Who Is to Judge the Morality of the Iraq War

[From America (americamagazine.org), Vol. 191 No. 15, November 15, 2004.]

Of Many Things

By Drew Christiansen, S.J.

Who is to judge the morality of war? In the lead-up to the 2003 war in Iraq, Catholic proponents of the war, like George Weigel and Michael Novak, repeatedly questioned the right of critics to judge whether the impending war was just. They appealed to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2309: “The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.” Though under Catholic social teaching every person and group has responsibility for the common good, the government’s propagandists insisted that the administration alone had the responsibility to judge whether it was morally right to go to war. The opinions of dissenters had no standing. There is an obvious sense, of course, in which public officials bear the primary responsibility to make the key judgments about the morality of a prospective war. Because they exercise the war-making authority, they naturally assume responsibility for moral assessment of the case for war. It does not follow, however, that they are the only ones who have such responsibility. After World War II, the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials, we may no longer presume that judgments about the morality of war belong exclusively to those in power. Unquestioning assent to political authority is a vestige of the days when warriors ruled. Just as blind obedience is no excuse for soldiers to fulfill criminal orders, so blind patriotism is no excuse for citizens to go along with a mistaken or trumped-up case for war. Our growing understanding of how the United States and Britain went to war in Iraq suggests that in the future it may be prudent to allow only a weak, prima facie presumption in favor of a government’s moral decision-making role. The Bush administration’s rush to war, with the complicity of Congress, provides a case study of how incompetence, in the form of poor and mishandled intelligence, combined with ideology, leads to erroneous--if not unscrupulous--moral judgments. As a vehicle for public moral decision-making, our system of government is broken. The reports of the Congressional 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Survey Group have left the central myth used to support the presumption in favor of political authority--that elected leaders know more than informed citizens--in tatters.Millions of people marching in the streets around the world knew better than our elected leaders. Academics and journalists knew better. The pope, the bishops and nearly all the churches in the United States knew better. We must conclude that in the future the presumption for the moral judgment of political authority can be no more than a weak one and that the duty of citizens to make their dissenting judgments public is a weighty one. At the beginning of the modern era, the Spanish Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez (d. 1617) argued that military commanders had the obligation to declare their conscientious judgments to the king. In a democracy, we can do no less; and we ought to do more. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his 1982 message for the World Day of Peace, “Rulers must be supported and enlightened by a public opinion that encourages them or, where necessary, expresses disapproval.” The U.S. bishops, in The Challenge of Peace, cited this admonition to urge the public to say no to nuclear war; but the principle has broader application. If we follow the pope’s advice, in the course of democratic policymaking the public has a responsibility to set a limit to the war-making discretion political leaders are allowed. In light of the war in Iraq, it appears that the catechism’s No. 2309 needs updating. The revision should take into account recent church teaching and the example of the pope, bishops and faithful in opposing war. It should acknowledge the fallibility and the failures of political leaders. Above all, it should affirm the right and responsibility of the public to set a limit in public opinion to the war-making of elected political elites.

Drew Christiansen, S.J., is an associate editor of America.