Introduction
The Christian faith rose to preeminence in the Roman world in the face of unrelenting hostility from the state—three centuries of that hostility. Unlike other faiths, which came to dominate their respective regions with the help of the sword, the Christian faith didn’t have that kind of help. It is consequently easy for Christians to keep a church/state distinction in mind . . . that is in our DNA.
But after those three centuries, when the pagan apparatus of control finally collapsed, the Christians found themselves with the keys to the place. But it turned out, surprise, that this included the keys to the armory. Having prevailed against the sword without any swords, the Christians discovered that the price of this victory was that they had now captured . . . the swords. What on earth are we supposed to do with these things?
The Augustinian Standards
A lot of the groundwork for subsequent Christian thinking on this vexed topic was done by Augustine, albeit not in a systematic treatise. Because it is obviously possible to sin with the sword (and the Christians had just seen three centuries of that), the question before the house was this. What constitutes the difference between a just and an unjust use of coercive force? And how are we supposed to tell the difference?
The devil, as they say, is in the details, but here are some of the basic criteria that we can trace back to Augustine. The cause of the conflict must be just, with the intention to correct a serious wrong. The war must be pursued by a legitimate authority, and not by private individuals. The intention behind the whole thing must be good, and not driven by avarice, or pride, or vengeance. The violence of war must be a matter of last resort. Have other means of resolving the problem been exhausted? Next, the nation going to war must not be killing ants with a baseball bat. The means they use must be proportionate to the good that is being sought. Next, wherever possible, the war should be pursued in a way that seeks to spare non-combatants. And last, there needs to be some probability of success.
All nice and tidy, right? Well, not exactly. There are other complicating factors. In a defensive war, it can be noble to prefer death to surrender, even if there is no possibility of success. And there are the odd situations where the leader does not create the war, but rather the war creates the leader. There is no declared war, but the thing just explodes, and a legitimate leader emerges. And in the Old Testament, it was certainly a lawful measure of war to besiege a city, but there is no way to do that without besieging the women and children. Still, we should take these standards as a good rule of thumb.
Then there is the distinction between jus in bello, referring to just behavior in warfare, which needs to be kept in mind by individual soldiers, and jus ad bellum, which needs to be remembered by those who are making the decision to go to war in the first place. The above criteria apply to the decision-makers, and not to the machinist mate in the reactor room of the aircraft carrier.
But with all exceptions and yeah buts noted, the rough and ready Augustinian template seems to me to be a good place for all judicious Christians to begin their thinking when it comes to any armed conflict.
So what about those Houthis? The Houthis, recently in the news, are renegade proxies for Iran who control large parts of Yemen, the parts of Yemen that now look like a moonscape, and so what about them?
Making the Rubble Bounce in the Middle East
I want to argue that there is a vast difference between our recent military strikes against the Houthis, which meet the historic criteria for sensible and just military action, on the one hand, and other ventures we have attempted in that part of the world within recent memory, which should be categorized as demented and idolatrous. We need to do this carefully because from a distance (we are on the other side of the world from it), it can simply look like we are “at war” again over there. But there is a striking difference between this action, and the military action taken by previous administrations.
Obviously, I would want to argue that wars that are demented and idolatrous would clearly not meet the standards set by just war theory. I am referring here to our attempts at “nation-building” in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our clash with the Houthis has been simple and really straightforward. If they would agree to stop shooting at the merchant ships going through the Red Sea, then we would immediately agree to stop our attempts to bomb them back into the early Neolithic era. Life is simple if you only resolve to keep it simple. One of the central principles of war is objective. What are you seeking to achieve? If there is no clear objective, this means you are killing people for no particular reason. If there is an objective, plainly stated and defined, then we can know when we have gotten there.
Our war in Iraq and the following war in Afghanistan did not meet the just war standard, and they failed on at least two different levels. The first would be a constitutional issue, and one that I find really important. But with that emphasized, it is still far less important than the second issue, which would be the messiah-complex that has undergirded a lot of American adventurism. This messiah-complex first became manifest in the worst president ever, that being Woodrow Wilson, but more than a few have followed in his footsteps.
Let’s take these in turn. First the constitutional issue.
I don’t think we should have a problem when the commander-in-chief orders a surgical action against bad actors who are not quite a state—from the Barbary pirates to the Houthis. Great, and limited by its very nature. There is a clear and clean objective, and that military objective can be pursued without fear of inevitable escalation and entanglement. But to go to war with a nation like Iraq, and to depose its ruler, Saddam Hussein, and to change its government, and to do all this without a declaration of war from Congress shows how far away from the Founding ethos we have drifted. We have wandered into the makeshift adjustment of seeking “congressional authorization,” but that is not what the Constitution requires. So such wars were not conducted in a lawful and constitutional way, which means that the legitimate authority criterion was violated.
But a far more serious problem confronts us when we consider the delusional role we think we are supposed to play in world affairs. We show up here and we show up there, and we sprinkle democracy dust everywhere we go. We do this in the sincere belief that democracies are going to spring up in those places, and they almost never ever do.
Remember that one of the Augustinian criteria was that the nation declaring war needed to be going to war with good intentions. Making the Red Sea safe for merchant ships passing through is a good intention. It is straightforward, simple, and clean. Let the man ship his pallets filled with consumer goods from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. Leave him alone, wouldja?
But to conquer a nation like Iraq, and to think that you can fix everything there in just a few years by dumping a boatload of money and a paper constitution suggests levels of blinkered stupidity that are scarcely to be comprehended.
So vain attempts at “regime change & nation-building” preceded by war do not meet the criterion of good intentions. They are the opposite of good intentions. They are crammed full of conceit, pride, hubris, exceptionalism, false doctrine, and a little more conceit. There is nothing good about it.
Postscript: Iran With Nukes
Now there are some modern challenges given the modern landscape of war. Missiles and drones mean that a lot can be done now without any thought of ground troops, and electronic intelligence and counterintelligence in real time mean that preemptive war can become much more justifiable. If we intercepted a message that said “we ride at dawn,” we could find ourselves riding two hours before that.
But if you have been following what I argued above, then it should be clear that I believe that America has no business at all going to war with Iran. At the same time, the president has said that Iran cannot have a nuke, a sentiment I share, and in the way these things go, nobody ever takes any options “off the table.” But some of those options, like an American air strike against Iranian nuke development, would be really bad. Iranian air defenses are currently threadbare, the regime is extremely unpopular with the people there, and a humiliating defeat at the hands of the great Satan would very likely land us in nation-building territory again—and we have a moral obligation to knock that stuff off. When it comes to nation-building in that part of the world, America needs to check into rehab.
At the same time, Iran really is a regional threat. Through their proxies, they have been shooting rockets at Israel for years. They have been conducting these proxy campaigns against Israel through Hezbollah, through Hamas, and through the Houthis—all three of which have now been neutralized. So the prospect of a nuke is the only thing that Iran has left, and Iran having a nuke really would be an existential threat for the Israelis—but it is still not an existential threat for us. So then, what would the “last resort” in this situation be? If the current negotiations to end Iran’s nuke program fail, if the economic pressures that can be applied do not bring satisfaction, then we would just nod to Israel. “We understand your need to defend yourself. If you decide to do so, it will not make us mad. And we will veto any nonsense coming out of the UN.”
It does not give me that much heartburn when our representatives publicly refuse to take an American strike off the table. That could be considered as a chip in the geopolitical poker game. But I do believe that America needs to tell Israel, behind closed doors and in an ungarbled fashion, that under no circumstances will America be attacking Iran. “But of course,” our ambassador adds, “we are speaking for our nation only. We cannot speak for others.”