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October
9, 2006
VOL.
44, NO. 17Oakland,
CA
Just-war thinkers
address
postwar obligations for U.S.
WASHINGTON
(CNS) -- The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have sparked new discussion
among just-war theorists about the postwar obligations of those who invade
a country to topple a hostile or dangerous government.
Paralleling the traditional just-war categories of “ius ad bellum,”
or the moral conditions for going to war, and “ius in bello,”
or moral conduct in war, the theorists have labeled the question of postwar
responsibilities “ius post bellum.”
Those responsibilities are difficult and complex and should serve as a
caution against warfare as a way to deal with dangerous states, said three
Washington-area experts convened by Catholic News Service to discuss just-war
issues in the five years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Maryann Cusimano Love, a professor of politics at The Catholic University
of America and an expert on terrorism and ethics in international relations,
said that in light of the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan the discussion
of postwar responsibilities is clearly one of the “growing edges”
in current developments in the just-war tradition.
A U.S. soldier responds to the scene of a suicide
car bombing that struck a U.S. military convoy in Kabul, Afghanistan,
Sept. 8. The blast, the worst in months, killed 16 people, including two
U.S. soldiers. CNS PHOTO/AHMAD MASOOD/REUTERS
Also on the panel were Jesuit Father John Langan, longtime professor of
Catholic social thought at Georgetown University and a specialist in the
just-war tradition, and Franciscan Father Louis V. Iasiello, president
of Washington Theological Union who served as a U.S. Navy chaplain for
more than 20 years before he recently retired, with the rank of rear admiral,
as chief of Navy chaplains.
“Post-bellum’s a tricky business,” Father Iasiello said.
“War termination is a tricky business. ... There are few constants
you can rely on in a post-bellum phase. ... There’s no calculus
for what to expect or how to handle it.”
Regarding Iraq he said, “I think one of the things that we will
need to look at in the future is why was there such a lack of emphasis
on the post-bellum phase of this particular war.”
“Father Iasiello’s point about needing to pay more attention
to postwar scenarios and ‘ius post bellum’ applies exactly
to Afghanistan (as well) because Afghanistan is falling apart,”
Cusimano Love said. “We’re seeing increased violence this
summer, the worst since the initial war. So we haven’t gotten it
right there.”
“I would think you could make a very serious argument that we should
have invested much more heavily in Afghanistan and not touched Iraq at
all,” Father Langan said.
He said Afghanistan successfully resisted takeover attempts by the British
in the 19th century and the Russians near the end of the 20th -- “and
we should have known that simply capturing Kabul (Afghanistan’s
capital) and establishing a government doesn’t mean the game is
won.”
After the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s forces in Iraq, Cusimano Love
said, there were several “preventable mistakes” that severely
undercut the country’s postwar security and safety needs and the
prospects for reconstruction.
She said these included “the deactivation process, basically shutting
down the existing security structures there, throwing out low-level Baathist
Party members (along) with war criminals, and doing other things that
really emasculated Iraqi society’s ability to respond themselves
-- not engaging with civil society.”
“We undertook to transform a society that we didn’t understand
very well,” Father Langan said. “This would be something like
going back to performing surgery before the days of X-rays -- I want to
just cut it up and see what’s inside there. And nobody today would
regard that as acceptable. ... We’re doing surgery on a patient
who has not signed a consent form, and without anesthesia. This is a messy
business.”
“The primary responsibility of someone who goes in and wages war
is to provide stability and security for the post-bellum period,”
Father Iasiello said. “That’s a given. It’s in international
law. ... So stability, security, and then to attain some sort of level
of quality of life that affords people hope for the future. And I think
that one of the things that people need to do is to keep going back and
saying, have we attained what we set out to do? This is what I think it
means when we talk about creating a just and lasting peace.”
Cusimano Love said the ongoing conflicts in Iraq are a barrier to fulfilling
U.S. postwar responsibilities there.
“The idea that with $18 billion we can reconstruct infrastructure
in Iraq hasn’t gone one-third of the way that we thought it would.
And that money ends in 2006,” she said. “There’s not
a lot of political will to extend that money.”
“You can lay down a lot of moral obligations about what we should
contribute to the future of Iraq,” Father Langan said, but “there
has to be a fit between, in effect, the political culture of the society
and the policies that are put before it. And frankly, the American people
were not given a realistic and honest and accurate account of what we
were up to, and as a result there is not much patience or trust that can
be drawn on.”
