicated to a deified Emperor upon military induction. Julian (sometimes known as the Apostate) was the last pagan Roman Emperor. He ruled from 361-363. Although he deprived the Church of many of its benefits under previous emperors, he did not outlaw Christianity nor purge the army of all Christians.

Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) exemplifies the widely held medieval view that military service and Christianity are fully compatible. The younger son of a minor noble in an age of primogeniture, he joined the army in 1517 as a way to earn fortune and fame. Badly wounded before achieving either, he began to read religious literature during his lengthy recovery. His reading fired him with zeal to emulate Christ. After a preparatory period of asceticism and education, he gathered a group of like-minded companions with whom he formed the Society of Jesus. Colloquially known as the Jesuits, these soldiers for Christ envisioned themselves as the Pope's troops, ready to answer his call for any duty, any battle. Ignatius symbolically offered his soldier's uniform and accoutrements to the Blessed Virgin Mary when he embarked on his time of spiritual preparation. He saw no inherent conflict between military service and Christianity; his symbolic offering declared his intent to be Christ's soldier under the Pope's command.

Except for isolated individuals and a few scattered groups such as the Anabaptists and Quakers, Christian pacifism had almost entirely disappeared by the Renaissance. The highest profile pacifist during the Middle Ages was Francis of Assisi whose commitment to non-violence extended to his refusal to injure animals.

A pattern of Christians born to the profession of arms, committed to it by a parent or lord, or opting for it as preferable to their other career choices emerged following the dissolution of the Roman Empire and generally persisted from the fifth century until the massive armies of Napoleon's era necessitated conscription.

Even after conscription began in the nineteenth century, the European heritage of established state churches aligned the Church behind the State's declaration that serving in the military was a Christian's civic duty. The authoritative Christian position in Europe, informed by each established Church's adoption and adaptation of Just War Theory, was that the Christian had a moral obligation to serve; pacifism was not an option. During WWI, the unprecedented need for military personnel caused all of the major powers to adopt some form of conscription. By then, the Church-state alignment had progressed so far that leading Anglican clergy, like the Bishop of London, the Rt. Rev. Winnington-Ingram, became some of the British Army's best recruiters. These clergy sometimes sounded as if they were more concerned about the fate of the British Empire than promoting the Kingdom of God.

A few Christians in the thirteen colonies had refused to fight during the American Revolution because of their Christian beliefs. Some of these individuals, or their forebears, had immigrated to the United States to escape persecution by a state church. For example, Quakers, who had founded and settled much of what became Pennsylvania, were prominent among those who refused to fight. They did not believe Jesus would kill; therefore, they should not kill nor serve in the military.

The Civil War brought conscription to North America, but exempted the members of the historic peace Churches (e.g., the Quakers and Mennonites, who had arrived in substantial numbers in the first half of the nineteenth century). Civil War conscription significantly differed from twentieth century U.S. conscription because anyone who was conscripted could pay a fee of three hundred dollars in lieu of serving or find a substitute to serve. These options gave pacifists who did not qualify for legal exemption a way to avoid military service. Both President Lincoln and his Secretary of War sympathized with the plight of conscientious objectors and occasionally interceded to release conscripted members of the historic peace churches from military service. In general, members of the historic peace churches regarded obeying the civic authorities as a religious duty.

Once Christianity had received the state's blessing under Constantine, the Church rapidly replaced pacifism with Just War Theory (examined in the next chapter) as the normative Christian perspective on war. Concurrently, Christianity preserved pacifism as a minority albeit often disrespected witness.

## C. Assessing Christian pacifism

Upon closer examination, none of the four rationales for Christian pacifism — (1) rules based; (2) results based, especially nuclear pacifism; virtue based (3) Jesus our moral exemplar and (4) our membership in the Christian community completely shaping our identity — is fully persuasive. Pacifism, whatever its role or contribution to Christian peacemaking, is neither the authoritative nor exclusive Christian perspective on war.

Rules-based (deontological) rationales for Christian pacifism are usually absolute. Obeying Jesus requires Christians to refrain from killing, always and in all circumstances. Problematically, Scripture, when viewed in its entirety, allows multiple interpretations of what the complete Christian rule set actually mandates:

\- How can Christians reconcile Jesus' reported pacifist teachings with his apparent acceptance of soldiers and their profession, an occupation that requires some to kill? Does Jesus' interaction with the centurion indirectly condone soldiers killing the state's enemies in the line of duty?

\- If Scripture defines pacifism as the correct Christian perspective on war, why is the rest of the New Testament silent with respect to killing in spite of the Church accepting soldiers as members without expecting those soldiers to renounce the profession of arms?

\- Christian pacifists who rely upon the New Testament witness must also address the very different view of war and killing found in the Old Testament. For example, is capital punishment, which several Old Testament texts seem to sanction (Leviticus 20:2; 24:14), consonant with a rules-based Christian pacifist moral vision?

Scripture's richly diverse tapestry requires deontological pacifists to develop a set of interpretive principles — hermeneutics — with which to read what the Bible says about war if they are to discern a consistent message. For example, Jewish readings of the sixth commandment's deceptively simple prohibition against killing generally excludes killing by military personnel in combat. The King James Version and other English translations that use _kill_ incorrectly translate the Hebrew _ratzach,_ which refers to illicit homicide, especially killing out of hatred or malice. Thus, the sixth commandment in its original Hebrew does not address manslaughter (accidental killing), killing in war, or capital punishment. A pacifist Christian reading the Sixth Commandment through the lens of Jesus' teachings about non-violence may very well hear a different message, one that prohibits all killing.

Consequently, efforts to articulate a definitive Biblical statement about the Christian perspective on killing and violence in war fail unless participants have a shared set of hermeneutical principles. The twentieth century ecumenical movement's failure to reunite Christianity's diverse strands around common beliefs suggests that identifying any widely accepted common hermeneutic is probably an unrealistic goal. Examining Scriptural teachings about war, the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops have acknowledged, "[the Scriptures] do not provide us with detailed answers to the specifics of the questions which we face today." The Roman Catholic Church relies upon its _teaching_ _magisterium_ to define the correct interpretation of the text for its members. That teaching magisterium, which Protestant Churches reject, therefore cannot provide a common basis for ecumenical dialogue about either hermeneutics or rules-based pacifism.

Furthermore, as with all deontological ethics, once a set of rules is established situations invariably arise in which two rules provide contradictory guidance creating an impasse. Quakers experienced that problem during the Civil War when their opposition to slavery collided with their opposition to war. Some Quakers followed their consciences and served in the Union Army, fighting to end slavery. Other Quakers, following their consciences, refused to fight. The Quakers never reconciled the tension these opposing views created.

United Nations peacekeepers in Bosnia were ineffective prior to their being authorized to use deadly force. After receiving that authorization, they killed a few Bosnians but saved many more Serbs. The original non-violent approach of simply being present was consonant with Jesus' teaching to love both one's neighbor and one's enemy. That policy failed. Watching Bosnians engage in genocide against Serbs cannot truthfully be described as loving Serbs or Bosnians. Killing Bosnians, when a necessary last resort to prevent genocide, enabled peacekeeping forces (mostly NATO air power) to fulfill Jesus' command to love their neighbors at the cost of disobeying Jesus' command to love their enemies. Choosing between pacifism and non-pacifism, in this case, was for Christians a Hobbesian choice, i.e., pacifism put the Christian in the morally irresponsible position of tacitly abetting genocide or compromising Christian non-violence to kill a few effectively ending the genocide.

A rules-based rationale for Christian pacifism therefore requires a provision for exceptions, instances when the use of lethal force from a Christian perspective is morally justified, perhaps morally required. Christianity presumes that killing is wrong. Just War Theory, presented in Chapter 3 provides a paradigm for Christians to identify morally appropriate exceptions to that presumption against killing. The paradigm seeks to hold in creative tension Christianity's strong preference for non-violence and the Christian's commitment to act as God's voice, hands, and feet to end evil. Without that creative tension between pacifism and the occasional need to use violence, philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe's critique too often rings true:

Pacifism teaches people to make no distinction between the shedding of innocent blood and the shedding of any human blood. And in this way, pacifism has corrupted enormous numbers of people who will not act according to its tenets. They become convinced that a number of things are wicked which are not; hence seeing no way of avoiding wickedness, they set no limits to it.

Christianity demands that Christians denounce what is evil and then join the fray against that evil without becoming evil themselves. The discussion of Just War Theory's jus post bellum criteria explores the issue of whether one can kill without becoming guilty of doing evil, a moral problem known as _dirty hands_.

The Jehovah's Witnesses have another rules-based rationale for pacifism that warrants a brief detour. The Witnesses, a millenarian, American Christian sect that appeared in the nineteenth century, object to nationalism as a form of idolatry. To avoid idolatry, they teach that Christians should shun anything related to the state, including military service. For example, the Witnesses equate saluting the U.S. flag with emperor worship in ancient Rome. No moral expediency can justify idolatry. However, their pacifism is not absolute; Witnesses stand ready to take up arms and fight with Jesus in the apocalyptic battle of Armageddon.

Jehovah's Witnesses are correct: national sovereignty does not figure into God's ultimate plan for creation. The Apostle Paul wrote that the Kingdom of God has neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian (Colossians 3:11). However, the Witnesses wrongly conclude that national sovereignty always entails idolatry and therefore Christians must refuse to serve their nation in any capacity. Anglican theologian Richard Hooker writing during the English Reformation emphasized that Christianity and nationalism are compatible. A person's identity as a citizen involves certain responsibilities (Romans 13:1). Obvious responsibilities include obeying the laws, paying taxes, and voting. No Christian theologian, to the best of my knowledge, has suggested that Christians, by virtue of being Christian, should no longer obey traffic laws. The Gospels recognize this multiplicity of allegiances when they portray Jesus teaching his disciples their responsibility to pay taxes to the Romans. Only when a nation's law contradicts what the Christian believes is God's teaching should the Christian disobey the law of the land. In the Biblical narrative, this tension most frequently arises when obeying the law requires idolatry, e.g., in the apocalyptic literature of the Old and New Testaments (for example, cf. Daniel 3 and Revelation 13:11-18). Christians need a holistic approach that integrates their faith with their citizenship rather than a schizophrenic bifurcation of Christianity and citizenship. The latter occurs when Christians separate politics from religion and their views on national policy from ethical underpinnings rooted in their faith commitment.

Admittedly, some people jumble their hierarchy of loyalties, placing nation before God. Others equate nation and God, a form of parochial hubris if not idolatry. Those misguided opinions and practices do not necessitate concluding that nations have no role as an interim vehicle of communal cooperation while creation moves towards its eventual destiny as one community of God's people living in peace. Nations supplanted tribes and clans as the basis for human cooperation. The biblical narrative largely centers around one example of this process, the story of wandering nomads settling and becoming the nation of Israel. The Revelation of John envisions the nations united in worshipping God at the end of time. Jehovah's Witnesses helpfully remind the rest of us that nations are a means to an end, not an ultimate end in and of themselves. Christians remain citizens of a specific nation, i.e., they are members of other communities, identities that carry their own responsibilities. Christians, simply by virtue of being Christian, have no moral or theological grounds for abdicating those responsibilities or membership in those communities. This conclusion is of critical significance in weighing the merits of Hauerwas' case for pacifism, discussed below.

Historically, the utilitarian pacifist argument maintains that prudential wisdom advocated pacifism as our only hope for survival, especially in a nuclear-armed world. However, the Soviet Union's demise greatly diminished the threat of superpower nuclear confrontation. A nuclear winter — near total destruction wrought by global nuclear war — no longer poses such an imminent threat to human survival. The aptly named policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) arguably helped to end the Cold War without an actual war.

No nation now has the military might, including nuclear weapons, to challenge the world's one remaining superpower, the United States, successfully. Great Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, along with the United States have openly acknowledged that they possess nuclear weapons. None poses a threat to the U.S. in the short run or, with one exception, to each other. The most likely candidates for a nuclear war waged between two nations today are India and Pakistan. Thankfully, they seem to have achieved a policy of mutual standoff analogous to the Cold War policy of MAD. If India and Pakistan used all of their nuclear weapons (estimated to total fewer than 100) against one another, the resulting holocaust while tragic would probably not imperil the totality of human life.

Nonetheless, the probability of nuclear attacks occurring increased following the fall of the Iron Curtain. Additional nations developing nuclear weapons, non-state actors attempting to procure nuclear weapons, and local conflicts (e.g., in the Middle East) each represent potential nuclear threats. Christian pacifist campaigns against nuclear weapons need to re-think their rationale, re-align their goals, and refocus their efforts. For example, Christian pacifists can constructively encourage nations to decrease or to limit the size of their nuclear arsenals in order to reduce the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Similarly, Christian pacifists can helpfully campaign for nations to endorse nuclear weapon non-proliferation treaties and agree never to use a nuclear weapon in a first strike. In nations with relatively few Christians, like India and Pakistan, these campaigns may have little immediate impact. However, global mobilization of support for these policies may achieve unexpected results over the longer term. This type of campaign has already begun as Christian pacifists and their allies push Great Britain to decide whether it needs a nuclear arsenal before committing to the huge cost of developing its next generation of nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

More worrisome, North Korea claims to have developed a nuclear arsenal. Any direct North Korean nuclear threat extends to South Korea, Japan, China, western Russia, and perhaps Alaska and Hawaii. Of those possibilities, South Korea and Japan seem the most probable targets. More likely, North Korea will seek to leverage its nuclear arsenal to pressure other nations to grant economic assistance or other advantages.

Christian pacifists can helpfully counsel global temperance in dealing with North Korea, a poverty-stricken enclave that is perhaps the world's most isolated, secretive, and authoritarian nation. Pushing North Korea into a corner may cause that unpredictable nation to take drastic action. Any war with North Korea involving China or the United States would assuredly end in North Korea's defeat. That foregone conclusion gives North Korea no reason to refrain from employing nuclear weapons if attacked. Some knowledgeable observers believe that the Bush Administration cutting off oil shipments to North Korea, after North Korea's alleged 2002 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) violations, a treaty to which North Korea is a party, prompted North Korea to withdraw from the NPT and to accelerate its nuclear weapons development program. President Bush's name-calling (e.g., describing North Korea as part of the Axis of Evil) "has been demonstrably ineffective and very likely counterproductive."

The best hope for avoiding renewed warfare on the Korean peninsula lies in building bridges — activity that Christians call peacemaking — to tie North Korea more closely to the global community. Such bridges can beneficially include expanding economic links between North Korea and other nations, visits between North and South Koreans, economic and humanitarian assistance, educational and cultural programs, etc. A Christian pacifist who exclusively advocates total nuclear disarmament will not lessen the nuclear threat that an atheist nation like North Korea poses. Only by pro-actively addressing a host of broader issues can Christian pacifists realistically hope to reduce the threat of a nuclear war.

The threat posed by any future Iranian nuclear arsenal is more difficult to assess. Iran lacks the people and resources to embark on a program of global conquest. Iranian annexation of a neighboring nation's territory against the wishes of that nation's people also seems unlikely. Surrounded by Islamic states, Iran in recent years has sought to displace Saudi Arabia as the recognized leader of the Islamic community of nations. That goal has proven elusive, in large part because Iran is a Shiite nation and most of the other fifty-six Islamic nations, like Saudi Arabia, have significant Sunni majorities. (Iraq is the notable exception; its majority Shiite population lives largely in the south. Chapter 5 explores this issue.) Islam's decisive role in determining Iranian national policy, Islamic ethics (see Chapter 4), and Iranian hopes to displace Saudi Arabia as the leader of global Islam make an Iranian nuclear attack on any Islamic nation highly unlikely. However, Iran certainly wants the prestige and perceived security that possessing a nuclear arsenal supposedly provides. A nuclear-armed Shiite Iran would balance Sunni Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, which Saudi Arabia probably funded.

Iran's bellicosity primarily targets the United States and Israel. An Iranian nuclear attack against the U.S. homeland seems improbable. Iran currently lacks delivery systems for nuclear weapons that are capable of reaching North America. Iran also does not seem bent on self-destruction, the almost certain result of U.S. nuclear reprisals after an Iranian nuclear first strike on the United States. Iran sponsoring, perhaps even conducting, terrorist attacks in the U.S. represents a more likely scenario. Perhaps most probable and potentially disruptive are conventional attacks on U.S. naval vessels and commercial shipping in the Straits of Hormuz. Iranian threats to close the Straits, through which approximately 20% of the world's oil passes, periodically ratchet up tension between the U.S. and Iran, increasing the odds of armed conflict.

A nuclear-armed Iran could more likely succeed in keeping the Straits closed using only conventional weapons and would similarly gain some measure of immunity from U.S. reprisals for terrorist attacks. In both instances, the need to avoid putting Iran in a situation in which it perceived that it had nothing to lose by using nuclear weapons limits U.S. military options. The potential negative consequences of nuclear war seem likely to exceed any advantage that either could hope to gain by using nuclear weapons.

The U.S. should respond to any Iranian terrorist threat or act as the U.S. should respond to all terrorist activity: terrorist acts are crimes, terrorists are criminals, and the criminal justice system should vigorously investigate and prosecute. Prior to 9/11, that is how the United States and most other nations responded to terrorism. As the analysis of the war in Afghanistan (Chapter 6) demonstrates, invading and then occupying a state sponsor of terrorism is neither efficacious nor morally justifiable.

Iran closing the Straits of Hormuz would force global markets to cope with a dramatically reduced supply of oil and no commensurate decrease in demand. Militarily keeping the Straits open (minesweeping, escorting tankers, etc.) is an expensive strategy with no clearly defined end; the heightened risk and uncertainties would assuredly cause a substantial increase in petroleum prices and might lead to war. Alternatively, the U.S. and other nations might accept the closure, although international law assures free passage on the seas. Higher oil prices might decrease demand, in the longer term create other routes for bringing oil from Iraq and the Gulf states to market, and increase the attractiveness of alternative sources of energy. Conversely, closing the Straits of Hormuz greatly limits Iran's ability to sell its oil; Iran's economic and political dependence upon oil revenue suggests that Iran, its bellicose rhetoric notwithstanding, is unlikely to close the Straits for any extended period.

Israel is also widely believed to possess nuclear weapons and seems Iran's most likely nuclear target. This potential conflict represents the world's second gravest nuclear threat. Probably, the best hope for avoiding war between Iran and Israel is for those two countries to recognize that their situation may be analogous to that of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War. In that case, neither nation "wins" in a nuclear conflict, a message that pacifists and others can beneficially underscore repeatedly.

Christian nuclear pacifists cannot prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Christian pacifists working to reduce or defuse Iranian threats can engage in bridge building activities, seeking to draw Iran deeper into the community of nations. They will also work to temper isolating rhetoric from governments hostile to Iran and concurrently emphasize to Iran the human, economic, and political costs of using a nuclear weapon. Pacifists rightly remind the Church to oppose all aggression, including times when one's nation seeks to justify its aggressive behavior for reasons of economics or self-interest. Narcissism all too often influences individual and collective judgment of what is just.

A non-state terrorist group obtaining nuclear materials or weapons constitutes the most serious nuclear (as well as most serious terrorist) threat today. The United States has an active but grossly underfunded program to procure and safeguard nuclear materials in the countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. Another potential source from which a terrorist organization might obtain nuclear material or weapons is an isolated state such as North Korea or Iran that perceives an existential threat.

A _dirty bomb_ is a nuclear weapon designed to spread radioactive materials through a conventional explosion. Terrorists could build a dirty bomb with radioactive materials purchased or stolen from thousands of locations worldwide. These locations include storage sites for nuclear waste from power plants and medical facilities, nuclear weapons magazines, and active nuclear installations such as power plants, medical centers, and scientific laboratories. A dirty bomb's real harm is the panic it might unleash, rather than any actual damage from the explosion or radiation.

The old saw, _an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure_ , applies to the problem of controlling nuclear weapons and material. Once a terrorist group has obtained a nuclear weapon, or the materials needed to assemble such a weapon, only preemptive armed intervention is likely to prevent the group from actually using the weapon. Committed terrorists are just that, dedicated to their cause and ready to use whatever means necessary to achieve their goals. Terrorists' reliance, to date, on non-nuclear explosives may indicate that current, underfunded efforts to control nuclear materials have achieved at least modest success. However, groups like al Qaeda want to develop and then to use dirty bombs. Christian pacifists concerned about nuclear war will broaden their agenda from deterrence to address non-proliferation, first use, limiting the number of warheads, and safeguarding nuclear materials.

Christian pacifism based on emulating Jesus' example of rejecting violence regardless of the consequences focuses narrowly on one aspect of Jesus' life, ministry, and death. Doing so implicitly, if unintentionally, devalues other aspects of Jesus' life and ministry, distorting the historical record. For example, Jesus not only disdained the use of violence but also deeply loved others. So what is the person who has become a pacifist in emulation of Jesus' moral example to do, after exhausting all available forms of non-violent resistance, when faced with choosing between using lethal force or allowing people to die? This was not a hypothetical choice in WWII once the Nazi pogrom to exterminate the Jews received public notice. Christian pacifists who refuse to countenance the use of lethal violence in any circumstance seem to place a narrow sense of their own spiritual well-being ahead of their full measure of responsibility for the well-being of others. They keep their hands clean, refusing to kill, blind to the bloodstains on their hands that using lethal force could have prevented.

Adopting Jesus as one's moral exemplar also presumes that Christians can know what Jesus would do in every specific situation with certainty. Popular WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelets and buttons regrettably gloss over that challenge. The New Testament, written in the century following Jesus' death, provides culturally and theologically conditioned accounts of Jesus by first- and second-generation disciples. Those disciples could only write what they remembered or what others had told them about Jesus. Their accounts thus lack completeness and incorporate inaccuracies that human memory invariably introduces, inaccuracies caused by forgetfulness, collapsing multiple events or sayings into one, personal biases, etc. For many Christians, ignorance of basic biblical facts (e.g., knowing the Ten Commandments or the names of the four Gospels) exacerbates their inability to answer the question, _What would Jesus do?_

Unfortunately, Jesus left no playbook detailing his game plan for us. Christians have often pointed to Jesus' succinct summary of God's instructions (love God and others – Mark 12:28-34) and the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17) as sufficient. Yet these brief rule sets can seem frustratingly vague when we attempt to apply them to specific situations or to complex, global problems. Conversely, expanding two or even ten commandments into a comprehensive rule set that offers detailed guidance for every contingency quickly produces a vast and unmanageable number of rules. Christians who claim that the New Testament, or the Bible as a whole, offers humans a comprehensive rule set delude themselves. Biblically illiterate, most Christians do not know many of the biblical rules (e.g., stone blasphemers to death (Leviticus 24:14-16) and that women are unclean during their menstrual periods, are to remain apart during that time, and must make an atonement offering to become clean (Leviticus 15)), much less how to apply those rules to specific situations not found in the Bible (e.g., the morality of the Cold War's mutually assured destruction policy). Indeed, one aspect of Jesus' teaching was a reaction against the proliferation of rules that Judaism had developed to help Jews correctly apply the Torah's 613 rules to daily life.

Additionally, there is no Christian equivalent of the Hadith, the widely accepted Muslim compilation of Mohammed's words and deeds not recorded in the Koran. Non-canonical materials about Jesus (i.e., those not in the Bible) are no more reliable than the four canonical Gospels and arguably less reliable as many post-date the biblical materials. A few of these documents, like the Gospel of Thomas, shed some light on life in the first century or the early Christian Church and offer a different theological perspective on how early Christians understood Jesus. Other materials are patently more unreliable than the Scriptural witness is. For example, the non-canonical _Infancy Gospel of Thomas_ describes Jesus playing by a stream. When he makes twelve sparrows from the clay, his father asks him why he is doing something prohibited on the Sabbath. Jesus responds by clapping his hands. The sparrows come alive and then fly away. On another occasion, Jesus causes a child who bumps into him to die. When the child's death upsets villagers, Jesus blinds them. Those incidents so strongly clash with Jesus' image as a healer and man of peace that scholars of all theological persuasions reject the stories as fabrications.

Other Christians seek an answer to _What would Jesus do?_ directly from God through prayer. This approach builds on the historic Christian teaching of a risen Christ who lives within the believer and who, through the Holy Spirit, guides the Christian in his or her daily life. This approach, particularly in a highly individualistic culture, risks misidentifying personal thoughts, preferences, fears, and hopes as expressions of God's will. President George W. Bush seems to have relied heavily upon prayer to discern God's will in deciding to invade Iraq. Similarly, Pat Robertson, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, declared that God had sent the terrorists as a judgment on the U.S.'s immorality; Jerry Falwell agreed.

Nor can Christian community assure that we rightly discern God's will. Groups ranging from fringe sects like the Branch Davidians in Waco to mainstream Christian Churches have at times appallingly misidentified God's will:

In 1095 at the Council of Clermont, in response to appeals for help from the Eastern emperor at Constantinople, Urban II preached a sermon urging his listeners to undertake an expedition under papal leadership to free the Middle East from pagan control. He stirred his audience by describing how the Turks had disemboweled Christian men, raped women and desecrated churches. Urban appealed for unity in the face of the enemy... The crowd responded enthusiastically to his sermon shouting: 'God wills it! God wills it!'

That sermon launched the first Christian Crusade, unleashing a wave of killing, plunder, and rapacity that is still a major, negative force in shaping Islamic-Christian relations. Several Popes encouraged Christian soldiers by declaring those killed in the crusades defending the Church would be martyrs for the faith, guaranteed to enter heaven. The Eastern Orthodox Church made the same declaration.

The second virtue ethic rationale for pacifism, proposed by Hauerwas, circumvents the problems of relying upon Jesus as moral exemplar. Hauerwas contends that Christians who employ lethal force, even as a last resort after exhausting all non-violent alternatives, preempt God from acting decisively: "... war has been eliminated for those who participate in God's history. The miracle we call the church is God's sign that war is not part of his providential care of the world. Our happy task as Christians is to witness to that fact." God, as I read history, seems disinclined to act unilaterally and regularly relies upon human assistance. If my reading of history is correct, then Christians who employ lethal violence as a last resort do not preempt God. Just the opposite is true. God expects Christians to employ violence when all else has failed to end egregious evil.

For example, the media sporadically report a story about well-meaning Christian parents who trusted prayer, laying on of hands, and other spiritual resources to heal their sick child instead of obtaining proper medical care for their child. When the child died, the parents say God wanted their child in heaven, the public is outraged, and the larger Church, lamenting the parents' misguided faith, reiterates that God uses healthcare providers and medical treatments to bring healing. Human selfishness, indifference, and inertia also afford God many opportunities to heal the sick without human assistance in geographic areas acutely short of healthcare providers and medical resources. Yet God's intervention is far from obvious: millions suffer from curable diseases and thousands die needlessly. The pattern of divine-human interaction appears to be one of teamwork, God working through and alongside humans to heal the sick.

A similar pattern of divine-human interaction best describes how God feeds the hungry. Each year, millions die of hunger, often because of drought, flood, or crop pests. Yet God does not feed those people, not even the Christians among them who pray devoutly and fervently for divine help. Nor has God, in spite of repeated pleading, eliminated drought, flood, and pests. Instead, relief comes only when other people, the Church, non-profit organizations, or nations act. Much, perhaps even most, of that aid comes from religious communities motivated by their commitment to God and/or their commitment to peace with its implications for justice and the flourishing of all people.

History does not justify accepting Hauerwas' claim that God will intervene, miraculously and supernaturally, to end war and killing if only Christians become a faithful, non-violent community. Hauerwas' argument too facilely dismisses the plight of the victims of injustice. He recognizes that his position opens him to this accusation and goes so far as to acknowledge that Christians cannot promise Jews that "never again" will there be another Holocaust. In 1942, the United States began denying Jews who were fleeing the Holocaust entry, afraid that helping the Jews would erode U.S. support for the war. Christianity takes the plight of the victims of injustice seriously, acting to stop the injustice non-violently, if possible, but willing, as a last resort, to use lethal force.

The God of the Bible is both merciful and just. Not using every available means, including killing if a last resort, to prevent the extermination of any group is neither just nor merciful. Martin Niemoller, a German, a Lutheran pastor, and a leader of the German resistance movement against Hitler, said, "Yesterday they came for the Jews and I said nothing. Then they came for the people across the street and I said nothing. Today when they came for me, there was no one left to object." Non-violent resistance is ineffective in confronting evil that respects neither human dignity nor anything other than lethal force.

Reinhold Niebuhr emphasized that the responsibility of the Church and Christians for the well-being of humanity requires effective engagement in the world. He criticized Christian pacifism for not recognizing the depth and persistence of sin and for tacitly preferring tyranny to war. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Christian and long-term prisoner in the Soviet gulag, wrote, "During my time in the camps I had got to know the enemies of the human race quite well: they respect the _big fist_ and nothing else; the harder you slug them, the safer you will be. (People in the West simply will not understand this, and are forever hoping to mollify them with concessions.)" A Christian missionary to India eventually concluded that at times only violence can end even worse evil. He reluctantly advocated martial law to end the fighting between Hindus and Muslims after witnessing the spiraling violence between those two groups at the time of India's independence from Great Britain. Prior to this, he had been a pacifist with such strong convictions that during WWII he had served a prison sentence in the U.S. rather than register for the draft or accept exemption as a seminarian.

Although the arguments for pacifism are not persuasive, those arguments highlight important aspects of the Christian tradition. Too often, Christians who reject pacifism try to ignore the pacifist witness by disparaging, discarding, or discounting any values associated with Christian pacifism. Yet from the time of Constantine, concurrent with the development of Just War Theory, the Church established two standards of conduct, one for the laity and for the clergy. This preserved the pacifist witness while addressing social demands for safety and security. A healthy Christian Church accommodates both those who accept and those who reject pacifism. Pacifism is neither a litmus test of a person's identity as a Christian nor an indicator of a weak or naively idealistic faith as some allege.

The Church rightly bears a multiform witness to the world, embracing both pacifists and Just War theorists. Noted philosopher John Rawls' observation about diverse moral judgments unquestionably applies to issues of war and peace: "Many of our most important judgments are made under conditions where it is not to be expected that conscientious persons with full powers of reason, even after free discussion, will all arrive at the same conclusion." That multiform witness exists among individuals and the various Christian Churches. For example, the official Roman Catholic position is Just War Theory. The pastoral letter from the U.S. bishops to Roman Catholics "reaffirms Pius XII's injunction that states have a moral duty to defend their people against aggression and that nations are obliged to assist one another in self-defense." Nevertheless, the Roman Catholic Church, like most Churches, makes room for both the pacifist and the Christian willing to employ lethal force as a last resort.

Christian pacifists have a special vocation to the Church and to the world, as do monks, nuns, and others. The pacifist witness counterbalances holy war rhetoric and impulses within the Church and within the larger community. Nations are typically too quick to wage war and can find militarism attractive for a variety of reasons. Pacifists symbolically remind the Church that it works in conjunction with God and not on its own, that lethal force is only a morally justifiable last resort in well-defined situations, and that ideally nobody would ever employ violent means. The pacifist witness also reminds other Christians that peacemaking requires complementing campaigns for restraints on killing with pro-active community building. Christian pacifists need to recalibrate their agenda for peacemaking in view of the changed circumstances since the end of the Cold War and emergence of new types of threats.

## D. Conscientious objection

Conscientious objection, a key component of pacifism in action, incarnates a pacifist's rejection of killing and military service. The conscientious objector believes that one or both of those acts will violate his or her conscience by requiring cooperation with evil. For the Christian pacifist, conscientious objection supplements other peacemaking activities that include non-violent resistance to evil and pro-actively working to establish genuine peace.

Four types of conscientious objectors exist:

1. The absolutist, who not only refuses to serve but even to pay the taxes with which the government funds the military;

2. The alternativist, unwilling to serve in the military but willing to perform alternative service;

3. The noncombatant, unwilling to engage in combat but willing to serve in the military in a noncombat role, e.g., as a medic;

4. The selective conscientious objector, who will fight only in wars the person deems just.

This section examines each of the four categories of conscientious objectors in detail, paying especial attention to arguments in favor of selective conscientious objection.

Legal recognition of conscientious objection is relatively new. Prior to the American Civil War, no nation exempted conscientious objectors from military service. By WWII, the United States had formalized a process for exempting conscientious objectors who cited religious reasons. With the Korean Conflict, the U.S. military expanded the basis for conscientious objection to include philosophical reasons. Moskos and Chambers in their definitive work on conscientious objection more broadly trace conscientious objection's four-stage history, summarized in Figure 2.1.

Conscientious objectors, whether already in uniform or facing conscription, usually pay a social cost for having adopted a generally unpopular position, costs in time and resources for requesting conscientious objector status, and deprive the nation of a potential warfighter. The costs associated with conscientious objection underscore the depth of conviction behind those objections. If all pacifists were elderly, disabled, and others with no obligation to serve in the military, society could easily ignore their views. Being a pacifist would cost such individuals nothing and their position would pose no impediment to marshaling resources for war. Christian pacifists generally regard the cost of conscientious objection as a cross that they bear for walking in Jesus' footsteps (Mark 8:34).

The more radical an individual's dissent, the greater the likely cost that the individual will incur. The absolutist war tax resister, who refuses to the pay the proportion of his or her taxes used to fund the military, represents one extreme of dissent. This person may attempt to emigrate to a nation that has no military and thereby avoid any legal consequences of refusing to pay war taxes. Doing so disrupts the other aspects of that person's life. Alternatively, the war tax resister may accept, at obvious cost, the criminal penalties associated with not paying taxes. Henry David Thoreau famously did this, going to jail instead of paying a tax he believed supported war and slavery, then chronicling the incident in his essay, "Civil Disobedience." Alternatively, the war tax resister may intentionally refuse to generate enough income that he or she would be liable for tax, opting for voluntary poverty to avoid complicity from cooperating with militarism.

One nuclear pacifist who became an absolutist war tax resister and garnered considerable publicity was Seattle's former Roman Catholic Archbishop, Raymond Hunthausen. Although his diocese included the nuclear submarine base at Bangor, WA, Archbishop Hunthausen encouraged Roman Catholics to pay only half of their income tax because the United States then spent about half of its federal budget on defense. He preached that reliance on God instead of nuclear weapons was the only source of true security.

Fr. Daniel Berrigan is an even more radical absolutist, repeatedly arrested for active non-violent protests against U.S. nuclear weapons and militarism. A large portion of the publicity that Hunthausen and Berrigan attracted was because their stances were costly to them and to the Roman Catholic Church.

Jehovah's Witnesses have similarly incurred persecution because they will bear arms in Christ's army but not in their nation's army, will not serve as military noncombatants, and refuse to perform alternative service. This persecution stopped in 1970 when the U.S. Supreme Court recognized Jehovah Witnesses as valid conscientious objectors.

The New Testament depicts the nascent Church as recognizing that life within the larger social fabric requires Christians to tolerate policies with which they disagreed but could not control. The Apostle Paul wrote, "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God" (Romans 13:1). Those same governing authorities often prosecuted Paul for disturbing the peace, used tax revenues to fund pagan worship, and initiated numerous wars. The absolutist position does not cohere well with the New Testament picture of early Christianity or with most Christian history since. Absolutists are like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, hoping that their voices, their paltry withheld taxes, and their refusal to acknowledge society's claim upon them, will alter history's trajectory.

God apparently calls few people, if any, to the modern martyrdom of absolute pacifism. Alternativists and noncombatants witness to the importance of non-violence while fulfilling their obligations as citizens of a particular nation. By granting them conscientious objector status, a nation honors the alternativist's human dignity and rights more fully than requiring these individuals to choose between mandatory military service, on the one hand, and flight or civil disobedience, on the other hand. Precisely for this reason, the post-WWII German Constitution incorporates a provision for conscientious objection. Democratic societies with legal provisions that recognize conscientious objector status acknowledge their society's pluralism and their commitment to honoring the dignity and diversity of all of their citizens. Giving conscientious objection legal standing formally recognizes the moral legitimacy of conscientious objection. Honoring the human dignity and rights of all people — perhaps especially pacifists — is fundamental to Christianity.

Eliminating or minimizing the costs associated with conscientious objection by alternativists and noncombatants may diminish the impact of their witness on the larger society. Conversely, making pacifism less costly by legalizing conscientious objection also makes pacifism more attractive. That may increase the number of conscientious objectors and thereby magnify their collective social impact.

Rampant militarism in many nations, including the U.S., imparts a continuing importance to conscientious objectors' pacifist witness. For example, during the Reagan presidency, U.S. law required eighteen-year-old males to register for a possible future draft. At least half a million did not do so. Most of those who failed to register were not absolutists. They simply wanted to end the draft, were too lazy to comply with the law, or were ignorant of the requirement to register. There were no prosecutions. This cost free, or nearly cost free, protest added momentum to ending mandatory registration. Generally, the number of conscientious objectors tends to increase with increasing social opposition to a particular war.

Opponents of conscientious objection correctly observe that exempting pacifists from military service can weaken the fabric that binds the larger community together. That claim is especially true in nations like Switzerland that have programs of universal service for all adults, or even all men, of a certain age. In such nations, military service performs an important socialization function as people transition from being youths to adult citizens. However, no nation has ever had a significant percentage of its populace become pacifists. For alternativist and noncombatant conscientious objectors, legal recognition of their status coupled with alternative or noncombatant military service appropriately balances respect for individual conscience and communal obligations.

The majority of pacifists are alternativists, unwilling to renounce their citizenship or its civic responsibilities but also unwilling to serve in the military. Patriotism, in fact, appears to be pacifism's main rival for supremacy among an alternativist's various and conflicting allegiances. Military service transgresses the threshold of acceptable options because, unlike paying taxes, all military personnel are too complicit in the military's warfighting mission. Medics, after all, provide healthcare to military personnel not only to save lives but also to keep personnel combat ready. Medics are also defensive combatants, i.e., in an extreme situation they may need to take up arms to defend their unit from enemy attack. Christians and others who choose alternativist pacifism do not benefit from the same socialization as do their peers who serve in the military, e.g., the alternativist will suffer from any negative feelings that potential employers have towards those who do not serve in the military. In a nation such as Israel, in which universal military service is a rite of passage and a school for building national identity, those who do not serve (e.g., Arabs are not required to serve) often lose credibility among the wider population and receive less enculturation in society's values. Conversely, alternativists benefit by avoiding any potential cost associated with military service, e.g., the problem of dirty hands if the alternativist had killed in combat. For any specific individual, these issues represent hypothetical situations that permit only ex post facto analysis.

Noncombatants, those willing to serve in the military but not in a combatant capacity, number no more than a relative handful. The cost of granting noncombatant conscientious objectors special status and assigning them duty as medics imposes no significant burden, administrative or otherwise, on the military or nation. Medics now generally run the same risks as other personnel in a unit, because asymmetric warfare eliminates the distinctions between front line and rear echelon. The costs, social or otherwise, to the individual conscientious objector are low, if any. Probably the greatest advantage of recognizing noncombatant conscientious objectors is showing the nation's respect for the rights and dignity of its citizens, even when those citizens subscribe to unpopular, distinctly minority, opinions. The noncombatant conscientious objectors with whom I have discussed their military service felt good about the choice they made for themselves, the help they rendered to others, and disappointed that their choice had not influenced others to reject combat as a moral option. Probably Seventh-day Adventists, who actively encouraged their members, when conscripted, to become medics in WWII and Vietnam, have comprised the largest group of noncombatants.

When faced with conscription during WWII, Thomas Merton adopted the position of a noncombatant conscientious objector:

After all, Christ did say: 'Whatsoever you have done to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.' I know that it is not the mind of the Church that this be applied literally to war — or rather, that war is looked upon as painful but necessary social surgical operation in which you kill your enemy not out of hatred but for the common good.... After all, I might be able to turn an evil situation into a source of much good. In the medical corps — if that was where they put me — I would not be spared any of the dangers that fell upon other men, and at the same time I would be able to help them, to perform works of mercy, and to overcome evil with good. I would be able to leaven the mass of human misery with the charity and mercy of Christ, and the bitter, ugly, filthy business of the war could be turned into the occasion for my own sanctification and for the good of other men. If you set aside the practically insoluble question of cooperation that might be bought, it seemed to me that this was what Christ Himself would have done, and what He wanted me to do.

Ironically, the issue of his status became moot when the Army found Merton physically disqualified for military service.

Given the small numbers of pacifists, any social problems that result from granting exemptions or assigning alternative service to conscientious objectors lacks sufficient magnitude to fray a nation's social fabric. Importantly, that generalization ceases to hold true when a war is widely perceived as immoral or unpopular. The number of conscientious objectors in the United States increased to a significant level during the Vietnam conflict and in Israel during Israel's first invasion of Lebanon. In both instances, rather than fraying the social fabric, the number of conscientious objectors added impetus to efforts to end the conflicts.

Obviously, an all-volunteer military force, such as the United States now has, renders most questions of alternativist conscientious objection moot. Conscientious objectors simply do not volunteer to serve. The U.S. armed forces do allow military personnel who become pacifists to apply for discharge as conscientious objector based on religious or philosophical moral objections to war. Approximately two to three hundred service personnel apply per year. Upon receiving a request for conscientious objector status, the service's personnel command solicits the opinion of the chain of command, a chaplain, a lawyer, and others knowledgeable about the nature and sincerity of the individual service member's beliefs. If the military service decides that the individual has truly become a conscientious objector, then the service discharges the person. The military does not track the number of personnel who become noncombatant conscientious objectors. These individuals generally have limited options. Depending upon pay grade, military occupational specialty, aptitude, and ability, some may obtain a transfer to a medical specialty. Most must remain in their current occupational specialty, complete any obligated service, and only then leave the military.

When I was a Navy chaplain, commands occasionally tasked me to assess an individual service member's sincerity as a conscientious objector. While working on the Chief of Chaplains staff for three and a half years, I served, on a rotating basis, as a member of the Navy personnel board that approved conscientious objector requests. In general, conscientious objectors received a fair hearing; individuals demonstrating sincere, well-reasoned beliefs received an honorable discharge. Some had experienced a rekindling of prior religious or philosophical beliefs after entering the military. Combat training, parental influence, reading, renewed interest in religion, or other factors might have caused that renewal. Other service members found themselves drawn to a friend's religious tradition, especially if romantically involved with that friend. Many were Jehovah's Witnesses. A smaller number came from historic peace churches such as the Quakers and Mennonites. Very few came from other Christian traditions. Non-Christians primarily established a philosophical basis for their pacifism, citing the works of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and other proponents of non-violent change.

Sadly, I knew a small number of Christian U.S. military chaplains who opposed all forms of conscientious objection. The attitude of these chaplains underscores the importance of pacifism and conscientious objection as a living witness against militarism and nationalism. Thankfully, regardless of religious tradition, most chaplains with whom I worked recognized both the rights and important witness of conscientious objectors.

This discussion of conscientious objection has so far focused on persons who object to all lethal violence and thus to all wars. Selective conscientious objectors dissent from participation in a particular war rather than objecting to all wars. The United States military does not recognize selective conscientious objection. A handful of Christians approached me when I was a chaplain seeking to become a selective conscientious objector. One whom I remember objected to the first Gulf War (GWI), the expulsion of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces from Kuwait, because this Christian service member believed that the war did not meet the criteria for a Just War. He strongly believed that oil was the real reason for GWI. (Chapter 3 explicates Just War Theory and analyzes GWI according to Just War criteria.) I also dealt with one of several Muslims in the U.S. Navy who objected to GWI because he believed that his faith taught him it was wrong to kill other Muslims, which he anticipated he might have to do in the war. The U.S. Army unsuccessfully court-martialed and then discharged an officer, 1LT Ehren Watada, who did not object to military service per se but who refused to deploy to Iraq because he morally objected to Gulf War II (GWII), the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

To date, the U.S. Congress has declined to authorize selective conscientious objection, defeating legislation proposed in 1971 that would have authorized it. A 1967 U.S. government panel studied creating an option of selective conscientious objection for the Selective Service Commission, the agency responsible for administering the draft. The commission reported that establishing an option for selective conscientious objection:

\- Would require the government to cross the barrier between religion and state;

\- Is a political question that cannot be "judged in terms of special moral imperatives;"

\- Would invite selective disobedience;

\- Would render noncombatant military service impossible;

\- Could disrupt the armed forces' morale and effectiveness.

The context for the panel's work was growing public opposition to the Vietnam War and increased resistance to the draft. The most enduring exposition of Just War Theory, a modern philosophical work that has become a classic, is _Just and Unjust Wars_ by Harvard philosopher Michael Walzer. Individual assessment of whether a particular war is just, using philosophical criteria such as Walzer advocated rather than religious criteria, easily avoids excessive entanglement with religion. Indeed, a major purpose of Just War Theory is to allow individuals to assess the morality of particular wars, refuting the panel's second objection to selective conscientious objection, that selective objection is a political, instead of moral, choice.

Selective conscientious objection is also consistent with Christian versions of Just War Theory. Christian citizens have a moral obligation to understand why they fight a particular war and to object if they believe that war immoral. Shakespeare's idealized Christian king, Henry V, in the eponymous play, affirms the traditional Christian conviction that a combatant's conscience is clear only if his leader's cause is just and honorable. Then Shakespeare, ever the secularist, continues the play with a foot soldier saying that he and his peers do not need to understand the justice of the king's military ventures. "The rationalization Shakespeare evokes may be especially popular among combatants of most cultures, but it's a rationale with which many people everywhere run their whole life: The authority is in charge. I'm doing what I'm told."

That rationale conflicts with a Christian understanding of personal responsibility. The Catholic Peace Fellowship approvingly quotes James Turner Johnson, a leading military ethicist, when he cites two early, Christian Just War Theorists, Spanish Roman Catholic priests Francisco Suarez and Francisco de Vitoria, who concluded:

When the prince's cause is manifestly unjust, subjects may not serve in his war.... Suarez even pushes the issue back one step: when arguments have been advanced that raise some doubt in the consciences of the subjects, they must inquire into their prince's cause. If they discover that the cause is unjust, they may not serve... Suarez and Vitoria offer a clear justification for individual conscientious objection to particular wars....It is emphatically the subject's responsibility to dispel any doubt...and if doing so results in certainty on his part that the war is unjust, he must in conscience refuse.

Imminent Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, a pacifist prior to WWII who became a supporter of that war after learning of the Holocaust, concluded as early as 1966 that the Vietnam War was immoral. Young men eligible for the draft who shared Niebuhr's Christian view that war is sometimes a moral necessity but that the Vietnam War was immoral had no good option. They did not fit any of the three conscientious objector categories of absolutist, alternativist, or noncombatant. Their choices were: lie in order to better fit one of those categories; commit an act of civil disobedience; or flee the nation. Allowing for selective conscientious objection would have better served such men as well as the nation.

Selective conscientious objection also respects diversity of religious beliefs and practices, an aim consonant with the Christian emphasis on respecting the dignity and worth of all without establishing any religion or creating an excessive state entanglement with religion. An individual requesting selective conscientious objector status would have to demonstrate what his or her religion teaches as well as a genuinely sincere commitment to living in fidelity to that teaching. The present law unfairly privileges the absolute pacifism of the historic peace churches over the selective conscientious objection taught by most Christian Churches (e.g., the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran) and non-Christian religions. For example, Muslims who object to fighting in wars in which they may have to kill Muslims could request selective conscientious objector status based on their religious beliefs. This process parallels the constitutionally acceptable process by which an individual service member may currently request conscientious objector status.

The panel's third objection, that establishing an option for selective conscientious objection invites civil disobedience, seems improbable. Just the opposite seems more likely, as granting selective conscientious objectors a legal avenue for acting upon their beliefs will discourage civil disobedience. With no conscription in the U.S., selective conscientious objection currently pertains only to military personnel. Options for the selective conscientious objector are flight or direct disobedience of a lawful order, both of which are punishable by death in wartime. Selective conscientious objectors often receive more media attention than other types of conscientious objectors, perhaps because of the high cost presently associated with their actions, e.g., the aforementioned case of 1LT Watada. However, Watada's actions have not triggered even a trickle of similar cases, perhaps because of that high cost. High military morale also discourages any but those with the strongest convictions from following his lead.

The panel's fourth objection, establishing an option for selective conscientious objection renders noncombatant military service impossible, is a non-sequitur. Selective conscientious objection and noncombatant military service are not mutually exclusive. Admittedly, some individuals who previously opted for noncombatant service might instead have chosen selective conscientious objection. Nevertheless, not all are likely to have done so, e.g., Thomas Merton who felt strongly about his duty in WWII to aid those injured in combat:

Finally, the panel was concerned that an option for selective conscientious objection would diminish the military's morale and fighting effectiveness. Any claim that allowing individuals in the U.S. military to choose the wars in which they will fight will materially diminish military readiness and effectiveness rightly evokes considerable skepticism. That has not proven true in nations that have created an option for selective conscientious objection, e.g., Great Britain and Israel. Great Britain in WWI and then in WWII, even while under siege, exempted selective conscientious objectors. Selective conscientious objection would not allow military personnel to opt out of the service on a whim. The member would have to apply for a discharge, demonstrate that he or she had a well-reasoned philosophical or religious basis for selective conscientious objection, show that the particular war in question met those criteria, and prove that he or she was sincere. Individuals serving in units with high morale would face significant peer pressure to remain in the military, further discouraging the insincere from applying.

Pacifism is one of Christianity's three historical perspectives on war. The pacifist tradition, rightly not the dominant perspective, contributes important insights and corrective influences by emphasizing the Christian presumption against violence, the vocation of peacemaking, and countering militarism. Conscientious objection, in nations with mandatory national service or military conscription and for persons whose views change after entering military service, recognizes the moral integrity of pacifism, respects the dignity and worth of non-pacifists and pacifists, and fosters public discourse about the morality of war. Selective conscientious objection represents an important moral option for Christians and others confronted with a national or military demand to serve in what the Christian believes is an immoral war. The third Christian perspective on war, Just War Theory, provides a paradigm that has withstood the test of time for determining which wars are moral and which are immoral.

#  Chapter 3: Just War Theory

_For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:... a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace._ (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 8)

_Righteousness and peace will kiss each other._ (Psalms 85:10)

The Navy tasked me to conduct the worship service at Camp David the Sunday prior to the 1990 launching of Desert Storm, the U.S. led liberation of Kuwait from its Iraqi invaders. President and Mrs. George H.W. Bush attended. That was perhaps the most difficult sermon I have preached: what does one say, from a Christian perspective, to the President of a nation that appears about to start a war? I finally decided to preach about Just War Theory. Publicly, the President had not yet committed the nation to war. Saddam Hussein presumably could have withdrawn his troops and avoided the war. Also, as an individual, I had not discerned any sign that God was directing the U.S. to wage war against Iraq.

I am not a pacifist. Sometimes, Christians have no choice but to use lethal force to stop evil. My sentiments echo those of Dietrich Bonheoffer (1906-1945), a German Lutheran pastor and seminary professor, who abandoned pacifism precisely because he recognized in Nazism an evil so pernicious and tenacious that only lethal force could stop it. Prior to WWII, Bonheoffer was a committed pacifist and peacemaker, pro-actively working against Hitler and the Nazis even before their 1933 ascent to power. In 1939, Bonheoffer accepted an appointment to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. However, his reflections on Just War Theory while he watched the Nazis utterly disregard basic Christian values, including respect for the dignity and worth of life, as they initiated their program to exterminate Jews and others deemed undesirable, persuaded Bonheoffer that he had to act, regardless of any personal cost. Before teaching even a single class at Union, he left the safety of New York, returned to Germany, and rejoined the struggle against Hitler. The Nazis arrested him for attempting to help Jews escape to Switzerland. Discovering papers that linked him to a failed attempt on Hitler's life, they hung Bonheoffer at the Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, the day before the Allies liberated it. Tragically, Christians sometimes find war both a necessary evil and moral responsibility. Just War Theory is the Christian paradigm, continually evolving in response to changing circumstances, for determining when the evil of war is morally justifiable.

## A. Background and development

Immediately before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, the Roman emperor Constantine saw what he believed was a vision of a cross in the sky above the noonday sun, emblazoned with the words, "Conquer by this." Attributing his victory that day to the Christian God, Constantine adopted a symbol comprised of the Greek letter Chi with the letter Rho superimposed upon it (the first two letters of the Greek word _Christos_ , meaning _Christ_ ) as his army's emblem. Interestingly, he deferred converting to Christianity until near the end of his life in 337. At the battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine defeated his first major rival for the imperial Roman throne but did not reign as sole emperor until eleven years later, when in 323 he defeated his last rival, Licinius, emperor of the Empire's eastern portion. In 313, Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan, proclaiming the Empire's toleration of Christianity. From that time forward, Constantine treated Christianity with increasing favor, although it was not the Empire's official religion.

In 380, the emperor Theodosius decreed that Christianity was the Roman Empire's official religion. Politically, this changed Christianity's status from the favored to the established religion. Socially, this completed Christianity's transformation from a once obscure faith held only by a relative handful of Jewish Christians in a distant province into the Empire's dominant religion enshrined in law. Collectively, these changes meant that the Church could no longer ignore questions about military service and the legitimate use of lethal force.

Christians generally regarded the need for domestic law enforcement as a natural corollary of Christianity's teaching that humans are fallen and sinful. Prohibiting Christians from serving in the Roman military at a time when the vast majority of the Empire's population was Christian would have created a serious obstacle to the Empire being able to recruit sufficient military personnel to maintain law and order. Indeed, some Christian writers, from the second century onward, acknowledged the need for policing and the compatibility of military service for that purpose with Christianity. However, the same personnel and units that performed police duties also performed all other military operations. Therefore, the Church could not approve of Christians participating in the military's policing role without tacitly condoning Christians participating in warfighting.

Furthermore, to the extent that the pax Romana prevailed, it represented an absence of hostilities congruent with progress toward the Christian vision of a world at peace. Distinguished church historian Roland Bainton quotes these lines from the fourth century Christian poet Prudentius to illustrate the widely held perception that the pax Romana was synonymous with Christian peace:

When God desired that men asunder rent

By tongue and dress should own a single sway,

With gentle bonds of concord were they drawn

Till love of piety all hearts conjoined...

Mortals by rage of Bellona embroiled,

Wild armed hands inflicting mutual wounds

By God were curbed and taught the laws of Rome,

Joined by one right, one name, one brotherhood...

Triumph on triumph gave to Rome the earth,

And laid the road on which the Lord should tread...

And now, O Christ, a world prepared takes thee,

Linked by the common bond of Rome and peace.

Differentiating between policing and keeping the _barbarians_ (those who would destroy that peace) at bay was exceedingly difficult. Barbarian intrusions and depredations were so frequent, severe, and unrelenting that by the end of the fourth century the Church had discarded pacifism as the normative view Christian attitude toward war, creating an ethical void that the utilitarian (results-based) Just War Theory soon filled. No rules-based (deontological) or virtue ethics approach to determining when Christians can morally use lethal force in war has ever gained widespread acceptance in the Church or among Christians.

Augustine (354-430), Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, was the pivotal figure in the development of Christianity's new perspective on military service and warfighting. Augustine elaborated ideas first voiced in the latter part of the fourth century by Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (338-397). Ambrose had been a widely respected layman, a civil official in northern Italy, when popular acclaim demanded that he fill the vacant Bishopric of Milan. Quickly ordained and installed, Ambrose was an effective bishop and persuasive orator. He employed many Old Testament military metaphors to encourage people to join in repelling the invading barbarians, who were Arians, a heretical Christian sect. Ambrose's preaching and teaching emphasized that a war's conduct be just and that clergy abstain from fighting. Instrumental in Augustine's conversion to Christianity, Ambrose baptized Augustine in 387.

Very much a realist, Augustine had no expectation that people would ever completely overcome what he believed were humans' sinful nature and proclivities in order to achieve Christian perfection on earth. Augustine also understood that the mere absence of war falls far short of the Christian concept of peace, i.e., the complete well-being and flourishing of creation. Since genuine peace was an unrealizable utopia, he accepted the necessity of employing state authority and power to establish as close an approximation to peace as possible. He regretted that the military needed to use lethal force in policing and in defending the empire against the forces of evil and chaos but could envision no alternative. Drawing upon his classical education as well as Ambrose's ideas, Augustine outlined this framework to guide Christians of good conscience in waging war in a morally responsible manner:

\- The intent of the war must be to restore peace;

\- The object of the war must be to vindicate justice;

\- The conduct of the war must be just;

\- The war must be waged under just auspices.

"Love for neighbors threatened by violence, by aggression, or tyranny, provided the grounds for admitting the legitimacy of the use of military force. Love for neighbors at the same time required that such force should be limited."

Following Augustine, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) made the most substantial contribution to shaping Just War Theory. He articulated what many, including the Roman Catholic Church today, consider the theory's basic form. Aquinas explicitly built upon Augustine's work, identifying three criteria that a just war must satisfy before Christians can participate in good conscience. One measure of Aquinas' lasting influence is that his Latin label for these criteria, _jus ad bellum_ (justice before war), remains normative:

1. "The authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged....

2. "A just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault....

3. "The belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil...."

Aquinas then adds three conditions for waging a just war, which he labeled _jus in bello_ (justice in war), a division and label that also remain normative:

1. Clergy and bishops are not to fight because warfare is incompatible with their spiritual duties;

2. Ambushes and deception are lawful in war;

3. When necessary, holy days present no impediment to waging war.

Although both the paradigms of Augustine and Aquinas appear deontological (i.e., a set of rules), the implicit presumption of both is that sometimes the good that results from warfighting will exceed the harm done, representing a utilitarian calculus. Otherwise, the entire construct of Just War Theory is prima facie incompatible with the ethic of Jesus, which teaches love for both neighbor and enemy.

During and after the European enlightenment, secular ethicists adapted and adopted Just War Theory, articulating a theory that largely parallels Christian Just War Theory but does not rely on Christian theology for its rationale. Since Aquinas, Just War Theory has benefited from continuing refinement by noted scholars including Francisco de Vitoria (1486-1546), Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1704), Christian Wolff (1679-1754), and Emerich de Vattel (1714-1767). Prominent twentieth century Christian ethicist Paul Ramsey eloquently articulated an updated version of the Just War Theory during the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Just War Theory's secular trajectory culminated in Michael Walzer's definitive expression in his 1977 book, _Just and Unjust Wars_. Although he briefly acknowledges his debt to Aquinas, Walzer's development of Just War Theory is purely secular and relies on human rights as its philosophical basis.

Secular and Christian versions of Just War Theory share common goals derived from the premise that a moral standard exists by which individuals and groups (families, tribes, clans, nations, etc.) should live. First, both versions attempt to set limits on when humans and societies can morally wage war (jus ad bellum). In other words, the old adage that _might makes right_ is wrong. Within a Christian context, Just War Theory also represents a restraint on holy war proponents who believe that God has directed them to wage a specific war. War may at times be morally necessary, but God does not call people or groups to launch holy wars or crusades: "The case for war should be difficult to make. Not impossible, but difficult." Indeed, the development of modern weapons, beginning with rifled cannons and primitive machine guns, prompted a shift in the Christian version of Just War Theory from a neutral presumption toward war that began with Aquinas back to Augustine's earlier bias against war.

Second, both the secular and Christian versions of Just War Theory seek to limit the violence and destruction associated with war (jus in bello). In other words, the end does not always justify the means. The means by which one wages war are necessary but not necessarily good in and of themselves, e.g., although battle may necessitate killing enemy soldiers, killing anybody remains morally wrong. A sizable minority of Just War theorists, particularly secular theorists, dissent from this opinion, but, from a Christian perspective, killing, even when essential, seems incongruous with Jesus' ethic of loving one's neighbor and one's enemies. Just War Theory takes the reality of evil and our human responsibility to oppose evil seriously while concurrently squarely facing the horrors of war, which combat veterans know all too well.

Third, contemporary scholars who research or embrace either the Christian or secular version of Just War Theory more and more recognize that a war that ends by sowing the seeds, intentionally or unintentionally, of further instability, injustice, and war fails to satisfy the criteria for a just war. WWI, promoted among the Allied Powers as the _war to end all wars_ , miserably failed to achieve that goal. Historians generally agree that the terms on which WWI ended set the stage for the Nazi rise to power, inevitably leading to WWII, e.g., Germany's reparations to the Allies virtually bankrupted Germany. The most significant updating of Just War Theory has entailed arguing for the addition of _jus post bellum_ (justice after war) criteria, helpfully expanding Just War Theory to include a post conflict requirement to establish greater justice and to build a more lasting peace.

Within Just War Theory's original two divisions, schemata have proliferated enumerating differing numbers and various phrasings of criteria. Debating Just War Theory's nuances is a cottage industry among ethicists interested in the morality of war. Yet a broad consensus persists about the general outlines of a Christian version of Just War Theory, among both scholars who agree and those who disagree with Just War Theory conclusions. Christians who utilize Just War Theory can feel confident about analyzing the morality of wars and warfare from this perspective, aware that people of good conscience may reach different conclusions about the morality or justness of particular wars.

In teaching ethics as part of my duties at the Marine Corps' Officer Candidates School, the Naval Academy, and the Naval Postgraduate School, I found that the model delineated in Figure 3.1 presents the first two parts of Just War Theory, jus ad bellum and jus in bello, with a maximum of clarity and simplicity. Sections B and C of this chapter examine those components in detail. Section D develops the rationale and framework for jus post bellum criteria as an integral element of Christian Just War Theory. All three sections emphasize the importance of virtue ethics when conducting a just war analysis. Finally, section E illustrates Just War Theory's moral utility with an analysis of the first U.S. Gulf War.

## B. Part I: Jus ad bellum

Only if an actual or potential war satisfies all six jus ad bellum criteria can Christians consider the war just.

#### a. Just cause

Historically, just cause has evolved from feudal nobility defending their honor into a nation's self-defense against an aggressor nation(s) or defending the victim of aggression against its aggressor. Preserving territorial integrity is a sine qua non for avoiding incessant war in a global community of independent nation states. Just cause ignores issues of which nations should exist or the proper location of national boundaries. Thus, Just War Theory does not address any moral issues raised when one nation purchases land from another, such as the U.S. purchase of Alaska from Russia in a deal that abrogated the prior claim of Inuit, Aleut, and Indian tribes to the land. Nor does just cause speak to issues involved in the voluntary union or dismemberment of nations. In general, just cause also excludes armed rebellion or secession. Consequently, the American Civil War, from the aggressor's perspective, was unjustifiable. That is, the southern states did not have just cause to secede forcibly from the Union. Conversely, the Union satisfied the just cause criterion as it fought to preserve its territorial integrity.

The problem of slavery, which complicates any moral analysis of the Civil War, illustrates the principal moral shortcoming in the historic understanding of just cause, i.e., situations of horrendous, ongoing injustice to persons do not constitute just cause for waging war. Aquinas considered rebellion against an unjust tyrant a just war, if the rebellion satisfied the other jus ad bellum criteria, because the tyrant was responsible for the injustice. Contemporary Just War theorists frequently cite the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews, the handicapped, homosexuals, etc., as a prime example of the need to expand the scope of just cause. Christians highly value human life and rights; broadening Just War Theory to include interventions in defense of persons or human rights translates those moral values into moral practice.

In the last few decades, the primary counter-arguments to expanding just cause have emphasized issues of national sovereignty, i.e., one nation not having a moral right to interfere in the internal affairs of another nation. For example, Michael Walzer cites the U.S. decision not to intervene in the 1956 Hungarian revolution as an example of just cause delimited by issues of national sovereignty. Arguments about respecting national sovereignty are not persuasive in light of the egregious evil that some regimes inflict on their citizens.

Unfortunately, expanding just cause from its narrow definition (defending national territory) to a broader view (defending human life and rights as well as territory) introduces substantial but unavoidable ambiguity into a previously straightforward definition. Violations of established national boundaries provide an objective basis for determining just cause. Determining the number of people a government kills unjustly poses difficulties in obtaining an accurate body count and even thornier issues in ascertaining that the nation killed each person unjustly. If a government kills one person unjustly, assuredly that is more likely due to human error rather than to a horrendously unjust government in whose affairs other nations are morally justified in interfering. At the other extreme, explicit genocide of an entire people certainly constitutes reasonable just cause. Determinations along the spectrum between those two extremes require the exercise of much prudential wisdom as well as reliance upon the other jus ad bellum criteria. Similar difficulties exist in ascertaining just cause based on violations of human rights that fall short of death, a task further exacerbated by the lack of agreement on a definitive catalogue of those rights and on the relative importance of each of those rights.

#### b. Right intent

Right intent connotes justifiable goals for waging a war. For Christians, only one right aim exists: trying to move the world closer to the fullness of peace. Even when a war's cause is just, temptations persist during and after warfighting to engage in unnecessary violence and to exploit the war as an opportunity for gain or national advantage. Warriors, like all humans, will act unjustly at times, a problem considered in the discussion of jus in bello.

Nations may also use a just cause as a pretext to exact vengeance from another nation or people. After WWI, Great Britain and France, hungry for oil, annexed the Ottoman Empire's Middle Eastern lands. They justified their actions as punishing the Ottoman Empire for having aligned itself with the Axis Powers. Regardless of whether the Allied Powers' intent was punishment, greed, or a combination of both, the Allied Powers' actions manifested a lack of right intent. This land grab sowed some of the seeds for the current enmity and strife between radical Islamists and the West. Revenge, from a Christian perspective, is never consonant with right intent because revenge does not move the world closer to peace. Hence, the Bible wisely recognizes that vengeance is God's, rather a human, prerogative (Deuteronomy 32:35; Hebrews 10:30).

The American Revolution of 1776 illustrates the distinction between intent and cause as well as right intent connoting striving for peace rather than national or personal gain. Colonials believed that they had just cause to rebel, rallying to the cry of "No Taxation without Representation." Taxation by the British government was a form of legalized taking without the consent of the colonists, who had no representation in the British parliament. Before agreeing that this and the other British injustices the colonists experienced constituted just cause for war, one has to analyze carefully the full extent of the injustice. Accounts of life in eighteenth century America suggest that these injustices perhaps made human flourishing more difficult but did not make flourishing impossible. If that assessment is correct, the colonists lacked just cause to revolt.

The American Revolution's root cause appears to have been colonists' desire for self-governance. I strongly subscribe to the proposition boldly stated in the Declaration of Independence that government should be of the people, for the people, and by the people. Self-determination is a basic human right and, in general, democracy is the form of government most conducive to human flourishing and most congruent with Christianity. Yet, from the perspective of Just War Theory, a desire for self-governance does not constitute, per se, just cause. Human well-being and flourishing are possible without self-governance. Indeed, the Canadians and Australians flourished, and, in time, achieved self-governance without revolting against the British, even though the British monarch remains their titular head of state.

Philosophers and others occasionally hypothesize the existence of alternative universes in which all possible permutations of life play out. If that hypothesis is correct, then multiple alternative universes, unknown to us, exist in which the thirteen colonies did not revolt in 1776. Without knowledge of those alternative universes, the following questions are unanswerable: Would the thirteen colonies have flourished to the same extent, achieving the same levels of prosperity and freedom? Would the thirteen colonies have stood ready to aid the Allies in WWI and WWII as well as to be a firm bastion against Communism in the Cold War? Alternatively, would the thirteen colonies (or their successors) have entered WWI and WWII earlier, ending those wars sooner and with less loss of life? Would slavery have ended when Britain abolished slavery, avoiding the great slaughter of the American Civil War? If so, would that have resulted in much healthier race relations and the U.S. more nearly achieving equal opportunity for all regardless of race? We cannot relive history. Alternative universes, if they exist, are inaccessible.

Most U.S. citizens are justly proud of our American democracy, even with its faults and shortcomings. Yet from a Christian Just War Theory perspective, the American rebellion against the British lacked right intent. The colonists focused narrowly on their flourishing, not a broader conception of human flourishing; they particularly focused on the flourishing of free, white, property-owning males. The Revolution brought no immediate benefit to other white males or to any women; the revolt may have actually increased, over time, the injustices inflicted on non-whites.

Right intent morally justifies nations and their warriors performing deeds that otherwise are morally wrong, especially killing. The Christian tradition developed the doctrine of double effect to deal with this apparent paradox, an immoral deed performed for a moral reason. In simplified form, the doctrine of double effect requires that the act be necessary, its intended effect be good, the actor's intent is the good and not the evil effect, and the good done outweighs the evil. The last is critical: "the good effect must be at least equivalent in importance to the bad effect." The doctrine of double effect figures prominently in discussions of noncombatant immunity (part of jus in bello) and of reintegrating warriors into the community (part of jus post bellum).

#### c. Right authority

Historically, right authority denoted the person or entity within a nation authorizing the war who has no political superior. For example, the President of the United States is the Commander in Chief of the military forces but the Constitution specifies that the legal authority to declare war belongs to Congress. The twentieth century witnessed the erosion of Congress's war making authority as Presidents increasingly acted unilaterally. Examples of unilateral Presidential decisions to initiate military operations that, from a Just War Theory perspective, are wars include the 1983 U.S. invasions of Grenada under President Ronald Reagan and of Panama in 1989 under President George H.W. Bush. In both cases, presidential decisions pre-empted public moral discourse and resulted in de facto wars that, from a Just War Theory perspective, were morally unjustifiable.

The Grenada government may have posed a threat to U.S. citizens there, but this seems unlikely. One may debate whether that threat was of sufficient magnitude and immediacy to satisfy the just cause criterion (the discussion of the last resort criterion, below, explores the related issue of preemptive strikes). In retrospect, the U.S. intent was clearly broader than protecting its citizens. Regime change, replacing an unfriendly Marxist government, figured prominently in Reagan's agenda. At least one historian intimates that the U.S. invaded Grenada primarily to boost military morale with a victory. From a Christian perspective, one nation does not have the right to impose a form of government on another nation; to do so is an act of hubris that usurps the free agency of the other nation's citizens, who are responsible for choosing their own government. This is especially true when a nation acts with the ulterior aim of boosting military morale. The U.S. thus lacked right intent when it invaded Grenada.

The Panamanian government during General Noriega's Presidency engaged in narcotics trafficking. However, invading to stop the flow of illegal drugs from Panama into the United States was not a just cause. Panama exporting drugs did not violate the rights of U.S. citizens or directly kill U.S. citizens. Citizens who died from drug usage during that time did so because they used drugs, not because Panama exported the drugs. Demand and ineffective border control led to the importing illegal drugs. Noriega's government also had an abysmal record of disregarding the human rights of its own citizens. Nevertheless, those violations were not so bad as to constitute just cause. In retrospect, removing Noriega from power and bringing him to trial only temporarily reduced the flow of narcotics into the United States.

The Vietnam War was the United States' most costly failure to engage in a full and open debate about whether to wage war. President Johnson relied upon Congress' 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as Congressional authorization for the Vietnam War. Congress passed that resolution following an alleged attack by North Vietnamese forces in international waters on the Navy destroyer, USS MADDOX (DD-731), an incident now known to have never happened. President Johnson simply wanted, for political reasons, a dubious Congress to authorize the war ex post facto.

Congressional debates over whether to invade Grenada and Panama would have eliminated the surprise upon which both invasions relied to achieve victory with minimal casualties on all sides. Conversely, timely and fully informed debate about the merits and morality of the Vietnam War would probably have avoided hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. In all three cases, the lack of public debate deprived citizens, including the nation's Christians and religious leaders, of the opportunity to voice their concerns and moral perspectives in a timely manner. Right authority within a democracy requires that citizens fully and knowledgably participate in the political process, insisting that their voices be heard and votes be counted. Political involvement by Christians is a privilege (and sometimes a cost) of living in a democracy.

Right authority traditionally presumed an existing government's legitimacy and precluded individuals, businesses, or other groups from waging war. However, the enlarged scope of just cause implies, in the case of an excessively unjust government, moral justification for the oppressed to rebel and for external nations to support those revolutionaries. A prospective or actual revolution must fully satisfy all of the Just War criteria except right authority to constitute a just war. In such cases, a significant proportion of the population must experience major injustices that place large numbers of lives at risk. Primary responsibility for rebelling, fighting, and determining the new government's form and composition belong to the unjust nation's citizens. Satisfying the jus post bellum criteria will improve the likelihood of establishing better conditions post-war than existed pre-war.

The locus of right authority, over Just War Theory's long history, shifted from a feudal hierarchy to sovereign nations. With the rapidly emerging reality of a global community, Christian Just War advocates have begun arguing that right authority is becoming an international responsibility. The accelerating interconnectedness of people and nations, the spreading scope and density of transnational economic ties, and the propensity for combat — even without weapons of mass destruction — to reach beyond national borders add urgency to revising the definition of right authority. International alliances and action can help to minimize perceptions that the strong bully the weak. International coalitions also help other nations to invest in solving common problems, e.g., problems rogue states produce.

Regrettably, viable international institutions or organizations able to respond effectively to world problems generally do not exist. Although some scholars suggest that the United Nations is the best locus for international authority, few nations willingly accept U.N. authority. Apart from unique circumstances of a Soviet boycott of Security Council deliberations that enabled the U.N. to authorize participation in the Korean Conflict, which the U.S. officially characterizes as a police action, the United Nations has never fielded an effective military force in combat. Its peacekeepers are increasingly vulnerable; many nations are reluctant to provide peacekeeping forces; and achieving consensus within the U.N. Security Council about peacekeeping deployments is problematic. Regional groups, like the European Union or NATO, represent an interim option to national sovereignty until global institutions and organizations become viable. NATO was, for example, instrumental in ending the Bosnian genocide and a decade later still has peacekeeping forces on duty there.

#### d. Proportionality

The jus ad bellum proportionality criterion requires both that the values at stake exceed the anticipated values to be sacrificed and that no less harmful option for attaining the same result exists. After the People's Republic of China's army crossed the Yalu River in 1950 to attack the United Nations forces that were defeating the North Korean forces above the 38th parallel, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, commanding the U.N. forces, strongly advocated invading China. MacArthur believed that war with China was inevitable and winning that war sooner rather than later would be preferable and less costly. U.S. President Harry Truman disagreed. Truman held that invading China might precipitate World War III or even a nuclear war. While the jury remains out on the inevitability of war between the United Sates and the People's Republic of China, from a Just War Theory perspective President Truman's decision was morally correct. The cost of defeating China would surely have exceeded any immediate benefits. Sixty plus years later, China is progressing towards capitalism, taking some preliminary steps towards developing a fledgling democracy, and the inevitability of war between the U.S. and China appears greatly diminished.

Weighing the proportionality of various options is a utilitarian calculation fraught with uncertainty. For each option, what will be the cost in terms of casualties (killed and wounded), property destroyed, and resources expended for all sides? What are the future consequences of each option? What is the estimated probability of each option's identifiable outcomes? The discussion of possible consequences of Iranian bellicosity in the previous chapter illustrates the necessity and the difficulty of these calculations.

Proportionality calculations seldom yield a high degree of certainty or clarity. Perhaps one of the clearest examples of proportionality is the Allied commitment to defeat the Axis powers in WWII. The Nazi Holocaust, which primarily targeted Jews but that also swept up all _undesirables_ (the handicapped, Communists, gays, etc.), killed more people than were lost in direct combat during WWII. Comparing the number of non-military personnel on both sides killed in bombing raids, who starved to death, or who otherwise perished because of the war to the number who would have been killed had the Nazis permanently conquered Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and perhaps North America, and maybe other parts of the globe is impossible. Given the Nazis' brutal reign while in power, the comparison almost certainly would support the Allies waging WWII as a proportional response to Nazi expansionism and rule.

Conversely, in 1968 when the North Koreans captured the USS PUEBLO (AGER-2) on the high seas, the United States did not make any military reprisal against North Korea even though the two nations have not signed a treaty to end the Korean War. The Koreans killed one U.S. sailor in their attack, captured, and then imprisoned the eighty-one other crewmembers. Today, North Korea still holds the PUEBLO, which remains a commissioned U.S. Navy vessel.

Israel attacked the U.S. Navy ship USS LIBERTY (AGTR-5) in 1967. The Israelis killed thirty-four sailors in the battle but failed to sink or to capture the ship. The U.S. did not respond by declaring war on Israel or with any other military action. Instead, the U.S. officially accepted Israel's apology and explanation that the incident resulted from a tragic mistake in spite of much evidence to the contrary. Former Central Intelligence Agency Director Richard Helms observed:

Israeli authorities subsequently apologized for the accident, but few in Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified as an American naval vessel. Later, an interim intelligence memorandum concluded that the attack was a mistake and "not made in malice against the U.S." When additional evidence was available, more doubt was raised.... I had no role in the board of inquiry that followed, or the board's finding that there could be no doubt that the Israeli's knew exactly what they were doing in attacking the Liberty. I have yet to understand why it was felt necessary to attack this ship or who ordered the attack.

Under international law, all naval vessels, including the PUEBLO and LIBERTY and regardless of location, are an extension of a nation's sovereign territory. Although engaged in electronic eavesdropping, both the PUEBLO and LIBERTY were in international waters when attacked. Thus, both attacks satisfy the traditional jus ad bellum just cause criterion, giving the U.S. partial moral justification for a military response. The United States' failure to respond militarily to both attacks continues to disturb some military veterans and others; they feel that the nation sent sailors into harm's way then reneged on a moral obligation to support those sailors. Yet those protests have not generated sufficient public outcry to force the U.S. government to take military action. The recognition that the cost of any military action in lives, property, and funds would greatly exceed any potential benefit or justice restrained the chagrin and angst that U.S. leaders presumably felt at the time of the incidents and since. In other words, military action would not have satisfied the test of proportionality.

#### e. Last resort

"War is hell" and "war is barbarism," according to Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman, responsible for leading the Union army from Tennessee to the Atlantic, burning Atlanta en route, and leaving a wide swath of land destroyed in his wake, knew of what he spoke.

War, the most lethal and destructive of a nation's political options, will always be, from a Christian moral perspective, the last resort, used only when all other alternatives have proven ineffectual or are reasonably assessed, with a high degree of confidence, to be ineffectual if implemented. This criterion requires identifying all of the practical alternatives to war and then demonstrating that those alternatives will not, singly or in combination, rectify the injustice(s) on which the claim of just cause rests.

Completing that assessment requires restraint and a measure of prudential wisdom too often lacking in the heat of the moment. For example, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, President Bush believed, apparently along with a majority of Americans, that the U.S. needed to respond quickly and militarily. Most Americans demanding action were uncertain about what military response to make, a warning sign that emotion rather than prudential judgment about last resort drove their desire for decisive action. One of Just War Theory's historic goals has been to eliminate wars motivated by revenge or a desire to even the score.

Multiple political options other than waging war are available to a nation as powerful and wealthy as the United States. Many of these options are not mutually exclusive and nations often employ more than one concurrently. Available options include:

\- Accept, with strong political protest, the belligerent act as a _fait accompli_ — This happened, as noted, after North Korea's seizure of the PUEBLO and Israel's attack on the LIBERTY.

\- Diplomatic negotiation — In 1978, President Carter brought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat together to work out the Camp David Accords, achieving a peaceful resolution to thirty years of war and hostility between those two nations.

\- Economic assistance — In the short term, this has often bought other nations' cooperation, e.g., since the Camp David Accords Israel and Egypt have consistently been among the largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid. Often, economic assistance has taken the form of military aid that may, in the long term, increase instability and conflict; much economic assistance also is intended to benefit donor nation vendors at least as much as to help the recipient nation. Improved aid programs might substantially enhance global stability and human flourishing. Improved aid programs also have greater potential to support the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals and are more likely consonant with Jesus' teachings about loving one's neighbor and helping the poor.

\- Unilateral pressure — The U.S., for example, may offer to extend Most Favored Nation (MFN) status to a belligerent trading partner, conferring substantial economic benefits. Conversely, threatening to withdraw MFN status, with an attendant potential diminution of trade, may persuade a recalcitrant nation to alter course. Other options for unilateral pressure include public pronouncements, extending/withdrawing participation in cultural programs (e.g., scholarship programs), and extending/withdrawing military cooperation (e.g., joint exercises and intelligence sharing).

\- Multilateral pressure — A nation may seek to bring international pressure to bear upon the actions of another nation by initiating or supporting resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly or Security Council, by disseminating information to the international media, or by directly communicating with another nation's populace through media such as the Voice of America. Participation in regional bodies like NATO and the Organization of American States provide other opportunities to marshal international pressure in pursuit of desired objectives.

\- Economic sanctions — U.S. administrations frequently employ this as the response of choice, or, at the least, as the penultimate response short of the ultimate response of war. Economic sanctions imposed on Cuba and Iraq have caused much suffering among their general populations while failing to alter either government's policies. Consequently, a Christian may well argue, using a line of reasoning that extends beyond the limits of this book, that employing economic sanctions should require meeting the same jus ad bellum criteria, except for last resort, as does waging a just war.

\- Bellicose talk and actions — Since President Theodore Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet on its global circumnavigation, U.S. Presidents have deployed naval forces, especially aircraft carriers, to show the flag and to pressure other nations into adopting desired policies or programs.

\- Covert acts — In the 1960s the unprincipled use of covert action by the United States through its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) received considerable public attention. The U.S. government used CIA covert actions to remove at least one government perceived unfavorable to U.S. interests, to keep other governments thought favorable to U.S. interests in power, and to aid U.S. businesses. Some of these covert acts subverted democratic political processes in other nations. Congress subsequently imposed considerable constraints on the CIA's ability to engage in covert actions. Those constraints need re-examination. Is, for example, assassinating a dictator who rules through brutal oppression and lacks popular support (e.g., Saddam Hussein) morally preferable to armed invasion, occupation, and regime change?

\- Military acts short of war — During the last decade, and probably for the last three decades, U.S. military Special Forces with little public visibility have executed missions in over seventy-five nations. The U.S. has also employed military force in very public ways not intended to start a war, e.g., air attacks on Libya after obtaining evidence of Libyan support for terrorist' plane hijackings. Ethical analysis of these and other military acts short of war lies beyond the scope of Just War Theory. When, if ever, and under what conditions is the use of such military acts morally justified?

Does the jus ad bellum last resort criterion preclude preemptive first strikes? Consider this hypothetical case. Hostilities, short of war, exist between two nations. The presumptive aggressor, far the stronger of the two nations, has massed its forces near a shared border, positioning them as if for an attack. The presumptive victim of this aggression has reliable intelligence that the potential aggressor has ordered those forces to attack in the next few days. This roughly matches the situation Israel faced when it decided to launch the successful preemptive Six Day War of 1967 against Egypt and its Arab allies.

That situation highlights a key reason why Just War Theory today needs to incorporate a limited provision for preemptive strikes, contrary to traditional Just War Theory's blanket opposition to preventive and preemptive strikes. Israel attacked based on reliable, timely information about Egyptian plans and decisions, information of a type and timeliness that would have been unobtainable prior to the development of twentieth century technology.

Daniel Webster, when U.S. Secretary of State in 1842, formulated a useful ethic for preemptive violence: "a necessity of self-defense... instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation." No matter how high one sets the standard for justifying preemptive strikes, a few situations will meet that standard. In general, the threat must be actual (once launched, a war cannot be undone), be significant (Walzer calls it a supreme emergency), the preemptive strike must be the last resort, and the presumptive victim must defer striking until the last possible moment so that the potential aggressor has every opportunity to change course, entailing a highly subjective judgment. Obviously, a just preemptive war must also satisfy the other Just War Theory criteria.

Preventive wars are wars waged to prevent a war. An example often cited to justify preventive war is Israel's strike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear facility in 1983 that severely disrupted Iraq's effort to develop nuclear weapons. In fact, that attack, which did not initiate a war between Israel and Iraq, is more accurately described as a military action short of war. Philosopher Edmund Burke astutely observed that preventive wars tend to be futile. From a Christian perspective, _preventive war_ is an oxymoron, as nations still wage war; all that has changed, perhaps, are the nations involved, the conflict's timing and location, or the war's scope. The Just War Theory tradition has generally, and rightly, excluded any possibility of a morally justifiable preventive war.

#### f. Reasonable chance of success

Waging war only when one has a reasonable chance of success logically extends the proportionality criterion. God is not a god of lost causes. When defeat appears certain, war is morally unjustifiable and a nation, with but one exception, should select a different course of action, no matter how unpalatable the other alternatives appear. Thus, from a Christian Just War Theory perspective, the Jewish revolt against Rome in 70 was immoral; the Jews had no reasonable chance of military success against Rome. Their revolt, triggered by the prospective Roman desecration of the Jerusalem Temple, was a visceral reaction that valued the Temple's sanctity more than human life. On the other hand, meek acceptance of the Nazi pogrom to exterminate the Jews, even if one were convinced that pogrom would inevitably succeed, would have been immoral. Fighting for survival in the face of otherwise certain extinction, regardless of the likelihood of success, is the one exception to Just War Theory's reasonable chance of success criterion. No people should passively permit its own elimination.

Obviously, victory, prior to a war's commencement, is almost never assured. The Vietnam War pitted one of the world's two superpowers against a much smaller, poorer, and technologically disadvantaged third world opponent. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara took office in 1961 confident U.S. of success in Vietnam. He naively believed the United States' advantages to be militarily decisive. Well before he resigned as Secretary in 1968, he recognized that victory in Vietnam had proven elusive.

Assessing the probability of success requires informed, carefully considered judgment. Christians in democratic nations have a moral obligation to do their homework by developing a personal familiarity with publicly accessible information about places in which their nation may potentially choose to employ military force. Analyzing a situation from the Just War Theory framework necessarily entails using incomplete, inaccurate, and imperfect information. Complete information only exists hypothetically. Even in retrospect, the fog of war and other factors prevent anyone from knowing or accessing all of the relevant facts. Incidentally, ex post facto critiques of Just War Theory analyses will usefully recognize this problem before assessing blame or declaring an analysis made before the war incorrect. Incomplete information is one reason why Christians who rely on Just War Theory to analyze a particular war can disagree about the war's justness.

In 2012, North Korea denied most human rights to the preponderance of its citizens, genocide occurred in the Sudan's Darfur region, and China, after a successful mid-twentieth century invasion, continued to occupy its annexed neighbor, Tibet. Just cause for waging war clearly existed in all three situations; each situation may also have satisfied other jus ad bellum criteria. However, no nation had the resources or political will to attempt to rectify even one of those three problems. In each case, a reasonable chance of success did not exist regardless of whether the other five jus ad bellum criteria were satisfied. A global analysis would identify many more situations in which just cause for waging war exists but which lack any reasonable chance of success.

Douglas MacArthur announced in 1951 that, "there is no substitute for victory." Yet defining victory, or success, in war has become difficult. The Christian Just War tradition defines success as progress towards real peace. For centuries, defeated nations had to rely upon their own devices and resources to build their future. As weapons increased in lethality and the size of conflicts grew, the discrepancy between military victory and genuine peace gradually became more evident. The Reconstruction era that followed the U.S. Civil War, the tragically flawed treaties that ended WWI, and the easy U.S. victory over Afghanistan in 2001 followed by long years of occupation during which the Taliban experienced a resurgence all underline the difference between military victory and establishing genuine peace. Consequently, Just War theorists have started to focus on the need for jus post bellum as the third essential aspect of Just War Theory.

## C. Part II: Jus in bello

German military theoretician Clausewitz wrote, "To introduce into a philosophy of war a principle of moderation would be an absurdity. War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds." Just War Theory repudiates that rhetoric as well as achieving victory at any cost. Instead, Just War Theory provides a conceptual framework, the jus in bello criteria of proportionality and noncombatant discrimination, for analyzing what means are morally legitimate in warfare. Significantly, the jus in bello framework has shaped international law, such as the Geneva Accords. For the Christian, Jesus' choice to die on the cross instead of organizing military opposition to Rome underscores the necessity for limiting the ways in which nations wage war. By accepting death on the cross, Jesus explicitly rejected the idea of winning at any cost. Christian ethicists during the Cold War approached consensus in decrying as immoral any victory that hinged upon using nuclear weapons to destroy all of an enemy's cities or turning the world into a nuclear desert.

#### a. Proportionality

With respect to jus in bello, the proportionality criterion has three important, overlapping dimensions. First, proportionality prohibits violence that does not contribute to mission accomplishment. Defenders of Truman's decision to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese appropriately cite the principle of proportionality, contending that the nuclear bombs caused fewer casualties (deaths and injuries) than if the U.S. had invaded the main Japanese islands. That conclusion has two important caveats from a Christian Just War Theory perspective:

1. All human life, friendly or enemy, is of equal value. Any justification for using the nuclear weapons must include loss of life on both sides when calculating proportionality, e.g., the bombs killed fewer Japanese than the number of people, Japanese and American, who would have died if the U.S. had invaded Japan.

2. In order to justify using any weapon or tactic, including nuclear weapons, the potential employment must satisfy both the criterion of proportionality and the criterion of noncombatant immunity. Death and destruction wrought by military missions not essential for bringing the war to its earliest possible conclusion are, from a Just War Theory perspective, immoral because they violate the principle of proportionality, i.e., the harm done exceeds any progress toward peace. Even if the WWII use of nuclear weapons satisfies the proportionality criterion, the weapons' use must also satisfy the noncombatant immunity criterion in order for their use to have been morally justifiable.

Authorizing the use of deadly force inherently creates situations with the potential for the misuse of that force, whether by military personnel, law enforcement personnel, or private citizens with government issued gun permits. Authorizing the use of deadly force by personnel immersed in the fog and unrelenting stress of combat increases the potential that those personnel may misuse that force. The Independent Human Rights Commission accused a U.S. Marine patrol of employing excessive force after Iraqi insurgents ambushed the patrol with an improvised explosive device in 2007. News reports indicate that the Marines responded with a series of machine gun attacks along a ten-mile stretch of road that killed twelve civilians including three elderly men and an infant and that left dozens wounded. Regrettably, this is only one of several incidents in which U.S. military personnel allegedly used lethal force that did not contribute to mission accomplishment. United States prohibitions against the excessive use of force and investigations of alleged misuse of force even during ongoing military operations underscore how profoundly this aspect of the Just War tradition has had a positive influence upon the way in which at least one nation wages war.

Second, the criterion of proportionality prohibits excessive or gratuitous violence, an extension of the requirement that violence contribute to mission accomplishment. Just war seeks victory over, not annihilation of, enemy forces. U.S. Army attacks against Native Americans in the latter half of the nineteenth century in which the Army sought to take no prisoners and gave no quarter, violated the Just War principle of proportionality. The prohibition against excessive violence also precludes inflicting suffering on the enemy for reasons of profit, vengeance, or punishment. Consequently, proportionality imposes constraints on the weapons and tactics nations may morally employ in war. In prior generations, Just War Theory led to the banning of poison arrows, Greek fire, and bullets that explode after entering the body.

Treaties banning the use of chemical, biological, and radiological (CBR) weapons are encouraging outgrowths of the Just War tradition. CBR weapons violate the principle of proportionality because they cause excessive suffering among those affected. John Hersey's 1946 bestseller, _Hiroshima_ , graphically documents individual suffering caused by the hydrogen bomb dropped on Hiroshima. WWI saw the first use of chemical weapons. Both the Central Powers and the Allies used tearing agents (e.g., _chloropicrin and chloromethyl chloroformate_ ), asphyxiants (e.g., chlorine and cyanide compounds), and blistering agents (e.g., mustard gas). Of these weapons, mustard gas was perhaps most feared, causing internal and external bleeding that, over the course of several weeks, usually resulted in a very painful death. The Iraqi military under Saddam Hussein utilized chemical weapons in Iraq's 1988 war with Iran and against Kurdish Iraqis. In 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo religious sect executed the last known chemical weapons attack, releasing sarin in the Tokyo subway, killing twelve and injuring over fifty-five hundred people. Biological weapons, like the anthrax virus, similarly create unnecessary and uncontrollable suffering. Many nations have developed biological weapons but twentieth century use seems limited to the Germans and Japanese in WWII. Although Iraq developed biological weapons in the 1990s, it never employed those weapons.

Third, proportionality values warriors as humans worthy of dignity and respect. Warriors are not simply another form of expendable combat material like ships, guns, planes, and munitions. Proportionality requires that the reasonably anticipated military gain exceed the projected cost in lives lost, persons wounded, and property destroyed. This stipulation, the essence of the consequentialist jus in bello calculation, does not preclude feints or other tactics certain to fail that are integral aspects of a larger strategy deemed likely to succeed.

The infamous 1854 Crimean War charge of the Light Brigade at Gallipoli exemplifies soldiers ordered into combat without a reasonable expectation of proportional gain. The Light Brigade, the British 11th Hussars stationed at Balaclava, launched an ill-fated attack on well-entrenched, better armed, and numerically superior Russian forces. The Russians killed or wounded about eighty percent of the British forces, an outcome that British commanders should have anticipated. Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson captured the stupidity and immorality of that action in his well-known lines:

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'

Was there a man dismay'd?

Not tho' the soldier knew

Someone had blunder'd.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Sadly, that ill-fated charge is only one of numerous such incidents in military history. The protracted, futile trench war that lasted for most of WWI and resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties will hopefully have marked the nadir of combat without a reasonable expectation of proportional gain.

Reasonable expectation of proportional military gain establishes a helpful benchmark for determining whether surrender or otherwise ending hostilities is the most moral option. Christians do not expect that warriors always fight to the death. Nor, if defeat becomes certain, does Just War Theory expect the losers to commit mass suicide, as the Jews did, during their revolt against Rome in 70, when, at Masada, the Roman siege had become certain to succeed.

The Code of Conduct for the United States' fighting force personnel illustrates both a reasonable expectation of proportional military advantage and its incorporation into an official ethical standard for military personnel:

_a._ I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist.

_b._ As an individual, a member of the armed forces may never voluntarily surrender. When isolated and no longer able to inflict casualties on the enemy, the American soldier has an obligation to evade capture and rejoin friendly forces.

_c._ Only when evasion by an individual is impossible and further fighting would lead only to death with no significant loss to the enemy should one consider surrender. With all reasonable means of resistance exhausted and with certain death the only alternative, capture does not imply dishonor.

Key provisions in that excerpt from the Code are the guidance not to surrender while a unit still has _the means to resist_ and that when an individual can no longer evade capture and inflict further harm _capture does not imply dishonor_. Those provisions presume the worth and dignity of the combatant as a person.

The Laws of Land Warfare (the Geneva Conventions) explicitly define standards for the humane treatment for prisoners of war (POWs). Once a combatant surrenders or is captured, the capturing force incurs a moral and an international legal obligation to provide for the POW's well-being and security. POWs are noncombatants and the rationale for discriminating between combatants and noncombatants, the second jus in bello criterion, applies to POWs.

In sum, the proportionality criterion requires that violence contribute to mission accomplishment, not be excessive, and value the warrior as a human being.

#### b. Noncombatant immunity

The criterion of noncombatant immunity requires that morally justifiable warfighting target only combatants. Thus, by way of illustration, Just War Theory has traditionally maintained that noncombatants have the right to leave a besieged city. In practice, few combatants allowed noncombatants that liberty. Besiegers recognized that the more people trapped in a city, the sooner those within would consume all of available water and food, and the sooner the defenders would have no alternative but to surrender or to die. Furthermore, noncombatants within a besieged city are often loathe to leave their homes, reluctant to abandon loved ones defending the city, and wary of entrusting their fate to the attacking forces.

Noncombatant immunity creates three military challenges: correctly identifying who is a combatant, correctly targeting only combatants, and deciding how much, if any, _collateral damage_ is acceptable. The first challenge, correct identification of combatants, has become exceedingly complex. Combatants represent a direct threat, or would if given the opportunity, to enemy combatants. Clearly, uniformed military personnel are combatants. The Geneva Conventions exclude military chaplains and medical personnel from this generalization. The Conventions prohibit chaplains from carrying or using weapons and authorize medical personnel to use weapons only to defend themselves or their patients. These personnel wear military uniforms and recognize the risk associated with doing so. In a conventional war between two uniformed militaries, civilian attire generally signifies noncombatant status. However, viewing a small number of civilian leaders (e.g., the President of the United States who is the commander in chief of the armed forces) as combatants is reasonable. Military personnel who engage in espionage or other missions out of uniform behind enemy lines lose their combatant status and association protected status as POWs if captured. Like both American Major Nathan Hale and British Major John Andre in the American Revolution, such personnel, if caught, are subject to criminal prosecution for espionage.

Partisans, including non-uniformed guerillas, fighting behind enemy lines may run similar risks, but modern militaries have frequently accorded captured partisans combatant status, with its attendant legal protections. Yet the line between irregular, non-uniformed forces and regular military personnel is at best blurred. Is the partisan always a combatant or only a combatant when actively engaged in military affairs or actions? What type(s) and level(s) of activity qualify a partisan as a combatant? Alternatively, is it an oath or formal act of allegiance that defines the partisan or guerilla as a combatant (not all guerillas and partisans participate in such an act)?

Militaries require extensive logistical support provided by civilians. The military needs weapons and supplies; are civilians who work in armaments factories combatants? Military personnel must eat; are civilians who grow, transport, or sell food to the military combatants? Military personnel often fight better when their cause enjoys public support; are civilians who provide moral support to the military combatants? No military can fight without financing; are civilians who pay taxes combatants? From the time of Constantine until the nineteenth century, Christian ethicists unanimously agreed that the answer to all of those questions was negative; persons not on the battlefield involved at some remove from active fighting were, by definition, not direct threats and therefore noncombatants.

The development of mass armies with extensive logistical requirements began to raise doubts about that negative answer. For example, was Sherman morally justified in destroying crops and other property as his army cut a wide swath through the south on its march to the sea? The expressed intent was to drive a Union wedge through the south, depriving Confederate armies of the food and other resources the armies needed to continue their fight. Two consequences of this destruction, intended or otherwise, were (1) inflicting great suffering on a large number of noncombatants and (2) sowing a legacy of hatred toward the North that lingered for decades. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that Sherman's army could have effectively accomplished its mission of dividing the south and depriving the Confederate armies of vital supplies without having left such a thoroughly devastated swath of countryside in its wake. That judgment may not have been obvious at the time.

The development of weapons, beginning with airplanes and submarines, capable of striking well beyond the battlefield, intensified the need to clarify who is and who is not a combatant. In WWII, the Allies bombed Axis armament industrial installations. That choice implicitly treated armament workers present in the factory either as combatants or as acceptable _collateral damage_. ( _Collateral damage_ is the modern military term for unintended casualties and therefore casualties acceptable according to the doctrine of double effect). From a Christian perspective, neither option is especially attractive. War requires armaments, but the factory, and not its employees, constitutes the morally legitimate target. Armament industry employees, unlike military personnel, do not actively engage in combat. Regarding armament industry workers as acceptable collateral damage wrongly minimizes the value of their lives.

However, what if the facility produces, or soon will produce, a weapon that could alter the war's outcome, such as the WWII German nuclear weapons program? Does that justify regarding employee casualties as morally acceptable collateral damage? For example, the 1983 Israeli air strike that destroyed Iraq's nuclear weapons production facility resulted in casualties among the facilities workforce. Iraq's use of chemical weapons and launching Scud missiles at Israel during GWI suggests a significant probability (perhaps 50% and probably higher) that Iraq might have attempted a nuclear strike against Israel. If so, then the number of unintended casualties from Israel's 1983 strike pales in comparison to the number of casualties that Israel's strike averted.

Many other similar, real-world scenarios exist in which the unintended effect of noncombatant casualties from military operations totals far fewer casualties than would most likely have happened without the military operation. In such instances, the doctrine of double effect applies. Making noncombatant immunity an absolute, inviolable rule is an impractical approach to minimizing the death and destruction morally justifiable military actions cause.

One of the current debates raging among Just War theorists is whether a moral distinction between noncombatants and combatants still makes sense. The jus in bello criterion of proportionality limits the use of violence to acts that contribute to mission accomplishment and prohibits unnecessary violence. Distinguishing between combatant and noncombatant helpfully emphasizes that violence is morally justifiable only when it contributes to mission accomplishment. Thus at the opposite extreme from situations in which the doctrine of double effect applies, aiming to achieve victory by killing the enemy's entire population is not morally justifiable because it violates the population's noncombatant immunity, serves no realistic military purpose, requires excessive force, and makes the fullness of peace impossible for the losers. For example, the WWII Allies intended their strategic bombing of German cities to destroy Germany's industrial capacity and the morale of the German citizenry. Dresden burned for seven days and nights; at least sixty thousand noncombatants died. The futility of strategic bombing quickly became apparent. Yet the Allies persisted with strategic bombing in Europe and then employed the tactic in the Pacific, firebombing Japanese cities, all morally unjustifiable actions. In general, civilians — factory and farm workers, business people, the unemployed, taxpayers, seniors, children, etc. — are all noncombatants.

Development of smart munitions and an improved ability to fight at night have greatly facilitated accurately targeting combatants, the second challenge associated with preserving noncombatant immunity. Technological advances will hopefully continue to reduce the number of noncombatant casualties. Conversely, militaries that place high value military targets (e.g., anti-air missile batteries) in or adjacent to noncombatant facilities or concentrations (e.g., an orphanage or hospital) force opposition military commanders, in accordance with the doctrine of double effect and the jus in bello criteria, to weigh likely harm to noncombatants against military necessity.

Aiming to progress along a trajectory toward peace inherently constrains Christian support for some strategies, tactics, and weapons. The strategic concept of total war gained prominence following the Napoleonic Wars. Total war between nations resembles the unlimited retaliation between individuals and tribes that prevailed before the lex _talionis_ (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth) became widely accepted more than it does the Just War tradition. Consequently, total war represents a moral step backwards and away from the limits that Just War Theory has sought to impose on the frequency of war and the way in which nations wage war.

Christians similarly oppose using strategic nuclear weapons because those weapons indiscriminately kill too many noncombatants, immediately damage the global environment, and unleash long-term harms. In Just War Theory terminology, nuclear weapons fail to satisfy both jus in bello criteria. Christians also support treaties banning the use of CBR weapons because nobody can accurately predict _kill zones_ for CBR weapons, shape _kill zones_ to avoid noncombatants, or design CBR weapons to target only combatants. In particular, local winds affect the size of the geographic area all three types of CBR weapons impact. Research programs to devise a radiological weapon suitable for battlefield use with an extremely limited impact range that will minimize noncombatant casualties have failed.

Tactics involving land mines and anti-personnel bombs that disperse hundreds of bomblets deserve additional moral attention. Militaries rarely clear battlefields of unexploded ordnance when hostilities end; some types of weapons remain active for decades, annually exacting a considerable toll in noncombatant casualties long after the war ended. If a nation ever deems using mines morally justifiable, then that nation has a moral obligation to remove or destroy all of its mines at war's end.

The third challenge associated with noncombatant immunity, deciding how much collateral damage is acceptable, requires military decision makers to make hard choices about force protection. The United States, when it finally decided to act to end the Serbian genocide of Kosovar Muslims, responded exclusively with air power. Smart munitions enabled the U.S. warplanes to fly high and fast while accurately delivering ordnance on target, greatly reducing the likelihood of the Serbs shooting a plane down. Opting not to put "boots on the ground" by sending personnel into Kosovo certainly reduced the number of U.S. casualties. In fact, the U.S. had no casualties from enemy action. On the other hand, some analysts believe that air power was at best marginally effective and permitted the genocide to continue far longer than would have happened if the U.S. had sent ground forces into Bosnia.

Likewise, the United States' emphasis on force protection minimized the benefits to Somalis from the U.S. humanitarian intervention there, Operation Restore Hope in 1991. The U.S. promptly withdrew its forces from Somalia following the incident popularized in the book and eponymous movie, _Black Hawk Down_.223 Consequently, Somalia returned to a state of lawlessness with widespread famine, having experienced only a transitory respite during the brief intervention. U.S. military personnel killed in Operation Restore Hope died for little or no gain. Before and afterwards, most aid agencies, without the protection of the U.S. forces, did not dare to provide with humanitarian relief services.

Tradeoffs between force protection and acceptable levels of collateral damage necessitate difficult judgments about probable futures. Victory will require what military actions? What tactics are available? What level of own-force casualties, enemy casualties, and collateral damage is associated with each tactic?

Military and political leaders making those assessments have no alternative to relying upon the best available information and professional expertise about probable outcomes. Choosing strictly based on minimizing casualties to one's own forces ignores the Just War Theory precept of noncombatant immunity and values the lives of one's own forces more highly than other lives. (Bearing witness to the equal dignity and worth of all lives is an important Christian vocation in secular societies.) Alternatively, some collateral damage may be unavoidable. Never violating noncombatant immunity may preclude victory and devalue or ignore the just cause that morally justifies the war. Warriors, by definition, are at risk; noncombatants, by definition, are not warriors. Combatants therefore have a responsibility to make every reasonable effort to avoid noncombatant casualties.

Harming noncombatants, no matter how morally justifiable, leaves those involved with _dirty hands_ , i.e., moral guilt for their actions, a problem addressed in the jus post bellum discussion below. Given our human propensity to rationalize almost any desired behavior and the inherently imprecise nature of jus in bello calculations, remaining attentive to the problem of dirty hands can effectively help to restrain immoral acts.

## D. Part III: Jus post bellum

Traditional Just War Theory, in which the only just cause for war was an aggressor nation invading another nation's territory, presumed that wars ended with the restoration of national boundaries to their pre-war locations. The victor did not occupy or impose regime change on the loser. Expanding just cause to include protecting human lives and rights significantly broadened Just War Theory.

One military strategist's simple and realistic definition of a just war is a war that leaves an affected society better than it was before the war. From a Christian perspective, _better_ in that definition connotes more closely approximating the Christian understanding of peace that is conducive to human well-being and flourishing. Toward the end of his pontificate, Pope John Paul II was a firm opponent of the Iraq War. In his 2003 State of the World Address, he made his views abundantly clear: "No to war!" he declared. "War is not always inevitable, but it is always a defeat for humanity." Later he pointed out that "wars do not in general resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore ultimately prove futile." Incorporating a jus post bellum paradigm into Just War Theory is an explicit effort to make the costs of war more worthwhile through intentional, constructive steps toward peace.

Emphasizing the importance of how a war ends is not a new idea. The Chinese philosopher of war, Sun Tzu, wrote in the second century BCE, "To win victory is easy; to preserve its fruits, difficult." The German military strategist Clausewitz similarly directed that a protagonist not take the first step of a war without considering the last. Yet relatively few ethicists have publicly explored the concept of jus post bellum.

Michael Walzer was one of the first scholars to do so, pointing to Germany after WWII as an example of the need to update Just War Theory by defining criteria for just endings. Germany and Japan are today important, relatively prosperous, and widely respected members of the global community because the U.S. and its allies recognized that real victory in WWII required more than defeating the Axis powers and ending hostilities. Walzer identified the three issues of legitimate occupation, creation of a new state, and the need for closure as critical elements for reaching just endings to just wars.

Following Walzer, numerous scholars have proposed their own jus post bellum schemata, some focused on ethics, some on legal issues, and some addressing both. None of these schemata has gained wide traction, much less achieved anything approaching a consensus. Most of these alternative jus post bellum schemata are effectively _laundry lists_ of proposals, lacking the internal philosophical coherence and external comprehensiveness necessary both for a good model and for a consensus to develop.

Too often Christians have wrongly presumed that imposing restraints on when and how nations wage war fulfilled the Christian responsibility for peacemaking. The need to expand Just War Theory to include a jus post bellum framework emphasizes the inadequacy of that presumption. Indeed, _Just Peacemaking_ , edited by Christian ethicist Glen Stassen and written with thirty contributors, identifies seven essential principles of Christian peacemaking. Christian peacemakers: (1) proactively initiate grace; (2) take responsibility for peacemaking rather than foisting it upon another; (3) affirm the dignity of all and adhere to Christian moral standards; (4) invite others to make justice and peace; (5) create inclusive community; (6) are historically situated; and (7) empirically validate their efforts. That list of essentials represents a rough consensus among the contributors of the basic Christian peacemaking principles, ensuring the comprehensiveness of any proposed jus post bellum model erected on them _._

The five-part jus post bellum model presented below and summarized in Figure 3.2 rests upon those seven essential principles (the numbers in parentheses refer to the seven principles):

\- Respect for persons affirms the dignity of all (#3) and is essential for creating community (#5);

\- Establishing justice requires adhering to Christian moral standards in historical context (#6) and fosters the creation of community (#5);

\- Exercising ecological responsibility is integral to Christian moral standards (#3);

\- Engaging multinational commitment and support both acknowledges responsibility for peacemaking (#1 and 2) and invites others to participate in those efforts (#4);

\- Bringing the process to closure implies that peacemaking efforts that fail to produce practical results are non-productive and wasteful (#7).

The model, as will become apparent in the discussion of each criterion, integrates important contributions and insights from many prior proposals. A nation or international coalition acts in accord with Just War Theory's jus post bellum criteria by conducting all jus post bellum operations in accordance with the five criteria. Doing so significantly increases the likelihood of bringing a just war to a just ending and moving the world closer to peace.

#### a. Respect for persons

When the Spanish-American War of 1898 ended, U.S. President William McKinley ruminated about whether the United States should annex the Philippines:

It came to me one night that we could not turn the islands over to France or Germany, our commercial rivals; that would be bad business and discreditable. We would not give them back to Spain; that would be cowardly and dishonorable. We could not leave them to themselves; they were unfit for self-government. There was therefore nothing left for us to do but to take care of them and educate them and Christianize them.

McKinley's comment exposes an attitude of blatant self-interest and cultural imperialism that, contrary to his expressed goal of Christianizing the Philippines, articulates aims at odds with Christian respect for the dignity and rights of all people. His statement also wrongly presumes that Roman Catholics are not Christians, for by 1898 the majority of Filipinos were members of the Roman Catholic Church.

The criterion of respect for persons embodies an important precondition for many jus post bellum efforts and programs: a majority of the population in the nation(s) that lost the war welcomes the outside assistance. In particular, respect for persons, which includes the right to collective self-determination, requires that one of these conditions precede the just occupation of a defeated nation(s):

1. The occupied nation lacks a functioning national government that provides security, governance, and justice at least comparable to pre-war conditions (e.g., Iraq following the second U.S. Gulf War). Effective governments establish security by monopolizing the legitimate use of force, exercise administrative control across the governed territory and population, ensure the rule of law, enable economic development, and provide essential infrastructure and services. Without effectual governance, respect for persons is impossible and occupation thus entails regime change.

2. Egregious human rights violations, manifesting widespread disrespect for persons by the occupied nation's former government, justified the war in part or whole (e.g., Nazi Germany in WWII). In this case, allowing the former regime to remain in power leaves that regime poised to continue (or to resume when able) the type and scale of rights violations that justified the war. Not implementing regime change in this case requires that all probable costs associated with regime change (casualties, property losses, military expenditures, etc.) exceed the projected costs of leaving the government in situ (potential future rights violations, costs of avoiding/ending those violations, etc.). Occupations for this reason have generally involved regime change, although the no-fly zone imposed on Iraq following the first Gulf War is an example of ending genocide without imposing regime change.

Otherwise, respect for persons means ending the war without the victor(s) occupying the loser(s), e.g., Iraq following the first U.S. Gulf War. If so, the victor(s) should take every step practical to strengthen the defeated state(s) to aid in preventing future wars.

Respect for persons is a sine qua non for successful occupations. During an occupation, victors who treat the vanquished without the equal respect and rights due a fellow human quickly alienate many friendly or sympathetic persons among the defeated. That alienation becomes a catalyst for renewing hostilities, fuels resisters' recruiting efforts, and creates the popular support essential for an insurgency to succeed. Lacking the finances, weapons, and trained personnel traditional warfare requires, late twentieth and twenty-first century resisters often adopt terrorist or guerilla strategies as their best hope. With popular support, these asymmetric fighters become what Mao Tse Tung described as _fish swimming in the sea_ and will generally defeat conventional forces. In short, post war efforts to build peace will likely fail in the absence of a respect for persons that allows the occupied citizenry some degree of self-determination.

Ideally, respect for persons moves people and nations toward reconciliation, a basic Christian concept. In practice, reconciliation generally proves too difficult to achieve. Not all people, not even all religions, share a common understanding, much less common commitment, to reconciliation. Encouragingly, some reconciliation almost inevitably occurs as a byproduct of establishing respect for persons and justice, two essential prerequisites for reconciliation.

Respect for persons also connotes addressing the problem of people the war displaced, both those who are refugees within their own country and those who fled abroad. Contextually appropriate solutions for displaced persons may include their settling permanently in another nation or returning home. In either case, most displaced persons will require financial assistance during their transition; many will also need educational assistance, language training if they settle abroad, help reuniting with family, etc. Because displaced persons may not trust officials from either the victors or losers and both victors and losers may lack sufficient resources to solve the problems, responsibility for displaced persons will often extend beyond the nations that fought the war to the larger international community. Additionally, respect for persons presumes that governments and aid organizations address the mental health problems of the civilian population attributable to the war, problems nations have generally ignored.

Finally, post war respect for persons connotes reintegrating warriors — from both sides — back into the warrior's society. Reintegration requirements encompass POWs, discharged veterans, warriors released from active duty but remaining in the reserves, and warriors continuing on active duty. Thus, reintegration begins with militaries disarming and demobilizing troops and POW repatriation. Reintegration then involves helping individuals, as appropriate, resume marital, parental, and other relationships interrupted by the war, renew both their sense of self-worth and respect for their foes, obtain all necessary medical treatment and rehabilitation, transition to civilian life, find meaningful civilian employment, and receive disability compensation.

Although a nation rightly views its military as an instrument — the means — of implementing national policy, from a moral perspective warriors remain persons of value, i.e., a warrior is never only the means to an end. Non-existent or inadequate reintegration programs and efforts inevitably cause additional problems. In the United States, the disproportionate percentage of the homeless who are veterans partially results from inadequate warrior reintegration: 20% of the homeless are veterans while veterans comprise only 8% of the nation's population.

Two reintegration issues merit additional comment. First, some warriors will return with _dirty hands_ , i.e., individuals who performed acts morally justifiable in war but not at other times. Another Navy chaplain, a former colleague, has publicly reminisced about a young sailor in GWI who elegantly framed the problem of dirty hands:

I was a chaplain on an aircraft carrier. We were engaged in combat operations. The night before we were to launch our aircraft, I went down to the bomb loading area, and I was talking with a young ordnance man who was loading bombs on the aircraft. And as frequently is the case, they were writing their bravado-laden slogans on the bombs. The next day, I came down after the attack had taken place. From our perspective, it was very successful. Yet I found that instead of being jubilant, this young ordnance man had a sense of sadness. When he could catch me alone without any of his friends around, he came up to me and asked, 'Chaplain, I wonder if my bombs really did what we intended for them to do. What if they did kill people?'

_Trigger pullers_ , warriors who shoot at the enemy, especially an enemy that they can see, perhaps even touch, and who have a healthy level of moral sensitivity will experience the problem of dirty hands even more acutely than did that young carrier sailor, whose loading of ordnance put him at one step removed from the actual killing.

Attempting to minimize moral sensitivity in combat may defer dealing with the moral problem of dirty hands but over time tends to create new, more serious issues. Either the warrior represses the sense of dirty hands, allowing it to fester and grow at a subconscious level, or the person becomes morally desensitized. If the latter, then the person has become a latent sociopath, like a man incarcerated at New Jersey's Trenton State Prison to whom I ministered while in seminary. This man was a Vietnam veteran, an Army infantryman who had experienced much close combat during his two years in Vietnam. He denied feeling any sense of dirty hands, that is, no guilt from anything he had done in Vietnam; those feelings, he told me, had gradually disappeared during his extended time in combat. Two days after he left Vietnam, he was home in New Jersey and discovered that his wife was living with a police officer. This veteran bought a handgun, went to the police station, and shot the officer to death. He saw nothing morally wrong with what he had done. Although I did not know the prisoner before or during his military service, everything he told me about himself pointed to combat having transformed him from a reasonably normal human being into a sociopath.

Militaries prefer to ignore the problem of dirty hands. One U.S. Army officer who has dared to broach this taboo subject says, "Until recently I have never seen anyone address a group about their feelings on killing.... It is just impolite conversation . . . like asking someone have you had an abortion?" Neither facing one's own guilt nor acknowledging the guilt of a highly respected total institution (like the military) to which one belongs is easy, especially if that guilt stems from behavior inherently connected to the institution's mission. Few of the thousands of military personnel with whom I served ever indicated that they savored the prospect of killing, even under the most morally justifiable of circumstances. Individuals who did seem to relish the prospect of combat were usually youthful new recruits for whom the magnitude and consequences of lethal combat shone with a romantic glow that soon vanished.

Hard evidence linking guilt from dirty hands to post-traumatic stress syndrome and other veterans' health issues is very limited. However, research published in the July 2004 New England Journal of Medicine reported 17% of veterans returning from Iraq suffered from severe depression, generalized anxiety, or Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Another study concluded that the more firefights in which a soldier or Marine participated, the greater the likelihood of that individual suffering PTSD. The study also found that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer mental health problems in excess of the 15% rate of PTSD among Vietnam veterans. Effective warrior reintegration requires medical and other programs for healing wounded minds and spirits, culturally appropriate efforts that may include religious rites, civic ceremonies, etc. The United States failed to honor this obligation to its Vietnam veterans. Opponents of that war incorrectly focused on military personnel, who are instruments of national policy, rather than the nation's policies and political leaders.

Faith communities, especially Christian ones, have multiple resources for helping warriors cope with the problem of dirty hands. Among these resources are Church liturgies, pastoral care, and individual spiritual practices. In the fourth century, "Basil of Caesarea punished soldiers who killed during war with a three year abstention from communion." Today, that ban seems harsh. However, the Church can use its liturgy to give returning warriors opportunity to confess, to receive forgiveness, and to experience the healing grace of Holy Communion. The twenty-first century carrier sailor who felt guilty because he was complicit in the death of those killed by bombs he had loaded on aircraft sought solace and absolution from his chaplain, a person symbolizing God's presence in the midst of warriors. The absolution may have followed a formal act of confession; more probably, the absolution was an informal assurance that God loved and forgave the sailor. Other warriors find cleansing through individual prayer, personally confessing their sin to God and receiving comfort from trusted, familiar words of Scripture. In all cases, however, the issue of dirty hands is most honestly and healthily resolved when explicitly acknowledged and addressed. Doing so honors a warrior's worth and dignity as a human.

Second, reintegrating warriors is a moral obligation for nations. Warriors serve on behalf of a nation and its citizens, making many sacrifices for their nation, including, for many warriors, going into harm's way. Failing to reintegrate warriors permanently dehumanizes them, reducing them to a means by which a nation seeks to defend itself or to achieve other foreign policy goals. This denies a warrior's God given human dignity. Reintegration is one of the many ways in which a nation has a moral obligation to care for its warriors in order to treat them as persons. Ideally, each nation reintegrates its own warriors. However, when a nation is unable to fulfill that obligation, jus post bellum demands that other nations assist.

#### b. Establish justice

Pope Paul VI said, "If you want peace, work for justice." People universally desire justice but frequently find articulating a cogent definition of justice surprisingly elusive. One useful approach, deeply embedded in the Christian tradition, enumerates the three primary aspects of justice as the distributive, commutative, and legal. Distributive justice governs the allocation of economic resources and power within a society, commutative justice pertains to personal relationships, and legal justice focuses on an individual's obligations to society and state. Establishing the three dimensions of justice presumes and extends the first jus post bellum criterion of respecting the dignity and rights of all. Victor and vanquished, working together, will aim to improve the standards of justice that prevailed in the defeated nation(s) before the war using culturally appropriate economic, legal, and political institutions and systems. (Victor(s) usually have little incentive to improve justice internally.) Although establishing justice is always a jus post bellum goal, the opportunities and resources required for establishing justice obviously depend in large measure upon whether the victor(s) occupies the defeated nation(s). Significantly, without improved justice, any occupation is likely to fail.

A more just economic system and power structure provide people, on average, with an improved standard of living and a more equitable sharing of power than existed pre-war, i.e., a higher standard of distributive justice. Economic systems that are most congruent with distributive justice and progress toward peace blend reliance upon free markets, individual initiative, and choice with appropriate legal structures to protect the less advantaged, help the unfortunate, and prevent elites from accumulating and exercising excessive power and wealth. Such a system also allows and regulates both natural monopolies (e.g., water, sewer, and electricity providers) and cooperative enterprises when freely entered into for mutual benefit (e.g., a mutual savings bank or community garden). Pope John Paul II articulated a similar belief, that a free market economy situated within a democratic political system is the system most conducive to the common good, justice, human dignity, and human freedom.

Regardless of a nation's economic system, Christian distributive justice requires compassion for all, ensuring that society satisfies each person's right to life's basic, physical necessities. Anything less diminishes human dignity and conflicts with Jesus' radical love.

Improvements are possible without forcing a rapid transition to a free market economy. Quantitative metrics helpfully measure progress, including improved nutrition, sanitation, housing, and healthcare, as well as a less authoritarian political system with broader enfranchisement. Improvements may enhance reliability, lower prices, expand choice, improve quality, etc. Establishing distributive justice is generally incompatible with unconditional surrender, indefinite occupations, annexation, and economic sanctions that indiscriminately penalize the defeated nation's citizens: "To beggar thy neighbor is to pick future fights."

Political reform encompasses issues of sovereignty (i.e., ending any occupation as soon as possible), territorial integrity, and governance. Although secular democracy is the form of government most congruent with a Christian understanding of distributive justice, not every nation's citizens are Christian, desire to live in a democracy, or are ready to accept the responsibilities of democratic citizenship. Important prerequisites for effective participation in representative democratic processes include widespread literacy, a sense of national identity, and commitment to democracy. "Democracy is more than picking leaders through elections. It is the establishment of institutions of pluralism and attitudes of majority forbearance and minority acceptance and protection."

Thus, a Just War victor rightly insists on progress toward democracy but allows the vanquished to adopt a culturally appropriate political system that represents a transition toward some form of democracy. Efforts to impose democracy on a vanquished nation usually fail. Post-WWII Japan, the principal exception to that generalization, successfully transitioned to democracy because of its high rate of literacy, strong national identity, its history of citizens trusting their government, and their driving desire to build a new future for their nation. Significantly, the U.S. occupiers and Japanese leaders created Japan's new political system with cultural sensitivity, e.g., preserving a symbolic role for the emperor. In other words, the Japanese were ready for democracy and adopted a culturally suitable democratic form of government.

More often, occupying forces only succeed in imposing a political system with power centrally controlled, i.e., a dictatorship or oligarchy. Such political systems fail to establish commutative and distributive justice, disrespect their citizens, lack legitimacy among the citizenry, and have short life expectancies. For example, when Vietnam ended the Cambodian genocide under the Pol Pot regime, Vietnam imposed a short-lived government on Cambodia that acted in Vietnam's best interests and lacked the legitimacy among Cambodians to end that nation's internal conflicts.

Commutative justice formally expresses the mutual respect and dignity between persons that results from recognizing God loves everyone equally and therefore all people are equally worthy of dignity and respect. A society's political system is the primary means for achieving commutative justice. The Jesus of the Gospels modeled commutative justice, eating and socializing with rich and poor, the healthy and sick, the religiously devout and the notorious public sinner, male and female, as well as people of all ages. Commutative justice establishes rights (claims upon others and the resources necessary for human dignity and worth) associated with human freedom, e.g., free speech, free exercise of religion, and freedom of assembly. These rights voice the universal cry for human freedom, a concept deeply rooted in Scripture. History records the slow and uneven progress Christians have made in incarnating commutative justice, e.g., not advocating outlawing slavery until the eighteenth and nineteenth century efforts by Christian abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Harriet Tubman.

Commutative justice, by its nature, is the most difficult dimension of justice to establish or to improve, requiring great cultural sensitivity, extensive dialogue with the local population, and often yielding to their views. People live within a specific cultural milieu that shapes their view of others, their understanding of social roles, their values, etc. Demanding that the vanquished immediately adopt the victor's standard of commutative justice imposes unrealistic expectations of dramatic and precipitous cultural change. Instead, taking sequential steps that lead toward improved commutative justice is a more realistic goal. For example, educating every child, girls as well as boys, may represent a reasonable, intermediate, and sustainable step toward commutative justice instead of immediately insisting upon full gender equality. Occupiers who do not make establishing commutative justice a jus post bellum priority will inevitably fail, erecting significant barriers for achieving progress towards distributive and legal justice.

A particular challenge of establishing commutative justice is lustration, "the purification of state institutions from within or without. The practice of lustration ordinarily revolves around, first, the screening of candidates for public office; second, the barring of candidates from public office; and third, the removal of holders of public office." _Public office_ understood broadly includes all government employees, civil servants, elected and appointed officials, and military personnel. Changing laws that pertain to these matters is part of distributive or legal justice. More difficult is changing attitudes, eroding entrenched prejudices perhaps centuries old, to allow as many former members and allies of the old regime to reenter public life as possible while excluding those who are not rehabilitated or whose role in the old regime was so prominent or significant that criminal proceedings rather than rehabilitation is most appropriate. Three principles beneficially govern lustration: (1) situationally and institutionally balancing retribution, restoration, and reparations; (2) punish in proportion to wrongdoing; (3) avoid lustration based on retroactive law.

Justice's legal dimension is ubiquitous for the Jesus of Scripture, the Scriptures as a whole, and in the broader Christian tradition. The Gospels portray Jesus as the victim of misdirected legal justice. Pilate was more interested in keeping Jerusalem crowds happy than fairly adjudicating Jesus' criminal charges. Jesus seems to have abided by civil and criminal law, even paying his taxes.

The New Testament similarly encourages Christians to obey the law and to trust government personnel, as God's agents, to administer the law. When ancient Israel existed as an independent nation, Israel obviously administered its own legal system. The Jewish Scripture (Christian Old Testament), consequently includes considerable material intended to shape Israel's legal system in accordance with God's will, e.g., the prophets communicated God's outrage when the law or the authorities deprived people of justice.

The Christian tradition was largely silent about issues of legal justice until after Constantine for the same reasons that Christianity did not address the issues of war and peace until then. After establishment in 391 as the Roman Empire's official religion, a consensus emerged that Christian legal justice — what I term the rule of law — should provide for the common welfare, ensure equality under law for all, and allow the exercise of human freedom. At a minimum, the rule of law requires a government monopoly on the use of force, a written law code, honest and fair courts, lawyers, good transparency, and an effective, trustworthy constabulary. Various models exist for each component. As with the other aspects of establishing justice, jus post bellum legal justice does not have to be perfect but must strive to treat all equitably, fairly, in a reasonably transparent manner, and achieve recognizable and major improvements over the pre-war rule of law.

Jus post bellum efforts to establish justice frequently face three issues unique to post-war contexts: reparations, war crimes, and avoidance of a double standard. Reparations generally seek to punish the vanquished, usually by exacting money or land. Yet from a Christian perspective, punishment (balancing the scales of justice) belongs to God and not to humans (Psalm 59:5; Isaiah 26:21; Romans 12:19; Hebrews 10:30). One morally justifiable basis for reparations is when an aggressor nation loses a war and in defeat has the means to compensate the victims of its aggression for damages inflicted without unduly impoverishing itself. The only other morally justifiable basis for reparations is if the victor can demonstrate a realistic expectation that the reparations will deter further aggression, an unlikely outcome. Historically, reparations have usually caused resentment and anger rather than compensating the injured or providing deterrence. The burden of paying any reparations belongs to the elites responsible for initiating the war, not the general population. Otherwise, reparations skew distributive justice.

Although the prospect of reparations may seem attractive — the U.S. hoped that its second Gulf War would be largely self-financing through Iraqi oil revenues, thereby creating a win-win situation for the U.S. and Iraq — such hopes have consistently proven more illusory than real. Jus post bellum reconstruction efforts may prompt the victor(s) to forego reparations and instead encourage the defeated nation(s) to rebuild their economic capacity; the victor(s) may also invest directly in redeveloping the defeated nation(s). In fact, reparations have in the last fifty years have become progressively less important and less common while humanitarian factors have become more important.

Second, the new rule of law must adjudicate the cases of those alleged to have committed war crimes or major crimes against humanity under the prior regime. Temperance requires addressing this important task with due moderation, avoiding any appearance of unmerited urgency or excessive delay. Desires for vengeance and speedy justice are seldom compatible. Establishing distributive, commutative, and legal justice appropriately and necessarily take precedence over giving the accused their day in court. In time, the new political system will have a better perspective on whether the best option is to try a case in the national courts, submit the case to an international body or court for trial, or employ another model such as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Neither rash nor long-deferred adjudication of alleged war criminals among the defeated will usually yield justice or, equally important, the perception of justice. Blanket indictments of ethnic, religious, or other groups are unjust, failing to discriminate between individuals reasonably accused and persons reasonably presumed to be innocent of these crimes. Actions deemed necessary for a nation's survival, in situations that Walzer has characterized as _supreme emergencies_ , are plausibly not considered war crimes, although should the measures succeed nations owe their citizens and the international community a full accounting.

Third, the victor(s) and all occupiers must hold their personnel accountable for any alleged misdeeds during and after the war in a timely, transparent, and appropriate manner. To do otherwise quickly undercuts perceptions of the equality and rights of all; beliefs about a double standard then cause anger, resentment, and animosity toward the victor(s). For example, the urgent precedence given to Saddam Hussein's trial and punishment contrasted sharply with the perceived lethargy in adjudicating the cases of U.S. personnel accused of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. Many Iraqis perceived this as a double standard, a perception that fueled Iraqi anger toward the occupation. Legal justice that compensates victims of war crimes, regardless of who committed the offense, can aid in rebuilding the social capital requisite for a viable state.

#### c. Exercise ecological responsibility

The prophet Isaiah spoke to the importance of the jus post bellum criterion of exercising ecological responsibility:

The Lord will guide you continually,

and satisfy your needs in parched places,

and make your bones strong;

and you shall be like a watered garden,

like a spring of water,

whose waters never fail.

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;

you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;

you shall be called the repairer of the breach,

the restorer of streets to live in. (Isaiah 58:11-12)

Exercising ecological responsibility, a key component of Judaism's attitude towards war (cf. the first section of the next chapter), beneficially expands traditional Christian Just War Theory concerns. The ecological responsibility criterion recognizes that human well-being and flourishing depend upon a healthy environment and seeks to ensure appropriate post-war focus on it; _ecological_ emphasizes the interconnectedness of life in a way that _environment_ does not.

Four aspects of exercising ecological responsibility following a war are particularly important. First, in order to restore territory for safe occupation by humans and productive uses, someone has to locate, then explode or defuse, and lastly properly dispose of undetonated but expended ordnance. This includes mines (at sea and on land), artillery rounds, bombs, and rockets. This criterion extends the jus in bello proportionality criterion's prohibition against excessive force, which requires militaries to expend no more ordnance than necessary and to maintain accurate records of mine placement. Better yet, nations in accord with the jus in bello criterion of noncombatant immunity will refrain from using any ordnance that normally poses a post-war threat to noncombatants, e.g., landmines and bomblets. As a minimum initial step, after the fighting ends, any military that laid a minefield will publicly identify and prevent access to keep people, especially children, out of danger. This jus post bellum Just War Theory criterion expects nations to recognize that the cost of dealing with unexploded ordnance is an unavoidable cost of waging war justly.

Second, many modern military weapons and systems, with obvious exceptions like some knives and cargo planes, have no legitimate peacetime civilian use. Automatic weapons, grenades, missiles, armored vehicles, artillery, bombs, and fighter aircraft lack any legitimate peacetime civilian function. Even some apparently innocuous items, like uniforms, may help insurgents or guerillas who oppose peace to wage a new war. Therefore, at the end of a war, responsible parties will ensure secure government control of all military weapons and equipment that have no legitimate peacetime use and safely destroy any surplus. These items, in the wrong hands, pose a threat to peaceful human flourishing. Much of the material identified for destruction will contain hazardous materials. As with unexploded ordnance, ecologically sound disposal of all materiel is a responsibility and cost for the protagonists of waging war justly. If the vanquished are unable to fund their share of these costs without imposing significant economic injustice on the innocent then the victor helpfully obtains funding from alternative sources.

Third, exercising ecological responsibility requires good faith efforts to abate, or at least to contain, any significant environmental damage, pollution, or hazardous materials the war produced or released. These harms may include: soils compacted, eroded, or contaminated by military ordnance; improper disposal of human and other wastes; land defoliation; destruction of animal and plant habitat; and environmental degradation by military vehicles. Intentionally waging war by polluting an enemy's land violates the jus in bello criterion of noncombatant immunity, e.g., the practice in prior millennia of salting agricultural fields to ruin their productivity or the Iraqi attempt in the first U.S. Gulf War to destroy Kuwaiti oil fields. Other times, pollution may unintentionally result from legitimate military action, e.g., Iraqi guards deserting their posts guarding storage sites of radioactive materials as U.S. forces advanced in the second U.S. Gulf War. Regardless, just peace necessitates abating or at least containing the pollution and hazardous material. Furthermore, failing to mitigate environmental damage can diminish economic productivity and trigger future conflicts.

Fourth and finally, exercising ecological responsibility entails restoring infrastructure and ecosystems critical for human and other life forms to flourish that combat operations damaged, including buildings, roads, utilities, land, watersheds, etc. Christianity's holistic view of peace requires adopting this expansive view of ecological responsibility. This aspect of ecological responsibility will often overlap with efforts to establish distributive justice, e.g., a dam may provide vital flood control and critical animal habitat as well as hydroelectric power. This aspect of exercising ecological responsibility acknowledges war's destructive impact not only on people but also on the physical environment consisting of buildings, roads, utilities, animals, forests, land, watersheds, etc. Utilizing a mid-twentieth century perspective, the post-WWII Marshall Plan repaired or rebuilt roads, water systems, agriculture facilities, and other ecosystem infrastructure. Twenty-first century efforts will differ primarily because our greater awareness of human interdependence with non-human aspects of earth's ecosystem will result in an expanded scope of the restoration required.

#### d. Engage multinational commitment and support

Thomas Friedman, the well-known _New York Times_ ' columnist, memorably spotlighted the emerging global community when he titled one of his bestsellers, _The World is Flat_.269 Prominent U.S. military strategist and former Naval War College professor, Thomas P. M. Barnett, extended Friedman's analysis, arguing that civilization, in order to survive, must become global. Globalization coheres well with the concepts of human rights and equality foundational for developing a jus post bellum peace and integral to the first two criteria, respect for persons and establishing justice.

A global perspective superseding national parochialism, with a global concept of community and a global concern for justice, meshes nicely with the Christian recognition that nation states are only an interim step toward establishing a single community of all God's people. Consequently, just peacemaking, though often a costly endeavor for the victor, is an endeavor that in the long term can pay handsome dividends, as evidenced by European peace and U.S.-Japanese friendship following WWII. Engaging multinational commitment and support will become ever more important as the world becomes flatter.

Engaging other nations, beyond the victor(s) and loser(s), increases the potential effectiveness of reconstruction and nation building. Multinational involvement diminishes opportunities for, and the probability of, the victor(s) unjustly exploiting the loser(s). Multinational participation in creating a just end to a war is also more likely to diffuse animosity toward any one nation. Additionally, protagonists in many wars will lack the resources to fund post-war reconstruction, a shortfall other nations can cover. Finally, multinational involvement may even spread the cost of building a just peace more equitably than if only the participants pay, since peace and stability generally benefit, and often profit, many other nations.

Yet enlisting international involvement is often an uphill struggle. The victor(s) has the greatest stake and therefore the largest responsibility in establishing a just peace, while prosperous nations that did not participate in the fighting may have little or no direct stake in building a just peace. Tellingly, the unwillingness of other nations to commit to the jus post bellum process may indicate that the war was unjust or that the victor(s) is not making a good faith, reasonable effort to build a just peace.

#### e. Progress toward closure

_Progress toward closure_ connotes nations expeditiously and justly striving to establish a sustainable peace once the jus in bello phase ends. This presumes that indefinitely continuing hostilities does not become the new normal. This also presumes that nations neither end a just war prematurely (before ending the injustice that justified the conflict) nor prolong the war to achieve ulterior purposes.

Progress toward closure requires ending any occupation or continuing military operation as rapidly as morally practical. Victorious nations will often experience conflicting internal pressures in debates about the pace of progressing toward closure. Taxpayers and military personnel will many times want to minimize their costs in dollars and lives; competing interests will desire opportunities to expand businesses, reap profits, and otherwise exploit the war's outcome.

Within the defeated nation(s), internal conflicts about ending jus post bellum, and especially any occupation, will probably exist. Depending upon their expectations about gaining power, the future, and other actors as well as their commitment to respect for persons, establishing justice, and exercising ecological responsibility some voices may demand an immediate end to occupation while other voices clamor for a lengthy extension of it. Meanwhile, multiple voices may stridently insist on conflicting forms of government; any potential cultural change will likely have adamant proponents and opponents.

Resolving the conflicts among these multiple, sometimes competing demands, some of which are mutually exclusive, constitutes a Herculean task. Nevertheless, all stakeholders need to participate in decision making about the timing for closure, as is true for most other aspects of the jus post bellum paradigm. Deciding unilaterally, by definition, undercuts respect for those excluded from the process and too often results in unjust decisions. However, until viable international organizations capable of making fair decisions about the timing of progress for closure and then enforcing those decisions develop more fully, some element of unilateral decisions seems inescapable.

In each instance, nations must decide whether to adopt a maximalist strategy, a minimalist strategy, or a strategy between those two extremes. Maximalist strategies connote nation building, entailing regime change and broad civil and economic reconstruction. Minimalist strategies involve as few changes as feasible, aiming to exit the vanquished, or disengage in the absence of conquest, leaving conditions at least marginally better than before the war.

Prudential judgments will guide nations in identifying what is feasible; multinational input, assuring multiple perspectives and competing interests, will help to prevent the self-interests of occupiers and victors masquerading as concern for the defeated. Effective jus post bellum should not be a Sisyphean undertaking. For example, maximalist strategies proved efficacious in rebuilding Germany and Japan following WWII. Alternatively, the United Kingdom wisely adopted a minimalist approach after besting Argentina in the 1982 Falklands War.

The criterion of progress toward closure ensures all parties that just war is not an open-ended opportunity for one or several nations to insert themselves into the affairs of other nation(s), morally cloaking that involvement as working for peace or nation building. History is replete with wars in which the conflict really continued decades after the war had nominally ended. Sometimes undeclared war supplants a declared war, as occurred with British predation of U.S. shipping in the decades following the peace treaty that ended the American Revolution. Other times, occupying a vanquished nation becomes imperialism, whether the de jure imperialism of colonial conquest or the de facto imperialism of a sphere of influence, such as the Soviet Union exercised in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Both types of imperialism provoke antagonistic responses and are inconsistent with the Christian understanding of peace that emphasizes universal human dignity, rights, individual autonomy, and democratic self-determination. Had President McKinley adhered to this criterion, the U.S. would have adopted significantly different policies in the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War.

For most wars, closure entails negotiating and signing a formal peace treaty that is proportional, substantially ends the territorial invasion or egregious rights violations that caused the war, and publicly published. The settlement may include an apology from any aggressor(s) to the victim(s) of that aggression and delineate nations' various commitment to cooperate in building a holistic, sustainable peace by respecting persons, establishing justice, and exercising ecological responsibility.

Augmenting Just War Theory with a third component, jus post bellum, explicitly rejects the old adage that was always implicitly incompatible with Just War Theory: _To the victor go the spoils_. Just endings do not signify or require the fullness of peace. Instead, a just ending occurs when the war's aftermath appears, from that time and place in history, to represent movement toward the fullness of peace. The five jus post bellum criteria (respect for persons, establishing justice, exercising ecological responsibility, engaging multinational commitment and support, and progress towards closure) comprise the requisite elements of a just ending.

## E. Gulf War I: A just war theory analysis

My Camp David sermon on Just War Theory the Sunday before Gulf War I began appeared well received — except by the President, who was suffering from a cold and who seemed distracted. Years later, in reading Bob Woodward's book about post-Watergate presidencies, _Shadow_ , I learned that President Bush had privately concluded that GWI was necessary weeks before the war actually began. "We have to have a war," President Bush told his advisors, explaining that a diplomatic settlement would result in a huge strategic loss because of the missed opportunity to destroy Saddam's army. Key decision makers apparently feared rather than hoped that Saddam might order his forces to withdraw from Kuwait and thereby eliminate the expressed reason for going to war. In other words, realpolitik and national interest not unexpectedly took priority over Christian ethics. Nevertheless, GWI affords a worthwhile case study for Just War Theory because it was both recent (1990) and a precursor to Gulf War II, the U.S. 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq (considered in Chapter 5). The discussion of the Islamic perspective on War in Chapter 4 concludes by analyzing GWI from that perspective.

Of the six jus ad bellum criteria, Gulf War I satisfies, on a prima facie basis, five at most:

1. Iraq invading and then annexing Kuwait provided just cause in the classical sense. Kuwait not only lost territory but also would have ceased to exist as a sovereign nation without GWI. Iraq's annexation of Kuwait violated the U.N. Charter; Article 58 of that Charter authorizes other nations to aid a member nation against aggression.

2. Following Congressional authorization, the international coalition that the United States assembled under the auspices of U.N. resolutions constituted, at least superficially if not in fact, right authority. No higher political authority existed with the ability to veto coalition actions.

3. GWI also satisfied the requirement of proportionality, e.g., coalition forces did not drive their attack all the way to Baghdad nor force regime change in Iraq. The allies' death toll was two hundred and forty; the Iraqis, by their own account, lost approximately thirty thousand.

4. In spite of President Bush's premature, private decision, Gulf War I was also a last resort because Saddam refused to withdraw his forces from Kuwait. The coalition employed sanctions and other means short of war and openly massed its forces in the Middle East prior to launching the war. Iraq could have withdrawn from Kuwait at any time.

5. The coalition's easy rout of Iraq's forces shows that the coalition's expectation of success in waging GWI was well founded.

However, Just War Theory requires that a potential war satisfy all six jus ad bellum criteria before declaring the war morally just.

The remaining criterion, right intent, makes an evaluation of GWI's moral justification tenuous. Was the coalition's main intention to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty or to avoid Kuwait's petroleum resources coming under Iraq's control? Kuwait for several years prior to the war supposedly pumped Iraqi petroleum from Kuwait using diagonally drilled wells located in Kuwait that surreptitiously crossed underground into Iraq. The international community tolerated — at least took no action to stop — this de facto theft of Iraqi oil wealth. The U.S. and other coalition nations have not responded promptly, and sometimes not responded at all, to similar land grabs in which they did not perceive that their national interests were at stake. Genuine right intent demands a measure of selflessness arguably not present in Gulf War I. President Bush, deciding weeks before GWI began that the U.S. had to fight, obviously had an agenda that extended beyond restoring Kuwaiti independence.

Gulf War I satisfied the first but not the second jus in bello criterion. These criteria can never be completely satisfied, e.g., using modern weapons inevitably results in some collateral damage and humans invariably make mistakes in the stress and fog of war that cost lives.

The coalition's basic strategy of massive force, a feint from the sea, and air attack followed by maneuver warfare rapidly defeated the Iraqi forces while respecting both the precepts of proportionality and, to a lesser degree, noncombatant immunity. Perhaps the best evidence for proportionality during Gulf War I occurred when General Powell, then Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, watching coalition forces push into Iraq toward Baghdad while inflicting heavy casualties on the Iraqi army, ordered the field commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, to stop the killing and to return his forces to the Kuwaiti border. One can second-guess whether Powell or Schwarzkopf correctly timed that decision, but war is an imprecise art. The clear intent was to minimize unnecessary killing, i.e., to comply with the jus in bello principle of proportionality. Similarly, U.S. military forces and their allies train to fight in a manner that as far as possible protects noncombatant immunity.

The use of smart munitions, first employed on a wide scale basis in GWI, significantly enhanced the ability to respect noncombatant immunity. Subsequent U.S. military operations have relied even more extensively on smart munitions. The Iraqis estimated their GWI civilian deaths at two to three thousand.

However, heavily bombing Iraqi infrastructure (e.g., the electricity grid) during the "shock and awe" phase that preceded the actual ground invasion contributed disproportionately little to the war's success and resulted in tens of thousands of Iraqi noncombatant deaths.

For the sake of simplicity and brevity, this analysis of GWI examines the jus post bellum criteria only as they apply to Kuwait, Iraq, and the U.S. Post war efforts to control oil well fires and to remediate the environmental damage GWI caused in Kuwait represented a major post-war effort. The Kuwaitis had the financial resources necessary to fund reconstruction and to dispose of unexploded ordnance and surplus military material. The coalition — multinational in composition –expeditiously restored the pre-war boundary between Iraq and Kuwait and promptly returned political power to the pre-war Kuwaiti regime. In other words, what happened in post-GWI Kuwait reasonably satisfied the jus post bellum criteria of exercising ecological responsibility, engaging multinational commitment and support, and progress toward closure.

However, the Kuwaiti monarchy did not take significant, post-war strides towards building a more just society shaped by the principles of distributive, commutative, and legal justice. Efforts by the U.S. and others to push Kuwait in that direction achieved little. Kuwait after the war, like before, continued to rely upon foreign workers for most routine or manual labor, according those workers lower status and fewer rights than Kuwaitis enjoy. Coalition nations, particularly the U.S. as the coalition's leader and dominant member, share a measure of responsibility for not having more effectively pushed the Kuwaiti regime towards greater respect for persons and establishing justice. The lack of post GWI improvement means Kuwait fails to satisfy the jus post bellum criteria of respect for persons and establishing justice.

Iraq's jus post bellum report card is worse. Iraq refused to participate in multinational, post-war processes. Coalition nations enforced U.N. sanctions and no-fly zones. The sanctions, intended to coerce Iraq's government to become less bellicose failed, regrettably imposing hardships on the Iraqi people. The no-fly zones did succeed in protecting Iraqi citizens from their own government. Every effort to push the Iraqi government towards respecting all persons or creating a more just society proved futile. The U.S. encouraged both Iraqi Kurds and Shiites to rebel but then failed to support the rebellions, thus ensuring their defeat and the pointless death of thousands. Neither Iraq nor the coalition seems to have attempted to reintegrate Iraq's returning warriors back into Iraqi society.

With the exceptions of its badly damaged military and the no-fly zones, post GWI Iraq greatly resembled pre-GWI Iraq. Little evidence suggests that GWI increased respect for persons, improved justice, bettered the environment, welcomed meaningful multinational involvement, or progressed towards real closure in Iraq. President George W. Bush's administration in 2003 highlighted the continuing prevalence of injustice, the failure of multinational involvement, and lack of closure as factors justifying GWII. Continued concern about the same issues more than a decade after GWI underscores that events in Iraq after GWI fell far short of satisfying the jus post bellum criteria.

Elements of four of the five jus post bellum criteria apply to the U.S.: the warrior transition dimension of respect for persons; improving distributive justice; engaging multinational commitment and support; and progress toward closure. In the eyes of many U.S. citizens, the U.S. brought most of its troops home in spite of the unfinished business of Saddam remaining in power in Iraq. In the eyes of many Arabs, the U.S., leaving twenty-five thousand troops in the Middle East following GWI, signaled that the U.S. thought it had unfinished business there and symbolized the continued affront of infidels occupying Muslim land. In other words, GWI lacked closure.

That lack of closure highlights the fundamental cause of the United States' jus post bellum failures: the U.S. acted primarily out of self-interest, placing the well-being and flourishing of its citizens ahead of that of other nations without according those other nations equal standing to do the same. Genuine multinational operations require rough parity among partners and shared decision-making, conditions consonant with Christianity but ones that the U.S. generally rejects. The U.S., for example, rarely allows its soldiers to fight under foreign command.

Ironically, in a world rapidly transitioning toward global community, acting out of narrow self-interest unbalanced by equals doing the same is often self-defeating behavior. Genuine multinationalism, analogous to individuals each acting in their perceived individual self-interest in a market economy or democracy, can produce results consonant with the best interests of all. Consequently, the only viable path to peace requires treating all nations and persons with equal respect and seeking justice for all, a conclusion inherent in a Christian perspective. The United States, since GWI, has also done little to wean itself of its dependence on oil, an integral step in creating a global society with a higher degree of distributive justice (and arguably an element of exercising ecological responsibility).

Belatedly, the U.S. has begun to address the problems with which GWI warriors returned home, especially PTSD and diseases that appear linked to environmental hazards caused by oil well fires, smoke, etc. On a positive note, the U.S. did publicly honor its returning warriors, according them due dignity and equality.

In sum, GWI, although it embodies elements of a just war, does not fully satisfy all of the Christian criteria for declaring and waging a war justly. Post-war efforts also fell short of the jus post bellum standard for progress toward a just and lasting peace. Would the world be a better place today if the global community of nations had accepted Iraq's annexation of Kuwait as a fait accompli? Nobody can know with certainty.

Had the U.S. and its coalition partners waged GWI with right intent and more fully satisfied the jus post bellum criteria would the world be a better place? Answering that question affirmatively is easy. But positing right intent on the part of the U.S. and its partners means that those nations would have had different pre-war relationships with both Kuwait and Iraq. Would those different relationships have stopped or prevented the Kuwaitis from pumping Iraqi oil from wells drilled diagonally under their shared border? Would different relationships have ameliorated pre-war injustices and altered the Kuwaiti or Iraqi governments?

Just War Theory provides a useful paradigm for assessing whether an actual war was just. Just War Theory also provides a helpful paradigm for deciding whether a potential war will be just as well as guidance on how to wage a war justly and how to work for a just ending to a war. However, as the preceding questions imply, Just War Theory cannot answer hypothetical questions about what might have been.

Christianity has progressively sought to limit violence, encouraging people to build peaceful societies that enhance human well-being and flourishing. Just War Theory, summarized in Figure 3.3, represents Christianity's effort to chart a middle path between holy war bellicosity and the vulnerability to unconscionable evil that is a consequence of unswerving pacifism.

Christianity's scorecard for limiting war and violence is at best mixed. Critics vociferously decry the medieval Crusades, Western colonial conquests, and the conflict in Northern Ireland as evidence of Christian warmongering. These critics are also correct that Just War Theory has never caused a nation to scrap its warplans. Perhaps uniquely in the history of warfare, King Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and at the time Europe's most powerful monarch, suspended the Spanish conquest of the Americas for a year (1520—1521) while a deeply divided panel of Christian theologians and counselors evaluated it from a Just War Theory perspective. Tragically, the panel eventually concluded that the conquests were moral because the souls of the Native Americans were at stake. Tragically and immorally, the Spanish killed many of those Native Americans through pointless slaughter and the unintentional spread of diseases for which the Native Americans lacked immunity.

Sadly, the Protestant Reformation diminished Just War Theory's potential impact on world events because the reformers discarded all theology and ethics not explicitly rooted in the Bible. As one can infer from this exposition of Just War Theory, most of Just War Theory lacks an explicit scriptural warrant; nevertheless, the paradigm is deeply rooted in Christian ethics.

Even now, in the absence of any good alternative to Just War Theory, most Protestant Churches do not educate their clergy or laity in the Just War tradition. That ignorance also extends to most Christian military personnel. My first year as the senior Protestant chaplain at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, I preached a sermon in the Chapel on Just War Theory. I believed it important to equip future officers and leaders with the tools to make moral decisions when in combat or, when serving at the highest echelons of the service, asked to advise the nation's civilian leaders about war. To my surprise, the Academy's Superintendent, present that morning as he was every Sunday, requested a copy of my sermon. He told me that in over thirty-nine years of Navy service this was the first sermon he had heard on Just War Theory.

Three difficulties undercut Just War Theory's ability to limit war and the violence of war more effectively. First, Just War Theory pertains only to war between nations; it does not address conflicts between a nation and sub-state actors like terrorist groups and revolutionaries. Second, Just War Theory, per se, has no enforceable legal status and probably never will in a pluralistic global community. Indeed, Just War Theory is not part of the philosophical, ethical, political, or military heritage of Communist, Hindu, and numerous other ideologies and religions. Finally, people seeking to analyze a potential or actual war using Just War Theory criteria may reasonably reach divergent assessments because of different values, inaccurate or incomplete information, and the necessarily tenuous nature of hypothesizing about future outcomes of different courses of action.

In spite of those problems, Just War Theory enjoys the weight of sixteen hundred years of respect in the Christian tradition, embodying Christian emphases on the dignity and worth of all people as God's children and the importance of peacemaking. The theory has widespread scholarly support among Christian (and secular) ethicists; it remains the only Christian framework for making moral decisions about war and warfighting. Although Just War Theory has not averted wars, it has achieved some success in limiting how nations fight wars.

The discussions of a Jewish perspective on war and of an Islamic perspective on war in the following chapter identify important commonalities between the teachings of the three great monotheistic religions about war and peace. That common ground offers hope for Jews, Christians, and Muslims working together to limit war and to build peace.

Concomitantly, Christians and their Churches clearly can do a better job of educating the Christian community in Just War Theory, expand the theory to more robustly embrace jus post bellum, and issue timely, courageous, and prophetic proclamations about the morality of a war and warfighting before, after, and during wars.

#  Chapter 4: Jewish and Islamic Views of War

May the Lord give strength to his people!

_May the Lord bless his people with peace!_ (Psalm 29:11)

Agree with God, and be at peace;

_in this way good will come to you._ (Job 22:21)

U.S. Navy staff corps officers wear two devices on their uniforms, one indicating the officer's rank and the other designating the staff corps to which the officer belongs. When I was commissioned as a chaplain in 1981, the Navy had two staff corps devices for chaplains: a cross for Christian chaplains and the two tablets of the law surmounted by a small star of David for Jewish chaplains. Over the following quarter of a century, the Navy had added two more staff corps devices for chaplains: a crescent for Muslim chaplains and a prayer wheel for Buddhist chaplains. During that same period, the Navy added fresh emphasis to the chaplains' role as command advisors on the religious dimension of foreign cultures and religion's role in conflicts. Those changes symbolize not only a rapid increase in U.S. religious diversity but also the prominent role religious ideology plays in many contemporary conflicts.

Do Christians, Jews, and Muslims — the adherents of the world's three great monotheistic religions, all of which trace their roots to the patriarch Abraham — share a common understanding of and aspiration for peace? Are the normative Christian, Jewish, and Muslim views of the morality of war, the appropriate limits of warfighting, and the responsibility to work for peace sufficiently similar to permit Christians, Jews, and Muslims to cooperate in efforts to limit war, restrain warfighting, and build peace?

This chapter answers those questions affirmatively, exploring first Judaism and then Islam. Religious conflict is not inevitable; a strong ethical and theological common foundation exists that can enable Christians, Jews, and Muslims to work cooperatively to forge swords of war into plowshares of peace.

For the sake of consistency and ease of cross-religious comparisons, although acknowledging the risk of unintentional Christian bias, I present both the Jewish and Muslim perspectives on war using the Just War Theory framework (summarized in Figure 3.3). In doing this, I follow a precedent the U.S. Institute of Peace set, when, after GWI, it convened a symposium of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars to discuss religious perspectives on war in general and the first Gulf War in particular. Those conversations generally utilized the Just War Theory model to highlight their commonalities and differences.

My analyses of Judaism and Islam, like my analysis of Christian attitudes toward war, focus on what each religion teaches and not on the actual beliefs of its adherents. Considerable disparity exists between the formal teachings of each religion and the wide diversity of personalized and culturally shaped beliefs its adherents actually hold. Highlighting commonalities in the three religions' actual teachings represents a step toward increasing the mutual respect and understanding on which peace is contingent and demonstrates that people of faith cannot only avoid conflict but also work together for peace.

The literal translation of the Arabic word _Allah_ is _the God_ ; Arabic speaking Christians (and any Jews who refer to God in Arabic) use the word _Allah_ to denote the deity. This common terminology underscores that all three religions are rooted in the Abrahamic narrative. Judaism and Christianity trace their origin to Abraham through his son Isaac; Islam traces its origin to Abraham through Ishmael, Isaac's half-brother whose mother, Hagar, was the maid of Abraham's wife, Sarah. Significantly, the Jewish and Christian scriptures report that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; the Muslim scriptures report that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Ishmael, the older son. Although careful scholarly study of the three religions' scriptures and traditions generally yields a consistent understanding of the nature of the deity, less theologically well-educated adherents of all three religions sometimes persist in their insistence that the god of the other two religions is not the one true God.

## A. The Jewish view of war

In 1997, I visited the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, one of the death camps that the Nazis operated after they systemized their effort to exterminate the Jews. More than fifty years after its liberation by the allies, Dachau remained a haunting place. I live with indelible mental images from my visit that testify to our human capacity for doing evil. I saw a "shower" where arriving Jews were to wash that was in fact a gas chamber in which the Germans killed thousands. I toured barracks in which prisoners lived more like animals on a factory farm than normal humans. I read the message affixed in wrought iron to the front gate, _Work will make you free_ , intended to comfort and calm new arrivals while the guards sorted who would die immediately and who would receive a temporary reprieve. Amazingly, the Nazis committed enough resources to eradicating the Jews, even continuing through the Third Reich's death throes, to kill six million Jews.

Two years before visiting Dachau, while serving at the U.S. Naval Academy, three of us — the senior Roman Catholic chaplain, the Jewish chaplain, and I, the senior Protestant chaplain — had escorted a group of Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant midshipmen on a ten-day trip to Israel. We toured historical sights but also met with political leaders, military leaders, and sought to understand Israel's social fabric. We visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial to the Holocaust and to the heroes who had intervened to save Jews. There, we, like many visitors, planted a sapling, symbolizing hope and the promise of life in Israel.

The vast majority of Christians, in my experience, naively presume that their knowledge of Christianity, the New Testament, and the Old Testament give them a good understanding of Judaism. Comments in Christian adult education classes, from Christian midshipmen on the trip to Israel, and class discussions in the philosophy of religion course that I taught at the Naval Academy and in _Ethics across Cultures_ , a graduate level course in Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic ethics that I taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, confirm that widespread ignorance.

Christians generally read the Old Testament only through a Christian lens or they devalue the Old Testament as the New Testament's now superseded historical antecedent. Christians also fail to understand the decisive importance of the Holocaust for both contemporary Judaism and a Jewish perspective on war. Incredibly, not all Christians know that Jesus was a Jew, Judaism birthed Christianity, and the two faiths worship the same God and share scriptures.

Judaism posits three categories of war (Figure 4.1): required wars, optional wars, and defensive wars. Required wars are the wars that God specifically instructed Israel to wage. Rabbinic tradition teaches that God has only required Israel to wage wars against the Amalekites and seven specific Canaanite nations in Israel's conquest of the Promised Land. None of those nations exists any longer. Direct revelation from God, according to rabbinic tradition, ended over two millennia ago, so there is no option of expanding the list of nations against whom God commands Israel to wage war. Therefore, the Jews can never again fight a required war. Furthermore, required wars are the only wars in which Scripture instructs Israel to kill every member of the enemy nation.

Christianity derived its holy war tradition from the Jewish category of required wars. However, the Jewish concept of required war sharply diverges from the Christian definition of a holy war at two key points. First, unlike Jewish required wars, the Christian tradition does not specifically limit holy wars to certain enemies, goals, or timeframes. Some Christians, for example, consider Gulf War II a holy war. Second, Jewish moral discomfort with killing an entire nation, which developed prior to Jesus' birth, was the catalyst for imposing limits on required wars. This change reflects a remarkable reappraisal of Scripture unparalleled in the Christian holy war tradition. A growing awareness of God's equal concern for all people, because God created all people, and not Jewish pacifism, prompted that reappraisal. Pacifism seems absent from Jewish thinking about war until WWI, when the first Jewish pacifists apparently appeared.

Judaism teaches that God gave the Scriptures, particularly the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), to Israel. The Scripture does not belong to an individual but to Jews collectively. Interpretation, therefore, belongs to the community rather than to individuals. Rabbis are not priests but Jews who have received an education in Torah, devoted themselves to the study of Torah, and to whom the Jewish community grants authority to teach because of that education and devotion. Judaism reads and interprets its Scriptures through an ongoing dialogue between living rabbis conversing with Scripture, dialogue with the rabbinical tradition of interpretation, and one another. This communal interpretive process explicitly recognizes that Jews today read the Scriptures within a very different context than the one in which Israel received its Scriptures from God.

For example, Deuteronomy 25:19 records that God commanded Saul to kill all of the Amalekites. More than two millennia ago, that command troubled the rabbis: "The rabbis dared not criticize Deuteronomy, for they regarded it as the direct word of God; rather, they expressed their unease by means of interpretation. They could not exonerate Saul for being remiss in destroying the Amalekites, since the Bible states that he deserved his punishment; but they retold the story in a way that was sympathetic to Saul and expressed their own puzzlement at the command to destroy Amalek..." This Jewish reappraisal of required wars occurred long before anyone thought to apply labels to required wars that are not usually associated with the Jewish warfighting tradition, e.g., genocide and holocaust.

Optional wars are wars that Israel's king may choose to initiate. The rabbinic tradition developed this category of war to account for the wars that the kings of Israel and Judah waged to expand their territory or to obtain plunder. A necessary precondition for an optional war is the concurrence of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish court of seventy-one elders. By the time of Maimonides in the tenth century, C.E., the rabbinic tradition had definitively concluded that Israel could never again wage an optional war:

According to some authorities, the protocol for conducting an optional war included seeking permission from not only the Sanhedrin but also the _Kohein Gadol_ (the high priest) and the _Urim_ and _Tumim_ , the oracular devices used to ascertain the will of God. Since none of those institutions existed after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., the possibility of waging an optional war became moot. Nevertheless, in the decades following the destruction of the Second Temple, many Jews sought to overthrow Roman rule in Palestine, with disastrous results. This historical fact, along with the extinction of the institutions required to wage optional war — not to mention the end of a Jewish sovereign state — helped to shape a Jewish view that eschewed any interest in wars of aggression.

Even with the creation of the modern nation state of Israel, waging an optional war remains impossible because the institutions required to sanction such a war do not exist.

Defensive wars, the third category of wars from a Jewish perspective, are the only wars that contemporary Jews should fight. God commanded people to defend their lives, a conclusion the rabbis based on their interpretation of Numbers 10:9, "When you are at war in your land against an aggressor who attacks you, you shall sound short blasts on the trumpets, that you may be remembered before the Lord your God and be delivered from your enemies." Suicide, whether by one's own hand or passively accepting death from another's actions, disobeys God's command. God thereby implicitly commanded defensive wars; for this reason, some rabbis call defensive wars _commanded wars_.

Judaism has no paradigm for defensive wars, analogous to Christianity's Just War Theory, which outlines when to wage a defensive war, how to wage it, and what to do at war's end. A Jewish exposition of their defensive war concept begins with reading the relevant Scripture passages, especially Deuteronomy 20:1-20, the passage around which the rabbis concentrated their debates on the subject of war:

When you take the field against your enemies, and see horses and chariots — forces larger than yours — have no fear of them, for the Lord your God, who brought you from the land of Egypt, is with you. Before you join the battle, the priest shall come forward and address the troops. He shall say to them, 'Hear, O Israel! You are about to join battle with your enemy. Let not your courage falter. Do not be in fear, or in panic, or in dread of them. For it is the Lord your God who marches with you to do battle for you against your enemy, to bring you victory.'

Then the officials shall address the troops, as follows: 'Is there anyone who has built a new house but has not dedicated it? Let him go back to his home, lest he die in battle and another dedicate it. Is there anyone who has planted a vineyard but has never harvested it? Let him go back to his home, lest he die in battle and another harvest it. Is there anyone who has paid the bride-price for a wife, but who has not yet married her? Let him go back to his home, lest he die in battle and another marry her.' The officials shall go on addressing the troops and say, 'Is there anyone afraid and disheartened? Let him go back to his home, lest the courage of his comrades flag like his.' When the officials have finished addressing the troops, army commanders shall assume command of the troops.

When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it responds peaceably and lets you in, all the people present there shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not surrender to you but would join battle with you, you shall lay siege to it; and when the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, the livestock, and everything in the town — all its spoil — and enjoy the use of the spoil of your enemy, which the Lord your God gives to you.

Thus you shall deal with all towns that lie very far from you, towns that do not belong to nations hereabout. In the towns of the latter peoples, however, which the Lord your God is giving you as a heritage, you shall not let a soul remain alive. No, you must proscribe them — the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites — as the Lord your God has commanded you, lest they lead you into doing all the abhorrent things that they have done for their gods and you stand guilty before the Lord your God.

When in your war against a city you have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it, you must not destroy its trees, wielding the ax against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city? Only trees that you know do not yield food may be destroyed; you my cut them down for constructing siegeworks against the city that is waging war on you, until it has been reduced.

After reading the pertinent Scripture texts, a Jewish exposition of defensive wars will trace the evolution of rabbinic thought about those passages through the centuries, a task beyond the scope of this book. Several important elements that the rabbinic tradition carries forward from Deuteronomy 20 in their ongoing conversations about war are important to note:

\- Only the courageous, who possess faith in God and who do not have a commitment such as a new house, vineyard, or wife, are to fight (verses 1-10);

\- Offer peace to all besieged cities, conditional on the acceptance of terms of tribute (verses 10, 11);

\- If the city refuses that offer, put males to the sword, take females and small children captive, and plunder the city (Deuteronomy 21:10-14 somewhat ameliorates the status of female captives);

\- Do not cut down food trees in prosecution of a siege (verses 19, 20).

Jewish thinking about war and Christian Just War Theory each developed along its own trajectory. Nonetheless, Jewish and Christian teachings about war have much in common.

#### a. Jus ad bellum

The Jewish tradition's definition of a defensive war — responding to an aggressor's actions — matches the broadened Christian concept of just cause developed in the previous chapter: "The only possible just wars are defensive, 'defense' being understood as defense of national territorial integrity and/or the physical safety of citizens. In extreme cases, attempted 'cultural genocide' might afford grounds for defensive war." Defensive wars are mandatory, not optional. Jews also have a duty to assist other nations in their defense. Territorial or religious expansionism never justifies war from a Jewish perspective. The early Zionist movement, the precursor to the founding of the modern state of Israel, never advocated the military conquest of Palestine in order to establish a Jewish homeland:

Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of pre-state Palestine, urged that Jewish settlement of the land should proceed by peaceful means only. Even a Jewish king, Kook reasoned, would need to consult the High Court before embarking on war, for no war (other than purely defensive) might be pursued against those who observe the Seven Commandments, and if the enemy were idolaters (this would exclude Muslims and Christians), it would still be necessary for the Court to examine their moral condition before declaring the war justified. (For Kook, it was axiomatic that no such Court existed in the present day.) Later, a similar position prohibiting offensive war was taken by the ultra-Orthodox Yeshayahu Karelitz.

Jewish commitment to, and motivation for, having their own homeland increased during the years that the Nazis ruled Germany. Jews living in European ghettos had no place to which to flee to escape the Nazi's _final solution_. Western nations with no history of Jewish pogroms (e.g., Great Britain, Canada, and the United States) had, or erected, barriers to entry and accepted few Jewish immigrants. From 1920-1944, the United States only accepted one hundred thousand Jewish immigrants. Nor was flight to Palestine an option:

In the 1930s, the British allowed fewer than two hundred and seventy thousand Jews to immigrate to Palestine even though a former British Foreign Minister, Lord Balfour, had declared Great Britain's commitment to the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Fewer than five thousand Jews entered Palestine legally in 1941; thereafter, 'the gates of Palestine remained closed for the duration of the war, stranding hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe, many of whom became victims of Hitler's Final Solution.'

Armed resistance by the Jews to the Nazis and their pogroms has received too little public attention. Many non-Jews wrongly presume that the Jews went meekly and obediently to the death camps. Centuries of persecution had left the Jews unarmed, untrained, and unprepared psychologically to mount an effective defense against Germany's modern military might. Nevertheless, approximately one and a half million Jews fought in allied armed forces and as partisans against the Nazis.

The long, tragic history of Jews as a persecuted people against whom the Nazis organized an efficient campaign of genocide and for whom other nations showed little willingness to help led some Jews to employ violent means in their struggle for a homeland, a place of safety. Many of these Jews were secular Jews who did not believe in God, an idea that many Christians may regard as an oxymoron: how can one claim to be Jewish and not believe in God? Being Jewish is partly a matter of religion, partly a matter of genetics, and partly a matter of culture.

The division of Jews into various movements tends to have more visibility among Christians than do the varying definitions of Jewishness. In Jesus' time, Jewish movements included the aforementioned Zealots, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees. Today, the main Jewish movements in the U.S. include the Orthodox (those with the most literal interpretation of the Torah), Reform (those who radically redefine the Torah believing a literal interpretation irrelevant to contemporary life), and Conservatives (those who take a position between Orthodox and Reform). Minor Jewish movements usually represent a narrower expression of Orthodox Judaism, often known as the ultra-orthodox. Secular Jews may or may not feel constrained to wage war according to the Jewish religious tradition, e.g., those Jews who used violent means in the first half of the twentieth century to establish the nation of Israel. Alternatively, some Jews, from a post-Holocaust vantage point, regard the Zionist campaign to establish the modern nation of Israel as a defensive war, a war to defend all Jews against an unrelenting threat of genocide and persecution.

Right intent for Christian Just War Theory is progress toward peace; right intent within the Jewish tradition is the defense that constitutes just cause. Nevertheless, within Judaism peace remains the highest good. The Jewish commitment to peace, however, has not found expression in a numerically significant Jewish pacifist movement, which is not surprising in view of millennia of persecution and God's command of self-defense:

The conditions of an entire nation mobilized in the effort to establish a strong, independent nation-state are incompatible with the growth of a tradition of refusal. In fact, against such a background, conscientious objection is perceived to be antithetical to the prevailing value system. To recoil from the use of power becomes a form of disassociation from the collective effort.

Questions of right intent, however, do remain for Jews, e.g., what constitutes territorial expansion for Israel? Annexing any territory beyond the borders that the U.N. established for Israel in 1948? Annexing any territory beyond what belonged to King David's realm? Annexing watersheds or high ground critical for Israel's self-defense? If annexation occurs through military action, is that action a prohibited optional war or a permitted defensive war? Those questions are important for the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Those questions also underscore the relevance of the moral problem of double-effect for Jews as well as to Christians, i.e., can the intent of national defense justify the unintended consequence of territorial expansion and the injustice that may impose on those residing on the land?

From the perspective of the Jewish religion, the locus of right authority for declaring war is not obvious. The original loci of right authority — the monarchy, the oracle of God, and the Sanhedrin — no longer exist. The secular answer to the question of right authority is readily apparent, i.e., the government of the nation in which the Jew is a citizen, and especially the Israeli government because a majority of Israelis are Jewish. Memories of the Holocaust reinforce the Israeli government's legitimacy as right authority among Jews around the world: "The memory of this trauma, in which six million Jews were exterminated without any means of self-defense, is preserved in the mind of every Israeli, including the younger generations who have been in Europe. This collective memory created a genuine feeling that "this must never happen again" and plays a major role in the legitimacy of and the motivation for military service in Israel." Because God commands self-defense and wars of self-defense are the only morally justifiable wars, the issue of right authority is tangential from a Jewish perspective. Any government, leader, or Jew who will ensure the defense of Jews, has not only right authority but also the moral obligation to exercise that authority.

The criterion of proportionality is basic to the Jewish tradition since the concept of total war is alien to Jewish thought. Nuclear weapons distress some Jews because they regard nuclear weapons as weapons of total war and they thus can never represent a proportional response. Other Jews, such as the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Lord Immanuel Jacobovits, have adopted a more pragmatic approach to nuclear weapons, contending that by possessing nuclear weapons nations deter attack. This rationale supports Israel's possession of nuclear weapons as a deterrent against wealthier, more populous nations that claim to be committed to Israel's destruction.

War, from a Jewish perspective, must always be the last resort: "Every attempt should be made to settle international disputes by negotiation, not by war nor by the threat of war." Preemptive war, if truly an act of self-defense, is permissible. Judaism does not specify the threshold that the threat has to exceed before a preemptive attack is morally justifiable but insists that threshold is high, e.g., an aggressor nation has made preparations and announced its intent to attack imminently. The previous chapter cited the example of the 1967 Six-Day War in which Israel preemptively attacked and defeated the Arab nations whose massed military forces had already received the attack order. From a Jewish perspective, the Six-Day War was an ethically justifiable, preemptive, defensive war. "Deterrent (preventive) wars, aiming to stop potential enemies getting to the point at which they might threaten, are less justifiable" because a potential enemy, not having crossed the line of no return, may choose to defer the attack indefinitely or adopt another course of action entirely.

This vagueness about conditions under which a preventive war is morally justified within the Jewish tradition poses difficult questions for Israel today. Its enemies sometimes act inconsistently, e.g., taking steps towards building peace with Israel in spite of having formally committed to destroying Israel. Given the historic Jewish perspective on war, even if one deems Israel's attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear weapons development facility an act of war, then Israel's attack, notwithstanding the United Nations' Security Council condemnation, was morally justified because it avoided a likely nuclear attack.

Having a reasonable chance of success is not part of the Jewish concept of a defensive war. However, in the discussion of this criterion from a Christian perspective, the one exception to having a reasonable chance of success that satisfies the jus ad bellum criterion is fighting a foe(s) committed to one's total destruction, e.g., the repeated commitment of many Arab nations to Israel's destruction or the Nazi pogrom of Jewish extermination. On this point, the Jewish and Christian perspectives agree.

#### b. Jus in bello

Proportionality, the first of the two jus in bello Just War Theory criteria, figures prominently in the Jewish tradition. The tradition prohibits excessive violence: "Minimum casualties should be inflicted to attain legitimate objectives. This is not the same as minimum force. The threat, or even the use of maximum force may shorten a conflict and minimize casualties."

The Israeli military, officially known as the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), has incorporated the principle of proportionality into its doctrine:

The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent, and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity, and property.

Jewish objections to excessive force and killing are the same as Christian Just War Theory objections.

Similarly, Jewish warriors are ethically bound to treat their captives well. However, as repeatedly seen in the discussion of Christian perspectives on war, self-identified members of a religion do not always adhere to that religion's teachings:

At a later period, however, gross cruelty was practiced both by the Hebrews and by the other nations. After having defeated the Moabites, David cast them down to the ground and measured them with a line, putting to death two lines and keeping one alive (2 Samuel 8:2), while he put the Ammonites under saws, harrows, and axes of iron and made them pass through the brick-kiln (2 Samuel 12:31).

Given Christians' abysmal record in observing Christianity's precepts that seek to limit wars and warfighting, no reason exists to presume that Jews are any less moral than Christians are. Indeed, a Christian perspective suggests that the adherents of all religions will fall short of complying with restraints on war and warfighting.

The exigencies of war do create complications for religiously observant Jews that have no Christian parallel. For example, Jewish restrictions against working on the Sabbath and consuming prohibited foods potentially represent fatal handicaps for Jewish warriors. Fighting is work; not to fight on the Sabbath would be tantamount to inviting one's enemies to attack only on the Sabbath. Kosher food may be unavailable on a battlefield; not eating may leave a warrior too weak to win or even adequately to engage in self-defense. The rabbinic tradition concluded that warriors have religious justification for violating these mandates if required by military necessity. In other words, a Jewish perspective on war aims to level the field of combat (i.e., make the fighting proportional) by authorizing Jewish warriors to ignore religious requirements that would disadvantage them in a morally justifiable defensive war.

Noncombatant immunity figures prominently in the Jewish perspective on war: "If at all possible, noncombatants should be spared. The difficulty of exercising such discrimination with modern weapons of mass destruction means that it is not always possible to spare noncombatants; but on the other hand, it would be absurd for a country to surrender to an aggressor simply to save the life of one noncombatant hostage."

Discriminating between combatants and noncombatants in order to protect the latter is formally a guiding precept for the Israeli military. The Jewish tradition has also given particular emphasis to prohibiting the taking of hostages, i.e., imprisoning and threatening to harm innocent noncombatants unless combatants comply with the hostage takers' demands. In recent years, discussions of the ban against hostage taking have examined, without reaching definitive conclusions, whether indiscriminate terrorism is more analogous to war or to criminal activity.

#### c. Jus post bellum

Respect for persons, the first of the five jus post bellum criteria, is a significant factor in the Jewish tradition. Respect for the dignity and worth of all people, not just Jews, led to an early and definitive rejection of any future waging of required and optional wars. Judaism does not seek to convert others to Judaism nor does Judaism make any official statements about the merits or validity of other religions. A minority of Jewish movements and elements of the rabbinic tradition advocate active opposition to idolatry, but even those elements do not condemn religions in which the seven Noachide laws listed in the Talmud are incorporated. The Noachide laws are:

1. Prohibition of Idolatry: - There is only one God. You shall not make for yourself an idol.

2. Prohibition of Murder: - You shall not murder.

3. Prohibition of Theft: - You shall not steal.

4. Prohibition of Sexual Promiscuity: - You shall not commit adultery.

5. Prohibition of Blasphemy: - Revere God and do not blaspheme.

6. Prohibition of Cruelty to Animals: - Do not eat the flesh of a living animal.

7. Requirement to have Just Laws: - You shall set up an effective government to police the preceding six laws.

After the flood, God gave these laws to Noah as the basis of the new society that Noah and his descendants were to create.

Jewish respect for persons differs at two points from the Christian understanding of respect for persons. First, warrior reintegration in Judaism diverges from the Christian tradition because killing in self-defense, from a Jewish perspective, is not wrong. Consequently, Jewish warriors do not get their hands dirty in the same way as Christian warriors. Of course, some Jewish warriors may still feel guilty about killing or about other deeds performed in combat. In the words of Rabbi Edwin Goldberg, "War dehumanizes its participants. Jewish tradition attempts to preserve some humanity whenever possible." For warriors with dirty hands, Judaism offers religious rites for atoning of one's sin.

Second, respect for persons in the Jewish tradition led to the exemption of several groups of people from military service (the newlywed, the farmer who has just planted a crop, women, etc.). The Christian tradition, following Augustine's lead, often exempted the clergy from military service; women, more for cultural than religious reasons, were also exempt. However, the Christian tradition did not formally incorporate those exemptions into Just War Theory and the exemptions, except for the clergy, have diminished in importance, or vanished, over time. The Jewish exemptions nominally apply only to optional wars:

Exemptions in war are delineated in the Bible and therefore must be taken seriously by later authorities. Nevertheless, logic dictates that in cases of divine mandate, or self-defense, no exemptions can exist. If God clearly requires the war, or if your country is under attack, then the option to stay home is absurd. Certainly the idea of enjoying one's honeymoon while the homestead is under attack is ludicrous.

Yet the modern nation of Israel has preserved the concept of exemption and does not draft its Arab citizens, ultra-orthodox Jews, and religious women even though all of Israel's wars are nominally defensive. Arabs are exempt both because Israel lacks confidence in the commitment of Arab Israelis to defending a Jewish homeland and because Israel recognized that expecting Arab Israelis to fight for a Jewish homeland denigrated the Arabs' identity. Israel exempts ultra-orthodox Jews because the rabbis designated students of the Torah as exempt, based on an adaptation and extension of the exclusion of the Levites from military service in the Bible. (Incidentally, the rabbis extend noncombatant status to clergy of all faiths based on doing so for their own students of the Torah.) The exemption for religious (i.e., observant Jewish) women recognizes the noncombatant status of women implicit in Deuteronomy 20's guidance about the treatment of women captives.

Judaism applies the second jus post bellum criterion, working to establish justice, primarily to itself; other nations and peoples are responsible for themselves. The vision of establishing a just society was a key element of the Zionist program:

The labor Zionists who founded and staffed the _Haganah_ [the paramilitary organization who fought against the British to establish the modern state of Israel] perceived their martial responsibility as more than protecting the entire community of Palestine Jewry. They viewed it as an inseparable part of a wider ideal of reconstructing Jewish life in the land of Israel, based on humanistic-socialistic principles of justice, righteousness, and social solidarity.

This focus on Jews, in part, reflects the history of the Jewish people as a numerically small minority of the earth's population, living for centuries without their own nation, and enduring millennia of persecution by others. That history contrasts sharply with Christian history. The Jewish emphasis on establishing justice for Jews also emerges from Judaism giving other peoples and nations the space, literally and figuratively, in which to shape and to live their own lives, i.e., a manifestation of a profound respect for others. However, Judaism does not find the concept of establishing justice for all antithetical; the Jewish tradition contains threads of this idea that in time may acquire greater prominence and significance. Palestinian and Israeli present and future inter-connectedness infuses that development with an especial urgency.

Unlike Christianity, Judaism incorporated exercising ecological responsibility as an important and early element of its perspective on war. This environmental concern, derived from the Deuteronomic prohibition against the destruction of fruit trees, forbids wanton destruction during or after war. Cognizant that war inevitably damages the environment, Judaism has sought to minimize that harm. For example, "If at all possible, there should be no recourse to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, or other weapons destructive of the environment." The updated Just War Theory proposed in Chapter 3 integrates this important concern as an essential jus post bellum criterion; it is a point at which Christianity can learn from Judaism.

Although engaging multinational commitment and support to establish progress toward justice and peace is not an explicit component of a Jewish perspective on war, doing so is not incompatible with Judaism. Indeed, the modern state of Israel values support from evangelical Christians. Israel has also appeared to welcome multilateral efforts to assist in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, achieving peace with Egypt and Jordan through the Camp David Accords, and, more recently, encouraging its Prime Minister to meet with the Palestinian Authority President. Jewish respect for all persons undergirds this openness to multinational involvement.

The final jus post bellum criterion, maintaining progress toward closure, is implicit in the Jewish scripture that there is a time for peace and a time for war (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 8). Judaism is a compassionate religion; closure that brings peace manifests that compassion for the Jewish people and their enemies. The Jewish concept of peace, captured in the Hebrew word _shalom_ , is essentially the same as the Christian concept of peace among people.

In summary, this is how current Jewish thinking about defensive war compares with the Christian Just War Theory criteria:

\- Jus ad bellum: Just cause, proportionality, last resort, and reasonable chance of success reflect shared ideas between the two traditions; the Jewish tradition struggles to define right authority; right intent connotes defense rather than peacemaking.

\- Jus in bello: Both proportionality and noncombatant immunity have similar meanings in the Jewish and Christian traditions; the Jewish tradition helpfully emphasizes a prohibition against hostage taking.

\- Jus post bellum: Respect for persons and the environment are important, historical elements of the Jewish perspective on war; establishing justice, multinational commitment and involvement, and maintaining progress toward closure although not explicit elements of the Jewish perspective are congruent with it.

Jewish thinking about war, like Judaism in general, exhibits more dynamism than does Christian thought, evolving in response to changing context, current events, and the progressive development of Jewish thought. The basic Jewish perspective on war is rules-based (e.g., God commands self-defense). However, Judaism generally prefers living with prolonged periods of ambiguity to the alternatives of an exhaustive (but vast!) rule set that covers every contingency or complementing its rules with a secondary reliance upon utilitarianism and virtue ethics.

## B. A brief introduction to Islam

From 1989-1991, I served as Head of the Religious Facilities Management Branch in the Office of the Navy Chief of Chaplains. An increasing number of Muslim sailors and Marines meant that Navy religious facilities needed to accommodate Muslim worship in addition to Christian, Jewish, and, in some places, Buddhist services.

As part of my research on Islamic requirements and practices, I visited the Islamic Center of Washington. My guided tour of this beautiful and prominent Massachusetts Avenue building was very informative. What most surprised me was that the Saudi Arabian government had paid for the Center and donated the majority of its operating funds. That struck me as odd, in view of the typical American pattern of congregants — of whatever religion — financing their own building, staff, and programs. In response to a comment I made, my guide explained that Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Mohammed and custodian of Islam's two most holy places (Mecca and Medina), regarded providing mosques and religious leadership for Muslims around the world as a religious obligation. The seriousness with which Saudi Arabia took its religious duties impressed me. I wished that I could persuade Christians to accept their religious duties with equal commitment.

Then, a few months later, I visited the "Saudi Arabia: Yesterday and Today" exhibition held at the Washington, DC, Convention Center. The lavish exhibition, intended to celebrate Saudi Arabia's achievements in the last fifty years and Saudi-American friendship, had received much positive publicity:

Dunes beckoned [visitors] into the desert where, in the distance, the sandstone formations of Madain Salih loomed over a 24-meter (80-foot) Bedouin tent. A quiet courtyard and a fountain welcomed visitors to the world of Islam, and a busy Jiddah street, full of Saudi artisans, transported them to the very heart of a Saudi Arabian city. The scent of jasmine lingered in the air as the pulsating rhythm of the music accompanying the multi-media laser show filled the halls.

Nevertheless, I left the Convention Center feeling depressed. The exhibit clearly and indelibly communicated that the Saudi government was an absolute monarchy; national wealth and power belonged not just in name but also in actuality to the House of Saud. As a human and U.S. citizen, U.S. ties to the anti-democratic Saudi government and the obvious second-class status of Saudi women troubled me. As a Naval officer and chaplain, I realized that someday when that autocratic nation's population begins to demand greater freedom and insist on a more democratic form of governance, revolution, instability, and major disruptions in the world oil market would probably ensue because these changes are likely to be precipitous rather than incremental. For example, elections for the members of municipal councils are the only elections currently held in Saudi Arabia. Since 1963, male voters elect half of the members of these councils; the Saudi king appoints the other half. In 2011, the king extended the franchise to women, but the first election in which women can vote appears scheduled for 2015 (Saudi elections are sometimes postponed for a year or longer).

As a Christian who appreciates many Islamic teachings (e.g., its monotheism and historic tolerance of other, especially monotheistic, religions), the Saudi Arabian version of Islam reminded me of the disparity, and often hypocrisy, between what any religion teaches and how its adherents live. For example, the Saudis fall far short of the Islamic standard of religious tolerance. The U.S. military officially deploys chaplains to Saudi Arabia as morale officers; our Defense Department forbids U.S. chaplains in the Kingdom from wearing their Christian or Jewish uniform insignia in public.

The exhibit also made me wonder about the House of Saud's real motives in funding mosques and religious leaders for Muslims around the world. On my way home from the Convention Center, more than a decade before 9/11, I reminded myself and thanked God that Islam and the House of Saud are not synonymous. Since then, I have had numerous occasions to remind many others that no matter what some extremists do in the name of Islam, extremists do not faithfully represent Islam or its teachings.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Muslims comprised a fifth of the world's population. Over half of all Muslims live in Asia and another quarter live in Africa. Indonesia, the nation with the most Muslims, has one hundred and eighty two plus million Muslims. Iran, with more than sixty million Muslims, only has the world's fifth largest Muslim population. Egypt, the most populous Arab nation, but with fewer than sixty million Muslims, has the most Muslims of any Arab nation. Iraq, the second most populous Arab nation, has fewer than twenty-five million Muslims. Estimates of the number of Muslims in the U.S. cluster around one and a half percent of the population or four and a half million people.

The media has shaped most Americans' impression of Islam. That widespread, relative ignorance helps to explain why so many Americans hold the misconception that Islam and the United States are locked in a global struggle for survival. Chuck Colson, a well-known American evangelical leader, exemplifies this thinking:

Islam has a monolithic worldview, which sees just one thing: the destruction of infidels and the recovery of territories they've lost. We're in a hundred-year war and it's time to sober up, and Christians understand it because we understand our history, and we understand what makes the religious mind tick, and secular America doesn't get it.

In fact, Muslim enemies of the West who support or participate in a violent struggle against the West are a small fraction of all Muslims; the next section of this chapter explores their radical ideology in the context of comparing the traditional Islamic understanding of war to Christian Just War Theory. Furthermore, Islam, like all major religions, is not monolithic but encompasses considerable diversity. For example, during the first Gulf War, "a Baghdad group of scholars supported the Iraqi position and a Meccan group supported the anti-Iraqi position."

This section sets the stage for understanding Islam's perspectives on war by reviewing the history of Islamic-Christian interaction, a complex, richly woven tapestry with multiple colors and patterns. The review broadly outlines the ideas, events, and issues essential for Christians to understand Islam and especially Islamist terrorism in the twenty-first century. Legacies from the Crusades and Western colonialism, Islam's varied responses to those legacies, the West's emphasis on secular democracy, and conflicting claims of religious exclusivity all figure prominently in the tapestry.

Christian intolerance and mistreatment of Muslims during the Crusades starkly contrasts with general Islamic tolerance and benevolence toward Jews and Christians up until then. Islam's emphasis on innate human dignity and personal responsibility precludes compulsory conversion to Islam (Koran 2:256). Therefore, Islam has historically not sought to gain converts through physical coercion. Instead, heavier taxation, political disadvantage, and social advantages at times have induced people to convert to Islam.

When Islamic armies conquered new lands, sometimes the indigenous population converted to Islam and other times they did not. Legend records that when the Muslim Caliph Umar first entered Jerusalem following the Islamic conquest of that city in 614, he visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the church constructed at the supposed site of Jesus' crucifixion and burial. While in the Church, the hour for prayer came and Umar went to depart, to pray outside the Church in order not to give offense. However, the priest insisted that Umar remain and say his prayers from within the Church. Islamic rule of Moorish Spain and Andalusia during the eighth through fifteenth centuries represents the apogee of these highly laudable practices. Spanish Christian and Jewish communities were largely free to practice their religions unhampered by Muslim policies or law.

The Crusades were often little more than an exercise in pillage and plunder conducted in God's name that superseded a largely amicable arrangement for Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land. To most U.S. Christians, the Crusades represent the dim past, do not represent Christian values or behavior, and constitute a low point in Christian history. From an Islamic perspective, the Crusades, with their unprincipled slaughter of Muslims regardless of gender, age, or combatant status, frequently continue to shape a Muslim's foundational perception of Christians and Christianity.

Roughly concurrent with the Crusades, Islam achieved its maximum expansion into Europe. Muslims regarded this expansion as a sign of righteousness within Islam, righteousness that God blessed with greater prosperity and flourishing for those who submitted obediently to God's will. In 1698, the Holy League and Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Carlowitz, the first treaty between defeated Muslim Ottomans and Christians. The Ottoman Empire subsequently allowed Muslims to study with infidel teachers abroad in order for the Empire to acquire modern technology. Simultaneously, Islamic scholars began to analyze the practice of Islam within the Ottoman Empire to determine at what points Muslims had fallen away from the correct practice of Islam. Islam teaches that people who obey God flourish: "Islam, the ruler, and the people are like the tent, the pole, the ropes, and the pegs. The tent is Islam, the pole is the ruler, and the ropes and pegs are the people. None can thrive without the others." Europe's gradual conquest of North Africa and the Middle East in the eighteenth century capped by the Ottoman Empire's WWI defeat marked the nadir of Islam's power and influence, reinforcing Islamic self-doubt.

The industrialized nations' growing economic dependence on petroleum after WWI created an incentive for European nations and the United States to expand or at least to keep their colonial outposts in the Middle East as long as feasible. Europe and the U.S. also wanted to prevent other nations, especially the Soviet Union, from exercising hegemony in the oil rich Middle East.

Colonialism in the Middle East, like colonialism everywhere, at its least atrocious subtly implies the superiority of the ruling power's technology, culture, and people. At its worst, colonialism explicitly aggrandizes the conqueror's people, culture, and religion by demeaning the conquered people, their culture, and their religion. European nations had colonies on Arab soil for over a century. Those decades of Western self-aggrandizement at the expense of native peoples, their cultures, and Islam exacerbated the Crusades' sordid legacy. Colonialism evoked and refreshed pre-existent widespread, negative attitudes toward Christianity and the West rooted in Arab Islamic memories of the Crusades. When colonialism ceased to be viable, the Western powers sought to install and support puppet governments sympathetic to Western interests.

Middle Eastern colonialism posed theological challenges to Islam similar to those that the Crusades had posed because of Islam's emphasis on prosperity and flourishing as signs of God blessing the Faithfull's submission to God's will. Islamic efforts to reconcile the dissonance between Western prosperity and Arab Islamic peoples' lack of prosperity have generally adopted one of three approaches (flight, reinterpretation, and reform — discussed below); some groups have adopted first one and then another option. This diversity of thought and practice is typical of both Sunni and Shiite Islam.

Sunnis, who comprise 85-88% of all Muslims, believe that the best-qualified person should lead the community, i.e., the ablest person whose life most conforms to the practice of Islam. Sunnis do not have a clergy comparable to Jewish rabbis or to Christian priests and ministers. An imam is the man who ordinarily leads the prayers in a mosque but he is not the Muslim community's leader. The community's leaders, when Islam dominates a geographic area, are the government's leaders. The notable exception to that policy is modern Turkey, in which the population is overwhelming Sunni Muslim and the government is officially secular. In Sunni Islam, each individual exercises individual judgment to decide for him or herself what God requires.

Shiites (from the Arabic for partisan of Ali), comprise almost all of the other 12-15% of Muslims; they believe that a descendant of the Prophet should lead the Muslim community. The first rightful caliph who followed Mohammed as the leader of the Muslim community was Ali, whom Sunnis regard as the fourth caliph. Ali was a close companion of the Prophet, married the Prophet's daughter Fatima, and was the Prophet's cousin. Shiites, depending upon the number of rightful caliphs whom they believe followed Mohammed, split into the fivers, seveners, and twelvers (who are by far the most numerous). Iran is the largest Shiite nation; Yemen and Bahrain are also Shiite nations. Majorities in Iraq (about 65%) and Lebanon are Shiites.

Many of the differences between Sunnis and Shiites are irrelevant to their understanding of war, e.g., how one offers daily prayers. Although Sunnis and Shiites have occasionally lived in harmonious proximity, animosity between them is more common. Sunnis killed Hussein, Ali's son, at the battle of Karbala before Hussein could become caliph, permanently alienating the two groups.

One distinctive Shiite practice is mourning Hussein on Ashura, the anniversary of his death. This mourning may include self-flagellation and pilgrimages. Other distinctive Shiite practices include pilgrimages to tombs of Islamic saints (those whose lives Shiites regard as particularly holy because the person so completely submitted to God's will) and development of a cult around the Prophet's daughter, Fatima, analogous to Roman Catholic emphasis on the Blessed Virgin Mary. Sunnis tend to regard all of those practices as evidence of Shiite polytheism.

Since the nineteenth century, a Shiite clerical hierarchy has emerged with Grand Ayatollahs at the pinnacle and local mullahs at the base. This hierarchy exercises, when possible, religious and civil authority to ensure that the Muslim community conforms to Sharia, the codification of Islamic law. By living according to Sharia, an Arabic word that literally means path, Shiites believe that they and the ummah (the Muslim community) faithfully submit to God's will. Shiites expect that a hidden caliph, descended from the Prophet and his rightful heir, will emerge from hiding to unite and to rule the Muslim community. Many refer to this hidden caliph as the Mahdi (the guided one in Arabic); Shiites frequently refer to his hiding is frequently as the occultation. The Koran does not mention the idea of a Mahdi.

Sufis may be either Sunni or Shiite. Sufism is Islamic mysticism and emphasizes cultivating a personal relationship with God in addition to submitting to God's will:

Sufism is like the heart of the body of Islam, invisible from the outside but providing nourishment for the whole organism. It is the inner spirit that inbreathes the outward forms of the religion and makes possible the passage from the world of the outward to the inward paradise — a paradise at the center of our being in our heart but remain for the most part unaware of because of the hardening of the heart associated by Islam with the sin of forgetfulness.

The first Sufis appeared two centuries after Mohammed's death. They take their name from the Arabic word _suf_ , meaning _wool_ , an allusion to the wool coat that Sufi masters wore. The several Sufi schools all push past orthopraxy and orthodoxy toward experience, teaching Muslims ways to embellish the soul with virtue and to remove the imperfections or veils that prevent the soul from being wed to God's spirit. Sufism was instrumental, incidentally, in the conversion of the Malay Peninsula to Islam. Sufism is largely irrelevant to the forces that attempt to pit Islam against Judaism and Christianity.

Several different schools of Islamic jurisprudence peacefully co-exist in both Sunni and Shiite Islam. In general, the issues dividing these various schools have not substantially affected the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the terrorism Islamic extremists perpetrate. The notable exception to that generalization are the three different approaches to reconciling, on the one hand, Islam and the lack of modern Arab flourishing and prosperity with, on the other hand, Western prosperity and dominance.

First, some Muslims adopt the model of the hegira, the flight of early Muslims from Mecca to Medina led by the Prophet. These Muslims seek to flee the modern world and to live as Muslims did in Mohammed's day. No nation, apart from Afghanistan under the Taliban and perhaps a couple of the smaller emirates in the United Arab Emirates, has adopted this policy. Osama bin Laden and his associates fled Saudi Arabia because they believed that regime so corrupt and apostate that living there as a faithful Muslim is impossible. Metaphorically, those who espouse this view want Islam to flee from the seductive, self-centered willfulness of the West and return to complete submission to God in all things. The efforts of these radical Muslims to remake Islam, discussed in the next section, have distanced them from mainstream Islamic thought and practice.

Second, some Muslims seek to reinterpret Islam in view of contemporary situations and issues; these Muslims often describe themselves as modernists or moderates. Many of the Muslims who live in Europe, the United States, and Southeast Asia have chosen this response. In Turkey, a secular state that for at least two decades has campaigned for admission to the European Union, a majority of the population adheres to a moderate approach to Islam. Since the death of Kamal Ataturk, founder of the modern nation of Turkey, Turkey's military has periodically asserted its power in order to keep Turkey on a strictly secular course. Similarly, some Muslim organizations emphasize more of a secular than Islamic approach to life, e.g., Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization are secular.

Recent elections in Turkey and in Palestine (the religious Hamas — _Hamas_ is an Arabic acronym for _Islamic Resistance Movement_ — party prevailing over Fatah) cast doubt on whether this approach remains a viable option in the Middle East. Turkish Muslims who want to replace secularism with an Islamic state have become notably more active in recent years. They have distributed Islamic booklets in some strictly secular public schools, encouraged women to wear headscarves as a visible sign of their faith and modesty, directed some cafeterias to stop selling food during daylight hours in Ramadan because they presume all staff will observe the fast, etc. In 2008, the Turkish Parliament voted to allow women university students to wear headscarves, the first formal erosion of Turkey's strict secularism.

Third, some Muslims attempt to reform the practice of Islam so that it more closely follows the Koran's teachings and emulates the Prophet's example. All Muslims are fundamentalists, i.e., all Muslims claim that fidelity to the Koran and Hadith shapes their lives and faith. However, not all Muslims share the same interpretation of the Koran and Hadith. The growing preference among Muslim women around the world to cover their hair with a headscarf may exemplify this third approach. The headscarf, leaving the face uncovered, can suggest modesty, identify the wearer as a Muslim, and protest the objectification of women as sex objects. Of course, a Muslim woman may also wear a headscarf for reasons as diverse as legal requirements, peer pressure, or complying willingly or begrudgingly with her husband's wishes.

Islam teaches that religion should exclusively define a person's identity. That often sets Islam on a collision course with non-Islamic conceptions of ethnic/racial identity and with the modern, secular nation state, which promotes individual freedom and pluralism, pushing Muslims to choose one of the three responses to modernity identified above.

Finally, competing Islamic and Christian claims about religious superiority and exclusivity generates continuing friction between the two faiths. Islam envisions a world in which God's justice prevails because everyone submits to God by either becoming Muslim or living as a recognized minority under Islamic rule. The latter option, frequently referred to using the hybrid Arabic–English phrase _millet_ _system_ , worked well in Moorish Spain.

The Koran teaches Muslims to respect _People of the Book_ — Jews, Christians, and Sabateans — and to grant them freedom both of worship and to manage their own affairs within the Islamic state (Koran 5:69; 2:62). Some Muslim jurists expand that precept to include all monotheists; other jurists further expand the millet system to include all non-Muslims.

The Koran instructs Muslims not to be friends with Christians and Jews, people who have their own friends and will receive their own rewards (Koran 5:51). This instruction does not preclude business transactions, normal interaction as among acquaintances, strategic alliances with non-Muslims nations, and implies no blanket condemnation of the People of the Book. Instead, the instruction reflects the consistent Islamic emphasis on the community of the faithful as the context for the life of perfect submission to God. The prohibition's intent is to encourage Christians and Jews to see that Islam offers a better, more just way of life as well as to safeguard Muslims from apostasy. Islam, confident that it is the one true way, teaches that those who convert from Islam to another faith commit apostasy, sometimes punished by death.

Conversely, some Christians believe that they must exert every effort to convert non-Christians to the one true faith. To do otherwise means the Christian does not really fulfill Jesus' commands to love others and to evangelize the world; to do otherwise, means accepting a measure of responsibility for those who perish ignorant of the only way to receive eternal life.

These opposing perspectives collide violently when Christians attempt to evangelize in Muslim countries, occasionally by sending surreptitious or illegal missionaries. Christians regard laws that prohibit evangelism and conversion as human rights violations, infringing upon individual religious freedom. From the perspective of Western secularism, that argument may appear well founded. From the perspective of Islam, that argument is insulting because it strikes at Islam's most sacred belief: that Mohammed brought God's final and definitive revelation. Furthermore, the argument highlights Western emphasis on individuals in contrast to Islam's communal perspective.

However, Islam and Christianity share a common commitment to, and understanding of, peace. In time, and with dialogue, adherents of those two great monotheisms may find creative ways in which to coexist peacefully, showing mutual respect for one another.

Tensions between Muslims and Christians partially explain the U.S. military's prohibition against Jewish and Christian chaplains wearing religious uniform insignia in public in Saudi Arabia. U.S. leaders also want to aid House of Saud efforts to placate their conservative religious base, most of which is strongly biased against Christianity. Another reason for the policy is that over several centuries some Muslims began to believe that non-Muslims should not be near Mecca, a proscription that some extend to the entire Arabian Peninsula. Lastly, the United States does not wish to offend a government that the U.S. believes closely tied to vital U.S. national interests.

The insignia policy, per se, is inconsequential; trying to avoid offending others is certainly consistent with Christian respect for others. However, the policy symbolizes the vast cultural differences and conflicting religious perceptions that today too often separate Christians and Muslims. Islamic extremism, as well as many of the Christian responses to it, only widen the gap and harden the lines of division.

## C. Islamic extremism, jihad, and war

Radical Islam — what some call puritanism, radicalism, or Islamism — is gaining traction around the world, especially among Arab Muslims. (I use the four terms interchangeably.) In spite of the oil related wealth most Arab nations have, the majority of individual Arabs lack the prosperity that Europeans and people in the U.S. typically enjoy. Many radicalized Muslims blame the West for this, believing that the West achieved its prosperity by exploiting Arab oil and oppressing Arab Muslims.

The perceived laxity of Muslim practice among the Islamic rulers in most Arab nations scandalizes radical Muslims. Islamists often believe that the West has seduced or otherwise controls many or all of these lax leaders. From the Islamists' perspective, the leaders' laxity makes the leaders apostate, and therefore like the West, enemies of Islam.

Radicalized Arab Muslims usually ignore Islam's rapid, ongoing numerical growth as an indicator of Islamic vitality. They similarly ignore brisk strides toward improved levels of flourishing in the growing prosperity, greater literacy, and better health that some Muslim nations are achieving. The conclusion that Islam is in decline is not at all obvious, reinforcing the rejection of radical Islam by most Muslims, including most Arab Muslims. Experts estimate that 90% of all Muslims belong to Islam's non-radicalized majority.

Islamists generally believe that Islam regulates most, if not all, aspects of life and that the Koran and Hadith, correctly understood, eliminate any need to rely upon the Sunna (the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence) or human reason. Consequently, Islamists dismiss studying and dialoguing with Islamic jurisprudence's long tradition. Because the Koran and Hadith speak clearly and definitively, radicals also reject Islam's tolerance of diverse understandings and practices, willingly judging other Muslims since all faithful Muslims will behave in an identical manner. Elements of Islamic law (sharia) commonly found in nations or areas dominated by radical extremists include forbidding:

\- All forms of music, singing, and dancing.

\- All television programs, unless religious.

\- The giving of flowers.

\- Clapping the hands in applause.

\- Drawing human or animal figures.

\- Acting in a play, because acting is a form of lying.

\- Writing novels, because it is a form of lying.

\- Wearing shirts with animal or human images.

\- Shaving one's beard.

\- Eating or writing with the left hand.

\- Standing up in honor of someone.

\- Celebrating anyone's birthday, including the Prophet's birthday.

\- Keeping or petting dogs.

\- Dissecting cadavers even in criminal investigations and for the purposes of medical research.

Islamists derive those prohibitions from Arab culture at least as much as from Islamic sources. Each prohibition distorts Islamic teaching and tradition, e.g., Muslims refrain from decorating mosques with depictions of living things but the Koran does not ban drawing human or animal figures.

Sometimes known as the sixth pillar of Islam, jihad is an Arabic word denoting _striving_ or _struggle_. It consists of the greater and lesser jihads. The greater jihad, incumbent upon all Muslims, is a person's inner struggle to submit to God. Human willfulness means that submitting to God often demands great struggle, for which immersion in a community of the faithful offers encouragement, support, and guidance. The lesser jihad is the struggle against external forces opposed to Islam. In the Koran, the word _jihad_ never denotes _warfare_ ; the Koran uses another word, _qital_ for warfighting. The lesser jihad is the only form of jihad of which many Westerners are aware because of its regular mention in news reports. Equating jihad with the lesser jihad distorts Islam, reinforcing the incorrect idea of Islam and the West locked in violent conflict until one vanquishes the other.

Historically, politically and economically disenfranchised Muslims have frequently used Islam as a vehicle for social protest, especially in nations with a Muslim majority. Islam's emphases on morality and community, its lack of authoritative Sunni religious institutions, and its ability to unite people across racial and ethnic divides have often combined to make Islam an effective vehicle for social protest and change. This centuries old practice of using Islam for political purposes — a function consistent with the unity between the religious and political within Islam — adds further complexity to understanding Islam's role in many nations. Government efforts to outlaw or suppress groups using Islam as a vehicle for social protest and change have usually not only failed but also routinely backfired, confirming allegations of government injustices, enhancing the opposition movement's appeal, and further radicalizing opposition.

Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949) was a key figure in the development of Sunni Islamic extremism. He founded the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to protest life in Egypt under British rule following WWI, working within the established political order. He integrated, reframed in Islamic rhetoric, Western concepts of patriotism, nationalism, and parliamentary democracy. Al-Banna recognized that Islam is not a nation but a community with a comprehensive system of guidance for all aspects of life known as _Sharia_ , Islamic jurisprudence.

His best-known student was Sayyid Qutb upon whose writings many Islamists rely and who has probably had more influence on militant Islam than anyone else has. Significantly, Osama bin Laden, founder and, until his death, leader of the al Qaeda terrorist network, studied with Qutb's brother.

Qutb, also an Egyptian, visited the United States in the late 1940s, an experience that transformed his admiration for the U.S. and its ideals into harsh criticism. The racism, materialism, sexual promiscuity and permissiveness, and alcohol use and abuse he saw shocked him. That transformative visit became the catalyst for his setting the Muslim Brotherhood on a rejectionist course and issuing a revolutionary call to arms. He drew a parallel between, on the one hand, his rejection of the West and modernist Islam and, on the other hand, the Prophet's flight (hegira) from Mecca to Medina. In other words, he, like the extremists who follow in his wake, chose the first of three responses to the West delineated in the previous section. Modernizing Islam appeared to betray Islam's principles, making that an unacceptable alternative.

The Egyptian government sought to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, a predictable response from an entrenched and unjust regime. That policy backfired, driving the Brotherhood's frustrated and exasperated members to reject the third Muslim response to the West, internal reform, as hopeless and to demand revolutionary change.

Qutb categorized the entire world into two camps: Islam and the enemies of Islam. That dichotomy typifies the narrow interpretation with which most radicals read the Koran. For example, the Koran teaches that men and women should dress modestly (Koran 24:30-31). The Koran also instructs women to cover themselves with an outer garment when they leave the house (Koran 33:59). However, neither passage directs a woman to cover herself completely. Radical Islamists require that women cover themselves completely based on the Prophet Mohammed instructing his wives to hide behind a curtain (Koran 33:53). Moderate Muslims, in keeping with longstanding Islamic tradition and jurisprudence, believe that this latter guidance applied only to the Prophet's wives, not to all women.

Looking backward, the writings of Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) greatly shaped Qutb's thought. Al-Wahhab was a Muslim jurist whose religious rhetoric and endorsement enabled Muhammad Ibn Saud to establish the Saud dynasty that still rules Saudi Arabia. Al-Wahhab's Islamist views emphasized God's unity and condemned anything that might signify the creeping encroachment of polytheism, e.g., the Shiite practice of venerating the tombs of Muslim saints. He rejected medieval Islamic legal interpretations because they invited modernism, departing from strict adherence to a literal observance of Sharia based on the Koran and the Hadith. "His main theme was that Muslims had gone wrong by straying from the straight path of Islam, and only by returning to the one true religion could they regain God's pleasure and acceptance." Under Wahhabi influence, the Saudi regime created a religious police force to enforce strict orthodoxy and to destroy any move toward religious diversity or dissent.

Four factors contribute to Wahhabism's continuing appeal. First, al-Wahhab regarded the corrupt Ottoman Empire, even though it was nominally Muslim, as a foreign occupying power. This precedent linked Arab self-determination to Islam, a theme repeatedly echoed by Qutb, bin Laden, and other radicals. Extremist recruiters build on Arab antipathy toward the United States, depicting Arab life today as a sad legacy of the Crusades, colonialism, and post-colonial Western commercial exploitation. They contrast that legacy with God's promise to prosper all who faithfully submit to God. The recruiters especially target Muslims disenchanted with corrupt regimes at home, foreign hegemony, and the excesses of Western secularism:

The jihadist is not a beast or a new barbarian. He goes on that journey not because he wants to but because he must. The Qur'an tells us that fighting is repugnant. The journey is paved with hardships — painful and costly. Please do not buy into the notion perpetrated about us in the West that we worship death. We possess no cult of death. We love our families. But we want to live with dignity. We are willing to sacrifice our life because we want to live as free men rather than being enslaved. The jihadist who makes the supreme sacrifice to defend his religion and home is an exceptional human being — full of humanity.

Second, by returning (or fleeing) to a pristine Islam focused directly on the Koran, the Prophet, and the Prophet's Companions, al-Wahhab jettisoned centuries of Islamic jurisprudence, greatly simplifying the study of Islam. This unintentionally introduced the possibility of highly individualized interpretations to Islam, often interpretations without any precedent in Islamic jurisprudence. The proliferation of Islamic schools — _madrasas_ — that teach nothing but the Koran reflects the appeal of this simplified approach, distorting the beauty of Islam as a religion of peace and submission to God.

For example, the misogynist practice of Islamic extremists requiring women to cover themselves completely in public, except for their eyes, depends upon a misinterpretation of the Koran, as previously noted. Mohammed significantly improved women's status in Arabia, allowing women to inherit property and to divorce a husband. Mohammed's first wife owned and operated her own business. Mohammed permitted women to fight in battle and often heeded their counsel. Women have served as prime ministers of Muslim nations, e.g., Pakistan and Indonesia; Muslim women in non-Arab Muslim nations do not need to cover themselves completely and may freely pursue an occupation or profession. Many Muslim scholars believe that Islam offers women advantages over what other philosophies and religions teach:

The potential of women in Islam is far superior to anything offered by Confucius in China or Aristotle in Greece, or to what Hindu or Christian civilizations offer.... Where their lot is miserable and they have virtually no rights, as in certain tribal areas, it is to be attributed to Muslim male tyranny, not Islamic advice and is in need of urgent redress.

In other words, the oppression of women in Muslim nations demonstrates culture triumphing over religion, a phenomenon frequently observed in all religions, e.g., some forms of Christianity still regard women as inferior to men.

The narrow, idiosyncratic versions of Islam promulgated by extremists are akin to the radical, fundamentalist Christian cults that bomb abortion clinics. Even more tragically, it is only this form of Islam, with its unprecedented idiosyncratic interpretations, that justifies suicide bombing.

Extremists also distort Islam's teachings by dividing the world into two camps, Muslims and the enemies of Islam, which is a distinction foreign to the Koran. For the extremists, no middle ground exists, a teaching that has two roots in the Koran. The Koran instructs Muslims not to be friends with non-believers and, in conflict, not to ally themselves against other Muslims. The context for both revelations is a conflict in which Muslims can choose between allying themselves against other Muslims or non-believers.

These teachings do not mean that Muslims are never to associate with non-Muslims, much less that all non-Muslims are enemies of Islam. The Koran calls for all people to cooperate in working for good. In fact, Islam divides the world into three camps: Muslims, Islam's enemies, and neutral, non-belligerents. Much of the world, including secular democracies, belongs to the latter category. "The attitude adopted by the radicals is entirely inconsistent with the Koran's advice to seek to make the worst of enemies into affectionate close companions through good deeds."

Third, the location of Mecca and Medina in the heart of Saudi Arabia and, fourth, the hundreds of millions of dollars in Saudi oil money that funds Wahhabism globally, especially since the 1975 escalation of oil prices, have greatly contributed to spreading Wahhabi influence. Saudi Arabia denies Muslims from countries of which it disapproves access to Medina and Mecca, making the hajj impossible for those Muslims.

In retrospect, I understand why my visit to the Islamic Center of Washington left me feeling a little odd, wondering why Muslim devotion appeared so much more ardent than Christian devotion. By funding mosques like the Islamic Center of Washington, the House of Saud achieves prominence within the Islamic community and simultaneously appeases radical Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud fervently hopes that such moves will offset, or silence, Wahhabi criticism of the royal family's opulent, often un-Islamic lifestyle. The Kingdom also does little to end the crushing poverty in which many Arab, African, and Asian Muslims live in spite of both Mohammed's example and the Koran's teaching to the contrary (Koran 14:31). Islam, unlike Christianity, has never advocated a holy poverty; Mohammed did not instruct any of his followers to sell of all of their possessions to aid the poor. However, Mohammed gave generously of his possessions and wealth to help any whom he saw in need.

Tensions in Saudi Arabia continue to escalate between the regime and radical Wahhabi religious leaders even though each needs the other. The House of Saud depends upon Wahhabi religious leaders for religious credibility and support within Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabis want the influence and power that Saudi money buys. Osama bin Laden rejected that destructive collusion when, disgusted by Saudi hypocrisy and corruption, he fled first to Sudan in 1991and then to Afghanistan in 1996. However, few Muslims speak out against radical extremism, afraid of criticizing the Saudi regime that controls access to Islam's two holiest sites, intimidated by Saudi financial influence within the world of Islam, and widespread Muslim antipathy or even animosity toward the West.

The lesser jihad, the external struggle, can take many different forms. Propaganda, public protests, and foreign policy initiatives are three possibilities for the lesser jihad. However, _jihad_ , to most Westerners connotes only war or terrorism. Unlike the multiple Christian and Jewish perspectives on war, there is a single Muslim perspective. Islam, in common with Judaism and in distinction to Christianity, has no pacifist tradition.

The classical Islamic perspective on war is rules-based: "It is only in a defined set of circumstances that war is permitted. As anyone can see, this is a highly controlled affair; indeed, it is totally regulated by Islamic] law." This dependence on law does not equate to unanimity of opinion. Islamic scholars debate which rules apply, how to apply those rules, and the nuances of various interpretations of the rules, as seen in the exposition of the Islamic perspective on war below. The discussion follows the Christian Just War Theory framework (cf. [Figure 3.3), facilitating interfaith comparison.

#### a. Jus ad bellum

From an Islamic perspective, the only just cause is God's cause, a necessary precondition for waging war. That is, Muslims should wage war only "for the sake of justice, truth, law, and preservation of human society." God's ultimate cause is peace, defined in very much the same way as Christians define peace. Indeed, paradise is the land of peace (Koran 5:127) and war is hateful (Koran 2:216).

One of the two streams of Islamic tradition regarding just cause contends that the only just war is a defensive war, a war fought against invaders or those poised to invade, i.e., a war to stop evil. Proponents of this view emphasize that Mohammed only waged defensive wars and that the Koran teaches there is no compulsion in matters of religion. Since the time of Augustine, Christian Just War Theory has likewise emphasized that coercing conversion does not constitute just cause. This stream of Islamic tradition is similar to both the Jewish and historic Christian understandings of just cause.

The other Islamic stream contends that Muslims may fight to extend Islam's influence when adjacent nations refuse to recognize Islam's sovereignty by refusing either to convert to Islam or pay tribute. All of the Koran's verses that support this view date to between 622 and 632 when hostile tribes opposed the Prophet's efforts to establish Islam in Medina. The purpose of this type of war is to establish God's rule and not to convert individuals to Islam.

Advocates of this interpretation support their position by emphasizing that Islam brings justice and truth. This more expansive, second Muslim view has a very loose Christian analogue in the broadening of just cause to include defense of persons and their rights. Some Muslims have drawn an analogy between this broad view of just cause in the Islamic tradition and Christian liberation theology. In general, most Islamic jurists have favored the first stream, only defensive wars are just, while contemporary Islamic extremists favor the second stream with its expansive interpretation of defensive wars.

Right intent, from a Muslim perspective, is also an essential criterion. The Muslim leader openly declares the intent to wage war unless the prospective opponent converts to Islam or pays tribute. Glory in battle, proving one's courage, and conquering that Islam might rule over other religions are all wrong intentions for waging war. Even Islamic extremist groups declare their intent before launching a violent jihad.

However, the important issue with respect to right intent is determining, from a Muslim perspective, what organizational structure or leader has the proper authority to issue such a declaration. From a Sunni perspective, only the head of state has right authority. From a Shiite perspective, right authority is the rightful leader of Islam, the caliph, chosen for his justice and piety. Shiites disagree about the number of rightful caliphs but all concur that there has not been a rightful caliph for centuries. Therefore, Shiites believe that Muslims can only wage defensive wars, a responsibility of the Islamic leader of the nation threatened. That view accords well with both Christian Just War Theory and the United Nations Charter and international law. Tangentially, constructive strategies for dealing with Iran will publicly emphasize this aspect of Shiite teaching while underscoring one's own non-aggressive intentions. Conversely, demonizing, polarizing rhetoric affords Iran's Shiite rulers just cause to defend their threatened nation.

When Islamic nations fail to defend Islam, then Sunnis and Shiites both agree that the responsibility to defend Islam devolves upon every Muslim:

... the authority to lead a jihad defined by the individual duty to defend the religion and territory of Islam wells up from below, from the common exercise of the individual duty of the leader himself and all his followers to defend Islam. This is a significant change in the concept of the justification and authority for jihad in the sense of war.... [It] is of particular significance for understanding many contemporary appeals to jihad as calls for violence in the defense of Islam.

Islam historically limited the right to declare a defensive lesser jihad to qualified individuals, i.e., those trained in Islamic jurisprudence. The responsibility of individuals to act in the absence of Islamic leaders provides the rationale for rebelling against the rulers of a nominally Islamic nation when the rulers had become corrupt, apostate, and repressed dissent.

Islamist extremists have made two significant departures from Islam's traditional understanding of jus in bellum. First, they reject limiting war to defensive wars, arguing that the defensive war rhetoric of traditional Muslim jurisprudence represents false propaganda by jurists trying to excuse their failure to wage jihad. Qutb wrote that only by defining defense as the defense of people could Muslims rightly limit the just cause for waging war to defensive wars. Second, extremists within nominally Muslim nations who lack any training in Islamic jurisprudence today declare jihad, e.g., members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad declared Anwar Sadat an apostate ruler of a repressive regime and assassinated him as a legitimate target of jihad. Sunni extremists, following the lead of al-Wahhab and Qutb in sharp contrast to historic Islamic practice, consider all Shiites apostates, a view adopted in this century by significant numbers of Sunni moderates.

If the criteria of just cause, right intent, and right authority are satisfied, then waging war becomes obligatory for Muslims able to do so (Koran 2:190). The Koran does not mention conscription. Women, the frail, the sick, the blind, and those of other faiths are exempt from fighting. However, in a defensive war all Muslims have an obligation to fight. This does not mean that the war becomes a _holy war_ , a concept for which there is no Arabic term.

In general, the jus ad bellum criteria of proportionality and reasonable chance of success are not part of an Islamic perspective on war. One limit on waging war that might fall under the rubric of proportionality is that Muslims seek to refrain from waging war on other Muslims. All Muslims — those who say the _shahada_ ( _There is no god but God, and Mohammed is his prophet_ ) in good conscience — in spite of whatever other differences they may have, belong to the Islamic community. Warring against other Muslims is therefore a form of internal dissension displeasing to God. For the same reason, Muslims using a nuclear weapon against other Muslims is highly improbable because of the number of Muslims who would die.

Success in war, like everything else, depends upon God. Calculations of a reasonable chance of success based on numerical strength, types of weapons, logistical support, etc., are consequently not part of the Muslim perspective. Success in war signifies God has blessed the faithful because of their submission to the divine will.

A limited version of the final jus ad bellum criterion, that the war must be the last resort, is integral to an Islamic perspective on war. Right authority appropriately invites an adversary either to accept Islam or to pay the necessary tax before launching a war. That ultimatum is not equivalent to the last resort criterion of exhausting all alternatives to war before waging a war. The difference, however, is moot because moral Muslims currently wage only defensive wars, i.e., wars when attacked or to prevent an attack. Furthermore, "no harm to human life is warranted if the religious-moral goals are unclear or if there is no guarantee that engaging in warfare will eradicate the causes of corruption." In other words, this principle of non-maleficence serves as a further restraint on waging war prematurely or wrongly.

#### b. Jus in bello

Proportionality, the first of the two jus in bello criteria, is central to an Islamic perspective on war. Like Christianity, Islam rejects the use of excessive or gratuitous force, destruction, and violence. The Koran commends mercy and forgiveness over the strict proportionality of lex _talionis_ :

The Qur'an tells believers 'whoever attacks you, attack him just as he has attacked you' (2: 194), an injunction reminiscent of the Jewish law of 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' (5: 45, Exodus 21: 24). This gives rise to the general principle in Islamic law that harm should not be removed by a greater harm. However, the Qur'an also recommends mercy and forgiveness as an alternative to strict proportionality (5: 45) and urges Muslims to repel evil with what is better.

The Prophet, for similar reasons, gave strict guidance not to destroy crops or animals in war.

Islamic thinking about noncombatant immunity, the other jus in bello criterion, approximates that of Christian Just War Theory. In general, Islam limits warfare to active combatants and instructs warriors not to target presumed noncombatants, i.e., women, children, the elderly, the physically handicapped, and clergy. Presumed noncombatants lose that status if they become combatants, e.g., women in the Israeli Defense Force. Similarly, the Koran requires the humane treatment of POWs, i.e., warriors whose status as prisoners means they no longer pose a threat (Koran 8:70-71; 47:4).

"In Islam, the end does not justify the means; the means are the end. Fighting in the way of Allah is like living in the way of Allah. Both should exemplify the spirit of truth, justice, and goodness, whether or not they meet with worldly success." An Islamic perspective on nuclear weapons illustrates this understanding of jus in bello:

... although deterrence by accumulation of [nuclear] weapons is permitted in the Qur'an (8: 5960), using nuclear weapons would be against Islamic law on a number of counts:

\- That they use fire to burn the enemy - forbidden by the Prophet;

\- That they cause 'destruction on the earth' - forbidden in the Qur'an (2: 60);

\- That they cause the deaths of many innocent noncombatants forbidden by the Prophet and the Qur'an (2: 19);

\- That the results of using them could be suicidal - forbidden in the Qur'an (2: 19).

Islam recognizes that warfighting may unintentionally injure those whom the warrior is forbidden to target, e.g., when Muslims dwell in the midst of non-Muslims. Such harm is morally acceptable when the warrior's intent is to injure only enemy combatants. Thus, this precept is similar to the Christian concept of double-effect. Without this note of realism, no Muslim could wage war. Terrorist attacks, like those on 9/11 that the Muslim world widely condemned, violate the Islamic understanding of noncombatant immunity by explicitly targeting noncombatants.

#### c. Jus post bellum

Respect for persons, the first of the five jus post bellum criteria, is an integral element of an Islamic perspective before, during, and after war. Islam teaches that God created each individual; thus each person, endowed by God with the capacity to reason, is worthy of dignity and respect. In contrast to the idea that a Christian warrior has _dirty hands_ , Muslim warriors who die fighting are martyrs for the faith, free of sin, and go directly to paradise, bypassing purgatory. Because the warrior's body is free of sin, the body does not require washing before burial.

Establishing justice, the second jus post bellum criterion, is jihad's purpose, a purpose theoretically achieved by establishing Islamic rule. The presumed justice — distributive, commutative, and legal — of Islamic rule explains why radicals like Qutb sometimes adopt an expansive view of defense wars, defining _defense_ as defense of people, because they believe Islamic states most perfectly actualize justice. In general, Islamists adamantly oppose any move toward democratic government, believing that a pious despot is the most just system of government. Islam has always favored free markets over any form of socialism or centralized economic system, as the best means of achieving distributive justice. The Koran's prohibition on charging interest (Koran 2:275-276, 278-280; 3:130) has led to creative, alternative ways in which to value capital rather than a rejection of free markets. Christianity and Islam have broadly similar concepts of commutative justice (based on a common understanding of human dignity) and legal justice (both rooted in Jewish law). Perhaps the highest profile difference between Islamic and Christian legal justice, a difference contingent upon the school of Islamic jurisprudence, is the very different forms of punishment each advocates.

The third jus post bellum criterion, exercising ecological responsibility, has been an aspect of an Islamic perspective on war from the beginning, very much paralleling the historic Jewish perspective.

An Islamic perspective on war welcomes multinational commitment and support, the fourth jus post bellum criterion, from the global Islamic community to which all Muslims belong. Concurrently, Islam has sometimes rebuffed a secular multinational approach because of Islam's emphasis on the Muslim community as the community of people committed to submitting to God's will. Islam does not forbid alliances with non-Muslims so this rebuff is not an inherent element of an Islamic perspective on war. The percentage of Muslims who view democratic government as acceptable if not preferable seems likely to continue growing. If so, Islamic nations and organizations will experience greater comfort participating in pluralistic multinational endeavors. Muslim nations already contribute troops to many U.N. peacekeeping efforts.

Islam teaches that the lesser jihad of external struggle will end only when all people submit to God. In the interim, Islam seeks to end specific conflicts in order that people may live with as much justice and peace as possible. Bringing closure to a war, the fifth jus post bellum criterion, is therefore common to both Christianity and Islam.

In sum, Islam's rules-based perspective approaches war very differently than does Christianity yet arrives at a perspective that largely overlaps with Just War Theory:

\- Jus ad bellum: an Islamic perspective on war emphasizes the criteria of just cause, right intent, right authority, and to a lesser degree, proportionality and last resort; the criterion of reasonable chance of success is not part of an Islamic perspective.

\- Jus in bello: an Islamic perspective incorporates the criterion of proportionality and has a similar, though not identical, understanding of noncombatant immunity.

\- Jus post bellum: these criteria are the most foreign to Islam, although none contradicts Islamic teachings and Islam recognized the importance of environmental concerns long before Christianity did.

Like Christian Just War Theory, the classical Islamic perspective on war is compatible with the international Laws of War, except that Islam may require Muslims to aid other Muslims under attack by non-Muslims. Thus, Islamists from several Arab nations have gone to Iraq to fight against the U.S. occupation and to support fellow Sunnis.

One critical corollary of an Islamic perspective on war is Islam's definitive rejection of terrorism: "As a rule, the Sharia views acts of terrorism against unarmed people as a grave violation of the people's integrity and as a goad to greater conflicts." Anyone who equates Islam and terrorism wrongly demeans a religion that teaches submission to God in all things: "Islam, like Christianity, teaches in the strongest terms that terrorism is simply wrong. Nothing whatever in mainstream Islamic tradition and teaching defends any activity generally recognized as terrorism." Islamist radicals are at odds with the Muslim religious tradition; some Muslims even declare anyone who performs a terrorist act in the name of Islam to be apostate.

Chapter 3 concluded with an analysis of Gulf War I from the perspective of Christian Just War Theory. An Islamic perspective on Gulf War I differs from the Christian perspective in some significant ways, illustrating commonalities and differences between the two perspectives on war. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait violated Muslim principles because Iraq did not act in self-defense, did not warn Kuwait of its intent to invade, and lacked proper justification for the attack. Indeed, the Koran commands Muslims to find peaceful resolutions to disputes with other believers.

From an Islamic perspective, the subsequent U.S. response was also unjust because the intent appears to have been perpetuating U.S. global supremacy and access to oil. Many Muslims find that conclusion indisputable in view of the U.S. delay in intervening in Bosnia to stop the genocide of Muslims. Much of the global Muslim community believes that the U.S. also lacked right authority since both it and the U.N. perpetuate oppression and exploitation, e.g., in displacing Muslims to establish the modern nation of Israel and in protecting the flow of Middle Eastern oil. Similarly, U.S. tactics were not proportional and failed to protect noncombatants adequately, e.g., the excessive killing of Iraqi civilians, employing weapons that created too many combatant casualties, and destruction of vital Iraqi infrastructure that cause much noncombatant suffering and death. Most importantly from a Muslim perspective, GWI harmed Islam because the war did not increase justice in post-war Kuwait and the war strengthened Saddam's post-war stature and power.

Many Muslims believe that last conclusion, that GWI enhanced Saddam's post-war stature and power. Although Saddam had fought the world's only superpower and lost, he survived to fight another day. No other Arab or Muslim leader had even dared to confront the United States directly. From an Islamic perspective, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait placed Kuwait, the U.S., and the U.N. in untenable positions. Not responding to the attack would have permitted the injustice perpetrated by Iraq's invasion to prevail. Conversely, no Muslim leader had sufficient influence with Saddam to persuade him to withdraw his forces and no Muslim nation had the wherewithal to force an Iraqi withdrawal. Removing Saddam from power by having continued GWI would have caused greater violations of the Muslim principles of proportionality and noncombatant immunity. In other words, from an Islamic perspective, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait created a no-win situation for the U.S. and the global community.

This analysis does suggest some helpful avenues for shaping future interventions in Muslim states. A nation or international organization that consistently and equitably supports justice will evoke less suspicion that it is acting out of self-interest. Allowing a Muslim nation to have led the coalition against Iraq in GWI would have provided the coalition right authority in the eyes of many Muslims. Engaging Islamic jurists in discussions about the moral and military problems of targeting combatants who have taken positions among or adjacent to noncombatants may provide military tacticians morally viable options in future conflicts. Now is the time to have these conversations rather than waiting until the urgency of military necessity precludes that opportunity. Although such conversations may seem irrelevant to the leaders of secular nations, identifying tactics that are both militarily efficacious and morally compatible with Islam will minimize animosity toward the West in Muslim nations that do not distinguish between the secular and religious. Not seeking such solutions easily results in a self-defeating, no-win policy as happened in GWI. Maximizing the use of smart munitions will further minimize noncombatant casualties. Finally, exchanging the West's preoccupation with short term results for a longer term perspective on outcomes will doubly benefit the West by more closely synchronizing the West's perspective with that of the rest of the world and avoiding the perennial problem of today's solution (e.g., U.S. funding Saddam's opposition to Iran) becoming tomorrow's problem (Saddam invading Kuwait).

#  Chapter 5: Gulf War II: Invasion and Occupation of Iraq

Peace, peace, to the far and the near, says the Lord;

_and I will heal them._ (Isaiah 57:19)

As is true for most military chaplains, pastoral counseling was a major facet of my ministry in the Navy. I also taught ethics at the Naval Postgraduate School the year before GWII and for two years following the invasion. What I heard listening to U.S. military personnel, in the privacy of pastoral counseling sessions and in open forums such as ethics classes — both before and after the second Gulf War started — startled me. As I had anticipated, military personnel before GWII began were uniformly confident about prospects for a U.S. combat victory. However, even prior to the invasion, many were less than sanguine about the longer-term prospects for peace; a goodly number also doubted whether the U.S. invading Iraq was morally justifiable. Those doubts sharply contrasted with prevailing opinion in the military before and after GWI. Those doubts also sharply contrasted with a nearly universal desire that the U.S. act decisively to end terrorism.

Some of these warriors' doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq stemmed from their firsthand experience of the quagmire in which the U.S. and its allies found themselves ensnared following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan (discussed in the next chapter). Afghanistan's grim, unyielding realities had dampened and, in some cases, extinguished an initial enthusiasm for removing the Taliban from power, enabling women to live more freely, and allowing children of both sexes to return to school. Many of the military personnel whose opinions I heard had returned from Afghanistan doubting that the U.S. could prevail in building a secular, democratic, economically prosperous Afghanistan that respected the rights and freedoms of all Afghans. They remained convinced, however, that the U.S. should pursue terrorists like bin Laden.

In the months after GWII, the stories I first heard, flush with the excitement of victory in combat, rapidly gave way to frustration, doubt, and anger. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal shamed and angered the military professionals of all ranks with whom I worked. U.S. warriors pride themselves on their high moral standards; the individuals who mistreated Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib violated those standards.

My counselees, students, and other contacts — like most individuals in the U.S. military — were deeply patriotic. They hoped and prayed that U.S. leaders had rightly decided to invade Iraq. As prospects for the prompt election of a new, democratic Iraqi government and expeditious U.S. withdrawal faded, levels of violence grew and the death toll dramatically increased. I heard more and more doubts about the wisdom of GWII. Frustration began to creep into their comments as individuals realized that the U.S. was badly failing to achieve any of its goals in Afghanistan or Iraq. They wanted to know: Will these invasions and occupations lead to a longer lasting, most just peace? Given the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, what is the best way forward in those two nations?

This chapter and the next answer those questions, analyzing the invasion and subsequent occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan using the Just War Theory paradigm presented in Chapter 3. Applying Just War Theory, especially the jus post bellum criteria of respect for persons and establishing justice, requires understanding relevant historical and cultural dynamics. Each chapter's first section succinctly recapitulates the historical context; the chapters' second sections examine GWII and the Afghanistan war using the jus ad bellum and jus in bello frameworks. Chapter 5's final section assesses GWII jus post bellum efforts; Chapter 6's final section similarly examines the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan using the jus post bellum model.

## A. Historical context

For centuries, many scholars identified the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the center of modern Iraq, as the cradle of civilization. Christians who identify the Garden of Eden with a specific place still point to that same area in Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilization. According to the Biblical book of Genesis, the patriarch Abraham resided there, in the city Ur of the Chaldees, until he departed on his God-directed travels.

When populated and governed by the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, Iraq ruled mighty empires. Subsequently, the Greeks, Persians, Mongols, Ottomans, and lastly the British incorporated Iraq into their empires. Ottoman rule ended when the Ottomans surrendered to the Allied Powers at the end of WWI. To penalize the Ottomans for joining the Axis alliance with Germany, the Allied Powers expropriated most of the Ottoman Empire as Allied colonies, including all of the modern nations of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq. The British, having driven the Ottomans out of Iraq during the war, claimed Iraq as a colony, an acquisition the subsequent peace treaties confirmed.

Each empire that ruled Iraq drew its own set of territorial boundaries, in part because the area lacks natural geographic boundaries (rivers, mountain ranges, etc.). None of those territorial boundaries coincided with, or even approximated, the ones Winston Churchill is famously reputed to have drawn following WWI. Churchill's boundaries were somewhat arbitrary, essentially combining three Ottoman Empire provinces to form the single British colony of Iraq. Most Iraqis then, as remains true even today, did not consider themselves citizens of a single, unified nation. Instead, with its long history of migrations, conquests, and no shared sense of identity or purpose, Iraqis typically define their primary identity in terms of tribe, race, and/or religion. National identity as an Iraqi, dating only to the early twentieth century, if important at all, generally takes a backseat to those other factors.

In 1921, the British, frustrated by continuing unrest in Iraq, conducted a plebiscite that elected Faisal ibn Husayn, who had briefly been King of Syria, as King Faisal I of Iraq. Faisal was an Arab nationalist, a member of the Hashemite dynasty that still rules Jordan, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, and had never lived in Iraq. At Saudi Arabia's urging, Britain granted Iraq independence in 1932. Western oil companies and the British government persisted in wielding great influence, exercising what in many respects amounted to de facto control of Iraq until a 1958 Iraqi military coup executed the third monarch, King Faisal II, and ended the Iraqi monarchy. Continuing resentment among Iraqis towards the West, especially Great Britain and the United States, is one legacy of this imperial and economic domination.

The 1958 coup initiated twenty-one years of Iraqi political instability that ended only when Saddam Hussein seized control in 1979. Saddam, born in 1937, joined the Baath party in college ( _baath_ is an Arabic word meaning renaissance, a grave irony given Saddam's repressive, retrogressive regime). He participated in a failed attempt to assassinate Abdel Karim Qassem, who had become Iraq's prime minister following the 1958 coup. Saddam then fled abroad and remained in exile until the Baath grabbed power in 1963. The Baath managed to wield power only briefly; the successor government jailed Saddam until the Baath party returned to power in 1968. He then rapidly ascended through the party's ranks to its central governing council. From that platform, Saddam increasingly and ruthlessly exercised power until he formally became Iraq's head of state in 1979.

Immediately after becoming President, Saddam executed dozens of rivals and potential rivals, displaying the merciless tactics that kept him securely in power until the 2003 invasion toppled him. He particularly targeted Shiite religious leaders, believing that with their education, loyal followings, and strong commitment to justice they posed the most serious threat to his rule.

The absence of a strong sense of Iraqi national identity combined with Saddam's centralized authority and reign of terror left Iraq's people unprepared for the responsibilities of participatory government. One pre-invasion, U.S. intelligence report, which the U.S. regrettably ignored, accurately characterized Iraqi society as "largely bereft of the social underpinnings" of democracy.

Externally, since 1921 Iraq has been a consistent protagonist in Arab actions against Zionism and Israel. Although King Faisal I had accepted the Balfour Declaration in principle, including the Declaration's intent to establish a nation of Israel as a Jewish homeland, Faisal's two successors on Iraq's throne did not. Under Faisal II, Iraq joined other Arab nations in the 1948 and 1967 wars against Israel. Iraq likewise gave logistic support to Syria in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

During Gulf War I, Iraq launched Scud missile attacks against Israel. Presumably, Iraq hoped to draw Israel directly into GWI. Had that happened, Saddam would certainly have attempted to use Israel's involvement as leverage to recruit one or more Arab nations to support Iraq in the war against the U.S. and its allies. U.S. diplomatic pressure and the deployment of U.S. Patriot anti-missile batteries in defensive positions around Israel succeeded in defusing Israel's desire to retaliate directly against Iraq. Undoubtedly, those U.S. moves prevented hostilities from spreading and so were morally justified. However, one unintended consequence of those actions was to reinforce widely held Arab perceptions of an unbreakable bond between Israel and the United States. Arabs believe this bond means that the U.S. will invariably side with Israel in any conflict, regardless of whether justice lies with the Arabs or Israel.

In the Middle East, Iraq's actions also fueled conflicts not involving Israel. Iraq's rulers and overlords, dating back to Ottoman times, have wanted to annex Kuwait. After Kuwait became an independent nation in 1961, Iraq claimed that Kuwait was actually part of Iraq and in 1963 launched an abortive invasion that the British helped to repel.

Several factors triggered Saddam's 1991 invasion of Kuwait, the most brazen Iraqi attempt to annex Kuwait. Oil companies in Kuwait were allegedly angling their drilling rigs to enable a rig on Kuwaiti soil to pump Iraqi oil. If true, that could have cost Iraq hundreds of millions of dollars in lost oil revenue, funds desperately needed to pay debts from Iraq's war with Iran. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, in response to a query from Saddam sent him an unintended message, "We have no opinion on inter-Arab disputes, like your border dispute with Kuwait." Saddam interpreted Glaspie's message to mean that the U.S. had no position on the Iraq-Kuwait border dispute and would not get involved in the situation. Iraq's disastrous and costly 1980-1988 war with Iran had depleted Iraq's resources and its people. Iraq badly needed the revenues and morale boost that successfully annexing Kuwait would provide. Finally, Saddam harbored illusions of greatness, aspiring to a role as a pan-Arab leader, a goal he hoped annexing Kuwait would help him attain.

For most of the twentieth century, Iraq and Iran did not have a mutually agreed border. Their continuing border disputes precipitated the Iran-Iraq 1980-1988 war. Iraq was angry that Iran incited and aided the Kurds of northern Iraq in their ongoing struggle for independence from Iraq. Saddam also saw Iran's internal difficulties following the implementation of Sharia under Ayatollah Khomeini as a strategic opportunity to grab Iran's oil and to increase his stature in the Arab world.

At the beginning of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, the United States aided Iraq with intelligence about Iranian troop movements. President Ronald Reagan decided that the United States, "could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran," and that the United States "would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran." The Reagan administration feared Iran controlling both Iranian and Iraqi oil reserves because of oil's importance for the U.S. economy and the market power that controlling both reserves would give to Iran. Reagan acted after 1983 satellite imagery revealed Iraqi vulnerability to an upcoming Iranian advance. Siding with Iraq, not surprisingly, worsened already bad Iranian-U.S. relations. The U.S. also provided military assistance funding and eased Iraqi military procurement difficulties by removing Iraq from the U.S. list of nations that sponsor international terrorism.

During the Iraq-Iran war, Iraq employed chemical weapons in order to defeat the overwhelming numbers of Iranian troops. Some of the Iranian troops were young boys sent into battle without training and without weapons, e.g., to find safe paths through Iraqi minefields. Many of these boys went willingly, believing that if they died as martyrs they would immediately enter paradise.

This long war, which eventually ended in a stalemate, pitted Sunni dominated Iraq against Shiite Iran. Best estimates of the death toll are that the fighting killed between 1.1 and 1.2 million people. The war also eliminated any foreseeable rapprochement between Iraqi Sunnis and Iranian Shiites. During the war with Iran, Iraqi Shiites, who comprise 60-65% of Iraq's population, fought alongside Iraqi Sunnis against Iran (Sunnis are 32-37% of Iraq's population and Christians/other about 3%). The war pitted Arab (Iraqis) against Persian (Iranians), and, consistent with Iraq's history, ethnicity was more important than religion.

Internally, Iraq's history since 1921 is a story of tribal, ethnic, and sectarian religious strife. As is true for most Arabs, tribal identity trumps both ethnic and religious identity and all three factors trump any sense of national identity. Thus, Saddam filled key government and party leadership posts with handpicked fellow members of his al-Nasseri tribe. Similarly, tribes and clans closely connected with Saddam filled the ranks of the elite Special Republican Guard units. With approximately one hundred and fifty identifiable tribes, of which thirty are the most important, national unity is an elusive goal for Iraq. Indeed, no Arab nation has yet overcome the divisiveness of tribal allegiances to achieve real national unity.

Iraq faces the further difficulty, unusual among Arab nations, of ethnic diversity as an additional obstacle to national identity. The Kurds are an ethnically distinct people who inhabit northern Iraq and want their own nation. Kurds comprise 15-20% of Iraq's population; the remainder of Iraq's population is Arab. Iran and Turkey also have substantial Kurdish populations. Although tribal identity is important among the Kurds, their ethnic identity as Kurds creates a unified identity that transcends tribal differences. In spite of Iranian aid to the Iraqi Kurds during the 1980s, the Kurds have received little international support for establishing a national homeland. None of the four nations — Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey — wants the Kurds to have their own homeland because each of those nations would either lose territory or face increased Kurdish dissent.

In addition to tribal and ethnic divisions, Iraq's Shiite and Sunni religious split is a third source of internal division. Sunni political and economic domination of Iraq for the last century greatly exacerbated already negative feelings between Shiite and Sunni. Prior to Gulf War II (GWII), U.S. analysts predicted that only a strong central government could prevent sectarian violence from erupting in Iraq. GWII removed the strong centralized power structure. The eruption of Shiite-Sunni sectarian violence and segregating of neighborhoods by sect described in section C of this chapter proves the prediction's accuracy, underscoring the depth of sectarian animosity and lack of realistic hope for reconciliation. Foreign Sunni terrorists, like al Qaeda, flocked to Iraq following GWII not only to oppose the U.S. but also to prevent the Shiites from taking control.

## B. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello

Just War Theory provides a helpful ethical framework for analyzing _Gulf War II_ (GWII, the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by the United States and its coalition partners) from a Christian perspective. This section examines the jus ad bellum and jus in bello phases; the next section discusses the jus post bellum phase. As the analysis reveals, the major Christian ethical concerns regarding GWII arise in the decision to go to war and in the efforts to build a peace after the war.

#### a. Jus ad bellum

This discussion of jus ad bellum for GWII focuses on the United States. Briefly, from a Christian perspective, Iraq had just cause (defending itself after an invasion) and right authority (Saddam Hussein was effectively Iraq's dictator). Conversely, Iraq lacked right intent (wanting to perpetuate Saddam's rule rather than progress toward peace), a reasonable chance of success (Iraq's military had no realistic chance of prevailing against the U.S. and Bush's "coalition of the willing"), and proportionality (impossible without some chance of success). Most importantly, Iraq did not satisfy the last resort criterion because Saddam could have complied more fully with all U.N. resolutions and discarded his belligerent rhetoric. A more in-depth analysis would offer few insights because Iraq primarily reacted to U.S. initiatives. Additionally, Iraq was nominally Islamic and not Christian. From an Islamic perspective, Iraq's justification for fighting GWII is only slightly better. Iraq had just cause (defense of the _ummah_ ), right authority (every Muslim has a responsibility to defend the community), and last resort (the invasion occurred) but critically lacked right intent (submission to God).

##### Just cause

In contrast to Gulf War I, Iraq had not annexed or invaded another nation's territory, the traditional justification for a just war. Instead, U.S. President George W. Bush articulated three reasons for the war before launching GWII: a purported link between Iraq and al Qaeda, Iraq's program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and replacing Saddam Hussein's abusive dictatorship with a democracy that would respect human rights. The Bush administration also promoted the idea that GWII would be largely self-financing, using that expectation to sell the war to the U.S. public and Congress. That illusory hope may have diminished the care with which some members of Congress, the media, and the public examined the issues at stake and lowered their threshold for justifying the war.

The Bush administration repeatedly asserted, without public proof, Iraq's support for, and cooperation with, al Qaeda. Although al Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq had some exploratory contacts with each other, nothing came of them. Saddam at times pandered to Islamic fundamentalists and pretended to be a devout Muslim, e.g., having a copy of the Koran written in his blood and placed in the mosque that he built to commemorate GWI, a mosque known as the Mosque of the Mother of all Battles. However, his lifestyle was obviously at variance with Islamic principles, especially as al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden understood those principles. That meant Saddam, from the perspective of radical Islam, was an apostate Muslim.

Consequently, joint efforts between al Qaeda and Saddam would have required al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, to compromise their basic principle of non-cooperation with the enemies of Islam. Al Qaeda has always demonstrated an unwillingness to make such compromises, believing them inconsistent with relying upon and submitting to God's will, which they believe is their assured path to victory.

Nor did the Bush administration demonstrate that the alleged Iraq-al Qaeda link, apart from any Iraqi WMD, threaten the United States: "President Bush simply asserted that Iraq was integral to the war on terror. He had no basis for his claim before the war, but he turned out to be prematurely correct. As a result of the American invasion, Sunni fundamentalist terrorists have flooded into Iraq." The most direct link between Saddam and terrorists seems to have been Iraqi financial support for the families of some Palestinian suicide bombers. No evidence, however, connects those bombers with al Qaeda.

The Bush administration's second rationale for GWII, Iraqi possession or development of WMD, allegedly represented two potential problems. Because Iraq did not have a delivery system capable of reaching a target in the United States, Iraq's only real option for using a WMD against the U.S. was to sell or to give a weapon to a terrorist group that would then execute the attack. This heightened the importance of any potential link between Iraq and terrorists like al Qaeda. Even in the absence of such a link, Iraq might have sold WMD to a terrorist group.

The other global security threat that Iraq posed was the possibility of launching a WMD attack against Israel. In GWI, Iraq demonstrated that its Scud missiles could reach Israel and Iraq has a long history of attacking Israel at every opportunity. However, just cause requires establishing more than alleged capacity and possible intent on the part of a potential aggressor. The potential attack must be imminent and catastrophic. This was certainly not true of any hypothetical Iraqi WMD attack on Israel prior to GWII. The Bush administration policy of preventive war may appeal to patriotic nationalists, but, falls short of being imminent and catastrophic, and is therefore contrary to Christian Just War Theory.

Saddam Hussein believed that he enhanced global and national perceptions of his and Iraq's military might by claiming to possess WMD. He hoped to garner prestige, if not support, from nations and groups predisposed to oppose the United States and its policies. Those motives not only shaped his belligerent rhetoric but also prompted his obstreperous relationship with the U.N. weapons inspectors. Saddam's penchant for alarming and bellicose rhetoric makes judgments about his actual intent problematic.

Resolving the issue of whether Iraq possessed a realistic WMD capability (or soon would) to threaten the U.S., or Israel, is much easier. The U.S. had little reliable evidence that Iraq still possessed WMD following the post-GWI U.N. imposed destruction of Iraqi WMD and Scud missiles. U.S. decision makers seized what few scraps of evidence they could find that suggested Iraq had or would soon have WMD, ignored analysts' warnings that the evidence was at best inconclusive, and used that evidence to sell the U.S. public, Congress, and United Nations on the unwarranted conclusion that Iraq either possessed WMD or the capability to produce WMD. The management climate within the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and Bush administration that brooked no dissent greatly contributed to the ease with which this happened. In other words, the presumed threat from Iraqi WMD — to anyone — was not credible because U.S. decision-makers could and should have known by January 2003 that Iraq lacked any WMD capacity. After defeating Iraq, U.S. forces conducted extensive searches and found no WMD.

Saddam was responsible for much death, cruelty, and other evil in Iraq. His rule exhibited flagrant disregard for the teachings of both Islam and Christianity. Yet wanting to impose regime change, short of genocide, can rarely satisfy Just War Theory's just cause criterion. Following GWI, the U.S. and its allies took steps that effectively ended Saddam's capacity to engage in genocide against the Kurds and the Shiites. The preceding synopsis of Iraq's history underscored that Iraqis were generally not ready to shoulder the responsibilities of democracy. The laudable goal of improving the quality of life for Iraq's twenty-six million people (or of removing Saddam from power, as some Muslims believe was the primary aim) does not morally justify, from a Christian Just War Theory perspective, waging Gulf War II.

Gulf War II was clearly a war of choice not moral necessity.

##### Right intent

From a Christian perspective, the only right intent for waging a just war is trying to progress toward peace, in the fullest meaning of that word. Unfortunately, progressing toward peace is often more akin to trying to move in the right direction through a dense fog with too few, if any, signs marking the correct path. Consequently, Reinhold Niebuhr warned us to be wary of "children of light" to whom truth seems clear and attainable.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger describes President Bush as the most aggressively religious president in U.S. history. Bush was convinced that God personally guided him. President Bush and many in his administration may have believed that they could establish, quickly and easily, a democratic Iraq, bringing the Middle East several steps closer to peace while dramatically improving the quality of life for Iraqis and others. However, only the naïve accept that as the Bush administration's primary intent for GWII. For decades, U.S. foreign policy has presumed that ensuring an uninterrupted flow of Middle Eastern oil constitutes a vital national interest. Although the U.S. buys relatively little Middle Eastern oil, a substantial reduction in its flow would adversely alter the world oil market with potentially devastating consequences for the U.S. and other globalized economies. During the last century, the U.S. repeatedly intervened in the Middle East to preserve a steady flow of oil. In contrast, the United States has generally declined to intervene against exploitative and abusive regimes when the U.S. did not perceive its vital national interests at stake. Two of the very few exceptions to that last generalization are the brief Somalia intervention to protect non-governmental agencies' famine relief efforts and the employment of air power in Kosovo in an effort to stop genocide. Iraq's unpreparedness for democracy further undergirds the conclusion that oil was a primary aim of GWII.

The United States is a secular democracy in which politicians routinely advocate policies based on perceived national interest rather than Christian ethics. Adopting policies consonant with Christian ethics might actually better foster the long-term welfare and interests of the American people. Nevertheless, politicians tend to focus on a time horizon defined by the date of the next election. History suggests that policies geared to a short-term outlook infrequently yield results consonant with long-term interests. This short-term focus explains why politicians from both parties generally ignore the ill will among Arab Muslims garrisoning U.S. armed forces on Arab soil causes. Similarly, this short-term focus partially explains why Congress, concerned about public demands for prompt action following 9/11 and loyal to a President riding the crest of a wave of popular support, uncritically accepted claims that post-war oil revenue would fund the cost of the war and of Iraq's reconstruction.

The Bush administration may have had yet another goal for GWII: completing what they believed was the unfinished business of GWI: removing Saddam Hussein from power. That aim seems to have motivated some of President Bush's most influential advisors. Speculation is rife that the President shared this aim, wanting to outshine his father in the annals of history. Determining exactly how significant this goal was in deciding to launch GWII is, from a Just War Theory perspective, irrelevant. The only acceptable intent or aim for a just war is to establish a just peace, which clearly was a secondary or even tertiary in the decision to wage GWII.

##### Right authority

Whether Gulf War II satisfied Just War Theory's right authority criterion is much murkier than it was for GWI. Preceding GWII, U.S. controversies with Iraq centered on issues involving U.N. inspectors searching for WMD evidence in Iraq and Iraq's ability to manufacture WMD. The protracted and convoluted search process included Iraq admitting, ejecting, and readmitting U.N. inspectors as well as Iraq imposing various restrictions on the locations the inspectors could search. The U.N. Security Council, in response to a speech by President Bush, passed a resolution warning Iraq to comply with its obligations or face the consequences. Persuaded that the United States was serious, Saddam readmitted the weapons inspectors whom he had ejected from Iraq and even granted them access for the first time to his numerous palaces.

Claiming that Iraq still possessed WMD and was therefore in non-compliance with its obligations under various U.N. resolutions, President Bush maintained that he had the authority under international law to invade Iraq. If one adopts an international rather than a national perspective, given that by the beginning of 2003 Bush's claim that Iraq possessed WMD was less than credible, the United States did not meet the right authority criterion of Just War Theory. The U.S. inability to assemble a broad coalition of nations supportive of GWII, in marked contrast to GWI, suggests that the international community remained unconvinced that the U.S. had sufficient grounds for invading Iraq. The absence of Iraq's Arab neighbors from the handful of nations in the coalition that supported Gulf War II reinforces that conclusion. The U.N. Security Council subsequently refused to pass a resolution supporting GWII.

If one, however, holds the traditional Just War Theory view that right authority is a function of national sovereignty, then President Bush successfully maneuvered the U.S. Congress into granting him right authority. With the avowed purpose of coercing Iraqi compliance with various U.N. resolutions, the Bush administration sought Congressional authority to use military force as a last resort. Voting to grant the President that authority would obviously strengthen his negotiating position; voting against granting the President that authority would have had the opposite result, making Iraqi compliance less likely and increasing the probable need to use military force in the future. Congress overwhelmingly endorsed granting President Bush the authority he requested.

President Bush may have already decided to invade Iraq before requesting Congressional authority to do so. If so, his political gambit of arguing for authorization to strengthen his bargaining position with Saddam was, in some measure, deceptive. At the very least, some of Bush's key advisors strongly advocated invading Iraq long before the Congressional vote. In any event, when President Bush announced that the U.S. was invading Iraq, he sought no further authority from Congress. Conversely, in the several days immediately before the invasion and during the air attacks that preceded the ground war, when the certainty of war with Iraq had become apparent, Congress did not vote to rescind the President's authority to wage war against Iraq.

##### Proportionality

The U.S. GWII preemptive invasion of Iraq makes proportionality calculations a strictly hypothetical exercise. If the United States had not invaded, how many more people might Saddam's regime have killed? Analyzing each of the three reasons the Bush administration identified for waging war on Iraq provides a framework for estimating an approximate number who might have died had Saddam remained in power. Terrorist attacks have yet to kill more than several thousand people in a single incident. The absence of substantive evidence linking Iraq to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups means that waging war to combat terrorism can probably justify, at most, ten thousand wartime fatalities, i.e., the toll of several major attacks or numerous small ones. Similarly, since the preponderance of evidence before GWII suggested that Iraq did not have WMD nor an effective program for developing WMD (assessments confirmed after the war), waging war as a proportional response to destroy Iraq's WMD capacity can justify few, if any, wartime deaths.

A brutal, ruthless dictator, Saddam was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq's war with Iran, tens of thousands of deaths in genocides against Kurds and Shiites, and thousands of deaths to maintain his grip on power in Iraq. The war with Iran was over and Iraq no longer had sufficient military capacity to wage a successful war against a neighboring nation. The U.S. and its allies patrolled Iraqi no fly zones, preventing Saddam from committing genocide against Iraqi Kurds or Shiites. Iraq's lack of WMD eliminated that as a possible means of genocide (during the 1980-1988 war with Iran, Iraq had used chemical weapons against its Kurds).

Estimating the number of Iraqis whom Saddam might have killed in each additional year of his cruel and unjust regime is difficult. Good data does not exist on the number of Iraqis for whose death he was responsible, apart from war and genocide. The upper limit for that number is probably under twenty thousand per year, or fewer than five hundred thousand Iraqis during his twenty-four year rule. Fewer than ten thousand people per year, on average, is probably a more realistic estimate, and perhaps only several thousand per year. Remember, those numbers do not include Iraqis killed in genocidal pogroms or combat. In sum, a conservative projection is that the GWII Iraq regime change saved fewer than twenty thousand Iraqi lives per year.

Calculations of lesser evils ended (e.g., a culture of suspicion and few political rights) are equally difficult to determine and much more difficult to assess (e.g., how does one measure the cost of not being able to speak freely?). Although a few statistics do exist — for example, atrocities against four thousand raped, tortured, and murdered Shiite women are blamed on Saddam's regime — those statistics are unverifiable and paint only a partial picture.

Proportionality calculations, from a Christian perspective, treat both one's own losses as well as enemy losses equally. Death tolls in Iraq continue to grow. As of the end of 2011, U.S. military fatalities exceeded forty-four hundred. Fatalities among U.S. contractor employees numbered in the hundreds as did allied military fatalities. Estimates of Iraqi deaths vary widely, but even the most conservative is staggering. A Johns Hopkins University study estimated that six hundred and fifty thousand Iraqis, who otherwise would not have died, died from the beginning of GWII through early 2007. A 2007 World Health Organization study calculated that in the period spanning 2003-2006, one hundred and fifty-one thousand Iraqis died because of the war. The civilian death toll in 2006 alone was thirty-five thousand Iraqis, according to a United Nations' estimate. The U.S. Defense Department, according to documents obtained by Wikileaks, estimated Iraqi civilian deaths at over one hundred thousand. Although the vast majority of those Iraqis died because of Iraqi on Iraqi violence, those deaths would not have happened had the United States refrained from invading Iraq.

Furthermore, with the breakdown of effective government in much of Iraq, new forms of injustice occur. Sectarian cleansing is segregating Shiite from Sunni, limiting where each can live and go in safety. Basic services, such as water and electricity, are frequently no more available or reliable than when Saddam was in power. Petroleum production has rebounded since the invasion; gasoline, however, was less available in 2008 than in pre-war Iraq. Iraqis perceive these problems as evidence of broken American promises to improve the Iraqi quality of life. From 2003, the cost of gasoline had tripled by late 2007. The total effect of these changes on Iraq defies easy quantification but is clearly significant.

The bottom line seems apparent. The cumulative total of U.S., allied, and Iraqi deaths, in spite of considerable unreliability in some of the data, most likely exceeds by a substantial number the death toll for which Saddam Hussein would have been responsible had he remained in power. Quality of life indicators other than fatalities seem unlikely to alter that conclusion. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003 fails to satisfy the jus ad bellum proportionality criterion. This assessment does not seek to minimize the evils of Saddam's regime, only to correct distortions caused by the American demonization of Saddam that incorrectly tends to suggest his evils are on a par with those of Hitler.

##### Last resort

As the analyses of just cause, right intent, and proportionality indicate, the United States' invasion of Iraq was not a last resort. Senator Robert Byrd, D-WV, in the Senate debate over authorizing GWII declared: "The Senate is rushing to vote on whether to declare war on Iraq without pausing to ask why. Why is war being dealt with not as a last resort but as a first resort?"

Saddam's Iraq did not pose an immediate threat to the United States, Israel, Iraq's neighbors, Iraq's minorities, or world peace. In spite of Saddam's bellicose rhetoric, measures short of war were slowly forcing Iraqi compliance with U.N. resolutions and preventing Iraq from re-acquiring or distributing WMD. The U.S. increasingly turns to an early military option rather than relying upon the military option only as a last resort when all else has failed to achieve the desired results.

##### Reasonable chance of success

Iraq's military forces had no realistic chance of defeating U.S. military forces in a war. Significantly, U.S. air power controlled Iraqi skies before GWII even began. The U.S. was rightly confident of a lopsided victory over Iraq in military combat, achieving success both quickly and with a minimum of U.S. casualties.

However, the Just War Theory criterion of reasonable chance of success addresses not only the likelihood of winning the war but also of winning the peace, which the last section of this chapter considers more fully. The unfolding of post-invasion events during the long-lasting U.S. occupation of Iraq makes very clear that combat victory (successfully invading Iraq, defeating its military forces, and implementing regime change) has not brought peace to Iraq or made the world a safer place.

#### b. Jus in bello

Overall, the U.S. invasion of Iraq did not satisfy the Just War Theory's jus ad bellum criteria. The scorecard with respect to the invasion satisfying the jus in bello criteria of proportionality and combatant immunity is much better. Yet ethical conduct of an unjust war in no way morally justifies that war.

The inevitable fog of war and human error ensure that warfighting always causes unnecessary casualties, both from employing excessive force (violating the jus in bello criterion of proportionality) and injuring or killing noncombatants (violating the other jus in bello criterion). In GWII, four factors combined to improve the compliance of U.S. armed forces with both jus in bello criteria.

First, U.S. military doctrine, along with that of Great Britain, the U.S.'s major GWII ally, emphasizes conducting combat operations in a proportional manner and respecting noncombatant immunity. Official military doctrine calls for achieving combat success with as little death and destruction as necessary, not annihilating the enemy. However, force protection doctrine (minimizing U.S. and friendly force casualties) generally takes precedence over the requirement to employ force proportionally (in GWII, an estimated 30% of casualties were noncombatants). That priority, appropriate if one values U.S. lives more than enemy lives, contradicts the Christian belief that all lives have equal value.

Calculations that attempt to resolve conflicts between force protection and proportionality, as with all hypothetical calculations, are highly tentative. For example, would fewer or less intensive air attacks prior to launching the GWII ground war have resulted in fewer total casualties? With the exception of conflicts between force protection and proportionality, U.S. forces and their coalition partners officially sought to employ force proportionally. A long-term, though steeply uphill, challenge for Christians is to convince nations to value all lives equally; only then will the inherent tension between force protection and proportionality end.

Second, U.S. forces analyze their combat operations after the fact and integrate lessons learned into future operations to minimize future errors and casualties. GWII combat operations built on lessons learned from GWI, the invasion of Afghanistan, and other operations. Quantifying the difference this policy made is impossible, but the policy embodies a commitment to improving compliance with the jus in bello criteria. The most significant improvement in warfighting tactics were targeting less Iraqi infrastructure and the use of smart munitions, 68% of all munitions used. These changes resulted in better targeting, reducing noncombatant casualties, and unnecessary enemy force casualties. Conversely, Iraqi awareness of the U.S. commitment to observing noncombatant immunity complicated GWII targeting decisions. Iraqi forces placed key military units, such as an anti-air missile battery, immediately adjacent to, or even within, civilian facilities such as hospitals and orphanages.

Third, the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) incorporates disciplinary and judicial processes designed to deter illegal behaviors by adjudicating personnel suspected or accused of using excessive or inappropriate force in a timely and fair manner. Few militaries hold their personnel to such a high standard and consistently seek to enforce that standard even during continuing combat operations. Obviously, non-U.S. citizens may perceive that UCMJ processes are biased in favor of U.S. personnel, not fully transparent, or unjust in some other way. However, the UCMJ constitutes a good faith effort on the part of the United States to honor the jus in bello criteria of proportionality and noncombatant immunity. In an unusual step that might helpfully be utilized more often, the U.S. military has opened some of these proceedings to the public in order to achieve a greater degree of transparency.

Fourth and finally, granting members of the news media access to combat operations and battlefields added an additional safeguard to improve detection of incidents in which troops violate jus in bello criteria. Reporters have incentives to report illegal activities or atrocities. Such reports enhance a reporter's professional reputation and career. Media outlets publish or broadcast these reports because they build readership/audience and fulfill the outlet's sense of public duty. One of the military lessons learned from GWI was the importance of media access to troops and military operations, consistent with security and safety. Embedding reporters with military units in GWII provided a greater level of access than in GWI. The potential downside of embedding — the media representative developing a bias in favor of the troops whom the reporter accompanies — seems less serious than the advantages that result from greater access. In spite of improved access, evidence of only a few isolated violations of jus in bello criteria has surfaced. Importantly, no public reports of systemic violations have appeared.

The net result of those four factors during GWII was to minimize the number of violations of the two jus in bello criteria (proportionality and noncombatant immunity) by U.S. armed forces. Gulf War II was primarily an unjust war not because of how U.S. military personnel and their allies waged the war but because Gulf War II fell far short of satisfying Just War Theory criteria for waging war in the first place. Unfortunately, violations became more widespread during the occupation of Iraq after its GWII defeat, issues considered in the next section of this chapter.

One cause of jus post bellum difficulties were Iraqi personnel, who, anticipating their unit's impending defeat by U.S. or coalition forces, doffed their Iraqi military uniform, donned civilian attire, and fled, some with and others without their weapons. U.S. forces moving through Iraq during the invasion discovered thousands of Iraqi military uniforms apparently abandoned by fleeing personnel. Some of the Iraqi military personnel who abandoned their units and uniforms were conscripts whose main desire was to return home to family. In other cases, the individual's intent was to remain free by making it impossible for U.S. forces to distinguish between combatants and genuine noncombatants in order to resume the fight another day.

Assessing Iraq's conduct utilizing the jus in bello criteria during GWII combat produces mixed results. From a Christian jus in bello perspective, nobody can fight an unjust war justly. Iraqi soldiers engaging in an obviously futile defense died pointlessly, thus not satisfying the proportionality criterion. Iraqi soldiers who abandoned their uniforms to disappear into the civilian population, especially those soldiers who took their weapons with them, violated the noncombatant immunity criterion by intentionally placing noncombatants at risk. Placement of high value military targets adjacent to, or even within, sites such as schools, hospitals, and orphanages also violated this criterion.

From an Islamic perspective, partisan or guerilla opposition to an invader is moral, e.g., the use of improvised explosive devices that target military convoys. Such resistance only violates Islamic warfighting principles when the fighters target noncombatants or adopt a terrorist strategy or tactics, as happened during the jus post bellum phase of GWII.

## C. Jus post bellum

Brent Scowcroft, the retired Army general who served as President George H.W. Bush's National Security Advisor, publicly warned the U.S. in 2002 that invading Iraq "could turn the whole region into a cauldron, and thus destroy the war on terrorism." President George W. Bush's administration rejected Scowcroft's prescient advice. Indeed, the administration failed to plan for establishing peace in Iraq following the defeat of Saddam's regime. This section examines, from a Christian perspective, the outcomes of those decisions using the five jus post bellum criteria of respect for persons; establish justice; exercising ecological responsibility; engage multinational commitment and support; and progress toward closure.

The jus in bello phase of GWII (the conquest of Iraq) ended and the jus post bellum phase (the subsequent occupation of Iraq) began with President Bush's May 1, 2003 dramatic and symbolic speech aboard the USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN in which he declared, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended." Internal strife and terrorist activity in Iraq (rather than revolution or invasion) have caused widespread fighting since the conquest. Hence, the jus post bellum model, and not the jus in bello model, provides the appropriate analytical framework.

Demarcating the end of the jus post bellum phase is problematic. The majority of U.S. combatants departed from Iraq before the end of August 2010 and all but a couple of hundred U.S. military personnel left Iraq by the end of 2011, marking the de facto end of occupation. Although the U.S. seems certain to play a large economic, political, and even military role in Iraq for many years, this analysis focuses on the two major jus post bellum actors, Iraq and the United States, during the period of post-conquest occupation, May 2003 to December 2011.

#### a. Respect for persons

Respect for persons encompasses expressing appropriate respect for Iraqis, for persons displaced by GWII, and for warriors on both sides and their families. The GWII jus post bellum record for respecting persons was poor. From the start of the occupation, the U.S. failed to communicate a respect for and trust of Iraqis. As violence in Iraq increased, U.S. tactics reinforced a pervasive Iraqi perception that the U.S. lacked respect for persons. Although U.S. actions, policies, and tactics became more culturally sensitive and appropriate over time, the change was insufficient to overcome negative perceptions.

Occupiers rarely succeed in building positive relationships with an occupied people and the occupation of Iraq was no exception. For example, poor decisions and unfortunate personal leadership styles sometimes communicated disrespect. When U.S. Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces in Iraq from June 2003 - June 2004, visited Iraqi offices in the Green Zone, he, unlike most other general officers, always carried a weapon even though the Green Zone was Baghdad's most secure sector, directly under U.S. control. During these visits, Sanchez' bodyguards accompanied him; the Iraqis had their bodyguards present; and a company of Gurkhas and a platoon of tanks protected the immediate area. The Iraqis received a clear, if perhaps unintended, message: General Sanchez neither liked nor trusted them.

U.S. military tactics, even when militarily justifiable, often conveyed a similar lack of respect for Iraqis and their culture. Soldiers wearing body armor, patrolling in armored vehicles, and carrying automatic weapons alienated ordinary Iraqis. Many Iraqis felt threatened; many perceived that the U.S. forces distrusted Iraqis. Admittedly, much of Iraq was dangerous. U.S. forces, few of whom spoke the local language or understood the culture, constantly risked ambush and attack from a variety of aggressive opponents. Furthermore, U.S. force protection doctrine mandated the patrol tactics, policies that reduced U.S. casualties and significantly improved counterattack capabilities. Notwithstanding the occasional story of an American soldier befriending a child, those force protection policies tended to an impermeable barrier between U.S. forces and most Iraqis. To appreciate the barrier's magnitude, imagine a foreign military patrolling your neighborhood in armored vehicles, wearing body armor, carrying automatic weapons, and neither speaking your language nor understanding your culture.

Cultural ignorance, often compounded by dislike, also manifested itself in uglier ways. Early in the occupation, many coalition personnel called Iraqis, especially those resisting the occupation or coalition forces, _hajj_ or _haji_.486 Muslims find that perversion of their faith — a Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca acquires the honorific title of _hajj_ — highly insulting. A good analogy indicative of the magnitude of that hurtful insult is calling an African-American a _nigger_. Widespread use of _hajj_ and _haji_ as disparaging epithets by U.S. military personnel reflected a pervasive disrespect for Iraqis.

Likewise, humiliating an Iraqi man in front of his family, peers, or social inferiors, intentionally or unintentionally, violates the important Iraqi cultural norm of honor, implicitly disrespecting all Iraqis. Huge sweep and detain operations in which U.S. forces moved through an area and detained most Iraqi adult males at least temporarily further heightened alienation and opposition to the U.S. presence. Iraq cleric Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar poignantly summarized the situation: "The U.S. is using excessive power. They round up people in a very humiliating way, by putting bags over their faces in front of their families. In our society, this is like rape. The Americans are using collective punishment by jailing relatives. What is the difference from Saddam?"

Ambassador Robin Raphael, while assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority (the CPA functioned as Iraq's government until an interim Iraqi government was elected), insightfully observed that the United States cannot run a country that the U.S. does not understand. Insufficient numbers of translators and too few personnel who spoke Arabic meant that coalition forces would inevitably compound many of these problems. The relative isolation and superior security of the Green Zone diminished decision-makers' awareness of these problems and intensified Iraqi anger and resentment toward the occupiers.

Concomitantly, Iraqi disrespect for persons was pervasive. Widespread violence during the 2005-2008 insurgency against the American occupation and the new Iraq government was mostly predicated upon the Islamist dichotomy that one is either a true Muslim (i.e., agrees with them) or an enemy of Islam who deserves to die. The insurgency generally ignored the Koran's prohibitions against attacking the elderly, women, and children. Iraqi government corruption, ineptitude, and lack of commitment, especially among its military and police personnel, substantially contributed to the insurgency gaining traction, the increase in the number of displaced persons, and chaos becoming the norm in occupied Iraq. The extended occupation's failure to achieve significant progress toward justice in Iraq, discussed below, underscores this tragic, pervasive disrespect for person among a plurality of Iraqis.

Although the GWII jus in bello phase displaced some persons, the greater number of the 1.4 million Iraqi refugees fled Iraq during the U.S. occupation to escape the violence and chaos. Approximately 750,000 of those refugees went to Syria, many illegally. Syria, already struggling with a large number of Palestinian refugees, did not want to host the Iraqis. Syria intended its policies, such as prohibiting Iraqi refugees from seeking most forms of employment, to push the Iraqis refugees back home. Elsewhere, Iraqi refugees received, at best, a lukewarm welcome. In addition, post-war conflict has displaced another million Iraqis within Iraq. Since the level of violence in Iraq subsided toward the end of 2007, only a trickle of Iraqi refugees has returned home: "... the homes they left no longer exist. Houses have been looted, destroyed, or occupied. Most Baghdad neighborhoods, where Shiites and Sunnis once lived side by side, have been transformed into religiously homogeneous bastions where members of the other sect dare not tread." Iraqi government programs to aid returning refugees required them to register for assistance in the neighborhood from which they fled, a requirement that prevents many returnees from registering because they are too afraid to enter their old neighborhood, now controlled by the opposite sect.

Symptomatic of Iraq's post-war problems, approximately one million Iraqi Christians (about five percent of the population) enjoyed personal security and freedom of worship during Saddam's rule. By late 2010, roughly half of all Iraqi Christians had emigrated, fearful of continuing Islamist violence targeting Christians. An October 2010 Islamist attack on Baghdad's Roman Catholic Cathedral full of worshipers at Sunday Mass and protected by the normal complement of security personnel killed several dozen and underscored the security forces' inability to prevent violence designed to shred the fabric of Iraqi society. That attack was just one in an ongoing campaign by Islamists to "cleanse" Iraq of Christians. Ironically, a war launched by a Christian responding to his perception of God's leading created an Iraq that is unsafe for indigenous Christians.

Iraqis who supported coalition forces as translators and in other capacities frequently jeopardized their lives and families. Occupation opponents targeted cooperative Iraqis in order to hinder U.S. operations and to discourage other Iraqis from cooperating. Yet the U.S. admitted only four hundred and fifty-six Iraqi refugees from 2003 to 2006. Although quotas for Iraqi immigration increased to one thousand per month in September 2007, in the following four months, the U.S. admitted fewer than eleven hundred Iraqis. Iraqi immigrants, like those from other nations, often find that the United States is not the anticipated "promised land," encountering discrimination, trouble obtaining employment, and a lack of community in a radically different culture.

Warrior reintegration includes demobilizing and disarming troops, then helping them transition to civilian life, obtain all necessary medical care, find meaningful civilian employment, and, when appropriate, receive disability compensation. Non-existent or inadequate reintegration programs and efforts inevitably cause problems. When the U.S. disestablished the Iraqi military in 2003, over 400,000 military personnel instantly became unemployed and, if Baath party members, ineligible for any government job. All Iraqi government employees who belonged to the Baath party also became jobless. No longer able to provide financially for themselves or their families, often experiencing a variety of other problems, former party members instantly became prime prospects for recruiting by various insurgent and terrorist groups.

In the United States, inadequate healthcare for returning U.S. veterans contributed to eroding already weak support for jus post bellum efforts in Iraq. Due to improved battlefield medicine and rapid transport of wounded to field hospitals, larger numbers of personnel survived serious wounds than in previous conflicts. Some wounded will make a complete recovery and resume a normal civilian life. Many of the thirty thousand plus U.S. casualties in Iraq have permanent disabilities, physical or mental, that severely limit their ability to live a productive, happy life.

Significantly, many military personnel returned home from Iraq suffering from some form of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), other psychological problems, or guilt for actions they took in combat. Army suicide rates hit an all-time high. The U.S. Army has identified anxiety, depression, and acute stress as mental health issues for one-quarter of its personnel while they are serving a repeat tour in Iraq. According to DOD figures, as of 2008, approximately 60% of U.S. military personnel had served at least one tour in Iraq; 25% or more have served more than one tour. The U.S. military, not having anticipated the necessity for so many multiple tours in Iraq (as well as in Afghanistan!) nor the magnitude of those mental health problems, lacked the mental health staff to meet this increased requirement.

The toll on warriors' families from more frequent and extended (a year or longer) military deployments to Iraq is less quantifiable. Divorce rates are up and reports of family violence increased substantially; 10% more children in military families with a deployed parent seek professional mental health assistance than do children without a deployed parent. No good data exists about the decreased marital satisfaction, infidelity, increased emotional distance between personnel and their children, and other problems protracted absence may cause. Most families cope. But the occupation has imposed a heavy burden on a substantial number of families. Possible DOD steps to improve care for warrior families include better pay, enhanced programs to help personnel and their families to prepare for deployment and then reunite afterwards, giving personnel more time off at the end of a deployment, and extending the time between deployments.

The U.S. Navy reduced deployments after the Vietnam War from one year to six months because the Navy recognized that the longer deployments exacted too large a toll on sailors and their families. Conversely, extending tours in Iraq from six months to one year (or longer) for many personnel and units enhanced operational effectiveness because personnel developed a more in-depth understanding of Iraq and better relationships with Iraqi counterparts. This unresolvable tension highlights one intractable problem inherent in lengthy occupations.

President Bush frequently visited injured military personnel at Washington's Walter Reed Army Medical Center and elsewhere; the media reported on few of these visits. His visits expressed concern and respect for personnel injured in Iraq, actions that even those who disagree with GWII can beneficially emulate. Similarly, religious groups have prayed for deployed military personnel; the public and civic groups frequently thank veterans for serving and send care packages to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, genuine respect for combatants involves substantial, extended costs in addition to personal expressions of respect. Permanently disabled personnel have earned lifelong compensation and quality medical care; wounded personnel deserve the same until able to resume a normal life. Veterans, often suffering from undiagnosed or untreated mental illness, are twice as likely as non-veterans to be homeless. Their ranks will inevitably swell unless GWII veterans receive better care, imposing unquantifiable costs on society from wasted lives, destructive behaviors, etc. Religious groups have taken few steps, and those belatedly, to assist warriors with dirty hands reintegrate into society and into the warrior's faith community.

DOD and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) have taken some helpful strides but need more money and research to further improve treatment. Reported instances of DOD and the VA billing those injured in Iraq for treatment or rehabilitation represent terrible violations of the nation's moral obligation to respect combatants as persons. Public outrage over those instances and the abysmal conditions in some Walter Reed Army Hospital facilities resulted in quick fixes. Respect for persons requires that public concern and political involvement continue at that high level until the last veteran of GWII and the occupation has died.

#### b. Establish justice

GWII achieved little progress toward establishing any aspect of justice: the legal, commutative, or distributive. Overall, this failure "radically undercut social stability and built opposition to the American presence."

The U.S. led Coalition's worst mistake after conquering Iraq was failing immediately to establish legal justice. Coalition forces, not tasked with enforcing the rule of law, watched passively as Iraqis looted government buildings and businesses. The invasion had usurped Iraqi police and army authority, removing the deterrent that law enforcement provides against criminal behavior and thereby tacitly encouraging crime. Looting rapidly grew from individual acts into the systematic dismantling and sale abroad of entire industrial facilities. The Coalition's inaction also signaled Iraqi leaders — tribal, religious, and secular — that the U.S. and its partners were untrustworthy.

When the U.S. belatedly moved to establish legal justice, many of its tactics communicated a lack of respect for Iraqis and their culture. The U.S. Army's Center for Lessons Learned observed:

Tactics such as detaining the family members of anti-Coalition forces, destroying the houses of captured suspects without judicial due process, and shooting at Iraqi vehicles that attempt to pass Coalition vehicles on major highways may bestow short-term tactical advantages. However, these advantages should be weighed against Iraqi sentiments and the long-term disadvantages associated with the image this creates. It is a practice in some U.S. units to detain family members of anti-Coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members.

Those tactics are inappropriate for police work. A lack of proper equipment intensified difficulties, e.g., the smallest bomb in the U.S. arsenal was the 500 pounder, which would destroy not only a building from which enemy fire came, but also other structures within a 100-200 foot radius. Expecting trained warriors to perform police functions without adequate training and equipment set the U.S. occupation force on the wrong course.

Iraq's lack legal justice impeded establishing commutative justice, which, in turn, impeded progress toward legal justice. To illustrate, few Iraqis regarded Saddam's trial and execution as just, e.g., the video of Shiites jeering at Saddam's execution infuriated Sunnis, hardened their anger toward Shiites, and quickly became a recruiting video for foreign radicals.

Two of Ambassador Paul Bremer's policies, implemented while he was head of the CPA, de-Baathification and the unwise, ultimately aborted, U.S. insistence on majority rule also illustrate this circular dynamic. First, he ordered the removal of all members of the Baath party from their government posts, immediately depopulating the leadership of Iraqi local, regional, and national governments. This de-Baathification lustration policy mirrored the Allies' post-WWII de-Nazification policy in spite of major differences between the two occupations: the Allies had sufficient troop strength to provide essential government functions, Germans saw themselves as one nation, and war had exhausted Germany. Nevertheless, complete de-Nazification proved too extreme a measure, impeding the Allies' ability to re-establish justice in Germany. Similarly, complete de-Baathification proved too extreme in Iraq, initially creating a land without effective governance.

Second, Bremer, contrary to U.S. free election rhetoric, made clear to Iraqis that he would not allow them to elect the wrong person to lead Iraq's interim government. Unsurprisingly, when elected, the interim government lacked credibility in Iraq. It had no authority in many geographic areas. In areas where it had authority, it was generally ineffective and corrupt. Most damning to the majority of Iraqis, however, was their perception that the interim government was little more than a cover for continued U.S. control.

Having too few troops compounded the Coalition's difficulties. Prior to GWII, U.S. military planners estimated that jus post bellum operations would require between 260,000 and 479,000 troops. Other U.S. government experts — including faculty colleagues of mine at the Naval Postgraduate School — predicted post-war insurgency and strife in Iraq well before GWII began. But the then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, rode roughshod over all of those forecasts, wanting to prove that U.S. military's technological superiority enabled it to do more with fewer personnel.

By 2006, animosity had become so intense that 75% of Sunnis, for example, supported violent opposition to the U.S. occupation. Adding fuel to the conflict, Islamists, and increasingly all Muslims, objected to Christian occupation of a historic Muslim land. The 2006 Islamist attack on the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra, 80 miles north of Baghdad, was the trigger that transformed much of the Iraqi unrest, opposition to the occupation, and sectarian animosity into open warfare. Jus post bellum fighting then expanded along several major axes:

\- Saddam loyalists who, in the jus in bello phase, recognizing that they could not defeat the U.S. in a conventional war, had abandoned their military posts, often shedding their uniform but retaining their weapons, and then blended into the civilian population now emerged as guerillas fighting against the occupiers;

\- Shiite militias who wanted revenge against their Sunni oppressors and power for themselves;

\- Sunnis who wanted to retain power;

\- Rival Shiite and Sunni groups targeting one another for both political and religious reasons;

\- Kurds who sought to establish their own nation;

\- Non-Iraqis who aligned themselves with one of the above, who sought to inflame animosity amongst the various groups, or who opposed the U.S. occupation of Iraq (Shiites from Hezbollah and Iran; Sunnis from Hamas and al Qaeda; Kurdish rebels from Turkey).

The three factors that had shaped Iraq's history also influenced the axes of opposition: family loyalties, tribal identity, and sectarian affiliation.

To quell the rising tide of violence, the U.S. in early 2007 _surged_ the number of its troops in Iraq. Even at the height of the surge, the U.S. never had the approximately half million troops in Iraq estimated as necessary to keep the peace. In fact, the number of U.S. and Coalition troops in Iraq actually peaked in January 2005 at a level slightly above that achieved during the 2007 surge. Yet by late 2009, violence had declined to levels experienced in 2005 primarily because: (1) sectarian segregation had happened in much of Iraq; (2) Iraqis were tired of outside interference by both occupying forces and al Qaeda; and (3) the U.S. had modified its goals for Iraq.

A great deal of Shiite-Sunni segregation occurred following GWII, especially in Baghdad and other urban areas where either sect had a large majority. The polarized 2010 general election results reflect the realities of sectarian segregation and animosity. However, segregation is most complete in Iraq's Kurdish areas, where the national government's presence and power are almost non-existent. Symbolically revealing, the Kurds, even at Iraqi government offices, fly their own flag in lieu of the Iraqi national flag. Kurds cooperate in the Iraqi national government primarily because that government allows the Kurds to function de facto as an independent nation, continuing developments that began with the 1991 sanctions that prevented Saddam from attacking the Kurds.

Like most people anywhere, the majority of Iraqis want to live in relative security and tranquility. Illegal violence by terrorists was no more welcome there than it would be in the United States or Europe. Iraqi frustrations led to better cooperation with the U.S. forces through formation of the _Awakening_ or _Concerned Local Citizens_ movement, later rebranded the _Sons of Iraq_. This program concentrated on Sunnis, paying them to participate, providing an income to largely unemployable former Baath party members, former soldiers, and other unemployed males. The program successfully damped violence in the short-run and was a key factor in al Qaeda's campaign of terror collapsing. Unfortunately, the U.S. armed many of the Sons of Iraq, increasing the potential for future violence. In the words of Major General Rick Lynch, when commanding the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division in 2007, "They [Sunnis whom the Americans are arming] say, 'We hate you because you are occupiers but we hate al Qaeda worse, and we hate [Iraqi Shiites] even more.'"

Shiite cooperation in reducing violence mainly occurred in other ways, although some Shiite militias accepted U.S. funds. In August 2007, politically ambitious Sayyid Moqtada Sadr instructed the major Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, which was loyal to him, to observe a six-month ceasefire. In February 2008, he renewed his order, extending the ceasefire for an additional six-month period; the ceasefire has since remained in effect. One of Sadr's motives for agreeing to the truce was obtaining time to consolidate and to develop his political strength and reach. Another motive may have been deciding to wait until the U.S. withdrew from Iraq before renewing his effort to control Iraq, or at least the Shiite portion of Iraq. Sadr has also used this interlude to resume the studies that he hopes will culminate in his receiving the clerical title of _ayatollah_ , a status certain to enhance his stature and power among Iraqi Shiites.

The sectarian and ethnic segregation that temporarily diminished internal strife concurrently weakened the centripetal forces holding Iraq together as a nation and greatly complicated developing the multi-ethnic, multi-sect effective constabulary and military a unified Iraq requires for its security. By the end of 2007, many militias were better armed than before the surge. Moreover, Iraq's Shiites were already skeptical about Sunni trustworthiness in any power sharing arrangement. Conversely, most Sunnis are wary of Shiite rule; they are loathe to share or yield the power they have had for the last eighty years and do not wish to live under a Shiite version of Sharia.

Tragically, the diminished levels of violence represented only temporary restraint rather than permanent change because underlying issues remain unaddressed. When Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's Shiite dominated government replaced the interim government, his government assumed responsibility for the Sons of Iraq movement. It put few Sunni Sons of Iraq on the payroll. Not surprisingly, disaffection among the Sons of Iraq grew rapidly, igniting a 2010 resurgence of violence against Iraqis. The eighteen-month plus stalemate between the 2010 general election and the formation of a new Iraqi national government, months during which no party could form a ruling coalition, illustrates Iraq's continuing polarities and lack of commutative justice.

Belatedly, the U.S. acknowledged that the only viable government in Iraq is one that the Iraqis choose. Establishing a secular democracy was both too hard and eventually recognized as contrary to U.S. national interests. Iraq lacked the critical educational, economic, and social prerequisites that secular democracy requires. Additionally, most Iraqis preferred an alternative form of government. In electing their interim government, a majority of Iraqis voted for candidates who promised to establish a Shiite Islamic state with sharia instead of a secular democracy.

When the United States formally ended combat operations in Iraq on August 31, 2010, Prime Minister al-Maliki declared that Iraq was now a sovereign and independent nation. That declaration tacitly acknowledged the heavy hand with which U.S. authorities had guided past Iraqi government decisions. By December 15, 2011, only a few hundred U.S. troops remained in Iraq. Less visible but with no established date for their withdrawal were thousands of U.S. civilians taking over tasks that the military previously handled, everything from distributing financial aid to training Iraq's military and police forces. This large presence and continued aid suggest that the U.S. exerted considerable influence over the nominally independent Iraqi government.

The U.S., having dramatically scaled back its ambitions for Iraq, even failed to achieve its only remaining goal of establishing security. Internal security is an essential element of legal justice; external security is an essential element of commutative justice. Iraq lacks both. Iraq's heavily armed population, numerous militias, and terrorist organizations can outgun, outmaneuver, and overwhelm the ability of Iraq's police and army to impose law and order. Police ineptitude, corruption, and cowardice all abet an alarming escalation in violent crimes. In August 2007, retired U.S. Marine Corps General James Jones, President Obama's first national security advisor, reported that problems of corruption and sectarianism in the Iraq police force were so rampant that Iraq essentially needed a new police force. The following five years have brought little improvement in police integrity and capability.

Iraq's military is incapable of deterring an external threat. Turkey's military, for example, has repeatedly made incursions into Iraq pursuing Kurdish rebels. Iran may pose an even greater threat to Iraqi sovereignty. Iran is now funding the repair of Shiite religious institutions and buildings in Iraq as well as funding some Shiite militias; Iran still wants to displace Saudi Arabia as the global voice of Islam.

Without legal and commutative justice, Iraq can make only limited progress toward economic prosperity and distributive justice. Reconstruction efforts have proven largely futile and done little to rebuild Iraq's economic capacity. Billions of dollars in Iraqi funds and foreign, primarily U.S., reconstruction aid have been wasted or stolen, depriving the Iraqis of much needed help and exhausting the goodwill of other nations. In a vain effort to maintain Iraqi quality of life, the U.S. in 2004-2005 even spent two billion dollars subsidizing oil imports to preserve the artificially low price of petroleum products that Saddam had set.

By a few metrics, distributive justice has improved in comparison to pre-war Iraq. In 2011, electricity generation, one of the best indicators of quality of life, had increased from a pre-war 4.0 to 6.5 thousands of megawatts. However, the supply was not fully reliable, sometimes on for only a few hours per day, even in Baghdad. Meanwhile, other basic human services, such as healthcare and public water supplies, remain degraded or widely unavailable. Economic crime and sectarian violence both began to trend upwards shortly before the August 2010 withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops, boding poorly for future economic improvements.

#### c. Exercise ecological responsibility

Environmental issues have received scant attention from either the U.S. or Iraqis during the occupation. The U.S. badly misjudged the condition of Iraq's infrastructure, which Saddam had largely stopped maintaining because of economic sanctions imposed after GWI. Consequently, the expectation that Iraqi oil revenues would fund the post-war, post-Saddam reconstruction of Iraq proved unrealistic. Iraqi oil production in 2011 barely exceeded pre-war levels. The good news is that GWII, in sharp contrast to GWI, did not cause major environmental pollution.

The most significant GWII environmental issue was the failure of the small U.S. invasion force with its rapid rate of advance to secure or to destroy Iraqi arms caches and munitions depots. That failure subsequently provided criminals, insurgents, and others a ready and ample supply of arms. Given Iraq's pervasive warrior ethos, multiple internal divisions, and economic woes, coalition forces should have foreseen this contingency. Obviously, avoiding this failure would not have eliminated all post-war violence in Iraq. But, impounding and destroying those arms and munitions would have cost less in lives and dollars than fighting and disarming hostile belligerents who took advantage of that misstep.

#### d. Engage multinational commitment and support

As noted in the discussion of jus ad bellum, international sentiment prior to GWII, especially among Arab nations, generally opposed the invasion. Most Arab leaders supported Saddam and opposed the post GWI sanctions against him. They approached U.S. military leaders in the Middle East prior to GWII, inquiring what the U.S. intended for post-war Iraq and which Arab nation might the U.S. invade next. These Arab leaders also told the U.S. that toppling Saddam would destabilize the Middle East and make their internal political and external security situations worse.

The U.S. closed its Prince Sultan Air Base following the invasion, significantly reducing the U.S. military footprint in Saudi Arabia and addressing one radical Islamist complaint. Nonetheless, the prediction that invading Iraq would increase the problems of Arab governments has come true in most Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, the most important and influential of the Arab nations. More non-Iraqi insurgents appear to be Saudi citizens than citizens of any other nation. Saudi oil money has also helped to fund the insurgency. The lack of respect for Islam evidenced by the Abu Ghraib abuses and the video recording of people taunting Saddam at his execution added fuel to Arab discontent, especially in nations that support the United States.

Furthermore, the failure to engage Arab (i.e., Muslim) nations in active support of U.S. post-war efforts in Iraq reinforced many Muslims' inaccurate impression that GWII is part of a wider Christian war against Islam. From the perspective of radical Islam, Osama bin Laden was correctly confident that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would anger Muslims and build support, passive or active, for radical Islam. Prior to GWII, at least two leading Islamists openly objected to the 9/11 attacks as inconsistent with Islam. Unfortunately, the U.S. invading Iraq alienated both leaders, converting them into al Qaeda supporters. Many Western political leaders also view GWII as part of a larger religious war. Henry Kissinger, for example, has remarked that radical Islam wants to humiliate the West and that therefore the West must humiliate radical Islam. Kissinger supported GWII because Afghanistan did not adequately achieve that goal.

Multinational support for rebuilding Iraq eroded during the jus post bellum phase of GWII. Great Britain, the U.S.'s most loyal and active ally in Iraq, withdrew its military personnel in 2009. British forces had occupied the Shiite city of Basra, located on the Persian Gulf and Iraq's principal port. Initially, the British met with considerable success in establishing justice there and respecting persons, implementing lessons learned in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. However, the longer the British remained in Basra, the more contentious and volatile the city became. Eventually, British troops primarily confined themselves to a base on the city's outskirts and turned control over to Shiite leaders. Violence increased as various Shiite militias competed with one another for power.

A few other nations deployed relative handfuls of troops to Iraq, token gestures of support mostly designed to curry favor with the United States. These included South Korea, Poland, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Estonia, Latvia, and Singapore. However, by the end of July 2009, what President Bush once termed the "coalition of the willing" had become the coalition of one, the United States.

#### e. Progress toward closure

Measuring progress towards closure requires defining the desired end state and then establishing a set of metrics by which to determine progress. The U.S. announced at the start of GWII that its goal was an independent, democratic Iraq; achieving that goal entailed establishing secular democracy, security, and economic prosperity in Iraq. In the decade after that declaration, the U.S. explicitly abandoned the goal of establishing secular democracy, increasingly paid less attention to the need for economic prosperity, and finally focused on security and troop withdrawal.

Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni (a former commander of the U.S. Central Command whose area of responsibility included Iraq), Senator John Warner (former Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee), former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and others have noted parallels between Vietnam and the first four years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Those parallels include lack of focus, lack of political support in the U.S. and the host nation, dissembling to the U.S. public about progress, and the wrong strategy. Victory in asymmetrical conflicts, such as the U.S. fought in Vietnam and in Iraq, depends upon winning hearts and minds rather than military might.

Abundant anecdotal evidence of progress from individual U.S. soldiers exists. Yet those assessments can be misleading because most soldiers only saw a small slice of Iraq and tend to misinterpret the friendliness of individual Iraqi, especially children, as general sentiment.

Instead, assessing progress towards closure requires a broad perspective on the entirety of Iraq. The truth is that although Iraqis may like individual Americans they generally detest the U.S. occupation of their country. The occupation has resulted in a failed state, not a rebuilt nation. U.S. reluctance to cede the real authority of government in Iraq to Iraqis expresses more paternalism than genuine respect for Iraqi dignity and self-determination.

The main U.S. political incentive for making progress towards closure in Iraq was U.S. voters' impatience to end the occupation. In 2007, the U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus accurately characterized efforts to rebuild Iraq as a race against time. Sustaining a large number of military personnel in Iraq cost thousands of U.S. lives. Funding Iraq's reconstruction cost hundreds of billions of dollars. To put the amount that the U.S. spent on GWII in context, "one sixth of the cost... could put Social Security on firm financial footing for at least the next 50 to 75 years."

Iraq was ill prepared for democracy. If Iraqis continue to feel worse off than before the invasion, they may yearn for the "good old days," i.e., a dictator who will restore stability, security, and a degree of prosperity. Progress toward economic prosperity is particularly important from a Muslim perspective because prosperity is an indication of God blessing a faithful people. The deterioration of economic well-being in Iraq since the invasion has added fuel to the fires of violent opposition lit by incendiary Islamists. Within a week of the last U.S. troops departing Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sought to arrest the Sunni Vice President, Tariq al-Hashemi on corruption charges and to coerce boycotting Sunni members of Parliament to return or be replaced. Maliki, although embroiled in an intra-Shiite battle for supremacy, appears to be on a trajectory to becoming Iraq's next dictator.

Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State prior to launching GWII, warned President Bush that if the U.S. broke Iraq, then the U.S. would, metaphorically speaking, own Iraq. Powell was emphasizing the U.S.'s responsibility to leave Iraq in at least as good shape as it was in before GWII, a responsibility fully consonant with Just War Theory. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Joseph J. Collins, a member of the National Defense University staff in Washington, DC, recently published this assessment of GWII: "Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle." Pope John Paul II similarly concluded that GWII was immoral, not satisfying the Roman Catholic Church's Just War Theory teaching.

From a Christian perspective, U.S. failures in Iraq are traceable to two broad, underlying issues, both highlighted in this chapter's Just War Theory analysis of GWII. First, GWII was an unjust war that sowed seeds of injustice rather than forging swords into plows. Supposedly fought to diminish the terrorist threat, GWII actually had the opposite effect, destabilizing Iraq and diminishing support for U.S. counterterrorism initiatives elsewhere. Second, U.S. post-war efforts were not consonant with building a just and lasting peace. Instead, the U.S. left Iraq the world's next failed state. Globally, the world is less safe because of GWII: "some retired American generals and historians call the U.S. invasion of Iraq the greatest strategic military disaster in American history, a massive squandering of lives and resources that will affect the Middle East and reduce the power of the United States for years to come."

#  Chapter 6: Afghanistan

Too long have I had my dwelling

among those who hate peace.

I am for peace;

but when I speak,

_they are for war._ (Psalm 120:6-7)

The mid-career military officers who took the ethics courses that I taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in the years 2003 to 2005 surprised me. These career military professionals, some of the best and brightest in the U.S. armed forces, tended to view the probability of U.S. long-term success in Afghanistan with skepticism.

Few of them, at that time, had actually served in Afghanistan. But they did not allow their justifiable confidence in superior American military might to blind them to the realities of the conflict there. U.S. efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden had repeatedly proven unsuccessful. Reports about military operations involving U.S. ground units or Special Forces, especially in remote areas such as Tora Bora where bin Laden was supposedly hiding, consistently described rugged terrain, adverse weather conditions, and unreliable intelligence. U.S. forces faced determined foes, foes who, when facing unfavorable odds, would flee to welcoming and nominally inviolable sanctuary across Afghanistan's border with Pakistan.

My students, patriotic and highly motivated officers, were ready and willing to serve. Nevertheless, many understood enough about geo-politics to wonder whether the U.S. could achieve anything that resembled a meaningful victory in Afghanistan. Their courage during class discussions to question the outcome and the morality of the war in Afghanistan, a war that the United States would send some of them to fight when they graduated, inspired this book.

Chapter 6 follows the same outline as did Chapter 5's analysis of GWII, first providing a synopsis of pertinent aspects of Afghanistan's history and culture, then examining the U.S. conquest of Afghanistan using the jus ad bellum and jus in bello frameworks, and finally utilizing the jus post bellum model to assess the U.S. occupation.

## A. Historical context

A rugged, mountainous, and landlocked nation, Afghanistan has an area of two hundred and fifty thousand square miles, i.e., roughly the size of Texas. Afghanistan has few roads and long borders with Iran (slightly under six hundred miles), Pakistan (twelve hundred plus miles), and its Central Asian neighbors of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan (totaling over twelve hundred miles), as well as a short (fifty mile) border with China. With many of the world's tallest mountains and largely bereft of natural resources, Afghanistan is impoverished and inaccessible.

In 2007, Afghanistan's population was roughly 31.9 million people, comprising an "archipelago of competing ethnic groups" further divided by race, language, religion. Even demographers struggle with Afghanistan's complex population composition. Unceasing warfare, the absence of an effective central government, and massive numbers of refugees make any population estimates highly suspect. Counts of Afghan ethnic groups range from a high of fifty-five to a low of sixteen. An intriguing Afghan tradition, lacking any substantive historical evidence, identifies one tribe as one of the ten lost tribes of Israel.

Afghanistan's major ethnic groups include the Pashtun (40-42%), Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen (the latter three live north of the Hindu Kush — so named because the Afghans defeated the Hindus there), and the Shiite Hazaras (15%) in the western mountains adjacent to Iran. The Hazara have close links with Iran because of their shared Shiite version of Islam. Perhaps another 5% of Afghans are also Shia. Afghans, however, generally regard themselves as a Sunni people, sandwiched between competing empires. With its multiple tribes and languages, Islam has been Afghanistan's only centripetal force. Non-Pashtun Afghans have often viewed the state, ruled by Pashtuns for the last two hundred and fifty years, as a "tool of Pashtun domination."

Since the 1960s, three Islamic movements have widely influenced Afghan Sunnis, who had previously practiced a relatively moderate version of Islam. The first was a scriptural movement linked to Indian Sufism that emphasized personal piety and individualism. The second, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, opposed state secularization. The third, building on the first two and financed with Saudi money, was Wahhabism, calling Muslims to reform Islam through a rigid adherence to the Koran and the Hadith. This third movement decisively shaped the Taliban.

Key elements of Afghan culture, especially among the Pashtun, are courage, honor, hospitality, and revenge. Combined with a pervasive _gun culture_,584 those characteristics broadly shape the Afghan tribal culture:

This is not to suggest, as some of the first imperial ethnological studies of tribal societies did, that Afghans are more warlike than other groups of people. Afghan tribes are not concerned with how outsiders measure their society, but they do care deeply how fellow tribesmen measure tribesmen. Thus one of the standards by which a man's place in Afghan society is measured, and upward mobility achieved, is the degree of personal honor and courage displayed in combat.

Tribal warfare in Afghanistan "is about the maintenance of space and power relative to other tribal groups, not about domination or annihilation. This sense of boundaries and space affects not only tactics but also goals in warfare."

Afghanistan's warrior culture fused with its diversity to cause unending internal conflicts and feuds. For instance, tribes along the Khyber Pass — the main link between Afghanistan and Pakistan — enjoy a rich heritage of internecine feuds, kidnapping, and heroin smuggling. Afghan kings managed to keep their throne only by balancing and co-opting tribal leaders; tribal leaders tolerated the central government only to the extent that it was necessary to stabilize adjoining tribal areas.

An observant 1980 visitor to Afghanistan discovered a semi-lawless, impoverished land in which tribal, ethnic, and religious loyalties took precedence over nationalism. Approximately 90% of Afghans were illiterate and 85% were subsistence farmers, herders, or dwelt in small towns that existed to support farmers and herders. Many of them placed little value on any entity larger than clan or tribe and readily sold their loyalty to the highest bidder. Afghans, in accord with their cultural traditions, tried to survive, and perhaps even to thrive, by forming alliances with the powerful and those perceived as likely to succeed.

Afghanistan has no tradition of effective central government or national identity. Historically, Afghans have found a common cause only when fighting to repel invaders, but, even then, they usually conducted disjointed military operations in which ethnicity, tribe, or language defined independent units that functioned without coordinated command and control. This tradition dates back at least to Afghan opposition to Alexander the Great's conquest in the late fourth century BCE. Alexander never subdued, let alone pacified, the Afghan tribes who persisted in waging guerilla war against his forces. The Mongols nominally conquered Afghanistan in the thirteenth century; for three centuries, they tried to rule, regarding it as a nest of bandits, a no-man's land; finally, in the sixteenth century, they lost their tenuous control of the area.

More recently, the British found conquering Afghanistan impossible. The first British attempt, from 1839-1842, culminated in Afghans massacring the sixteen thousand man British army in Afghanistan. Only one man survived to tell the story. The disaster began by the British "[o]verestimating the importance of the state and underestimating the power of tribal loyalties." In 1878, the British returned to Afghanistan. They conquered, survived a winter surrounded by Afghan fighters, and then wisely negotiated a withdrawal with the Afghans, who outnumbered them almost three to one. That defeat occurred in spite of superior British training and weapons, including Gatling guns. The final British effort to incorporate Afghanistan into the British Empire consisted primarily of aerial bombing attacks on the Khyber Pass for a month in 1919. Discouraged by their lack of progress, the British begrudgingly acknowledged Afghan independence.

The two most important legacies from these campaigns are a lingering Afghan animosity towards the British and Afghanistan's borders. Demarcated by the British for their geo-political purposes, the borders establish Afghanistan as an amalgam of peoples without any unifying identity. Afghanistan's border with Pakistan is especially problematic. Named the Durand line, for the British general who drew it, this border divides the Pashtun ethnic group roughly in half between Afghanistan and Pakistan. When Pakistan gained its independence in 1947, Great Britain requested that Pakistan cede its Pashtun dominated areas to Afghanistan, but Pakistan refused. However, Pakistan has never been able to exercise effective control over its Pashtun regions.

Following the third Anglo-Afghan war, Aman Ullah, Afghanistan's king from 1919-1929, attempted to modernize his country through changes that included mandating public education for all children, establishing conscription in support of a national army, encouraging western attire, increasing taxes to fund the changes, and intervening in local affairs to promote his goals. Collectively, these changes led Afghans to doubt their king's piety and ignited broad opposition to his reign. In 1929, this animosity culminated in the King's forced exile, manifesting a latent religious conservatism that has intensified since the 1960s. The central government could not impose its will nationwide but had to depend upon the voluntary goodwill of ethnic groups, tribes, etc., to function.

During most of the Cold War, the United States perceived no national interests linked to Afghanistan and so largely ignored that remote nation. The few U.S. aid efforts were mostly ineffectual. For example, the U.S. built a poorly constructed road from Islam Qala to Kandahar that quickly became full of potholes and unsuitable for most motorized vehicles. By contrast, and as an ominous portent of their intentions, the Soviets funded and built the Afghans a road from Kabul to the Russian border capable of holding vehicles weighing up to eighty tons. No trucks weigh eighty tons, but heavy tanks do.

In 1979, the Soviets invaded, quickly conquered, and then occupied Afghanistan. The Soviets sought to prevent the radical Islamic movements that had penetrated Afghanistan from expanding into the adjacent, heavily Muslim, Soviet republics. During a decade of brutal occupation, in spite of deploying as many as one hundred thousand troops, the U.S.S.R. never controlled Afghanistan.

The Soviet legacy is worse than that of the British and has had major ramifications for Afghanistan's future. First, the Soviet Union's actions destroyed what little sense of nationalism had emerged in Afghanistan, reinforced tribal and ethnic divisions, and inflamed existing hatreds. Second, the Soviet defeat and withdrawal reinforced the conviction of many Muslims, particularly among Islamists, that faithful obedience to God ensures military victory. The U.S.S.R. war cost the Soviets forty-five billion dollars and was one of the most brutal wars of the modern era (e.g., the Soviets employed small anti-personnel, pressure sensitive mines and mines that appeared to be dolls and other toys). In spite of killing over a million Afghans, the Soviets did not prevail.

In the absence of reliable census data, the best estimate is that the Soviets displaced about a third of Afghanistan's population. Adapting Mao's infamous metaphor describing the necessity of popular support for a successful guerilla movement, the Soviets sought to drain the ocean in which the fish swam. Exercising less control in rural areas, the Soviets forcibly relocated approximately one million displaced Afghans to urban areas. Perhaps almost another three million Afghans, mostly Hazara Shiites, fled to Iran. Those refugees increased Iran's potential influence in Afghanistan as well as Iran's interest in Afghanistan having a stable, non-threatening government that would facilitate the refugees' safe return.

Predictably, most Afghans shared an intense enmity toward the Soviets and supported the mujahidin who fought them: "The Soviet invasion achieved that rarity in Afghan history: a unifying sense of political purpose that cut across tribal, ethnic, geographic, and economic lines. That purpose was to repel the Soviets." However, shared purpose did not translate into unified action:

After four years of war, arms provided to the Afghan resistance were turning up in bazaars marked up for resale. Mujahidin groups with old antipathies were fighting each other with their improved arsenals. Commanders squabbled over territory, farm produce, or recruits. The ancient Afghan practice of demanding tolls for passage through local valleys had reemerged with more intimidating muscle. Mujahidin convoys returning from Pakistan laden with weapons were sometimes ambushed by other resistance groups who thought they had been short-shrifted or simply wanted the plunder.

The more than three million Afghan refugees who fled to Pakistan received little aid from the Pakistan government. They did find madrasas (Islamic schools) funded by Saudi charities that taught little or nothing beyond the Wahhabi version of Islam, which was radically different from the pre-existing, more moderate, Afghan version of Islam, and where Afghan boys learned to hate non-Muslims. Not surprisingly, parents enrolled their sons in these madrasas, the only available schools. The Pakistani Pashtun community provided limited non-governmental aid to refugees, strengthening the ethnic bond and experiencing a parallel radicalism as its youth attended similar madrasas and absorbed the idealistic fervor that inspired jihad against the Soviets.

Thousands of mullahs in Afghanistan and elsewhere declared that a Muslim's duty to wage the lesser jihad meant war against the Soviet occupiers. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States collectively contributed over four billion dollars to the anti-Soviet jihad, waged by warriors known as mujahidin. In addition to Afghan refugees who had experienced the unjust Soviet occupation firsthand and their Pakistani Pashtun tribe members, ten to twenty thousand Arab Muslims volunteered to fight against the Soviets, much like American members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who flocked to Spain to fight Franco in the late 1930s. Some Arab and Pashtun mujahidin joined al Qaeda.

In the jihad against the U.S.S.R., mullahs and other Islamic opinion makers routinely encouraged the mujahidin by recalling Afghan successes against Alexander the Great, the Mongols, the Hindus, and the British. The mujahidin took full advantage of Afghanistan's steeply mountainous terrain to conduct raids and ambushes, a pattern of guerilla warfare modeled on their ancient tribal styles of fighting. Geography and guerilla tactics diminished the strategic importance of Kabul and other cities. Shoulder launched, U.S. supplied, surface-to-air missiles dramatically reduced the Soviet military advantage. Consequently, even facing an opponent with no air force, the Soviets lost.

The Soviets could have won only by convincing a significant majority of Afghans that accommodation rather than continued resistance was their best option. Given the mujahidin's decentralized structure, tribal _gun culture_ , belief that God directed this holy fight against infidel invaders, and embedded values of honor and revenge, the Soviets never had a realistic chance of succeeding. Their defeat and withdrawal reinforced all of those dynamics. Outsiders, like Osama bin Laden, likewise believed that the Afghan victory against the Soviet superpower was not a fluke; lightly armed mujahidin — God's warriors — can prevail against any infidel foe.

Most countries, including the U.S., terminated their aid to mujahidin groups when the Soviets withdrew. The U.S. had funded the anti-Soviet jihad only to thwart Soviet imperial ambitions. However, the funding had three unintended, long-term consequences: (1) further diminishing the rule of law in Afghanistan, making that country susceptible to Islamist takeover and rule; (2) dramatically proving that a relative handful of poorly equipped fighters could defeat a superpower; and (3) aiding the Taliban's emergence as a major player in Afghanistan.

Upon withdrawing from Afghanistan in 1989, the Soviets installed a puppet Communist government, propped up with Soviet money. The mujahidin continued fighting until they eventually triumphed in 1992, winning a hollow victory. None of the political parties, including several Islamist ones, were able to form a viable government. From 1992-1996, although nominally governed by the Mujahidin Government of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, Afghanistan was actually a de facto set of fiefdoms, ruled by various local warlords and tribal leaders. By 1996, a lawless warlord society had become the norm.

The years of fighting also further impoverished what was already one of the world's poorest nations. Consequently, Afghans returned to a traditional source of income, growing opium poppies. Poppy production doubled from 1991 to 1992, from two to four thousand tons, making Afghanistan the world's top producer. Europeans bought four-fifths of Afghanistan's opium production; U.S. and Russian mafias provided "chemists" to convert raw opium into finished products, a new step for the Afghans.

The Taliban's leader, Mullah Omar, is a Pashtun. Born about 1950, he uses only one name; the title _Mullah_ indicates that he has led Muslims in Friday congregational prayers. The scant biographical information available suggests the charismatic Mullah Omar is ideally suited for leadership in Afghanistan's tribal culture that emphasizes honor, conservative Islam, and being a warrior. He acquired a heroic combat record fighting the Soviets. An eye injured by shrapnel was probably the worst of his several combat wounds. He realized that he had permanently lost vision in that eye and risked infection as long as the shrapnel remained in his eye. Medical care was unavailable. So, in an action greatly revealing of his character, he plucked out his eye himself.

Upon completing his theological studies in the early 1990s, Omar served as mullah in a small village of approximately twenty-five families. In January 1994, after five years of the chaotic interregnum between Soviet rule and the Taliban seizing power, Mullah Omar learned that a nearby warlord had violated the Koran's injunction to protect noncombatants. The warlord had allowed, perhaps encouraged, his soldiers to commit atrocities against women, children, and the elderly. Omar led a small band of followers in a reprisal that punished the violators and ended atrocities in that area. This forceful action, and several others like it, solidified and spread Omar's previously local reputation. He began to attract like-minded individuals, individuals committed both to radical Islam and to establishing an Islamic state.

Mullah Omar believed God had called him to establish an Islamist state in Afghanistan. He has articulated that goal clearly and unambiguously: "We want to live a life like the Prophet lived 1,400 years ago and jihad is our right. We want to recreate the time of the Prophet and we are only carrying out what the Afghan people have wanted for the past 14 years."

The religious students (in Arabic, _taliban_ ) of the Koran who followed this rural mullah became the Taliban, with its simple Islamist ideology and an iron discipline that enforced rigorous moral values. A rapid string of military victories over the next two years, interpreted as God's blessing on their agenda of replacing Afghanistan's corrupt government with an Islamist state, gave the Taliban control of most of Afghanistan, with the significant exception of the northern areas, which they never controlled. At its peak, the Taliban numbered approximately sixty thousand.

Pakistan's military and intelligence services helped the Taliban to seize power, hoping to create a stable Afghanistan and thereby reduce the number of Afghan refugees (as many as 3.5 million) living in Pakistan and the turmoil and discontent they caused. Some moderate Pakistani leaders may have hoped that the Afghan mujahidin returning to Afghanistan would ease indigenous Islamist pressures on the Pakistan government. Saudi Arabia, motivated by religious sympathy, almost certainly continued to fund the Taliban, along with other Afghan Islamist groups, during these critical years. The early U.S. CIA view paralleled the Pakistani outlook, that the Taliban would bring badly needed order to chaotic Afghanistan.

As the Taliban successfully dominated first the Pashtun and then the other areas of Afghanistan, they both dismantled local governments loyal to various mujahidin groups and warlords and implemented their radical version of Sharia. These changes made any subsequent organized resistance difficult. Afghans accustomed to Pashtun dominance and already adhering to a conservative understanding of Islam found the Taliban's version of Islam initially acceptable if not agreeable. Many Afghans appreciated the order and relative stability that the Taliban imposed after seven years of chaotic conflict preceded by a decade of rebellion against the Soviet occupiers. Furthermore, the Taliban imposed sharia without attempting to create extensive government offices or programs that would have interfered with local prerogatives:

The Taliban believed that people were essentially virtuous and would take care of themselves as long as they chose the right path. The government existed in name only. Mullah Omar did not delegate authority and issued orders in a haphazard fashion to his lieutenants over a radio from his home in Qandahar. In their view, there was no need for any effective central ministries, such as health or social services, as the virtuous did not require the mediation of government.

However, Afghans increasingly chafed under the Taliban. They persecuted not only Afghan Shiites but also non-Pashtun tribes and Pashtuns who did not share their Islamist ideology. Many Afghans objected to the Taliban's draconian social policies, some of which stemmed from competition among Islamist groups to see which group could set and enforce the highest standards of purity. Other Taliban policies, not shared by other Muslim extremists, reflected the Taliban's distinctive blending of radical Islam and Pashtun culture, cloaking significant cultural elements in religious language. For example, the Taliban prohibited kite flying, a traditional Afghan national pastime, for alleged religious reasons, even though neither the Koran nor Islamic jurisprudence mentions, let alone bans, kite flying.

To promote their vision of purity, the Taliban sealed Afghanistan's borders, enforcing "a brand of Islam that horrified the world." Taliban edicts decreed the length of males' hair, listed acceptable Muslim names for newborns, closed schools conducted in private homes because they did not control the teaching, and required householders to blacken street facing windows to prevent passersby from seeing women inside. They banned recycled paper bags, fearful that recycled paper might include pages from a Koran. In their unrelenting campaign to purify Afghanistan, the Taliban destroyed the two magnificent sixth century Bamiyan Buddhas. Carved from a sandstone cliff, the gigantic Buddhas had coexisted with Islam in Afghanistan throughout Islam's fourteen-century presence there. Mullah Omar said that he feared God asking him why, if he could bring a superpower to its knees, he could not break two statues. The plight of women under the Taliban was especially dire. The Taliban forbade formal education for girls, required all women to cover themselves completely in public, permitted women to be in public only when escorted by a male relative, and barred most employers from hiring women. The estimated literacy rate for rural women, which had reached a high of ten percent prior to the Soviet occupation, fell.

Afghanistan became an international pariah. Only three nations (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates) recognized the Taliban regime. Saudi Arabia did so, having helped to fund the Taliban's rise to power and finding the Taliban's radical understanding of Islam compatible with Wahhabism. Pakistan, as already noted, had its own ulterior motives for aligning itself with the Taliban. The United Arab Emirates is a small actor in global affairs, often following Saudi Arabia's lead. The broader global community considered many of the Taliban's social policies repugnant and the lack of governmental institutions and services more characteristic of anarchy than a legitimate regime. The global community opposed Afghanistan hosting bin Laden and its surging economic reliance on opium production.

The Taliban initially forbade opium poppy cultivation. As their need for revenue increased and poverty-stricken Afghan peasants desperately sought employment or cash crops, Mullah Omar relaxed the ban. He decided that infidels should be free to destroy themselves if they chose to use destructive narcotics that the Koran prohibited. Ninety percent of Afghan poppy cultivation was in areas the Taliban ruled; they strictly controlled production and taxed harvests. In 2000, the Taliban again changed course. Acceding to external pressure, they reduced opium output from forty-six hundred tons in 1999 to about two hundred tons in 2000.

Concern over Afghanistan's poppy cultivation and opium production runs high in Iran, with an estimated two million illegal opiate users and addicts among a population of sixty-six million. Between 1982 and 1998, illegal drug traffickers, most linked to Afghanistan, killed thirty-three hundred plus Iranian military and law enforcement personnel. Iran also found itself facing an openly hostile, anti-Iranian Afghanistan because of the Taliban's rejection of Shiite Islam. Amnesty International estimates that in 1998 alone the Taliban executed between two and five thousand Shiites. These killings and other persecutions triggered a mass Shiite exodus and Iran thus became the unhappy host for approximately another two million Afghan refugees, mostly Shiite Hazaras.

In 1996, Osama bin Laden accepted the Taliban's invitation to relocate from Sudan to Afghanistan. At some point, bin Laden pledged his loyalty to Mullah Omar. This sparked some internal dissent in a Pakistani al Qaeda faction, which protested that the Taliban had deviated from pure Islam because they were puppets of Pakistan's intelligence service. The dissidents did not prevail; although the Taliban had accepted Pakistani funding, the Taliban insisted on their fealty to the Koran. Similarly, the Taliban did not unanimously embrace Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Later, many Taliban viewed the 9/11 attacks as contrary to Islam. Mullah Omar easily quashed the dissent. However, the mutual suspicions occasionally roiled relations between the Taliban and al Qaeda. Al Qaeda members disdained the Afghans and the Afghans resented the foreigners. Publicly, even after 9/11, Mullah Omar and the Taliban never wavered in their support for Osama bin Laden. Their consistent support coheres well with traditional Afghan and Islamic values of showing hospitality to guests and asylum seekers, keeping commitments, and honoring debts of gratitude.

## B. Jus ad bellum and jus in bello

After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush emphatically declared that nations must choose: stop harboring terrorists or become a target in the U.S. global war on terror. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld painted an even bleaker dichotomy: "We have two choices. Either we change the way we live, or we must change the way they live. We choose the latter." Military historian Andrew Bacevich has since observed, "If, today, this black-and-white perspective seems a trifle oversimplified, between 2002 and 2004, no politician of national stature had the wit or the gumption to voice a contrary view." Thus, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and much international goodwill President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, and other U.S. and allied decision makers tragically decided to invade Afghanistan without heeding the Chinese sage Sun Tzu's much quoted, perhaps even trite, adage that advises warriors to know their enemy.

From the perspective of a great many Muslims and probably all Islamists, the U.S. responded to 9/11 exactly as Osama bin Laden had predicted. On October 7, 2001, less than a month after the attacks, the United States commenced bombing Afghanistan, preparing to invade, conquer, and then occupy it. The U.S. implemented regime change, substituting "man-made" law for the Taliban's administration of sharia. Twelve years later, the U.S. and its allies remained mired in Afghanistan. Viewed in conjunction with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, unwavering U.S. support for Israel, and increasing global demand for oil, these actions made bin Laden's predictions appear uncannily prescient, enhanced his credibility, and elevated his stature as a global leader in the eyes of many Muslims.

This section considers whether the United States invasion of Afghanistan satisfied Just War Theory's jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria. The next section reviews the ongoing U.S. and NATO occupation of Afghanistan using Just War Theory's jus post bellum framework.

#### a. Jus ad bellum

U.S. policymakers' language repeatedly illustrated a disconcerting ignorance of Afghan and global Muslim sentiments. For example, initial U.S. descriptions of pending military actions against al Qaeda as parts of a crusade quickly disappeared in the face of withering criticism. "Crusade" was too emotionally laden a term, evocative of the excesses and atrocities Muslims associate with the medieval Christian Crusades. Similarly, officials originally code-named the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan "Infinite Justice," but expeditiously renamed it "Enduring Freedom" after some commentators remarked that the original name implied a negative judgment of Islam, i.e., Christians needing to bring justice to a Muslim land. Poorly chosen terms like these heightened feelings of competition between Islam and Christianity, reminded Muslims of painful Western colonialism, suggested an enduring clash with Islam, and work against building peace.

##### Just cause

Two lines of analysis potentially support concluding that just cause existed for the United States to invade Afghanistan post 9/11. First, the Taliban's provision of sanctuary and logistical support unquestionably facilitated al Qaeda organizing the 9/11 attacks. Rendering this assistance made the Taliban partially culpable, both legally and morally, for those attacks. After the attacks, Afghanistan refused to take actions against al Qaeda, to permit other countries to do so, or to evict al Qaeda from Afghan soil. The Bush administration decided that Afghanistan shouldered sufficient blame to warrant invading.

More reasonably from a Christian perspective with its presumption against war, Afghanistan aiding and abetting al Qaeda justified U.S. intelligence assets or military forces, hopefully with international authorization and cooperation, conducting brief, and, if necessary, multiple interventions to apprehend alleged criminals for adjudication, to destroy al Qaeda training camps and other bases, and to prevent future al Qaeda attacks. Targeted operations of this nature in a nation as dysfunctional as Afghanistan was, not involving conquest or regime change, would probably have remained military operations other than war, enabling the U.S. to defend itself against criminal terrorists in a failed state where the rule of law did not exist. Islamists would certainly have decried the U.S. actions and rallied to al Qaeda's cause. However, the global Muslim community, especially if the U.S. had enlisted the support of Muslim nations for these armed interdictions and in view of Muslim outrage at the 9/11 attacks, would probably have responded approvingly. Noted British military historian Sir John Keegan proposed this type of strategy, focused on bin Laden and al Qaeda, prior to the U.S. invasion. In an argument that echoed the analysis in the previous section, he observed that Afghanistan is "unstable, fractious, and ultimately ungovernable."

Second, the Taliban perpetrated egregious widespread human rights violations against Afghans. This rationale for war rests on the expanded Christian understanding of just cause presented in Chapter 3. Accepting the rationale requires assessing the war's probable proportionality: just cause for the war exists if the expected net gain in benefits from ending rights violations will exceed the harms entailed in waging the war.

##### Right intent

Post 9/11, senior Bush administration leaders held sharply divided opinions about possible United States' responses to the attack. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and others (often labeled _neo-conservatives_ or _neo-cons_ ) lobbied for a bold strike against Afghanistan. They envisioned a quick military victory, nearly total if not complete destruction of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and establishment of a Western style, secular democratic government that would respect human rights. Those views have since received much media attention. In retrospect, the naiveté of the neo-cons' expectations is glaringly apparent, an assessment that knowledgeable experts on Afghanistan could have provided to the administration pre-invasion. Wishful thinking is not synonymous with the right intent of establishing peace.

Secretary of State Colin Powell's dissenting view has received less public notice. Powell strongly advocated "a limited operation to focus on al Qaeda," arguing for a narrowly focused military objective "to bring its leaders to justice and to destroy its infrastructure" (as proposed in the discussion of just cause above). Regime change was not part of his agenda. Instead, Powell recommended that, "if the Taliban cooperated they could survive." Initially, President Bush publicly echoed Powell's position, an approach that enjoyed broad support among U.S. allies.

The Bush administration, however, quickly reversed its initial inclination and resolved its high-level internal debate in favor of the option that looked more decisive, i.e., invading Afghanistan and implementing regime change. President Bush appears to have made that decision because he, in varying degrees, felt political pressure both to end human rights violations in Afghanistan and to destroy al Qaeda, was unwilling to tolerate Taliban support for the leader of al Qaeda and America's number one enemy any longer, and believed that invading was the right thing to do. In varying degrees, the first two aims reflect a desire for a more peaceful world; the third, believing the war was the right thing to do, is tantamount to declaring the invasion a holy war or crusade, a move that contravenes the Christian perspective on war developed in this book's first three chapters.

##### Right authority

Within a week of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of military force against those responsible. From a national perspective, this law provided President Bush with the required authority to launch the invasion. Subsequent Congressional actions to fund the war, and then the occupation, represent additional endorsements of the president's authority for the war in Afghanistan.

Internationally, nothing in the public record indicates that the United States ever sought authorization from any international organization for invading Afghanistan. In fact, the U.S. initially rebuffed an offer of support from NATO. The basic NATO treaty requires member nations to respond in case of an attack upon any of the members. The Bush administration declined NATO's offer, and offers from several other countries, preferring to conduct the war in Afghanistan as a U.S. operation. No international law or organization authorized the war.

##### Proportionality

Intervening against al Qaeda and its leadership in the aftermath of the 9/11, as previously proposed, would have debatably constituted a proportional response to the attacks. Al Qaeda then had substantially fewer than 3000 fighters in Afghanistan (fewer than the number of persons who died in the 9/11 attacks). A series of fast, carefully planned strikes, repeatedly using air and ground assets to target al Qaeda in the type of operation that eventually killed Osama bin Laden, might have caused relatively few noncombatant casualties. The Taliban lacked the resources to stop such attacks. Immediately following 9/11, Pakistan would probably have willingly supported U.S. efforts focused on al Qaeda. Decisive action against al Qaeda might have prevented future attacks (e.g., in Europe) and deterred other terrorist organizations from attempting strikes on Western targets.

However, the U.S. opted to invade and conquer Afghanistan. The conquest was quick, with few U.S. fatalities. Total U.S. fatalities through the end of 2011 were 1858, of whom only 12 died in 2001. Non-fatal U.S. casualties through the end of 2010 for Operation Enduring Freedom totaled 13, 851; 20% of these were wounded in action, 20% received non-hostile injuries, and the remaining 60% were evacuated because of disease or other medical problem. Through 2011, allied deaths totaled 979.

Determining the number of Afghans who died in the massive bombing attacks that preceded the ground war, the number of Afghans killed in battles between the Taliban and other Afghan groups, and the number of Taliban that the U.S. and NATO have killed is impossible. CIA personnel carried out numerous missions as part of the conquest, publishing no public data about the number of their personnel or others killed during those missions. Nor do the Taliban and other Afghan groups publish reliable information about numbers killed. Similarly, no verifiable statistics exist about the number of Afghans killed during the air war. Official U.S. reports about the air war's magnitude and news stories about the ferocity of the ground war strongly suggest that the total number of fatalities substantially exceeded the 9/11 death toll. Additionally, a significant, but unknown, number of those killed were noncombatants. In other words, the 9/11 attacks by themselves are insufficient to justify the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as a proportional response.

Therefore, contending that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan satisfied the jus ad bellum proportionality criterion involves identifying each of the Taliban's extensive human rights violations, weighting each of the various types of violations, and then calculating the total harm. The U.S. invasion and conquest of Afghanistan is a proportional response only if the estimated sum of rights violations exceeds the war's projected cost in human lives. Such calculations are obviously impractical and too hypothetical to permit meaningful estimates.

##### Last resort

If egregious human rights violations by the Taliban constituted the just cause for the U.S. war with Afghanistan, then the war was assuredly a last resort. The Taliban consistently demonstrated their indifference to global opinion, were unwilling to bend their principles for economic reasons, and seemed firmly ensconced in power.

If punishing the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, and those who had aided and abetted them, constituted the war's just cause, then the U.S. conquest of Afghanistan was not a last resort. The U.S. could have conducted the type of interdictions proposed above. U.S. Secretary of State Powell lobbied hard within the Bush administration for this option. The Taliban lacked the wherewithal to expand, directly or with the help of an ally, the scope of any conflict beyond Afghanistan's borders.

Indeed, had the U.S. restricted its application of force to systematically defeating al Qaeda within Afghanistan, Afghans opposed to the Taliban might have seen an opportunity to revolt. Given Afghanistan's history, the Taliban would likely have found defeating one or more insurrections an impossibly challenging distraction while concurrently fighting U.S. forces. For example, the Northern Alliance, whom the Taliban never defeated and who played a key role in the U.S. conquest, might have initiated, or aided, an uprising.

##### Reasonable chance of success

Conquering Afghanistan superficially appeared to be a relatively easy task for the world's lone superpower. The Taliban were poorly organized, few in number, and ill equipped; growing numbers of Afghans were dissatisfied with Taliban rule. Indeed, the conquest occurred more smoothly and quickly than the U.S. anticipated. However, the Just War Theory reasonable chance of success criterion refers primarily not to success in battle but to achieving progress toward peace.

The neo-cons were wrong: Afghanistan was not ripe for a democratic, secular government. Afghanistan lacked the prerequisites of democracy including a prevailing sense of national identity, widespread literacy, and a firm commitment to the rule of law. These factors were all easily knowable by U.S. policymakers prior to 2001 and articulated by some government analysts, such as then CIA employee Michael Scheuer: "Clearly, what is happening today in Afghanistan was predictable and had been predicted. And making the prediction required nothing more than a reading of history and a review of the U.S. government's CIA-led covert-action program (1979-92) that supported the Afghan mujahidin."

Under the most optimistic scenarios, establishing an Afghan government that respected human rights, sought to establish the rule of law, and opposed Islamist terrorism would require a very lengthy, costly occupation. Instead, the U.S., after conquering Afghanistan, quickly shifted its focus to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nation building efforts in Afghanistan began late and were underfunded. Eleven years after the conquest, the U.S. appears eager to end its occupation, having announced a 2014 deadline for withdrawing all combat troops. The jus post bellum discussion in the next section of this chapter explores the consequences of this lack of commitment. As that analysis persuasively demonstrates, the United States, in conquering and occupying Afghanistan, never had a reasonable chance of successfully moving the world toward peace.

Just wars must satisfy all six Christian Just War Theory jus ad bellum criteria. At most, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, satisfied only four of those criteria. Even if one accepts the highly dubious claim that the 9/11 attacks and egregious human rights violations by the Taliban together constituted just cause, presumes that the U.S. acted with both right intent and authority, and posits that the invasion was a last resort, Operation Enduring Freedom was an unjust war. The U.S. critically lacked a reasonable chance of success, not in defeating the Taliban, but in achieving progress toward peace. Furthermore, the war's continuing cost — hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of casualties — are grim evidence that Operation Enduring Freedom was a disproportional response to the 9/11 attacks and the Taliban's widespread, egregious human rights violations.

From an Afghan perspective, if the U.S. lacked just cause for invading, then the Taliban had just cause for resisting the invasion. Defense of sovereign territory is the classic justification for waging a just war. The Taliban's intent was to establish peace through submission to God's will, as expressed in their interpretation and enforcement of sharia. After all, a Muslim is one who submits to God. Whether the Taliban had the right authority to lead opposition to the U.S. invasion is contingent upon whether one regards Mullah Omar as Afghanistan's legitimate (rather than simply de facto) Muslim ruler in 2001. Similarly, resisting the invasion was a last resort and, as the analysis of the U.S.'s chances of success indicates, the Taliban did have a reasonable likelihood of prevailing. Determining whether resisting was a proportional response is impossible. However, the justness of resisting the occupation in no way constitutes a defense of the justice of the Taliban regime. It simply underscores that coercing regime change through invasion and occupation added to the injustice.

#### b. Jus in bello

Military analyst Martin Shaw defines a _risk-transfer war_ as waging war in a manner that maximizes force protection at the expense of increased noncombatant casualties. The U.S. conducted its conquest of Afghanistan as a risk-transfer war.

At least in the short-run, risk-transfer wars can minimize domestic political opposition to the war, e.g., the initial conquest of Afghanistan cost only $3.8 billion, resulted in very few U.S. casualties, and President Bush's approval ratings soared. Internationally, a risk-transfer war, if high numbers of noncombatant casualties attract sufficient media attention, provides naysayers and enemies alike a propaganda field day, something much in evidence in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Over the longer run, risk-transfer wars often prove impossible to sustain for political reasons. International pressures, alone or in concert with domestic political forces, tend to prompt tactical changes away from force protection measures in favor of tactics that expose military personnel to greater risks but that will reduce noncombatant casualties. If these new tactics result in greater numbers of combatant casualties, a nation's political will to persevere may erode, affecting the war's eventual outcome.

Critically, risk-transfer wars pose serious moral problems for militaries and nations that try to incorporate Just War Theory's jus in bello principles of noncombatant immunity and proportionality into their warfighting doctrine. The basic premise of a risk-transfer war is to shift risk away from warriors, preferably imposing that risk on one's foes but accepting that noncombatants may also experience increased vulnerability. One technique for shifting the risk entails use of disproportionately overwhelming force, even if doing so will cause considerable collateral damage in order to avoid friendly force casualties. Techniques for shifting risk include using air power, artillery, and other tactics that apply force from a distance.

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan opened with an air war and deployment of Special Forces units and CIA assets. The bombing and missile attacks proved less effective than hoped because the Taliban had few obvious high value targets, limited troop concentrations, and held no conventional center(s) of gravity to destroy. Use of precision guided munitions helped to reduce the number of noncombatant casualties, but the lack of good intelligence and multiple Taliban military targets located in the midst of civilian populations resulted in high numbers of noncombatant casualties. Importantly, the U.S. occasionally bombed targets based on false information Afghans had provided as part of internal Afghan power struggles. Many members of the larger Muslim community regarded the number of noncombatant casualties in the initial attacks and much of the subsequent combat as disproportional. This triggered considerable outrage among Muslims, who had generally supported U.S. pursuit of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda following 9/11. U.S. allies similarly objected to the steadily increasing number of noncombatant casualties.

Special Forces and CIA assets conducted attacks in addition to guiding aerial employment of precision munitions against selected targets, improving effectiveness and reduced noncombatant casualties. The CIA brought seventy million dollars plus in cash to the war in Afghanistan. They used these funds judiciously, paying Northern Alliance leaders and other warlords to join the fight against the Taliban. The CIA also paid some Taliban commanders to surrender or to disperse their troops.

The air war and Special Forces/CIA efforts combined to tip the fighting against the Taliban, enabling the Northern Alliance to capture Kabul on November 13, about five weeks after the initial U.S. attack. Unlike most traditional wars in which capturing the enemy's capital signals the conquerors' victory, taking Kabul did not signal the Taliban's defeat. Determined Taliban and al Qaeda fighters simply retreated into Afghanistan's mountainous regions and took sanctuary in vast complexes of caves. There, despite massive B-52 attacks that repeatedly dropped huge tonnages of high explosive, these committed units and fighters persisted in their guerilla war against those whom they deemed Islam's enemies, foreigner and native Afghan alike:

The U.S., according to one former CIA operative familiar with the region, conducted the Afghan war with a startlingly cavalier disregard for geographic realities. Look at the map of Afghanistan. It is a country that is as big as Texas, hosts many of the highest mountains on earth, and shares borders of varying lengths with five nations whose populations are overwhelmingly Muslim, some militantly so. A good deal of the topography along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border — from Konar in the north to Baluchistan in the south — is incompletely mapped...

That unmapped and extremely rugged topography gave Taliban and al Qaeda fighters significant tactical advantages over their more heavily armed foes whose operations required extensive logistical support in a land with non-existent or primitive roads.

In the war's early stages, the U.S. initiated some half-hearted attempts at formal alliances with pre-existing, anti-Taliban Afghan groups, most notably the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance, as the group's name suggests, consisted of a loose coalition of warlords in the region of northern Afghanistan that the Taliban had never conquered. These fighters had exhibited a ferocious capacity for combat that successfully halted the Taliban advance. Nevertheless, the U.S. believed that the Northern Alliance lacked sufficient credibility and support among Afghans to prevail in wresting the rest of Afghanistan from the Taliban. Too close an alignment with the Northern Alliance seemed likely to alienate other groups among the disparate Afghan dissidents. The Northern Alliance also had negatives, e.g., financing their operations through heroin production.

The complete collapse of Taliban rule a few months after the fall of Kabul occurred only when Pakistan stopped supporting the Taliban and the U.S. deployed additional ground forces. Those forces propped up indigenous anti-Taliban units in places like Kabul and provided vital assistance in capturing the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Alternatively, the United States could have forged alliances with Pashtun warlords in the South and allowed those forces to expel the Taliban. That approach might have required more time but would have made Afghans more responsible for, and identified with, the victory. Nevertheless, Afghans, not the U.S. and its allies, were primarily responsible for defeating the Taliban.

Unlike GWII, no single event clearly demarcated the successful conclusion of the U.S. conquest of Afghanistan. Although the Taliban government collapsed early in 2002, combat really had only just begun, as the 12 U.S. deaths during the initial campaign and the 1846 deaths since indicate. By early 2009, domestic and foreign pressures reached such an uncomfortable level that then U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates directed U.S. forces to employ tactics that would better safeguard the civilian populace.

In spite of its warfighting doctrine, reliance on smart munitions, and emphasis on military ethics, the U.S., by fighting a risk-transfer war, conducted the Afghanistan war less ethically than it otherwise might have, failing to fully satisfy either of the jus in bello criteria. As the Afghanistan war illustrates, risk-transfer wars are glaringly inconsistent with Christian jus in bello principles.

## C. Jus post bellum

A majority of Afghans initially welcomed U.S. and allied forces, appreciative of their aid in ending the Taliban's oppressive rule. The reliance on risk transfer tactics and traditional Afghan animosity toward invaders quickly caused that apparent initial welcome to decay.

Important similarities between pre-conquest Iraq and pre-conquest Afghanistan decisively influenced the outcome of the U.S. occupation, reconstruction efforts, and jus post bellum peacemaking in both countries. Notably, both Iraq and Afghanistan have cultures shaped by

\- Islam and an appreciation of, and widespread popular desire to live under, sharia;

\- Loyalties to tribe, ethnicity, and sect that take precedence over nationalism;

\- Populations generally unprepared for democracy.

Furthermore, the same set of elected and appointed Washington policy makers oversaw both occupations; many U.S. military personnel, particularly senior leaders, served in both theaters. Consequently, both occupations relied on similar strategies and tactics. For example, in post conquest Afghanistan, as later occurred in Iraq, the U.S. deployed too few troops to establish and maintain the rule of law, with no plan for the other aspects of nation building essential for creating post-war peace. As in Iraq, the nominal conquest of territory did not end armed resistance. The Taliban and their allies, including al Qaeda, waged an ongoing asymmetric resistance from bases in Afghan areas not under the central government's direct control as well as from Pakistan's northwestern tribal areas. Following the much-touted success of the U.S. troop surge in Iraq, newly incumbent President Obama opted for an Afghanistan surge rather than an immediate reduction in force levels.

Unfortunately, four significant differences between post-conquest Afghanistan and Iraq tended to exacerbate rather than to ameliorate the post-invasion problems confronting the U.S. and its allies. First, Afghan warlords, tribal leaders, and other local power brokers were accustomed to little interference in their spheres of influence from Afghanistan's historically weak and ineffectual central governments. Most of these actors have persisted, with impunity, in operating independently of Afghanistan's new central government. This contrasts sharply with Iraq's twentieth century history of strong central rule.

Second, consistent with historical patterns, Afghanistan's otherwise acrimonious and fiercely independent ethnic, tribal, and sectarian groups formed numerous fluid alliances to oppose the U.S. occupation. Although transient and often incapable of conducting coordinated operations, these tenuous bonds helped to sustain the insurgency against the U.S. and its allies. In Iraq, internal strife threatens to shatter the façade of national unity; in Afghanistan, groups openly fight outsiders and one another concurrently.

Third, Afghans widely recognized that the U.S. had a limited, even if of unknown duration, commitment to occupying Afghanistan. Conversely, existing indigenous forces, such as the Taliban, would remain long after the U.S. and its allies departed — whenever that might happen. Therefore, many Afghans, regardless of personal preferences and aspirations, believed that the potential long-term disadvantages of genuine and public cooperation with the new Kabul government and the occupiers outweighed any short-term benefits they might realize. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq's strong central government had effectively eviscerated all independent loci of power; the conquest created a vacuum filled by new forces such as the Mahdi Army and al Qaeda Iraq.

Fourth, prior to the U.S. invasion, Afghanistan had no significant proven natural resources comparable to Iraq's vast oil reserves or developed economic base. The hugely profitable opium poppy was the only viable revenue source for most Afghan farmers and insurgents. The U.S. and its allies offered Afghan farmers insufficient financial incentives to cooperate with the government's erratic poppy cultivation eradication efforts, dooming the program to failure. Afghans understandably resented the forced eradication of their one easily marketable cash crop, generating additional animosity toward the occupiers and central government.

Consequently, a Just War Theory jus post bellum assessment of the Afghanistan war largely parallels that of GWII presented in the previous chapter, i.e., the war did not end justly, failing to move Afghanistan toward genuine peace. The aftermath of the two wars produced a set of often indistinguishable jus post bellum effects on the United States, its citizens, and its armed forces. A lack of public interest and active support for the wars in the U.S. partially created this blurring. Further blurring any distinction, units and individual military personnel often served in both theaters, assigned broadly similar missions and facing similar threats. Importantly, the U.S. public recognized military sacrifices but sadly underfunded essential programs to care for wounded warriors and to reintegrate returning warriors. Churches more often incorporated prayers for military personnel into their liturgies and sent care packages to deployment individuals than they aided warriors who returned home with physical, psychic (PTSD, e.g.), or moral injuries ( _dirty hands_ ).

To minimize redundancy, the discussion below omits an in-depth examination of factors discussed in the GWII jus post bellum section of the previous chapters as well as concentrating on Afghanistan, largely ignoring other countries, except Pakistan. Salient differences between the jus post bellum in GWII and Afghanistan do receive particular attention. The analysis also illustrates how the jus post bellum paradigm might constructively shape policy directions and program recommendations for bringing an unjust war to as just an ending as possible.

#### a. Respect for persons

Equal respect for persons never became the norm in Afghanistan, either among Afghans or occupiers. The U.S. initially took steps to accord all Afghans basic human rights, e.g., revoking the draconian Taliban rules that prohibited schooling for girls, banned most paid employment for women, required men to have a beard, and proscribed many popular entertainments. But those changes, and other attempts at constructive change, quickly became casualties of pervasive Afghan corruption and the Afghan government's inability to enforce the rule of law outside Kabul.

Military dominance defines victory in war. Post-war, achieving tactical military dominance in a specific encounter or moment at the cost of alienating the population cedes the more important victory — winning people's hearts and minds — to the tactically defeated insurgents or terrorists. As in Iraq, foreign forces seldom spoke the local language, had too few interpreters, did not understand the indigenous culture, and remained in situ too briefly to build the trust essential to defeat the Taliban, al Qaeda, and their allies. These factors, combined with tactics and dynamics parallel to those in Iraq, further drove a wedge of perceived disrespect between occupiers and natives.

Concurrently, the risk-averse U.S. force protection doctrine implicitly valued the safety of U.S. and NATO military personnel more than that of Afghan noncombatants. Coupled with a determination to prevail in every tactical situation, the result has been an unacceptably high number of noncombatant casualties and propaganda victories for the Taliban and other insurgents:

The insurgents regularly use civilians as shields, children as spotters and women as food suppliers. NATO killing civilians is great propaganda for the Taliban. At the same time, to Afghans with little technological sophistication, the scale and impersonality make the accidents seem intentional. Many are convinced the Americans are deliberately bombing them and even deliberately aiding a Taliban comeback.

The Taliban tends to capitalize swiftly on such incidents; U.S. and NATO officials are apt to initially deny or minimize them, and then fail to publicize investigations or findings. In 2007, for example, the best estimate is that in total the U.S., NATO, Afghan government forces, insurgents, and al Qaeda killed forty-five hundred Afghan civilians.

Afghanistan's terrain placed extra demands on U.S. combat personnel. They often conducted three-day patrols and other missions at altitudes in excess of ten thousand feet in areas with little or no vehicular access. Individual soldiers carried loads of one hundred to one hundred fifty pounds, imposing substantial physical strain on the warrior, reducing mobility, and increasing dependence upon frequent resupply by air. In combat, patrols had to choose between using overwhelming force more likely to injure noncombatants and allowing their more mobile foe to escape into the inhospitable, rugged terrain.

For the first time, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially the Predator, played a major role in military operations. The remotely controlled Predator can transmit real-time images and fire missiles. However, an image must have sufficient clarity to permit facial recognition in order to provide real time confirmation, something contingent upon not only technology but also time of day, camera angle, weather, etc. To date, Afghans have rarely provided the U.S. with timely, accurate targeting information. Thus, the most effective early Predator strikes occurred in conjunction with small ground units (usually Special Forces or CIA assets) or through serendipitously having a Predator in position when a target appeared. Predator operations have proven successful, responsible for killing more than a dozen senior al Qaeda leaders and forcing the organization to move from outdoor camps into caves and to flee from Afghanistan to Pakistan. At least in the short-run, these deaths have significantly degraded al Qaeda's capabilities. Continuing improvements will further enhance accuracy and reduce the amount of collateral damage.

Relying on UAVs to launch attacks raises four important jus post bellum ethical issues. First, is the attack an execution in lieu of attempting apprehension and trial? If so, the attack denies those killed legal justice. If not, if the attack targeted lawful combatants, then the attack is an ethical, proportional tactic. Significantly, apprehension and trial have historically inflicted more harm on a terrorist organization that enjoys wide popularity than simply killing the leader has. The assassination may temporarily slow an organization's pace of operations but may also generate public outrage advantageous for building support, aiding recruitment, and enhancing the organization's effectiveness.

Second, is the attack an attempt to transfer the risk of combat from warriors by placing noncombatants at greater risk? UAVs launching weapons against a fortified target in the middle of a village instead of inserting ground forces to conduct the attack exemplifies that type of risk-transfer and wrongly values the lives of noncombatants less than that of combatants. However, if inserting the ground forces cannot happen in a timely manner or without the target becoming aware of the pending attack in time to flee, then one must ascertain whether the likely benefits of a UAV strike outweigh the likely costs, i.e., make a proportionality calculation paying special attention to the potential for noncombatant casualties.

Third, does the attack violate national or international law? Breaking the law usually expresses disrespect for persons. United States' UAVs launched multiple attacks in Pakistan on Taliban, al Qaeda, and others foes hiding there between raids in Afghanistan. Any of these attacks conducted without Pakistan's authorization violated Pakistani sovereignty. Yet ties between the Pakistani military and the Taliban can make obtaining prior consent for a mission problematic. Some Pakistan military personnel, learning of a pending attack, would inform the intended target in time to flee to safety. Selective rather than widespread UAV attacks in Pakistan for which the U.S. has not obtained prior Pakistani authorization are likely to achieve greater results with fewer adverse ramifications.

Fourth, is the attack a proportional response? UAV attacks have contributed to political instability in Pakistan, reinforced the bonds between Pashtun on both sides of the Durand line, and triggered considerable resentment and animosity toward the U.S. for killing noncombatants. Jus post bellum utilitarian calculations — how to achieve the most progress toward peace for all — suggest some of the UAV attacks were immoral because they were counterproductive.

Neither the U.S. nor the new Afghan government made a concerted effort to demobilize, disarm, and reintegrate Taliban and other Afghan warriors into civilian society. The few efforts made have proven poorly designed, inadequately resourced, and ineffectual. Afghans remained heavily armed, consistent with their culture; the rugged terrain hides untold arms caches, offering ready resupply.

The United States and NATO could significantly improve respect for persons in Afghanistan by revising force protection doctrines to accept the greater risks for their personnel entailed in treating all human life as having equal value, except for individuals reasonably presumed to be acting outside the law. These persons, by their actions, forfeit the presumption of being noncombatants and become legitimate targets for the use of necessary, even lethal, force. Implementing this policy replaces risk-transfer warfighting tactics with tactics that are congruent with Christian ethics and that balance immediate tactical victory and the imperative to win the hearts and minds of the local population.

Another step toward respect for persons entails demilitarizing Afghanistan and its people, as much as feasible. None of Afghanistan's neighbors seems likely to invade, especially given Afghanistan's lack of resources, its history, and the Soviet and U.S. debacles. Therefore, Afghanistan does not need a national military equipped with high tech weaponry. Instead, each area of Afghanistan requires an honest and effective constabulary that enforces the local rule of law and enables citizens to feel secure in their persons and property. Local constabularies, loyal to local authorities, have a greater commitment to those goals than does a national force of questionable loyalties. Local constabularies have a greater probability of obtaining information that is more reliable from local residents, are more mobile than western troops, know local customs and geography, speak the language(s), and have similar or superior arms than do their foes. Governments take essential steps toward monopolizing the legal use of force in heavily armed areas by providing essential services, ending banditry, and consistently upholding the rule of law. As those changes occur, popular support facilitates disarming non-government forces, refugees return, and communities stabilize. One measure of the need for demilitarization is that Afghan expenditures on its military and police forces currently exceed Afghan tax revenues.

#### b. Establish justice

Justice — commutative, distributive, and legal — exists minimally or not at all across Afghanistan. The lack of commutative justice reflects the widespread lack of respect for the equal worth of all persons caused by a pervasive partiality toward members of one's own ethnic, tribal, or religious group.

Similarly, the distribution of political power remains skewed toward traditional leaders in local contexts. The Afghan democratic national government exists more in appearance than fact. U.S. policymakers responsible for regime change in Afghanistan wrongly anticipated that most Afghans would rapidly embrace representative democracy. Three major missteps toward regime change occurred.

First, the U.S. invaded without a plan or process for creating a post-Taliban Afghan government. Not until almost three months after combat started, in December 2001, did a conference in Bonn, convened under United Nations auspices, address the issue of post-Taliban governance. Only representatives from four major Afghan factions attended, excluding many other factions. Heavily influenced by the United States and its allies, conferees decided that because Afghanistan had not had a nationally accepted government since 1979, a _loya jirga_ should choose an interim government to exercise authority until national elections could elect a democratic regime.

Holding the _loya jirga_ , a Pashtun phrase meaning _grand assembly_ , was the second misstep. A Pashtun _loya jirga_ affords attendees opportunity to voice concerns and to seek consensus among those present; loya jirgas are not representative forums whose attendees speak on behalf of absent constituents or a means of inculcating democratic governance. Leaders from some of the major Afghan factions attended the _loya jirga_ ; but, as at the Bonn conference, numerous Afghan factions were excluded. Even calling the assembly a _loya jirga_ ignored Afghanistan's lack of a common national language and reminded its minorities of centuries of Pashtun dominance. More problematically, U.S. policymakers unilaterally set parameters that shaped the _loya jirga's_ outcome prior to the assembly's first session. Those parameters stipulated adopting a secular democratic government alien to Afghanistan's history and culture and peremptorily excluding options such as restoring the hereditary monarchy.

Decisions at the Bonn December 2001 conference largely predetermined Hamid Karzai's selection as leader of the interim government even before the _loya jirga_ met. Karzai just happened to have attended college at the American University in Beirut with Zalmay Khalilzad, then serving on President Bush's National Security Council staff.

Karzai did not fit the profile of a typical Afghan leader. Although a warrior, few Afghans thought of him as a great warrior against either the Soviets or the Taliban. In addition to his close contacts with the Bush administration, factors in Karzai's favor included his fluency in English and being the charismatic, photogenic, leader of an important Pashtun tribe, and a relative of Afghanistan's last king. No matter how wise a choice Karzai may have appeared, prematurely placing the U.S. imprimatur on him as Afghanistan's interim leader denied the _loya jirga_ ownership of the process, further reducing their already low investment in making a new national government viable.

The third major misstep, compounding previous difficulties, was pretending that the Afghan national elections that formally elected Hamid Karzai president represented genuine progress toward democracy. International voices widely echoed the pretense. Yet widespread electoral fraud resulted in a twice-postponed election that was more sham than substance, a process intended to create the illusion but not reality of democracy in Afghanistan. Sixty-five percent of Afghans polled before the election reported that they would vote as tribal leader directed. Afghans widely attributed Karzai's electoral victory to heavy-handed U.S. intervention in the allegedly democratic process, severely undercutting the credibility of Karzai and his government.

Karzai's government postponed the 2009 national elections scheduled for April until August. His term as President ended May 22, 2009, leaving Afghanistan legally without a president after that date. The August 2009 election, characterized by much fraud, was indecisive. The Afghan election commission subsequently declared Karzai reelected and cancelled the run-off election, scheduled for November 2009, when the opposition candidate withdrew. The Afghan parliamentary elections held in September 2010, after an unconstitutional delay, similarly entailed much fraud, and were indecisive.

Regime change has occurred, but few knowledgeable analysts believe that Afghanistan today enjoys democracy, effective government, or is steadily moving toward establishing economic prosperity or healthy social conditions. Karzai's popularity has plummeted because of a "quartet of woes that blight the lives of ordinary people in one of the world's poorest countries: insecurity, chronic unemployment, crippling food prices and endemic corruption." Allied efforts in 2009 to force a restructuring of the Afghan government reinforced the prevalent Afghan perception of Karzai as an "American stooge." Top-down imposition of a government, especially an honest government that delivers services, is impractical in Afghanistan's bottom-up environment.

The U.S. conquest and occupation of Afghanistan has achieved little progress toward establishing a greater level of economic justice. Decades of combat have destroyed what little infrastructure — roads, public utilities, education, and the legal system, to name only four critical components — Afghanistan once had and inhibited routine maintenance of what survives. Although by some indicators the quality of life in Afghanistan has improved (availability of health care and education, e.g.), the percentage of Afghans who think that their overall living conditions are good fell precipitously from eighty-five percent in October 2005 to sixty two percent in January 2009.

Rugged mountains physically separate many tribal areas from one another, preventing an easy flow of commerce and hindering social interaction between groups. The grievous inadequacy or complete absence of basic public infrastructure amplifies Afghanistan's geographic challenges. By way of illustration, in 2005 Afghanistan had connected an abysmally low six percent of its area to its electricity grid. In the absence of significant natural resources, economic development, and the rule of law, most Afghan government funding comes from either donor nations or the illegal drug trade. Even if a functional tax collection system existed, it would produce grossly insufficient revenue to fund an effective government able to deliver minimally essential services because most Afghans eke out their subsistence, earning piteously little taxable income.

Post-conquest, cultivation of opium poppies and illegal drug production surged. When the Taliban regime fell, factories for processing opium poppies into heroin began opening in Afghanistan (previously, most factories were in Pakistan). Reliance on opium poppies and heroin criminalized the economy and corrupted officials. Afghanistan's constitution guaranteed women twenty-five percent of Parliament's seats, but few women would run and the government took few steps to change the plight of women. In fact, drug lords control many of the seats that women nominally hold. Endemic poverty, the lack of a viable economy, ethnic rivalry, and the absence of a strong central government all contribute to Afghanistan's continuing dependence on the illegal drug trade.

Meanwhile, U.S. led and funded efforts to rebuild Afghanistan that began in 2002 have burned through a total of almost thirty billion dollars but achieved little: "The rebuilding — or building, in many cases — of the shattered Afghan infrastructure stalled almost immediately in a morass of bureaucratic inefficiency and flagrant corruption." Outside the major cities, expensive projects run by foreigners typically floundered, producing few results. Since 2001, Kabul has experienced an unprecedented building boom and explosive population growth. Yet even there the government has been unable to provide electricity and other basic services. Although the capital was awash in money, civil servants and teachers went unpaid. Training of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police lagged, in part because corrupt commanders pocketed payrolls. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the country, yet the most visible signs of the country's new wealth were the massive SUVs that clogged Kabul's dusty streets, garish mansions erected by corrupt government officials, and the fancy restaurants where well-paid Westerners drank imported alcohol and dined on imported food.

Improving Afghanistan's infrastructure has proven exceedingly tough; changing the Afghan culture represents a far more difficult task. U.S. intelligence agencies in the autumn of 2008 prepared a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Afghanistan was in a downward spiral of increasing chaos and violence spurred by rampant corruption and attacks by militants operating from Pakistan.

The reality of Afghanistan's weak, ineffective central government sharply clashes with the widely publicized U.S. goal of establishing security and the rule of law. This glaring disparity further eroded Afghan cooperation with the government. _Buzkashi_ is an Afghan game played on horseback in which the riders, including traditional Afghan leaders, vie for possession of a goat carcass. A "buzkashi mentality" characterizes Afghan national life, borrowing from the game the idea that a leader should "not attempt to use or display your authority unless you're sure you can pull it off, or risk losing what authority you possess." In other words, leaders who achieve their objectives accrue more power; those who attempt to exercise power and fail, tend to lose what power they had. Neither the interim nor the elected government ever established internal security or the rule of law for very long, or very far, beyond Kabul's city limits.

Ten years after the U.S. conquest, Afghanistan still lacks the basic institutions necessary for sustainable and fair legal justice (law, courts with judges and lawyers, police, prisons). Banditry and warlordism are again rife: "The truth is that Afghans missed the Taliban almost before they were gone because of the post invasion resurgence of banditry in rural Afghanistan." In some areas of Afghanistan, Afghans fear the national police more than they fear the Taliban. The Afghan army has made some progress toward effectiveness, but has major problems with soldiers' unauthorized absences (especially during Ramadan and the winter), enforcing discipline, and good unit organization. Individual Afghans, by heritage and experience, tend to fight as superb guerrilla warriors rather than coordinated cogs in a modern warfighting machine.

As in Iraq, U.S. and NATO military personnel trained as warfighters have brought the wrong training, skills, and equipment to the task of law enforcement in Iraq. Large numbers of Afghans, witnessing their occupiers disregard the law, "are now as afraid of foreign and national government forces as they are of the Taliban." U.S. tactics inevitably invite comparing U.S. occupiers to the detested Soviets, increasingly alienate Afghans, and accelerate the rate of Afghan attacks on their U.S. occupiers.

In 2010, the Obama administration changed the direction of its Afghan strategy, deciding to "surge" the level of U.S. and NATO forces by 30,000 troops, similar to the 2007-2008 allegedly successful troop surge in Iraq. The other NATO nations, most of which did not meet their existing commitments, declined to increase the number of their combat personnel in Afghanistan. The U.S. strategy also called for developing "village defense groups," adapting another tactic from Iraq. These village defense groups, paid by the U.S., are an effort to substitute money for bullets. They would hopefully provide timely information and combat assistance against insurgents and terrorists.

The surge proposal met substantial Afghan resistance because of fears that village defense forces will enflame rather than dampen hostile rivalries among Afghan groups. Afghan opposition to increased foreign troop levels, partially an expression of Afghan xenophobia, presumes that the United States will continue to wage a risk-transfer war, protecting its own forces at the cost of Afghan "collateral damage." Eight in ten Afghans surveyed in January 2009 objected to military operations that relied on airstrikes. Even President Karzai joined the chorus of voices who oppose utilizing overwhelming firepower. U.S. military leaders have finally recognized the problems with these tactics.

Efforts to establish justice — distributive, commutative, and legal — in Afghanistan have floundered badly: "Overall, 'nation building' in Afghanistan has so far produced only a puppet president dependent for his survival on foreign mercenaries, a corrupt and abusive police force, a 'nonfunctioning' judiciary, a burgeoning criminal layer, and a deepening social and economic crisis." As early as 2003, the interim central government's inability to provide nationwide stability and internal security was painfully apparent. Since then, tribal leaders, warlords, and bandit gangs aided by Afghanistan's geography, poverty, lack of basic infrastructure, and population diversity have reasserted themselves. Through increased levels of violence and other means, these centrifugal actors reestablished and sometimes expanded their spheres of influence.

To achieve progress in establishing justice in Afghanistan, the U.S. and NATO must implement culturally and contextually appropriate policies and programs, designed to achieve incremental rather than revolutionary change. Afghans tend to respect persons based on ethnic, tribal, and religious identity rather than endeavoring to treat all people with equal dignity and worth, values integral not only to Christianity but also to Islam. Afghans commonly fear ill treatment from a government dominated by hostile groups. They generally prefer a weak central government in conjunction with largely autonomous local rule, even if the latter is by a despotic warlord or unelected tribal leaders but of the same ethnicity, tribe, or religious sect as the local population.

Thus, Afghans — speaking through their leaders (warlords, tribal, ethnic, and religious) — might reject secular democracy, form a weak Islamic central government, and adopt sharia. Given Afghanistan's long and pervasive Islamic heritage, Afghanis' apparent preference for moderate versions of sharia, and the unpopularity of the Taliban's Islamism, this choice would most likely produce a middle of the road Muslim nation. Such a nation might improve commutative justice locally by fostering respect within and between communities, enhance legal justice through greater trust in government officials, and achieve greater distributive justice with less corruption. Such a nation might also be a bulwark against, instead of a hothouse for, Islamist activity.

#### c. Exercise ecological responsibility

Exercising ecological responsibility represents a largely unaddressed agenda that, if addressed, would prevent untold casualties, contribute to future Afghan stability, and potentially improve the quality of life for many Afghans. Afghanistan is one of the most heavily armed and mined countries in the world, with hundreds of thousands of pieces of unexploded ordnance. This problem continues to grow as military operations expend vast amounts of ordnance and the occupiers transfer large quantities of arms to Afghan units. For example, the U.S. alone expended a million pounds of bombs in Afghanistan between January and September 2007. Inexcusably, the U.S. military has lost track of about one third of all weapons shipped to Afghanistan, some certainly now in the wrong hands. At a minimum, the U.S. and the Afghan government more fully exercising ecological responsibility requires better controlling the distribution of and access to government arms, ramping up programs to destroy surplus ordnance and disarm private forces, and vigorous efforts to locate and make safe unexploded, expended munitions.

Decades of war have almost assuredly caused significant environmental damage, e.g., actual or potential contamination of watersheds. The U.S., in conjunction with other nations that want to assist Afghanistan, could beneficially conduct surveys to identify environmental hazards, propose solutions or remediation suitable for local implementation, and then fund local governments or Afghan businesses to implement the recommendations. Relying on local governments and businesses should be less expensive than hiring foreign contractors, gives locals a stake in the project's success, and helps to ensure reliance on locally sustainable technology.

#### d. Engage multinational commitment and support

When Afghanistan failed to embrace democracy immediately following the overthrow of the Taliban regime, U.S. expectations of a brief jus post bellum phase began to lengthen substantially. The need for additional military and nation building resources became pressing in the face of increasing violence and spreading rebellion. Only then did the U.S. turn to its NATO allies for assistance. NATO's involvement varied widely among its members. Some nations refused to contribute personnel or resources; some nations contributed only non-personnel resources; some nations that sent personnel imposed firm limits on what they could and could not do.

The number of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan never approached the 20:1 ratio strategists generally believe necessary for effective counterinsurgency operations. Regular personnel rotations further handicapped the mission. In early 2012, France — the fourth largest contributor of troops to the Afghanistan mission, although not a member of NATO — announced that it would withdraw its troops by the end of the year. France's president made the announcement in a joint appearance with President Karzai, who publicly expressed his approval and desire for the occupation to end a year early.

Historically, Afghanistan's occupiers controlled only cities, not the countryside. Eventually, the invaders would lose control of the cities in remote, rugged, and rural Afghanistan, unable to prevent Afghans from preying upon and disrupting vital logistic links. The U.S. has controlled only the cities; in response, the Taliban and other Pashtun groups appear to have adopted the traditional strategy. Attacks on U.S. and NATO convoys entering Afghanistan from Pakistan via the Khyber Pass have successfully disrupted resupply of essential material as well as items like chips and soft drinks.

To ease initial logistic difficulties, the U.S. rented air bases in adjoining Central Asian Muslim countries. This American presence caused some Muslims to fear an expanding U.S. imperialism. However, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have both evicted the U.S. from airbases used for logistical support of the Afghan occupation. Russia, China, and Iran seem unlikely to lease the U.S. an airbase to support operations in Afghanistan. Sustaining a large force in Afghanistan without a nearby airbase will strain, perhaps exceed, U.S. airlift capacity.

Critically, the United States and Pakistan have not worked together as trusted allies during the Afghan war's jus post bellum phase. For instance, Pakistan has at times refused to permit vital U.S. logistics to flow through Pakistan to landlocked Afghanistan. U.S. actions consistently seem to indicate that the U.S. does not understand Pakistan's internal politics and problems. Unsurprisingly in view of that distrust and misunderstanding, the two nations have cooperated ineffectually and, at times, clandestinely undermined the other's efforts.

Pakistan can presently do little to aid U.S. and NATO efforts to rebuild Afghanistan. Tensions are high between the Pakistani military, led by officers with Islamist sympathies if not ties, and the more religiously moderate elected government. Many Pakistanis are angry with the U.S. because Predator attacks in Pakistan have killed numerous noncombatants. Pakistan also perceives a U.S. bias in favor of archrival India. Obtaining permission from Pakistan's elected government for future Predator strikes is problematic; the military, however, might approve future attacks, hoping to strengthen links with the U.S. military, important in the event of another military coup in Pakistan. By refraining from actions that symbolically convey support for Pakistan's military at the expense of Pakistan's elected government, the U.S. may afford Pakistani leaders time to strengthen its fragile democracy, keep its government from becoming too closely aligned with Islamists, and provide the greatest long-term stability in that nuclear armed country.

The U.S. has failed to persuade other Muslim nations to participate in rebuilding Afghanistan in any significant manner. Post 9/11 support for the U.S. has become animosity. Muslim nations, in view of GWII and the Afghan war, are leery of U.S. intentions and actions, some Muslim leaders even wondering publicly which Islamic nation the U.S. will invade next. Engaging multinational commitment and support presumes mutual trust and respect between nations. The United States can profitably foster such relationships with moderate Muslim nations (e.g., Indonesia and some African nations) by recognizing the limits of what its Afghanistan occupation can realistically achieve, soliciting Muslim aid in culturally and contextually appropriate disarmament, infrastructure rebuilding, and economic development initiatives.

#### e. Progress toward closure

A decade after invading, the U.S. remains mired in Afghanistan. Progress toward closure has occurred mainly because the American public, and other NATO governments and their citizens, have wearied of the war, frustrated by the obvious lack of headway in nation building. Progress toward the ostensibly laudatory jus post bellum goal of establishing an effective government for Afghanistan that respects its citizens and provides them with improved levels of commutative, distributive, and legal justice has proven disappointingly elusive. This 2004 assessment remains disturbingly accurate: "The conditions that the people and the society live under are a true representation of a failed state — where 'anarchy is fuelled by irrational hatreds and the overall situation is characterized by vicious human rights abuse perpetrated by the mad and the bad.'"

President Obama has publicly announced his intention to _draw down_ (probably an intentionally ambiguous phrase) U.S. troop levels by 2014. His second Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, has suggested that U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan will end in 2013. Separately, U.S. military leaders have publicly stated that the U.S. will need to maintain a significant military presence in Afghanistan for years. Perhaps this military presence will prop up Afghanistan's civilian government, training Afghan forces to defend against not only a resurgent Taliban but also warlords and others. Perhaps this military presence will conduct operations against al Qaeda and other Afghanistan based international terrorists. Perhaps the U.S. military presence will perform both missions. But unless the U.S. and its allies adopt policies more aligned with the jus post bellum criteria, extending the military presence appears likely to achieve little or no forward movement toward building a more just and enduring peace in Afghanistan. Indeed, one commentator warns, "The U.S. failure to secure this region [Afghanistan and Pakistan] may well lead to global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and a drug epidemic on a scale that we have not yet experienced and I can only hope we never will."

Richard Parker, in his excellent biography of John Kenneth Galbraith, traces Galbraith's opposition to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam from the earliest U.S. decisions to deploy troops there to the war's end. Galbraith frequently visited Vietnam and focused on Southeast Asia policy issues during his two-year stint as U.S. ambassador to India in the Kennedy administration. Early in the Vietnam escalation, Galbraith requested that U.S. military leaders explain, and thereby justify, what increasing the number of U.S. troops beyond the eight to ten thousand then in Vietnam would accomplish that those eight to ten thousand plus the quarter million troops in the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN) could not accomplish. If the force already in Vietnam was unable to defeat the Viet Cong, Galbraith insightfully concluded that the real problem was something other than insufficient military force.

In retrospect, Galbraith was correct. Insufficient force was not the primary problem. The real issue was that the South Vietnamese government never won the hearts and minds of its populace. Popular support enabled the Communists to win. Some U.S. military analysts vehemently reject this conclusion, arguing that political restraints on the U.S. military made it impossible to defeat the Viet Cong (VC) and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Presume for a moment that those political restraints had not existed, that the U.S. had employed whatever methods, force, and funds were necessary to defeat the VC and NVA. Victory would have found the U.S. occupying a country with substantial environmental and infrastructure damage inhabited by an antagonistic and resentful people. Galbraith sagaciously recognized that the South Vietnamese government's corruption and ARVN's inability to defeat the VC and NVA, in spite of substantial infusions of U.S. equipment and trainers, were symptoms of underlying problems that made Vietnam an inherent "no-win" situation for the United States.

The parallels between Galbraith's perceptive analysis of U.S. engagement in Vietnam and the state of affairs in Afghanistan in 2012 are striking. The notoriously corrupt Karzai government controls little of Afghanistan outside Kabul. After eleven years of training and logistical support, the Afghan Army remains far from being a viable fighting force. For many Afghan soldiers, ethnic, tribal, and sectarian loyalties still take precedence over national identity, severely limiting their Army's integrity, cohesiveness, and potential as a fighting force. Meanwhile, forces opposing the government proliferate and grow stronger.

The quality of the individual Afghan Army soldier as a fighter is not the problem. By all reports, Afghan soldiers live up to their tradition of fierceness and courage under fire. Nor do they face an enemy who has overwhelming firepower, training, numbers, or logistical support. U.S. and NATO contributions of air support, trainers, and supplies have given the Afghan Army superiority with respect to each of those factors.

The problem is that Afghans simply want all foreigners to leave Afghanistan, their deeply xenophobic nation. Tellingly, a January 2009 ABC News poll showed that the percentage of Afghans who believe attacks on foreigners (Americans and NATO) are justifiable had doubled since 2006. In the same poll, the percentage of Afghans rating the performance of U.S. and Afghan military forces positively plummeted from sixty-eight percent in 2005 to just thirty-two percent. Those statistics are even more appalling when one recognizes that cultural factors probably skewed Afghan responses to yield a more favorable picture than truly exists. Angry at NATO and U.S. failures, Afghans are increasingly turning to the Taliban, whom they dislike, as the best hope for evicting Afghanistan's occupiers. Many Afghan soldiers similarly want the U.S. and NATO to leave Afghanistan. Since 2007, and with mounting frequency, Afghan soldiers have attacked their U.S. and NATO colleagues dozens of times. "'The sense of hatred is growing rapidly,' said an Afghan Army colonel. He described his troops as 'thieves, liars and drug addicts,' but also said that the Americans were 'rude, arrogant bullies who use foul language.'"

Outsiders, no matter how well intentioned, cannot solve Afghanistan's problems until Afghans widely welcome the assistance; the U.S. experience in Vietnam poignantly underscores this reality. In the meantime, Afghanistan endures as a place impossible to conquer. Bringing this unjust war to as just an ending as possible requires that NATO and the United States expeditiously end most of their Afghan nation building programs and initiatives, minimizing a futile and immoral waste of funds and lives.

Any continuing military presence in Afghanistan should have a single mission: tracking down, apprehending for trial if feasible and killing if unable to apprehend, international terrorism suspects. In other words, the United States, hopefully with permission from Afghanistan's government, should base troops in Afghanistan solely to conduct operations similar to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Human and other intelligence assets, rather than military patrols, can collect critical targeting information without alienating the local populace and at a lower cost in lives and other resources.

#  CONCLUSION

He shall judge between many peoples,

and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war any more;

but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,

and no one shall make them afraid;

_for the mouth of the_ _Lord_ _of hosts has spoken._ (Micah 4:3-4)

One reason that I retired from the Navy when I did was to have the freedom to advocate for peace by protesting against wars that I believed to be unjust, including the U.S. invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, most of the information that I learned from U.S. military personnel returning stateside from duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, set in the context of what I knew about those two countries, confirmed the broad outline of my analysis and suggested that the wars would not end well.

Sadly, time has proven my initial assessments correct. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have done little to establish justice or a fuller approximation of peace. In the beginning, I sometimes felt like the Psalmist (e.g., Psalm 120:6-7), that I dwelt among people who preferred war to peace. With the passing of years and GWII's unsatisfactory conclusion and a similar ending looming for the war in Afghanistan, the American public's attitude finally seems to be shifting against supporting the wars as just and easy victories.

Unlike the post-Vietnam era, people publicly honor Gulf War and Afghanistan veterans for their sacrificial service. They correctly distinguish between warriors and the war. But, like in the post-Vietnam era, veterans increasingly perceive these wars as futile, having cost more in money and casualties than the participants could afford and gained them, the nation, or the world little in return.

General George Washington, in his first Presidential Address, said, "To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace." In the post-Cold War era, the United States spends more on its military forces ($673 billion in fiscal year 2010) than do the next fifteen countries combined, almost 6 times as much as China and 12 times as much as Russia. Given that level and scale of expenditure, the U.S. ought to be adequately prepared to defend itself against any aggressor. The world today "is a remarkably safe and secure place. It is a world with fewer violent conflicts and greater political freedom than at virtually any other point in human history."

Nevertheless, many federal budget battles and almost every U.S. Congressional and Presidential campaign include strident calls for increased defense spending. Elected leaders, opinion makers, and special interest groups repeatedly voice concerns that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over-extended U.S. military personnel, depleted stocks of munitions, and wore out vital equipment. They also warn that China, with its burgeoning economy and growing military might, seems increasingly poised to threaten the West.

Concurrently, globalization — characterized by expanding webs of economic and cultural links between nations — combined with the increased destructiveness of modern weapons, has created strong incentives for nations to avoid fighting another total war similar to WWII. Since WWII, the number and magnitude of wars have decreased. The number of people killed in armed conflicts each decade since the 1950s has trended steadily downwards. Imperial conquests have diminished. Disputes between nations more commonly have led to extended armed standoffs, as in Korea and on the West Bank, than to war. Developed nations have used surrogates to avoid direct confrontations, as the Soviet Union did against the U.S. in Vietnam and the U.S. did when it aided the Afghan mujahidin against the Soviets. Indeed, two developed nations have not fought each other in direct combat since WWII. Repeated border skirmishes, as in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, have also not grown into full-scale wars. More recently, wars have tended to have a limited geographic scope, most often being a revolution or insurrection within a single nation. The U.S. invasion of Iraq may have been the world's last, or nearly the last, large ground war.

War obviously remains possible. Continuing nuclear proliferation may actually have heightened the specter of nuclear attack, as additional nations develop WMD and non-state actors continue their efforts to procure WMD, perhaps reversing the declining trend in the number of wars over the last sixty years.

Consequently, striving for progress toward building peace is more important than ever. President Washington implicitly equated the absence of hostilities with peace. From a Christian perspective, a perspective shared by Jews and Muslims, the absence of armed conflict inadequately defines peace. Properly understood, peace connotes the fullness of human flourishing and not merely an armed truce.

On the one hand, Christian peacemakers rightly reject every call to conduct a holy war or crusade. Confident of God's love for all people, Christians know that God does not command war against any nation or religion. Yet, war, at times, becomes an unavoidable and necessary evil, but always a last resort. God greatly prefers that God's people employ plows, not swords.

On the other hand, Christian peacemakers also reject tempting calls for unilateral disarmament. Such calls invite attack and, if heeded, would further destabilize an already unstable world. However, the essential and varied witness of pacifists reminds Christians to resist the powerfully seductive allure of war and militarism. Nations should spend no more on national defense than absolutely necessary. Peacemaking — forging swords into plows — requires much long, hard, and costly effort. Christians, Muslims, and Jews know that peacemaking is the ultimate defense against war.

For Christians, Just War Theory charts an essential _via media_ — middle way — between the morally unacceptable extremes of holy war and pacifism. The jus ad bellum criteria establish a set of principles for assessing the justness of a potential or actual conflict. The jus in bello criteria give those who actually wage war, or who weigh the morality of combat, guidelines for determining the just conduct of war. The jus post bellum criteria offer a model both for assessing post-war progress toward peace and for shaping post-war policies and programs likely to contribute toward building peace. Christian Just War Theory has much in common with both the Jewish and Islamic perspectives on war. Consequently, Christians can beneficially pursue interfaith efforts to limit war, restrain unjust conduct during wars, and build a durable peace when the fighting ends.

Reviewing the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq through the wide-angle Christian lens of Just War Theory explained how and why this unjust war moved the world away from peace. The analysis of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan examined why this was an unjust war and then used Just War Theory's jus post bellum criteria to suggest directions that the U.S. and its allies might take to minimize, if not reverse, the regress from peace the war caused. The legacies of both wars — in deaths, destruction, and, perhaps most critically, in a more destabilized world — are agonizing reminders of why Christian peacemakers work to forge swords into plows, reluctantly waging war only as a last resort to prevent egregious evil from prevailing over justice.

Cornel West has observed that poverty and paranoia eventually undermined every democratic project. The unjust U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq convey a genuine sense of paranoia about terrorism. The final, total cost of both wars will exceed $2 trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. Regrettably, that huge financial burden has done far more to impoverish the average American than to enrich the average Afghani or Iraqi. Poverty and paranoia pose real threats to democracy and flourishing in the United States and to the quest for peace. No amount of money can restore the lives of those killed; thousands more will live out their days with physical and mental scars received during the wars.

Peace without justice is impossible. Ethics, therefore, inherently shape any viable path toward peace. The Christian gospel calls Jesus' disciples to live into the ethic that Jesus lived, confident that God will bless their endeavors, bringing the world closer to the realization of the fullness of peace on earth. Just War Theory, revised to include jus post bellum criteria, provides practical guidance on how Christians can forge swords into plows and build a more peaceful world.

#  NOTES

. "Radio Address of the President to the Nation," 6 October 2001, accessed March 23, 2008 at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011006.html.

. Jean Bethke Elshtain, _Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World_ (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

. Stanley Hauerwas, Lecture on Pacifism, St. Michael's Episcopal Church, Raleigh, NC, May 9, 2007; Cornel West, _Democracy Matters_ (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 13.

. No standard, widely accepted definition differentiating ethics and morals exists; I therefore follow the common usage of employing the two terms, along with their various cognates, interchangeably.

. Osama bin Laden, "Letter to America," November 24, 2002, accessed February 18, 2008 at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver>.

. "Top U.S. Evangelist Targets Islam," BBC News, March 14, 2006, accessed March 23, 2008 at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4805952.stm>.

. "Falwell Sorry for Bashing Mohammed," CBS 60 Minutes, October 14, 2002, accessed March 23, 2008 at  http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/11/60minutes/main525316.shtml.

. John D. Carlson, "Winning Souls and Minds: The Military's Religion Problem and the Global War on Terror," _Journal of Military Ethics_ , Vol. 7 (Issue 2), pp. 85-98.

. This phrase is an allusion to Micah 4:3: "He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken."

. Andrew J. Bacevich, _The New American Militarism_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 2.

. Karl von Clausewitz, _On War_ , ed. A. Rapport, tr. J. J. Graham (London: Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 101, 119.

. For example, cf. Gerhard von Rad, _Holy War in Ancient Israel_ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).

. For a fuller description of what historians consider the most likely description of the events on which the Biblical account of the Exodus are based, consult John Bright, _A History of Israel_ (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972) or Bernhard Anderson, Stephen Bishop, Judith Newman, _Understanding the Old Testament_ , 5th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006).

. Anthony R. Cresko, _Introduction to the Old Testament_ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), p. 90.

. Cf. Genesis 1:26-27 and Acts 10:1-43. Also, cf., Jürgen Moltmann, _On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics_ , Douglas Meeks, tr. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), p. 12.

. For example, cf. the defeat mentioned in Judges 3:13 and the victory reported in Joshua 7-8.

. 1 Kings 22.

. L.E. Toombs, "War, Ideas of," _Interpreter's Dictionary of the B_ ible, ed. G. A. Buttrick (Nashville: Abingdon: 1962), Vol. 4, p. 800.

. Geza Vermes, _The Dead Sea Scrolls in English_ (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 122- 148.

. Exodus 15:3; Isaiah 42:13; Judith 9:7; 6:63. William Klassen, "War in the New Testament," _Anchor Bible Dictionary_ , ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), Vol. 6, pp. 869-870.

. Uriel Rappaport and Paul L. Redditt, "Maccabeus," _Anchor Bible Dictionary_ , ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), Vol. 4, p. 454. Roman Catholics and Anglicans regard these books as deuterocanonical (forming a secondary canon); Protestants and the Orthodox generally reject these books as not being part of the Bible.

. L. E. Toombs, "War, Ideas of," _Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible_ , Vol. 4, p. 799.

. Klassen, "War in the New Testament," _Anchor Bible Dictionary_ , Vol. 6, pp. 871-872, citing Revelation 17:14.

. C. John Cadoux, _The Early Christian Attitude to War_ (New York: Seabury, 1982).

. Roland H. Bainton, _Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace_ (Nashville: Abingdon, 1960), pp. 73-74, 66.

. Cadoux, p. 16.

. Samuel P. Huntington, _The Soldier and the State_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 387.

. Dwight D. Eisenhower, _Crusade in Europe_ (London: William Heinemann Limited, 1948).

. Os Guinness, _The American Hour_ (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 11.

. Ibid, pp. 52-54.

. Quoted in Kevin Phillips, _American Theocracy_ (New York: Viking, 2006), p. 207.

. Martin E. Marty, _Righteous Empire_ (New York: Dial Press, 1970), p. 198.

. Phillips, _American Theocracy_ , p. 207.

. Elton Trueblood, _Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish_ , excerpted and foreword by Alonzo L. McDonald, published as _Abraham Lincoln: The Spiritual Growth of a Public Man_ (Burke, VA: Trinity Forum, 1993), p. 17.

. Bacevich, _The New American Militarism_ , p. 146.

. Accessed at <http://www.warprayer.org/>.

. Kevin Phillips, _American Dynasty_ (New York: Viking Press, 2004), p. 231. Also, Bacevich, _The New American Militarism_ , pp.12-13.

. Annette Seegers, "South Africa: From Laager to Anti-Apartheid," _The New Conscientious Objection_ , ed. Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 130.

. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr," _New York Times_ , September 18, 2005, accessed 18 September 2005 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18schlesinger.html?ei=5070&en=706258e3360237ae&ex=1127620800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print.

. Abraham Lincoln, "Second Inaugural Address," March 4, 1865.

. Doris Kearns Goodwin, _Team of Rivals_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 462.

. Lee Griffith, _The War on Terror and the Terror of God_ (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), pp. 108-109.

. Michael Bess, _Moral Choices: Moral Dimensions of World War I_ (New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 105.

. Joseph L. Allen, _War: A Primer for Christians_ (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), pp. 13-15.

. For example, Jeremy Bentham, _Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation_ , pp. 21, accessed July 24, 2007 at <http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/bentham/morals.pdf>.

. Abraham Lincoln, "Second Inaugural Address," March 4, 1865.

. James F. Childress, "Pacifism," _The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics_ , ed. James F. Childress and John Macquarrie (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), p. 446.

. Joseph P. Healey, "Peace – Old Testament," _Anchor Bible Dictionary_ , ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), Vol. V, p. 207.

. William Klassen, "Peace – New Testament," _Anchor Bible Dictionary_ , Vol. V, pp. 207-208.

. Ibid, Vol. V, pp. 207-211.

. Quoted in Marcus Borg, _The Heart of Christianity_ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p. 133.

. Ibid, p. 132.

. Moltmann, _On Human Dignity_ , p. 136.

. Daryl Charles, _Between Pacifism and Jihad: Just War and Christian Tradition_ (InterVarsity Press), reviewed by Tobias Wright, "Hawks and doves," _Christian Century_ , December 12, 2006, p. 33.

. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, _The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, A Pastoral Letter on War and Peace_ , (Washington, D.C.: National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1983), p. ii.

. Ibid, § 116. John Cartwright and Susan Thistlewaite, "Support Nonviolent Direct Action," in _Just Peacemaking_ , Glen H. Stassen, ed. (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2008), p. 42. For a summary of Christian peacemaking activities, cf. David L. Clough and Brian Stiltner, _Faith and Force_ (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007), p. 67.

. Peter Brock and Nigel Young, _Pacifism in the Twentieth Century_ (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), pp. 338-355.

. Tobias Wright, "Hawks and doves," _Christian Century_ , December 12, 2006, p. 33, quoting John Paul II, _Centesimus Annus_.

. Childress has proposed a similar taxonomy, i.e., deontological, pragmatic (produces a net balance of good over bad consequences), redemptive (transformation through unmerited suffering), and technological pacifism (generally nuclear pacifism, a subset of one of the first three types depending upon its rationale). (James F. Childress, "Pacifism," _The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics_ , ed. James F. Childress and John Macquarrie (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), p. 447.) For a philosophical approach to pacifism based on a similar taxonomy, cf. Brian Orend, _The Morality of War_ (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2006), pp. 244-266.

. E.g., cf. this exposition of the Mennonite position, Herman A. Hoyt, "Nonresistance," _War: Four Christian Views_ , ed. Robert G. Clouse (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1981), pp. 31-58.

. Paul Ramsey, _Basic Christian Ethics_ (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1950), pp. 166-167.

. Bainton, p. 73.

. The contemporary Roman Catholic version of Just War Theory embodies this presumption (John Kleiderer, Paula Minaert, and Mark Mossa, _Just War, Lasting Peace_ (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2006), p. 20-29).

. Bainton, p. 82.

. Ibid, pp. 82-83.

. Bainton, p. 249.

. Billy Graham, "An Evangelist," _Peacemakers; Christian Voices from the New Abolitionist Movement_ , ed. Jim Wallis (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 21-27. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, _The Challenge of Peace_. For more on the concepts of proportionality and noncombatant immunity, cf. Chapter 3.

. Hans Kung, _On Becoming a Christian_ , tr. Edward Quinn (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1976), p. 189.

. Stanley Hauerwas, _Against the Nations_ (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 16.

. John Howard Yoder, _What Would You Do?_ 2nd ed. (Scottsdale, PA: Herald, 1992), p. 40.

. Stanley Hauerwas, "Pacifism," a lecture at St. Michael's Episcopal Church, Raleigh, NC, May 9, 2007.

. Bainton, p. 53.

. Malham M. Wakin, _Integrity First: Reflections of a Military Philosopher_ (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), p. 134.

. Klassen, "War in the New Testament," _Anchor Bible Dictionary_ , Vol. 6, p. 869.

. Kenneth Scott Latourette, _A History of Christianity_ , rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), Vol. 1, p. 85.

. Robert M. Grant, _The Thrust of the Christian Movement into the Roman World_ , p. 273, cited in Klassen, "War in the New Testament," _Anchor Bible Dictionary_ , Vol. 6, p. 873.

. Bainton, pp. 68, 73, 79-81.

. Cadoux, p. 243.

. Bainton, pp. 88-89.

. Cadoux, p. 256.

. Williston Walker, _A History of the Christian Church_ (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952), pp. 424-426.

. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, § 115.

. P.W. Singer, _Corporate Warriors_ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 22-23, 29-32.

. Bainton, p. 136.

. J.R.H. Moorman, _A History of the Church in England_ , 3rd ed. (London: A & C Black, 1980), p. 416.

. Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers II, "The Secularization of Conscience," _The New Conscientious Objection_ , pp. 28-32.

. Peter Brock, Varieties of Pacifism: A Survey from Antiquity to the Outset of the Twentieth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998), pp. 70-71.

. Ibid, p. 42.

. Wakin, p. 134; Peter C. Craigie, _The Problem of War in the Old Testament_ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), pp. 21-92.

. W. Gunther Plaut, _The Torah: A Modern Commentary_ (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981), p. 554-557.

. Stephen Noll, "Reading the Bible as the Word of God," _The Bible's Authority in Today's Church_ , ed. Frederick Houk Borsch (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1993), p. 133.

. Teresa Berger, "Ecumenism: Postconfessional? Consciously Contextual?" _Theology Today_ , Vol. 53, No. 2, July 1996, p. 219.

. John W. Coffey, "The American Bishops on War and Peace," _Parameters_ , December 1983, p. 31, quoting _The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response_ , p. 7.

. Brock, pp. 69-70.

. David Halberstam, _War in a Time of Peace_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 125-127, 294-298.

. G.E.M. Anscombe, "War and Murder," _Collected Philosophical Papers_ , Vol. III (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1981), pp.51-62; originally published in _Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience_ , ed. Walter Stein (London, UK: Merlin Press, 1961), pp.45-62.

. Shawn Francis Peters, _Judging Jehovah's Witnesses_ (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000), p. 106.

. Ibid, p. 192, 258, 260-284.

. Paul Ramsey, _The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility_ (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1983), p. 520.

. Perry C. Cotham, _Politics, Americanism, and Christianity_ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1976), p. 205.

. Richard Harries, "Application of Just War Criteria in the Period 1959-89," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , Richard Sorabji and David Rodin, ed. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), p. 224.

. J. Philip Wogaman, _Christian Perspectives on Politics_ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), p. 135.

. Bacevich, _The New American Militarism_ , p. 210.

. Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, _Cobra II_ (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), pp. 130-131.

. Peter W. Galbraith, _The End of Iraq_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 73.

. For a discussion of bridge building as Christian peacemaking, cf. Bruce Russett, "Advance Democracy, Human Rights, and Interdependence," in _Just Peacemaking_ , Glenn H. Stassen, ed. (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2008), pp. 116-131.

. Vali Nasr, _The Shia Revival_ (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), pp. 211-226.

. Micah Zenko and Michael A. Cohen, "Clear and Present Safety," _Foreign Affairs_ , Vol. 91, No. 2 (Mar-Apr 2012), 88. Kenneth Waltz, "Why Iran Should Get the Bomb," _Foreign Affairs_ , Vol. 91, No. 4 (July-Aug 2012), 2-5.

. Colin H. Kahl, "Not Time to Attack Iran," _Foreign Affairs_ , Vol. 91, No. 2 (Mar-Apr 2012), 166-173.

. Martin Van Creveld, _Defending Israe_ l (New York: St Martin's, 2004), p. 135. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, _The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 245.

. Andrew Fiala, _The Just War Myth_ (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), p. 20.

. Louise Richardson, _What Terrorists Want_ (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 159; Leslie H. Gelb, "GDP Now Matters More than Force," _Foreign Affairs_ , November-December 2010, p. 37.

. Ibid, pp. 227, 233.

. Ibid, p. 162.

. Craig Whitlock, "Homemade, Cheap, and Dangerous: Terror Cells Favor Simple Ingredients in Building Bombs," _Washington Post_ , July 5, 2007, p. A1, accessed July 6, 2007 at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/04/AR2007070401814_pf.html.

. Peter Chalk, Bruce Hoffman, Robert Reville, and Anna-Britt Kasupski, _Trends in Terrorism_ (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2005), pp. 11-38.

. Good lay introductions to these problems are Marcus J. Borg, _Jesus: A New Vision_ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987) and John Dominic Crossan, _Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography_ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994). For a more scholarly perspective, cf. John Dominic Crossan, _The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant_ (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).

. "Bible Widely Read but Ignorance Widespread, Survey Finds," _Washington Post_ , Sat Jan 12, 1991, B7.

. Elaine Pagels, _Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas_ (New York: Vintage, 2003); Crossan, _Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography_ , p. xi.

. _The Infancy Gospel of Thomas_ , Chapters 2, 4-5.

. Phillips, _American Theocracy_ , pp. 206-208; Bacevich, _The New American Militarism_ , pp. 12-13.

. Phillips, _American Theocracy_ , p. 219.

. Robert G. Clouse, ed. _War: Four Christian Views_ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1981), p. 16.

. Lee Griffith, _The War on Terror and the Terror of God_ (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), pp. 105-106.

. Angeliki Laiou, "The Just War of Eastern Christians and the holy war of the Crusaders," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , Richard Sorabji and David Rodin, ed. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), p. 35.

. Hauerwas, _Against the Nations_ , p. 196.

. Ibid, p. 66.

. George R. Edwards, _Jesus and the Politics of Violence_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 123-124.

. Reinhold Niebuhr, _An Interpretation of Christian Ethics_ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1963), pp. 63, 120-121.

. Reinhold Niebuhr, "Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist," in _The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses_ , Robert McAfee Brown, ed. (New Have: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 102-107.

. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf_ as excerpted by The Trinity Forum (Burke, VA: 1992), p. 23.

. Bainton, p. 240.

. Ibid, p. 84, referencing Eusebius, _Demonstratio Evangelica_ , Book I, Chapter 8, tr. W. J. Ferrar, accessed June 6, 2007 at <http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_de_03_book1.htm>.

. Rod Dreher, "Ministers of War," _National Review_ , March 10, 2003.

. John Rawls, _Political Liberation_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 58, quoted in David Lefkowitz, "On a Moral Right to Civil Disobedience," _Ethics_ , Vol. 117, January 2007, p. 230.

. John W. Coffey, "The American Bishops on War and Peace," _Parameters_ , December 1983, p. 31.

. Myron S. Augsburger, "A Christian Pacifist Response," _War: Four Christian Views_ , ed. Robert G. Clouse, p. 58.

. James Childress, _Moral Responsibility in Conflicts_ (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), p. 37.

. An earlier and expanded version of this section was published as George Clifford, "Legalizing Selective Conscientious Objection," _Public Reason_ , Vol. 3, No. 1 (2011), 22-38.

. The first three are from Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers II, "The Secularization of Conscience," _The New Conscientious Objection_ , Moskos and Chambers, ed., p. 5.

. Some of the thirteen colonies did allow people to pay a fee rather than serve in the militia, which was a mandatory duty for free males of certain ages (Brock, p. 45).

. Moskos and Chambers, pp. 23-26, 35-36, 43-46, 103-104, 110-111, 141-143, 154-155,

. Thomas Gumbleton, Raymond Hunthausen, Leroy Matthiesen, and Walter Sullivan, "Four Bishops," _Peacemakers; Christian Voices from the New Abolitionist Movement_ , ed. Wallis, pp. 30-32.

. Daniel Berrigan, "A Priest and a Poet," _Peacemakers; Christian Voices from the New Abolitionist Movement_ , ed. Wallis, pp. 147-154.

. James F. Childress, "Conscientious Objection," _The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics_ , ed. Childress and Macquarrie, p. 119.

. Childress, p. 199.

. Andre Gingerich, "A Draft Resister," _Peacemakers; Christian Voices from the New Abolitionist Movement_ , ed. Wallis, pp. 135-143.

. John Whiteclay Chambers II, "Conscientious Objectors and the American State from Colonial Times," _The New Conscientious Objection_ , ed. Moskos and Chambers, p. 39.

. Brock, pp. 69, 82.

. Douglas Morgan, _Adventism and the American Republic: The Public Involvement of a Major Apocalyptic Movement_ (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), pp. 90-96, 155-156.

. Thomas Merton, _The Seven Storey Mountain_ (by: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1948), pp. 312-313.

. Yoram Peri, "Conscientious Objection in a Democracy under Siege," _The New Conscientious Objection_ , ed. Moskos and Chambers, pp. 150-156.

. "Conscientious Objectors," Department of Defense Directive 1300.6 of May 5, 2007.

. Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers II, "Conclusion: The Secularization of Conscience Reconsidered," _The New Conscientious Objection_ , ed. Moskos and Chambers, p. 193.

. A formal process exists for enlisted personnel. Officers must submit their resignation from the service, stating conscientious objection as the reason.

. For a discussion of this problem, cf. C. H. Clancy and J. A. Weiss, "The Constitutional Objector Exemption: Problems in Conceptual Clarity and Constitutional Considerations," _Maine Law Review_ , Vol. 17 (1965), p. 155.

. Perhaps the best-known case of this genre was that of Mohammed Ali, convicted of resisting the draft in spite of his claim to be a selective conscientious objector during the Vietnam War (Childress, p 200). Christians rarely make a similar argument about killing other Christians. An exception, after the fact, is Fr. George Zabelka, who in 1945 was an Army chaplain assigned to Tinian where he ministered to the personnel who dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. He cites the killing of Christian nuns in Hiroshima as a primary factor in his post-war conversion to pacifism. (George Zabelka, "A Military Chaplain," _Peacemakers; Christian Voices from the New Abolitionist Movement_ , ed. Wallis, p. 16-18.).

. Michelle Tan, "Army Charges Officer Who Refused to Deploy to Iraq," _Army Times_ , 5 July 2005, accessed at www.armytimes.com; John Kifner and Timothy Egan, "Officer Faces Court-Martial for Refusing to Deploy to Iraq," _New York Times_ , 23 July 2006. "Ehren Watada, "Free at Last," accessed February 1, 2012 at <http://couragetoresist.org/ehren-watada.html>.

. Edwards, p. 120.

. Michael Walzer, _Just and Unjust Wars_ (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

. Edwards, p. 121.

. Ramsey, _The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility_ , pp. 94, 124-137; Edwards, p. 118; Arthur F. Holmes, "The Just War," _War: Four Christian Views_ , ed. Clouse, p. 129.

. Roger Wertheimer, "Reconnoitering Combatant Moral Equality," _Journal of Military Ethics_ , Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 64-65.

. Catholic Peace Fellowship Staff, "Selective Conscientious Objection: History, Theology, and Practice," _Sign of Peace_ , Vol. 4, No. 2 (2005 Spring), quoted in Tim Rietkerk, "The Duty of the Selective Conscientious Objector in a Values Based Army," _The Army Chaplaincy_ , Spring-Summer 2008, p. 73.

. Edwards, p. 119.

. Ramsey, _The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility_ , pp. 99-100.

. The panel's minority report made this point (Ramsey, _The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility_ , pp. 99-100).

. Childress, "Conscientious Objection," _The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics_ , ed. Childress and Macquarrie, p. 119; Moskos and Chambers, "Conclusion: The Secularization of Conscience Reconsidered," _The New Conscientious Objection_ , ed. Moskos and Chambers, p. 204.

. Brock and Young, pp. 45-47, 156-164, 166.

. Childress reaches a similar conclusion arguing from a philosophical rather than theological perspective ( _Moral Responsibility in Conflicts_ , pp. 191-219).

. Eric Patterson, _Just War Thinking: Morality and Pragmatism in the Struggle against Contemporary Threats_ (Lanham: Rowman & Martin, 2007), p. 12.

. Bainton, p. 88.

. This brief history emphasizes Just War Theory's Christian etiology and ignores its secular antecedents prior to the Enlightenment for the sake of brevity.

. Bainton, pp. 95-100.

. Ramsey, _The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility_ , p. 144.

. Thomas Aquinas, _The Summa Theologica_ , tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benziger Brothers ed. 1947), II2, Q40, Art. 1, accessed April 24, 2007 at <http://www.ccel.org/a/aquinas/summa/SS/SS040.html#SSQ40OUTP1>.

. Ibid, II2, Q40, Art. 2-4.

. For a contrary opinion, cf. James Turner Johnson, _The War to Oust Saddam Hussein_ (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 17, 35-36, 129-130.

. Ramsey, _The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility_.

. Walzer, _Just and Unjust Wars_ , p. xx.

. Kenneth Himes, OFM, quoted in Tobias Wright, "Hawks and Doves," _Christian Century_ , December 12, 2006, p. 34.

. Patrick A. Messina and Craig J.N. dePaulo, "The Influence of Augustine on the Development of Just War Theory," in _Augustinian Just War Theory and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq_ , Craig J.N. dePaulo, Patrick A. Messina, and Daniel P. Tompkins, ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 49.

. For Christian versions of Just War Theory consult: Bainton, pp. 33-43, 89-101; Hauerwas, _Against the Nations_ , pp. 135-136; Martin Cook, _The Moral Warrior_ (Albany NY: State University Press of New York, 2004), pp. 21-38; Ramsey, _The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility_ ; Robert W. Brimlow, _What About Hitler?_ (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2006), pp. 39-40; Thomas A. Shannon, _What Are They Saying About Peace and War?_ (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983), pp. 3-81; _War: Four Christian Views_ , ed. Clouse, pp. 117-135. For secular versions, consult Walzer, _Just and Unjust Wars_ ; Childress, pp. 63-94.

. Cook, _The Moral Warrior_ , p. 32.

. Ramsey, _The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility_ , p. 43.

. Intriguingly, the Bible provides a precedent that suggests preserving national unity does not justify war: The prophet Shemaiah counseled King Rehoboam not to wage war against the ten tribes that seceded from the twelve tribes of Israel ruled by the house of Judah in order to restore national unity (1 Kings 12:21-24). The disintegration of Israel's unity, given Israel's actual history, is less startling than if one accepts the Biblical narrative at face value. Just War Theory debates have appropriately ignored this incident.

. Harfiyah Abdel Haleem, Oliver Ramsbotham, Saba Risaluddin, and Brian _Wicker, The Crescent and the Cross: Muslim and Christian Approaches to War and Peace_ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), p. 123.

. C. A. J. Coady, _The Ethics of Armed Humanitarian Intervention_ (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2002), pp. 20-31.

. Walzer, _Just and Unjust Wars_ , pp. 91-95.

. Henry Paolucci, ed., _The Political Writings of St. Augustine_ (Chicago: Regenery Gateway, 1962), p. 164.

. Spanish priest and theologian Francisco de Vitoria similarly argued that economic causes do not constitute just cause, citing the example of King Philip's wars against Native Americans. (Arthur F. Holmes, "The Just War," _War: Four Christian Views_ , ed. Clouse, p. 128).

. Moltmann, _On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics_ , , p. 28; Philip J. Wogaman, _Christian Perspectives on Politics_ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); Cotham, pp. 219-241; Michael Novak, _The Universal Hunger for Liberty_ (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 90.

. The lack of democracy, religious freedom, and failure to protect private property are insufficient causes for a just war (Fiala, p. 123).

. Walzer, _Just and Unjust Wars_ , p. 153.

. Shannon E. French, _The Code of the Warrior_ (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 236.

. U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 2 and Article I, Section 8.

. Peter Huchthausen, _America's Splendid Little Wars_ (New York: Viking, 2003), p.75.

. For example, Kleiderer, Minaert, and Mossa, _Just War, Lasting Peace_ , pp. 20-29.

. Coady, p. 32. For a dissenting opinion, cf. Johnson, _The War to Oust Saddam Hussein_ , pp. 127-131.

. Richard Helms with William Hood, _A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency_ (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 300-301.

. Childress, p. 126.

. The U.N. Millennium Development Goals are: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; develop a global partnership for development (accessed July 10, 2007 at <http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/>).

. Cf. Oliver O'Donovan, _The Just War Revisited_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 99-102.

. Economic sanctions, for example, may widely violate the jus in bello principle of noncombatant immunity (Orend, pp. 57-58.). The U.N. imposed economic sanctions on Iraq may have resulted in as many as seven hundred thousand deaths, of which perhaps 227,000 were children, through malnutrition and lack of health care, a death toll heightened by Saddam's mismanagement and misappropriation of funds (Hassan Qazwini, _American Crescent_ (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 174; Clough and Stiltner, p. 186).

. Walter Pincus, "Missile Strike Carried Out With Yemeni Cooperation: Official Says Operation Authorized Under Bush Finding," _Journal of Military Ethics_ , Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 227-229. Also, Johnson, _The War to Oust Saddam Hussein_ , pp. 72-75.

. For a dissenting view on the necessity of the Six Day War as a preemptive strike, cf. Mearsheimer and Walt, p. 85.

. Ramsey, _The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility_ , pp. 61-69. Daniel P. Tompkins, "The Question of Just War Theory and the Augustinian Caveat Praeemptor," in _Augustinian Just War Theory and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq_ , dePaulo, Messina, and Tompkins, ed., pp. 145-146.

. Walzer, _Just and Unjust Wars_ , p. 74.

. Randall R. Dipert, "Preventive War and the Epistemological Dimension of the Morality of War," _Journal of Military Ethics_ , Vol. 5, No. 1 (2006), pp. 32-54.

. Walzer, _Just and Unjust Wars_ , pp. 251-255.

. Ibid, p. 78.

. Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: _The Life and Times of Robert McNamara_ (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1993), p. 359.

. Karl von Clausewitz, _On War_ , quoted in Clouse, ed., _War: Four Christian Views_ , p. 22.

. For a quantitative analysis comparing the death toll from the nuclear weapons employed in WWII against Japan to the projected death toll from other options (e.g., continuing the maritime blockade of Japan or invading Japan's home islands), cf. Bess, pp. 198-254. Bess's analysis also raises questions about the extensive degree to which the Japanese government sought to involve the civilian population as combatants in the event of invasion. Yet more difficult to estimate, but an essential element of the proportionality calculation, is the amount of noncombatant suffering caused by an invasion vs. that caused by use of the nuclear weapons.

. Paul von Zielbauer, "Marines' Trials in Iraq Killings are Withering," _New York Times_ , August 30, 2007 accessed August 30, 2007 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/world/middleeast/30haditha.html?R=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print.

. John Hersey, _Hiroshima_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).

. Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," accessed April 27, 2007 at <http://poetry.eserver.org/light-brigade.html>.

. "Code of the U.S. Fighting Force," Army Pamphlet 360-512, of 1June 1988, p. 5. Accessed April 27, 2007 at <http://www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/p360_512.pdf>.

. The full texts of the Geneva Conventions, with commentaries, are available at <http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/CONVPRES?OpenView>.

. Bess, pp. 88-110.

. The U.S. Roman Catholic bishops in their pastoral statement came close to this position (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, §146-169).

. Cook, _The Moral Warrior_ , p. 127.

. Mark Bowden, _Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War_ (New York: Penguin, 1999).

. Michael Ignatieff, _The Warrior's Honor_ (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), p. 99.

. Orend, p. 94.

. Dieter Blumenwitz, "The Future World Order: The implications of the War in Iraq on International Law," in _Augustinian Just War Theory and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq_ , dePaulo, Messina, and Tompkins, ed., p. 147.

. Thomas P. M. Barnett, _The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century_ (New York: Berkley Books, 2004), p. 326.

. John Julian Norwich, _Absolute Monarchs_ (New York: Random House, 2011), p. 465.

. Thomas E. Ricks, _Fiasco_ (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 59.

. Ibid, p. 59.

. Walzer, _Just and Unjust Wars_ , pp. 18-22; _Arguing About War_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 162-168. The first proposal for jus post bellum came from Michael J. Schuck, "When the Shooting Stops: Missing Elements in Just War Theory," _Christian Century_ , 26 October 1994, pp. 982-984.

. Wogaman, _Christian Perspectives on Politics_ , p. 135.

. Glenn H. Stassen, et.al., "Just Peacemaking as the New Ethic for Peace and War," in _Just Peacemaking_ , Glenn H. Stassen, ed. (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2008), p. 22.

. For a philosophical development of the jus post bellum model presented in this section, cf. George Clifford, "Jus Post Bellum: Foundational Principles and a Proposed Model," _Journal of Military Ethics_ , Vol. 11, No. 1 (2012), 42-57.

. William McKinley quoted in Henry Steel Commager, "Ethics, Virtue, and Foreign Policy," in Ethics and International Relations: Ethics in Foreign Policy, vol. 2, ed. Kenneth W. Thompson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1985), 127–137, quoted in Coady, p. 8.

. Richard Sorabji, "Just War from Ancient Origins to the Conquistadors Debate and its Modern Relevance," in: Richard Sorabji and David Rodin, eds., _The Ethics of War_ , p. 22 citing Vitoria, _On the Law of War_ , Q. 2, Art. 5.

. Richard H. Schultz, Jr., and Andrea J. Dew, _Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 247.

. Even avowed realist, advocate of U.S. national interests, and military analyst Ralph Peters has concluded respect for persons is necessary for an efficacious foreign policy (Ralph Peters, _Wars of Blood and Faith_ (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2007), p. 355).

. Patterson, pp. 95-97.

. Captain Jay Magness, Chaplain Corps, U.S. Navy, interview with Kim Lawton, PBS _Religion and Ethics Newsweekly_ , March 28, 2003, accessed July 11, 2007 at <http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week630/magness.html>.

. Greg Jaffe, "War Wounds: Breaking a Taboo, Army Confesses Guilt after Combat; West Point Professor Pushes Military to Talk to Troops About Battlefield Killing; A 'Bloodcurdling Sound,'" _Wall Street Journal_ , August 17, 2005, p. A1.

. Ibid

. Charles W Hoge, Carl A. Castro, Stephen C. Messer, Dennis McGurk, Dave I. Cotting, and Robert L. Koffman, "Combat Duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mental Health Problems, and Barriers to Care," _New England Journal of Medicine_ , 351:1 (2004), pp. 13-22.

. W.E. Schlenger, R.A. Kulka, J.A. Fairbank, et al., "The prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder in the Vietnam generation: a multimethod, multisource assessment of psychiatric disorder," _Journal of Trauma Stress_ , 5 (1992), pp. 333-63.

. Richard Sorabji, "Just War from Ancient Origins to the Conquistadors Debate and its Modern Relevance," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 35.

. Charles E. Curran, "Roman Catholic Christianity," _God's Rule: The Politics of World Religions_ , ed. Jacob Neusner (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003), pp. 79-80.

. Brian Orend, "Jus Post Bellum," _Journal of Social Philosophy_ , Vol. 31, No. 1 (2000), p. 124.

. Raymond Kuo, "Occupation and the Just War," _International Relations_ , Vol. 22, No. 3 (2008), p. 299.

. J. Philip Wogaman, _Economics and Ethics_ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986); M. Douglas Meeks, _God the Economist_ (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989); Novak, p. 67. For dissenting views, cf. Jürgen Moltmann, _The Future of Creation_ , tr. Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), p. 111, and Novak, pp. 54-56.

. Pope John Paul II, _Centesimus Annus_ , quoted in Novak, p. 96.

. David Sheppard, _Bias to the Poor_ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983), pp. 196-199.

. Brian Orend, "Jus Post Bellum: The Perspective of a Just War Theorist," _Leiden Journal of International Law_ , 20:3 (2007), pp. 580-581.

. Schultz and Dew, p. 247; also, cf. Novak, pp. 159-162.

. Fiala, p. 132.

. Walzer, _Arguing About War_ , pp. 19-20.

. John E. Smith, "Rights," _The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics_ , ed. Childress and Macquarrie, pp. 556-557; Moltmann, _On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics_ , p. 20.

. Moltmann, _The Future of Creation_ , p. 99.

. Novak, pp. 10-11.

. Jens Meierhenrich, "The Ethics of Lustration," _Ethics and International Affairs_ , 20:1 (2006), p. 99.

. Ibid, pp. 99-120.

. Thomas E. Davitt, S.J., "Law," _The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics_ , ed. Childress and Macquarrie, pp. 342-344.

. Orend, pp. 166-168.

. Carsten Stahn, "'Jus ad bellum', 'jus in bello' . . . 'jus post bellum'? – Rethinking the Conception of the Law of Armed Force," _The European Journal of International Law_ , 17:5 (2006), pp. 939-940.

. For a more extensive discussion of war crime trials, cf. David Kinsella and Craig L. Carr, _The Morality of War_ (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007), pp. 343-408.

. Brian Orend, "Is There a Supreme Emergency Exemption?" in Mark Evans, ed., _Just War Theory: A Reappraisal_ (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), pp. 134-153.

. Moltmann, _On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics_ , pp. 27-28.

. Ibid, p. 19.

. Mark Woods, "The Nature of War and Peace: Just War Thinking, Environmental Ethics, and Environmental Justice," in Michael W. Brough, John W. Lango, and Harry van der Linden, eds., _Rethinking the Just War Tradition_ (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 2007), pp. 20-21.

. Thomas L. Friedman, _The World Is Flat_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

. Barnett, p. 298.

. Ramsey, _The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility_ , pp. 79-80.

. Fiala, p. 125.

. Walzer, _Arguing About War_ , pp. 166-168.

. Rebecca Johnson, "Jus Post Bellum and Counterinsurgency," _Journal of Military Ethics_ , 7:3 (2008), p. 221.

. Brian Orend, "Jus Post Bellum: The Perspective of a Just War Theorist," _Leiden Journal of International Law_ , 20:3 (2007), pp. 586-587.

. Patterson.

. Walzer, _Arguing About War_ , p. 20.

. Orend, _The Morality of War_ , pp. 160-166, 180-181.

. Bob Woodward, _Shadow_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), pp. 184-185.

. Although some Christian ethicists object to utilizing the Just War Theory framework to analyze the morality of a particular war (e.g., Oliver O'Donovan, _The Just War Revisited_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 13-15), no other model exists. Moral judgments, however nuanced, are inescapable and influence actions. We best make these judgments explicitly, open to critique, rather than implicitly and privately (Fiala, pp. 1, 11, 24, 26).

. Michael Quinlan, "Britain's Wars Since 1945," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, pp. 236-237.

. For a dissenting view that argues the U.S. and its coalition partners killed too many civilians, cf. Timothy L. Challans, _Awakening Warrior_ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 99-101.

. Albert C. Pierce, _Strategy, Ethics, and the "War on Terrorism"_ (Berkeley: Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2003), p. 13.

. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, p. 152.

. Daniel P. Tompkins, "The Question of Just War Theory and the Augustinian Caveat Praeemptor," in _Augustinian Just War Theory and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq_ , dePaulo, Messina, and Tompkins, ed., p. 147.

. Orend, p. 185.

. Ali A. Allawi, _The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 127.

. Ricks, p. 5.

. Bacevich, _The New American Militarism_ , p. 195.

. Nigel Biggar, "Between development and doubt: the recent career of just war doctrine in British churches," in _The Price of Peace_ , Charles Reed and David Ryall, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 72.

. Walzer, p. 4.

. Sorabji, "Just War from Ancient Origins to the Conquistadors Debate and its Modern Relevance," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 18.

. Clough and Stiltner, p. 222.

. David R. Smock, _Religious Perspectives on War_ (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2002).

. Ibid, p. 49. Also, Clough and Stiltner, p. 5.

. Genesis 16-17, 21; Koran 2:125-129; 19:54-55; 37:99-111.

. Edwin C. Goldberg, _Swords and Plowshares: Jewish Views of War and Peace_ (New York: URJ Press, 2006), pp. 12, 15.

. Brock and Young, p. 379.

. Norman Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 110.

. Goldberg, p. 14.

. From the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 20b, quoted in and translated by Goldberg, pp. 22-23.

. Goldberg, p. 28.

. Ibid, p. 35.

. Scripture quotations in this section are from the _Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures_ (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

. Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 110.

. Ibid, p. 109.

. Ibid, p. 122, 127.

. Ibid, p. 123.

. Jews for Racial and Economic Justice web site, accessed June 4, 2007 at <http://www.jfrej.org/Jewish.Immigration.Timeline.html>.

. Mitchell Bard, "British Restrictions on Jewish Immigration," Jewish Virtual library accessed June 4, 2007 at <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/mandate.html>.

. Yad Vashem web site,  http://www1.yadvashem.org/visiting/temp_visiting/temp_index_soldiers.html, accessed June 4, 2007.

. Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 117.

. Clive Lawton, "Judaism," _Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions_ , ed., Peggy Morgan and Clive Lawton, ed. (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 165.

. For an example of Jewish pacifism, cf. Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, "'That Was Then...' Debating Nonviolence within the Textual Traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam," _Ethics in the World's Religions_ , Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin, ed. (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2001), pp. 259-264.

. Yoram Peri, "Conscientious Objection in a Democracy Under Siege," _The New Conscientious Objection_ , ed. Moskos and Chambers, p. 147.

. Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, pp. 128-129.

. Ibid, pp. 128-129.

. Reuven Gal, "Israel," _The Military More than Just a Job?_ ed. Charles C. Moskos and Frank R. Wood, (Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey's, 1988), p. 269.

. Lawton, "Judaism," _Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions_ , ed. Morgan and Lawton, p. 166-167.

. Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," T _he Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 127.

. Goldberg, pp. 45-51.

. Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 127.

. Goldberg, p. 43.

. Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions, ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 128.

. Quoted in Goldberg, p. 76.

. Ibid, pp. 71-84.

. M. Seligsohn, "War," Jewish Encyclopedia accessed August 4, 2007 at  http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view_friendly.jsp?artid=37&letter=W.

. Ibid; Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, pp. 111-112.

. Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 128.

. Ibid, pp. 128-129.

. Goldberg, p. 38.

. Ibid, p. 75.

. Ibid, pp. 64-65.

. Peri, "Conscientious Objection in a Democracy Under Siege," _The New Conscientious Objection_ , ed. Moskos and Chambers, pp. 148-149.

. Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 116.

. Gal, "Israel," _The Military More than Just a Job?_ ed. Moskos and Wood, p. 268.

. Deuteronomy 20:19-20. Goldberg, pp. 85-94.

. Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, p. 128.

. Bacevich, _The New American Militarism_ , p. 134.

. Solomon, "The Ethics of War: Judaism," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, pp. 112-113.

. Piney Keston, "Presenting... Saudi Arabia," Saudi Aramco World, November/December 1989, accessed April 1, 2008, at  http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198906/presenting.saudi.arabia.htm.

. Jeremy Scahill, _Blackwater_ (New York: Avalon Books, 2007), p. 19.

. Kleiderer, Minaert, and Mossa, _Just War, Lasting Peace_ , p. 88.

. For a fuller account of Islamic-Christian interaction, cf. Ira M. Lapidus, _A History of Islamic Societies_ , 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

. Paul L. Williams, _Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror_ (New York: Alpha Books, 2002), p.54.

. Bernard Lewis, _What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity_ (New York: Perennial, 2002), pp. 21-23, 101, quoting Ibn Qutayba, _'Uyun al-Akhbar_ , vol. 1 (Cairo: 1963), p. 2.

. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, p. 19.

. Syyed Hossein Nasr, "Islam," _Our Religions_ , ed. Arvid Sharma (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 467-468.

. Steve Coll, _The Bin Ladens_ (New York: Penguin, 2008), pp. 397-417.

. Akbar S. Ahmed, _Postmodernism and Islam_ (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 154; Andrew Rippin, _Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices_ , 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 181. Khaled Abou El Fadl, _The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists_ (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).

. Hauerwas makes the same claim for Christianity ( _A Community of Character_ (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)).

. El Fadl; Ahmed, p. 154; Rippin, p. 181.

. E.g., in the last decade some of the world's most rapidly expanding economies were in Islamic nations (Jeffrey D. Sachs, _The End of Poverty_ (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 316-317).

. Novak, p. 202-204.

. El Fadl, p. 96, 136-137.

. Ibid, p. 160.

. The first five pillars of Islam are declaring belief in God and Mohammed as his prophet, the prayers, fasting, almsgiving, and pilgrimage to Mecca (the hajj).

. Johnson, _The War to Oust Saddam Hussein_ , p. 9.

. Anthony Shadid, _Night Draws Near_ (New York: Picador, 2006), p. 343.

. John L. Esposito, _Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam_ (New York: Oxford, 2002), p. 51.

. Dale C. Eikmeier, "Qutbism: An Ideology of Islamic-Fascism," _Parameters_ , Spring 2007, p. 86.

. Sayyid Qutb, _Milestones_ (Cedar Rapids, IA: Mother Mosque Foundation), pp. 93-95, 118.

. El Fadl, p. 45.

. Ibid, pp. 70-72.

. Robert M. Cassidy, _Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror_ (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), p. 16.

. Qutb, p. 82.

. Fawaz Gerges, _Journey of the Jihadist_ (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006), p. 272.

. Qutb similarly rejected Islamic jurisprudence, explaining that the first generation of Muslims took the Koran for action and not for study and discussion as did subsequent generations of Muslims (Qutb, p. 19).

. Ahmed, p. 43.

. El Fadl, p. 226.

. Ibid, p. 213.

. Ibid, p. 237.

. Susan Schmidt, "Spreading Saudi Fundamentalism in the U.S.," _Washington Post_ , October 2, 2003, p. A1, accessed at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31402-2003Oct1?language=printer. Thomas L. Friedman, "The Power of Green," _New York Times_ Magazine, April 15, 2007, accessed April 16, 2007 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15green.t.html?pagewanted=print. Robert Baer, _Sleeping with the Devil_ (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), p. 11. John S. Esposito, _The Future of Islam_ (New York: Oxford, 2010), p. 70.

. Tariq Ramadan, _In the Footsteps of the Prophet_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 111-114.

. Williams, pp. 92-95.

. El Fadl, pp. 87-94.

. Moskos and Chambers, "The Secularization of Conscience," _The New Conscientious Objection_ , ed. Moskos and Chambers, p. 9.

. A. K. Brohi, "Preface," in S. K. Malik, _The Quranic Concept of War_ (New Delhi, India: Himalayan Books, 1986), p. xv.

. Malik, p. 20.

. John Kelsay, _Islam and War: A Study in Comparative Ethics_ (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), pp. 29-30.

. Koran 2:251. Malik, pp. 23-24; Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, pp. 66, 113.

. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, pp. 42-43.

. Kelsay, _Islam and War: A Study in Comparative Ethics_ , p. 36.

. Kleiderer, Minaert, and Mossa, _Just War, Lasting Peace_ , p. 89.

. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, pp. 124-125.

. Kelsay, _Arguing the Just War in Islam_ , pp. 101-102.

. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, pp. 67, 113.

. Kelsay, _Islam and War: A Study in Comparative Ethics_ , pp. 36-38.

. Koran 22:39-41. James Turner Johnson, _The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions_ (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 151.

. Qutb, pp.57-58.

. Johnson, _The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions_ , p. 160-164.

. Allawi, p. 234.

. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, p. 79.

. Johnson, _The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions_ , pp. 62-63.

. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, p. 67.

. Kelsay, _Arguing the Just War in Islam_ , p. 103.

. Sachedina, p. 119.

. Malik, pp. 47-48.

. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, p. 115.

. Ibid, p. 119.

. Richard Sorabji, "Just War from Ancient Origins to the Conquistadors Debate and its Modern Relevance," _The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions_ , ed. Sorabji and Rodin, pp. 69, 77.

. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, p. 98.

. Ibid, p. 117-118.

. Kelsay, _Islam and War: A Study in Comparative Ethics_ , p. 75.

. Kelsay, _Arguing the Just War in Islam_ , pp. 106-110, 141-142.

. Esposito, _Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam_ , p. 34.

. El Fadl, p. 198.

. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, p. 119.

. Ibid, pp. 133-140; Kleiderer, Minaert, and Mossa, _Just War, Lasting Peace_ , pp. 91-92.

. Sachedina, p. 123.

411. John Renard, _Responses to 101 Questions on Islam_ (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), p. 141. For an analysis of why Islam opposes terrorism, cf. El Fadl, pp. 242-243.

. Yona Alexander, _Counterterrorism Strategies: Successes and Failures of Six Nations_ (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006), p. 151.

. Qazwini, p. 132.

414. Haleem, Ramsbotham, Risaluddin, and Wicker, pp. 162-166, 197.

. Phillips, _American Dynasty_ , pp. 303-304; Bill Gertz, _Treachery_ (New York: Crown Forum, 2004), pp. 178-184.

. Steven Strasser, ed., _The Abu Ghraib Investigations: The Official Reports of the Independent Panel and the Pentagon on the Shocking Prisoner Abuse in Iraq_ (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

. Allawi, p. 15. For a specific example of these problems, cf. Donald P. Wright, Colonel Timothy R. Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, _On Point II: Transition to the New campaign: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom May 2003 – January 2005_ (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2009), p. 417.

. Lapidus, pp. 552-553.

. Schultz and Dew, pp. 213-214; Phillips, _American Theocracy_ , pp. 75-76.

. Lapidus, p. 551.

. Qazwini, p. 16.

. Allawi, pp. 72, 144-145.

. Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung, "Analysts' Warnings of Iraq Chaos Detailed," _Washington Post_ , Sunday, May 26, 2007, p. A1, accessed May 26, 2007 at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052501380_pf.html.

. Schultz and Dew, p. 223.

. Galbraith, p. 38.

. Lapidus, p. 553.

. Schultz and Dew, p. 219.

. National Security Archive, accessed March 14, 2007 at <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/>.

. Schultz and Dew, pp. 219-220.

. "World Factbook," Central Intelligence Agency, accessed May 15, 2007 at  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/iz.html#People.

. Allawi, p. 182. Schultz and Dew, pp. 203-204, 244.

. Lapidus, p. 552.

. Allawi, p. 156.

. "World Factbook," Central Intelligence Agency, accessed May 15, 2007 at  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/iz.html#People.

. Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung, "Analysts' Warnings of Iraq Chaos Detailed," _Washington Post_ , Sunday, May 26, 2007, p. A1, accessed May 26, 2007 at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052501380_pf.html

. Allawi, pp. 132, 10.

. Galbraith, p. 78-79. Several other reasons for GWII have been advanced, e.g., Henry Kissinger identifying the need to humiliate radical Islam (Bob Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 408); none of those reasons is cogent or has widespread support.

. Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , p. 120.

. Sachedina, p. 53.

. CBS Evening News, January 17, 2003.

. Galbraith, p. 80.

. Gunning, "Hamas: Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya," _Terror, Insurgency, and the State: Ending Protracted Conflicts_ , ed. Heiberg, O'Leary, and Tirman, p. 147.

. Tony Zinni and Tony Kolz, _The Battle for Peace_ (New York: Macmillan, 2006), p. 146.

. The only Christian attempt to argue in favor of preventive war, of which I am aware, is the very weak case made by Harold O. J. Brown, "The Crusade or Preventive War," _War: Four Christian Views_ , ed. Clouse, pp. 153-168.

. Joseph J. Collins, _Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath_ (Washington, DC: Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, April 2008), p. 9.

. Schultz and Dew, pp. 228-230.

. Galbraith, p. 78. Indeed, at least one scholar believes that the Bush administration intentionally sought to mislead the public about Saddam possessing WMD (Albert L. Weeks, _The Choice of War_ (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011), pp. 42-52, 59.

. Allawi, p. 80.

. Gordon and Trainor, Forward.

. In his book, _The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness_ , cited by Joel Rosenthal, "New Rules for War?" _Naval War College Review_ , Vol. LVII, No. 3/4, p. 15.

. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr," _New York Times_ , September 18, 2005, accessed 18 September 2005 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18schlesinger.html?ei=5070&en=706258e3360237ae&ex=1127620800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print.

. Phillips, _American Theocracy_ , pp. 75-78.

. Bush's Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has explicitly confirmed the importance of oil in deciding to wage GWII (cf. _Augustinian Just War Theory and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq_ , dePaulo, Messina, and Tompkins, ed., p. 112).

. Phillips, _American Dynasty_ , pp. 294, 312; Renee de Nevers, "Sovereignty and Ethical Argument in the Struggle against State Sponsors of Terrorism," _Journal of Military Ethics_ , Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 8.

. Orend, p. 55.

. For a fuller discussion of the international legal issues, cf. Susan Fink, "The Trouble with Mixed Motives," _Naval War College Review_ , Vol. LVII, No. 3/4, Sumer/Autumn 2004, pp. 24-26.

. Galbraith, pp. 76-77.

. Weeks draws an analogy between the Congressional Resolution authorizing the Iraq War and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, both the result of misleading if not false information ( _The Choice of War_ , pp. 58-59).

. Allawi, p. 75.

. Gilbert Burnham, Shannon Doocy, Elizabeth Dzeng, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts, "The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002-2006," accessed January 10, 2008 at <http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf>.

. Katharine Sanderson, "New Estimate of Iraq Death Toll," _Nature_ , January 9, 2008, accessed at <http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080109/full/news.2008.426.html>.

. "34,452 Iraqi Civilians Killed in 2006, U.N. Says," _New York Times_ , January 16, 2007, accessed January 16, 2007 at  http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-Casualties.html?pagewanted=print.

. "Iraq Body Count," accessed October 28, 2010 at <http://www.iraqbodycount.org/>. Also, cf. Sabrina Tavernise and Andrew W. Lehren, "A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq," _New York Times_ , October 22, 2010 accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/middleeast/24contractors.html.

. Steven Lee Myers, "A Benchmark of Progress, Electrical Grid Fails Iraqis," _New York Times_ , August 1, 2010 accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/world/middleeast/02electricity.html. Ned Parker, "The Iraq We Left Behind," _Foreign Affairs_ , Vol. 91, No. 2 (March/April 2012), 94.

. "Vital Indicators," _New York Times_ , March 16, 2008, accessed March 22, 2008 at  http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/03/16/world/middleeast/16insurgent.graphic.ready.html.

. Allawi, pp. 124, 371. Esposito, _The Future of Islam_ , p. 83.

. Sudarsan Raghavan, "Disaffected Iraqis Spurn Dominant Shiite Clerics," _Washington Post_ , December 21, 2007, p. A01, accessed December 21, 2007 at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122002553_pf.html.

. For a complementary analysis, cf. Kenneth Roth, "Was the Iraq War a Humanitarian Intervention?" _Journal of Military Ethics_ , Vol. 5, Issue 2, (2006), pp. 84-92.

. George Hunsinger, "Invading Iraq: Is It Justified?" in United States Institute of Peace, _Special Report: Would an Invasion of Iraq Be a Just War?_ (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2003), p. 11.

. Ricks, p. 62.

. Griffith, pp. 85-89.

. Several good accounts of the war have already appeared, most notably, Gordon and Trainor. Nathaniel Fick's _One Bullet Away_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), offers a narrower, more personal yet well-written and perceptive account of one Marine officer's participation in the war.

. For four concurring opinions, all written by Christian ethicists prior to the start of GWII, see: United States Institute of Peace, _Special Report: Would an Invasion of Iraq Be a Just War?_ Michael Walzer, from a philosophical point of view, also argued, prior to GWII, that any invasion of Iraq would violate just war principles ( _Arguing About War_ , pp. 143-170).

. Cook, p. 122.

. This has already begun with respect to GWII, e.g., Collins.

. Neta C. Crawford, "Principia Leviathan: The Moral Duties of American Hegemony," _Naval War College Review_ , Summer/Autumn 2004, Vol. LVII, No. 3/4, pp. 72-73.

. Allawi, p. 148.

. Ricks, p. 47. Other senior U.S. military officers echoed this warning, e.g., Army Generals Eric Shinseki, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, General Wesley Clark, Admiral William Crowe, Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, and General Merrill A. McPeak, USAF (Weeks, p. 80).

. Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , pp. 103, 106. Allawi, p. 96. Collins, pp. 11-14.

. Allawi, pp. 158, 169, 186.

. Shadid, p. 214.

. Ricks, pp. 175-17.

. Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, pp. 217-221.

. Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , p. 180.

. Ricks, p. 177.

. Michael B. Oren, P _ower, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present_ (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), p. 596.

. Ricks, p. 420.

. Ricks, pp. 224, 233-235, 238, 252. Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, pp. 122, 322-323.

. West, _Democracy Matters_ , p. 142.

. Ricks, p. 204.

. Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , p. 320. Ralph Peters, "A Grave New World," _Armed Forces Journal_ , April 2005, p. 34. Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, pp. 217-221.

. Allawi, p. 372.

. Karen DeYoung, "Balkanized Homecoming," _Washington Post_ , December 16, 2007, p. A01, accessed December 16, 2007 at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/15/AR2007121501921_pf.html.

. Anthony Shadid, "Church Attack Seen as Strike at Iraq's Core," _New York Times_ , November 2, 2010 accessed at <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html>.

. Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, "Iraq Translators Face Closed Door U.S. Immigration Policy," Fox News, Wednesday, February 7, 2007, accessed January 14, 2008 at <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,250595,00.html>.

. "U.S. Lets in Fewer Refugees, Not More," MSBNC News, January 2, 2008 accessed January 14, 2008 at <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22476090/>.

. Allawi, p. 157.

. Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, pp. 535-546.

. Anna Mulrine, "Army report: Suicide rate sets record; some alcohol abuse up 54 percent," _The Christian Science Monitor_ , January 20, 2012 accessed at  http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2012/0120/Army-report-Suicide-rate-sets-record-some-alcohol-abuse-up-54-percent.

. Thom Shanker, "Army Worried by Rising Stress of Return Tours to Iraq," _New York Times_ , April 6, 2008 accessed April 6, 2008 at <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/washington/06military.html?hp>.

. Gregg Zoroya, "Soldiers' Divorce Rates Up Sharply," _USA Today_ , June 8, 2005, p. 1, accessed 8 June 2005 at <http://ebird.afis.osd.mil/ebfiles/e20050608372604.html>.

. Benedict Carey, "Mental Health Visits Seen Rising as a Parent Deploys," _New York Times_ , November 8, 2010 accessed at <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/us/08child.html>.

. Lizette Alvarez, "Long Iraq Tours Can Make Home a Trying Front," _New York Times_ , February 23, 2007 accessed February 23, 2007 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/us/23military.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print.

. Ricks, p. 166.

. Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, pp. 89-92.

. Allawi, p. 116.

. Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , p. 151.

. Ricks, p. 253.

. Terrence K. Kelly, "The just conduct of war against radical Islamist terror and insurgencies," in _The Price of Peace_ , Reed and Ryall, ed., pp. 209-210.

. Souad Mekhennet and Michael Moss, "In Jihadist Haven, A Goal: To Kill and Die in Iraq," _New York Times_ , May 4, 2007, accessed May 4, 2007 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/world/middleeast/04bombers.html?pagewanted=all.

. Coalition Provisional Order Number 1, in Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, pp. 595-597.

. Scahill, p. 118.

. Ricks, pp. 73, 158-166.

. Stephen E. Ambrose, _Eisenhower: Soldier and Statesman_ (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 213-215.

. Gordon and Trainor, p. 490.

. Bruce J. Reider, "Strategic Realignment: Ends, Ways, and Means in Iraq," _Parameters_ , Winter 2007-2008, p. 53. Allawi, pp. 396, 443.

. Ricks, pp. 79, 97.

. Schultz and Dew, p. 231. Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, p. 94. Weeks, p. 130.

. Cecilia M. Bailliet, "'War in the Home': An Exposition of Protection Issues Pertaining to the Use of House Raids in Counterinsurgency Operations," _Journal of Military Ethics_ , Vol. 6, No. 3 (2007), p. 191.

. Collins, p. 19.

. Qazwini, p. 157.

. Esposito, _The Future of Islam_ , p. 80.

523. Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, p. 79, 87. Schultz and Dew, pp. 231-242. Michael R. Gordon and Dexter Filkins, "Hezbollah Said to Help Shiite Army in Iraq," _New York Times_ , November 28, 2006, accessed November 28, 2006 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/world/middleeast/28military.html?R=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print. Sudarsan Raghavan, "'In the Land of the Blood Feuds' South of Baghdad, U.S. Troops Navigate Fault Lines of Sect and Tribe," _Washington Post_ , August 10, 2007, p. A01 accessed August 10, 2007 at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/09/AR2007080902412_pf.html. Megan Greenwell, "Iran Trains Militiamen Inside Iraq, U.S. Says," _Washington Post_ , August 20, 2007; p. A11, accessed August 20, 2007 at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR2007081901394_pf.html. Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , p. 384. National Intelligence Estimate, _Prospects for Iraq's Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead_ (Washington, DC: National Intelligence Council, January 2007), pp. 6-7. Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, pp. 99-111.

. Allawi, p. 180.

. Bruce J. Reider, "Strategic Realignment: Ends, Ways, and Means in Iraq," _Parameters_ , Winter 2007-2008, p. 50.

. "Vital Indicators," _New York Times_ , March 16, 2008, accessed March 22, 2008 at  http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/03/16/world/middleeast/16insurgent.graphic.ready.html.

. Allawi, pp. 447-451; Damien Cave, "In New Tactic, Militants Burn Houses in Iraq," _New York Times_ , March 12, 2007 accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print. Edward Wong, "In North Iraq, Sunni Arabs Drive Out Kurds," _New York Times_ , May 30, 2007 accessed May 30, 2007 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/world/middleeast/30mosul.html?hp=&pagewanted=all; Marie Colvin, "Iraqi Villagers Battle to Hold Off al-Qaeda," _The Times_ , December 23, 2007 accessed December 23, 2007 at  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article3087088.ece.

. Anthony Shadid, "Iraq Election Results Hint of Political Shift," _New York Times_ , March 15, 2010, accessed at <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/world/middleeast/16iraq.html>.

. _National Intelligence Estimate_ , pp. 6-7.

. Allawi, p. 73.

. Martin Fletcher, "Al-Qaeda Leaders Admit: 'We are in crisis. There is panic and fear." _The Times_ , February 11, 2008 accessed at  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article3346386.ece.

. John F. Burns and Alissa J. Rubin, "U.S. Arming Sunnis in Iraq to Battle Old Qaeda Allies," _New York Times_ , June 11, 2007, accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html?R=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all.

. Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , pp. 117-118.

. Anthony J. Schwarz, "Iraq's Militias: The True Threat to Coalition Success," _Parameters_ , Spring 2007, pp. 62-63.

. _National Intelligence Estimate_ , pp. 6-7.

. Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung, "For U.S., the Goal is Now 'Iraqi Solutions,'" _Washington Post_ , January 10, 2008, p. A01, accessed January 10, 2008 at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/09/AR2008010903701_pf.html.

. Weeks, p. 60.

. Allawi, p. 138.

. Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, p. 431.

. David S. Cloud, "Panel Will Urge Broad Overhaul of Iraqi Police," _New York Times_ , August 31, 2007, accessed August 31, 2007 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/washington/31policy.html?R=1&th=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&emc=th&adxnnlx=1188577648-OZ38DlicgwihB6Zzo/vx3A&pagewanted=print. Galbraith, pp. 221.

. Collins, p. 15. For a discussion o some of the problems, cf. Wright, Reese, with the Contemporary Operations Study Team, pp. 385-391.

. "Panel: Billions Wasted in Iraq Reconstruction, _USA Today_ , accessed March 23, 2007 at  http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Panel%3A+Billions+%27wasted%27+in+Iraq+reconstruction+-+USATODAY.com&expire=&urlID=21652911&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fnews%2Fwashington%2F2007-03-22-iraq-reconstruction_N.htm&partnerID=1660. James Glanz, "Billions in Oil Missing in Iraq, U.S. Study Says," _New York Times_ , May 12, 2007, accessed May 12, 2007 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/world/middleeast/12oil.html?R=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print.

. Allawi, p. 256.

. Amy Unikewicz, _New York Times_ , December 19, 2011, accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/12/19/opinion/1219OPCHARTunikewicz.html.

. Weeks, p. 70.

. Ricks, p. 98. "Iraq by the Numbers," _Christian Science Monitor_ , December 7, 2011 accessed at  http://www.csmonitor.com/CSM-Photo-Galleries/In-Pictures/Iraq-by-the-numbers/(photo)/410370/410370). Amy Unikewicz, _New York Times_ , December 19, 2011, at  http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/12/19/opinion/1219OPCHARTunikewicz.html.

. Weeks, p. 115.

. Schultz and Dew, pp. 204-206, 208-209.

. Allawi, pp. 68, 200.

. Ricks, p. 20.

. Allawi, pp. 296-297. Mearsheimer and Walt, p. 254.

. Thomas L. Friedman, "The Power of Green," _New York Times Magazine_ , April 15, 2007, accessed April 16, 2007 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15green.t.html?pagewanted=print.

. Collins, p. 24. Oren, p. 608.

. Esposito, _The Future of Islam_ , p. 83.

. Gerges, pp. 4, 214-220, 239, 242, 245.

. Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , p. 408.

. Allawi, p. 187.

. Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks, "As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates," _Washington Post_ , August 7, 2007, accessed August 7, 2007 at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/06/AR2007080601401_pf.html.

. Joshua Partlow, "List of 'Willing' U.S. Allies Shrinks Steadily in Iraq," _Washington Post_ , December 8, 2007, p. A1, accessed December 8, 2007 at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/07/AR2007120702585_pf.html.

. Rod Nordland and Timothy Williams, "Soon, Only U.S. Will Remain of Iraq Coalition," _New York Times_ , July 29, 2009, accessed at <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/world/middleeast/29iraq.html>.

. Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , p. 410.

. Phillips, p. 318; Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , pp. 398, 409, 419; Bruce J. Reider, "Strategic Realignment: Ends, Ways, and Means in Iraq," _Parameters_ , Winter 2007-2008, p. 48.

. Raymond Kuo, "Occupation and the Just War," _International Relations_ , Vol. 22, No. 3 (2008), p. 299.

. Ricks, p. 178.

. Woodward, _State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III_ , p. 388.

. Bruce J. Reider, "Strategic Realignment: Ends, Ways, and Means in Iraq," _Parameters_ , Winter 2007-2008, p. 56.

. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict, quoted in the _Christian Century_ , April 22, 2008, p. 9.

. Tim Arango and Yasir Ghazi, "Iraqi Leader Threatens to Abandon Power Sharing," _New York Times_ , December 21, 2011 at  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/world/middleeast/iraqi-leader-threatens-to-abandon-power-sharing.html. Ayad Allawi, Osama al-Nujaifi, and Rafe al-Essawi, "How to Save Iraq From Civil War," _New York Times_ , December 27, 2011, at  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/opinion/how-to-save-iraq-from-civil-war.html. Hayder al-Kohei, "Decoding Iran's Sectarian Rivalries," _Foreign Affairs_ , January 31, 2012, accessed at  http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137064/hayder-al-khoei/decoding-iraqs-sectarian-rivalries?page=show.

. Collins, p. 1.

570. _Augustinian Just War Theory and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq_ , dePaulo, Messina, and Tompkins, ed., p. 80.

. Ned Parker, "The Iraq We Left Behind," _Foreign Affairs_ , Vol. 91, No. 2 (March/April 2012), 94-110.

. Ahmad Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ (New York: Penguin, 2009), p. xlii.

. Amalendu Misra, _Afghanistan: The Labyrinth of Violence_ (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004), p. 131. Afghanistan does have sufficient natural gas that it, prior to 1992, exported relatively small quantities of natural gas to the Soviet Union. Hooman Peimani, _Falling Terrorism and Rising Conflicts: The Afghanistan "Contribution" to Polarization and Confrontation in West and South Asia_ (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), p. 17. Afghanistan may also have undeveloped deposits of rare earth minerals and some precious gem deposits.

.  Https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/af.html accessed December 19, 2008. Misra, p. 6, 172.

. Ibid, p. 41.

. Stephen Tanner, _Afghanistan_ (New York: Perseus, 2002), pp. 6-7.

. Misra, p. 32.

. Peter Marsden, _The Taliban_ (Karachi, Pakistan: 1998), pp. 78, 8.

. Schultz and Dew, p. 151.

. Marc Sageman, _Understanding Terror Networks_ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 58.

. Schultz and Dew, pp. 155-156.

. Peter L. Bergen, _Holy War, Inc._ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 57. Nick B. Mills, _Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan_ (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007), p. 64.

. Mills, p. 31.

. Jon Lee Anderson, _The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan_ (New York: Grove Press, 2002), p. 123.

. Schultz and Dew, p. 158.

. Ibid, p. 157.

. Lapidus, p. 720.

. Bergen, p. 10.

. Schultz and Dew, p. 151.

. David Chaffetz, _A Journey Through Afghanistan_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

. Tanner, p. 302.

. Anderson, p. 102.

. Schultz and Dew, p. 157; Lapidus, p. 718.

. Tanner, pp. 48, 100-101.

. Schultz and Dew, p. 162.

. Ibid, pp. 164-166. Bergen, p. 53.

. Tanner, pp. 218-219.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , pp. 265-267.

. Misra, p. 3.

. Alan G. Jamieson, _Faith and Sword: A Short History of Christian-Muslim Conflict_ (London, UK: Reaktion Press, 2006), p. 188.

. Misra, p. 47.

. Tanner, p. 257.

. Bergen, p. 52. Ahmed Rashid, _Taliban_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 18.

. Tanner, pp. 255-256.

. Marsden, p. 28.

. Tanner, p. 243.

. Ibid, p. 253. Also, cf. Misra, p. 63.

. Mills, pp. 97-98.

. Tanner, pp. 251, 274. Jamieson, p. 188.

. Sageman, p. 40.

. Tanner, pp. 4, 140, 240, 266-268.

. Michael Scheuer, _Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq_ (New York: Free Press, 2008), p. 158. Andrew J. Bacevich, _The Limits of Power_ (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), p. 45.

. Misra, p. 28.

. Jamieson, pp. 202-203.

. Marsden, p. 36.

. Scheuer, p. 7.

. Steve Coll, _Ghost Wars_ (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 203.

. Marsden, p. 42; Misra, p. 61.

. Roland Jacquard, _In the Name of Osama bin Laden_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 135-136.

. Coll, _Ghost Wars_ , p. 287.

. Jacquard, pp. 40-41; Lars Erslev Andersen and Jan Aagaard, _In the Name of God_ (Odense, Denmark: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2005), p. 195. Reports that are more prosaic indicate that personnel at a Red Cross hospital in Pakistan removed his eye surgically (Coll, _Ghost Wars_ , p. 288).

. Coll, _Ghost Wars_ , p. 288.

. Misra, p. 62.

. Rashid, _Taliban_ , p. 43.

. Marsden, pp. 46, 61; Mills, p. 100.

. Jacquard, p. 39.

. Tariq Ali, _The Duel_ (New York: Scribner's, 2008), p. 122. Marsden, pp. 128-129; Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , pp. 13-14. Jamieson maintains that the Pakistanis and Saudis both supported the Taliban's rise to power (Jamieson, p. 204.).

. Coll, _Ghost Wars_ , p. 299.

. Peimani, p. 23.

. Anderson, p. 110.

. Tanner, p. 303. Bergen, pp. 15-16.

. Sageman, p. 44. Also, Misra, p. 77.

. Bergen, p. 16.

. Peimani, p. 44.

. Marsden, p. 71.

. Misra, pp. 70-71. Bergen, p. 158.

. Mills, p. 100.

. Rashid, _Taliban_ , p. 70.

. Bergen, _Holy War, Inc._ , p. 9.

. Coll, _Ghost Wars_ , pp. 548-549.

. Tanner, p. 284. For an accurate depiction of that plight set within the context of a novel, cf. Yasmina Khadra, _The Swallows of Kabul_ , tr. John Cullen (New York: Anchor Books, 2004).

. Misra, p. 8.

. Jacquard, pp. 138-140; Peimani, p. 15.

. An alternative explanation of this change is that overproduction had driven down the opium's price so much that the Taliban imposed its ban to shrink stocks and force the price back up; the Taliban lifted its ban on poppy cultivation in 2001 (Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , p. 19).

. Peimani, p. 16.

. Misra, p. 78.

. Sageman, p. 45.

. Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, _Cracks in the Foundation: Leadership Schisms in al Qaeda from 1989-2006_ (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, 2007), p. 13.

. Anderson, pp. 82-84.

. Sageman, p. 45.

. Bergen, pp. 163-165, 167.

. Bacevich, _The Limits of Power_ , pp. 58-59.

. Sageman, p. 138.

. For a first person account of the war in Afghanistan that coheres very well with the picture painted here, cf. Craig M. Mullaney, _The Unforgiving Minute_ (New York: Penguin, 2009), pp. 215-342.

. Misra, p. 112.

. Scheuer, p. 110.

. Schultz and Dew, p. 183.

. "Authorization for Use of Military Force against Terrorists," Public Law 107-40, 115 Statute 224, enacted September 18, 2001.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , pp. liii, 65, 67.

. Hannah Fischer, _U.S. Military Casualty Statistics: Operation New Dawn, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom_ (Washington: Congressional Research Service, 2010), p. 11.

. Scheuer, pp. 100-101.

. Martin Shaw, _The New Western Way of War_ (Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 1.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , p. 97.

. Tanner, p. 313.

. Peimani, p. 75; Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , pp. 106, 142.

. Shaw, p. 26; Tanner, pp. 295-302.

. Shaw, p. 26.

. Scheuer, p. 106.

. Coll, _Ghost Wars_ , p. 502.

. Mills, pp. 232-233.

. Tanner, p. 308.

. Thom Shanker, "Gates: Modest Goals, More Strikes," _New York Times_ , January 27, 2009 accessed at  http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/gates-modest-goals-more-strikes/.

. Tanner, p. 325.

. Scheuer, p. 106. Mills, p. 174.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , p. xli.

. Peimani, p. 45.

. Ali A. Jalali, "Afghanistan: Regaining Momentum," _Parameters_ , 2007-2008 (Winter), p. 12.

. Peimani, p. 51.

. Cf. Chapter 5c for a fuller discussion of these issues. For a story of how combat in Afghanistan breaks down morale, erodes combat effectiveness, and creates PTSD, cf. Elizabeth Rubin, "Battle Company is Out There," _New York Times_ , February 24, 2008, accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/magazine/24Afghanistan-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.

. Ibid.

. Pamela Constable, "Resistance to U.S. Plan for Afghanistan," _Washington Post_ , January 16, 2009, p. A16 accessed at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011504198_pf.html.

. Christina Lamb, "Taliban revival sets fear swirling through Kabul," _The Sunday Times_ , September 28, 2008, accessed at  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article4837667.ece.

. Ann Scott Tyson, "Weight of Combat Gear Is Taking Toll," _Washington Post_ , February 1, 2009, p. A03, accessed at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/31/AR2009013101717_pf.html.

. Mills, p. 231.

. Michael Evans, "Unmanned and heavily armed drones are killing off the 'senior management,'" _The Times, January_ 3, 2009, accessed at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5435471.ece.

. Audrey Kurth Cronin, _How Terrorism Ends_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 32, 150.

. Rashid, p. 210.

. Stephen Hadley and John D. Podesta, "The Right Way Out of Afghanistan," _Foreign Affairs_ , July/August 2012 accessed at  http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137696/stephen-hadley-and-john-d-podesta/the-right-way-out-of-afghanistan?page=show.

. Anderson, p. 122.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , p. 61.

. "Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions," accessed February 2, 2009 at <http://www.afghangovernment.com/AfghanAgreementBonn.htm>.

. Mills, p. 68.

. Misra, p. 174; Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , pp. 254-261.

. Tom Coghlan, "A picture of misery: how corruption and failure destroyed the hope of democracy," _The Times_ , January 31, 2009, accessed at  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5622229.ece.

. Mills, pp. 187, 190.

. "Not exactly a ringing endorsement," _The Economist_ , September 23, 2010, accessed at <http://www.economist.com/node/17106306>.

. Stephen Hadley and John D. Podesta, "The Right Way Out of Afghanistan," _Foreign Affairs_ , July/August 2012 accessed at  http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137696/stephen-hadley-and-john-d-podesta/the-right-way-out-of-afghanistan?page=show.

. Tom Coghlan, "A picture of misery: how corruption and failure destroyed the hope of democracy," _The Times_ , January 31, 2009, accessed at  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5622229.ece.

. "Western officials in plot to dilute powers of President Karzai," _Times Online_ , March 24, 2009, accessed at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5963150.ece. "A war of money as well as bullets," The Economist, May 22, 2008, accessed at  http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=11402695.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , pp. 191-195.

. John Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta, "Poll: Afghan Support for U.S. Operations Falling," _Washington Post_ , February 9, 2009, accessed at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/09/AR2009020901368.html?hpid=moreheadlines. Also, for similar conclusions based on two other polls, cf. "Changing the Guard in Kabul?" _The Economist_ , February 12, 2009, accessed at  http://www.economist.com/world/asia/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13110240.

. Mills, p. 210.

. Peimani, p. 52.

. Mills, pp. 196-197, 210-213.

. Peimani, p. 51.

. Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, "U.S. Study is Said to Warn of Crisis in Afghanistan," _New York Times_ , October 8, 2008, accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/world/asia/09afghan.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink. For a firsthand account of this in one village near Kabul, cf. Noah Coburn, B _azaar Politics_ (Palo Alto: CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

. Mills, pp. 231-232; Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus, "Iraq Auditor Warns of Waste, Fraud in Afghanistan," _Washington Post_ , February 2, 2009, p. A06, accessed at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/01/AR2009020102225.html?hpid=sec-world.

. Richard deVillafranca, "Reconsidering Afghanistan: Time for an 'Azimuth Check,'" _Parameters_ , 2008-2009 (Winter), p. 85.

. Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, "U.S. Study is Said to Warn of Crisis in Afghanistan," _New York Times_ , October 8, 2008, accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/world/asia/09afghan.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.

. Mills, p. 30.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , pp. 203-205.

. Scheuer, p. 108.

. Samuel Chan, "Sentinels of Afghan Democracy: The Afghan National Army," _Military Review_ , January-February 2009, pp. 30-37.

. Pamela Constable, "Resistance to U.S. Plan for Afghanistan," _Washington Post_ , January 16, 2009, p. A16 accessed at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011504198_pf.html. Nick B. Mills, _Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan_ (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007), p. 231.

. Jonathan S. Landay, "Soviet missteps haunt U.S.," _News & Observer_, February 15, 2009, p. 18A. Mills, p. 228. For extended reporting about one unit's operations that exemplify these dynamics, cf. Elizabeth Rubin, "Battle Company is Out There," _New York Times_ , February 24, 2008, accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/magazine/24Afghanistan-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.

. Helene Cooper and Thom Shanker, "Aides Say Obama's Afghan Aims Elevate War," _New York Times_ , January 27, 2009, accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/us/politics/28policy.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.

. "A war of money as well as bullets," _The Economist_ , May 22, 2008, accessed at  http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=11402695.

. Pamela Constable, "Resistance to U.S. Plan for Afghanistan," _Washington Post_ , January 16, 2009, p. A16 accessed at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011504198_pf.html.

. John Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta, "Poll: Afghan Support for U.S. Operations Falling," _Washington Post_ , February 9, 2009, accessed at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/09/AR2009020901368.html?hpid=moreheadlines.

. "Changing the Guard in Kabul?" _The Economist_ , February 12, 2009, accessed at  http://www.economist.com/world/asia/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13110240.

. Pamela Constable, "Resistance to U.S. Plan for Afghanistan," _Washington Post_ , January 16, 2009, p. A16 accessed at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011504198_pf.html. Richard deVillafranca, "Reconsidering Afghanistan: Time for an 'Azimuth Check,'" _Parameters_ , 2008-2009 (Winter), p. 79.

. Ali, p. 234.

. Peimani, pp. 49, 56-57, 126; Tanner, p. 320; Mills, p. 203; Ali A. Jalali, "Afghanistan: Regaining Momentum," _Parameters_ , 2007-2008 (Winter), p. 6.

. Ali, p. 237.

. Peimani, p. 50.

. Afghan desire for moderate Islam has manifested itself in the Taliban moderating their previously draconian views, e.g., in 2012 recognizing that all children deserve education and operating schools that educate thousands of girls (Yaroslav Trofimov, "Emboldened Taliban Try to Sell Softer Image," _Wall Street Journal_ , January 28, 2012 accessed at  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577177074111336352.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories).

. Mills, pp. 192-193.

. Elizabeth Rubin, "Battle Company is Out There," _New York Times_ , February 24, 2008, accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/magazine/24Afghanistan-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.

. Eric Schmitt, "U.S. Military Faulted on Weapons Tracking," _New York Times_ , February 11, 2009 accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/world/asia/12arms.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , pp. 349-373, 393-400.

. Catherine Philip, "US thinks the unthinkable: asking Iran for help with supply routes," _Times Online_ , February 26, 2009 accessed at  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5805172.ece.

. Peimani, p. 82.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , pp. 169, 219-239, 265-292.

. Scheuer, p. 105; Sageman, p. 138.

. Misra, p. 171.

. Tom A. Peter, "What happens when troops – and money – leave Afghanistan?" _Christian Science Monitor_ , February 7, 2012, accessed at  http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2012/0207/What-happens-when-troops-and-money-leave-Afghanistan.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , p. xlii.

. Richard Parker, _John Kenneth Galbraith_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 368-377.

. For another discussion of this, cf. Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, "Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template," _Military Review_ , November-December 2009, pp. 2-14.

. Samuel Chan, "Sentinels of Afghan Democracy: The Afghan National Army," _Military Review_ , January-February 2009, p. 26.

. The survey unbelievably reported that most Afghans want the U.S. to remain in their country, an opinion that anecdotal evidence, growing levels of violence, increasing sympathy and assistance for those opposed to the U.S., and Afghanistan's convoluted history and culture do not support. The lack of support among respondents for a U.S. or NATO troop surge – only eighteen percent – warrants considerable skepticism about the survey's accuracy. John Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta, "Poll: Afghan Support for U.S. Operations Falling," _Washington Post_ , February 9, 2009, accessed at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/09/AR2009020901368.html?hpid=moreheadlines.

. "Changing the Guard in Kabul?" _The Economist_ , February 12, 2009, accessed at  http://www.economist.com/world/asia/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13110240.

. Ali, p. 241.

. Matthew Rosenberg, "Afghanistan's Soldiers Step Up Killings of Allied Forces," _New York Times_ , January 20, 2012, accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/world/asia/afghan-soldiers-step-up-killings-of-allied-forces.html.

. Rashid, _Descent into Chaos_ , p. 6.

. Micah Zenko and Michael A. Cohen, "Clear and Present Safety," _Foreign Affairs_ , Vol. 91, No. 2 (Mar-Apr 2012), 80.

. Cf. John Horgan, _The End of War_ (San Francisco: McSweeney's Books, 2011).

. West, _Race Matters_ , p. 155.

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#  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Clifford is an Episcopal priest who retired from the U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps as a Captain at the end of 2005. His twenty-four years of active Naval service included duty at sea, overseas, with Marines, and teaching philosophy at the Naval Academy and ethics and the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). Since retiring, he has been a writer, parish priest, Visiting Professor of Ethics and Public Policy at NPS, consultant, and public speaker. In addition to numerous scholarly and popular articles, he has authored _Charting a Theological Confluence: Theology and Interfaith Relations_. He blogs at <http://blog.ethicalmusings.com/>.

