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by Jean Bethke Elshtain Basic Books, 2003 208 pp.; $16.10, hardcover |
In her book Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (Basic Books), Jean Bethke Elshtain critically examines responses to 9/11 and its aftermath, particularly from the academy and from church leaders, and makes the case for the principled use of force in the just war tradition. The book was published very soon after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, and it is sharply relevant to the ongoing debate about U.S. policy there. Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, spoke with Michael Cromartie early in the summer.
How would you assess the debate leading up to the war in Iraq?
It was, in many respects, quite extraordinary. Serious discussions were held in coffee shops and the halls of Congress. The fact that the Bush administration tried to work through the UN meant the issue dragged out for a considerable time. (Much easier to bypass the UN altogether, as the Clinton administration did when it commenced hostilities against the Serbs using NATO as cover.) Within the just war tradition, serious airing of issues, including whether a justifiable casus belli pertains, is a good thing.
That said, the debate was also disappointing, especially if one looks at the official statements from our churches. First, these statements were forthcoming without anything like widespread consultation with "the pews," so to speak. How else to explain the huge disparity on the war issue between the vast majority of ordinary Christians and the leadership of various denominations? Second, the just war tradition either was not referenced seriously or was actually misstated. I mean the criteria were distorted and the many complexities, subtleties and nuances of just war fell out. The notion that you must be directly attacked in order for a casus belli to pertain is wrong, for example. A strict interpretation of that requirement would mean we shouldn't have gone to war against Hitler's Germany, either: Germany had not directly attacked us. What was interesting to me is that people who otherwise lament sovereignty in favor of a far more internationalist or "cosmopolitan" outlook were suddenly using sovereignty and non-interference as if these were well-nigh inviolable concepts!
I would also have emphasized, from the side that favored the war, the absolute horrors of the Saddam Hussein regime at least as much as Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. I don't think the Bush Administration got the proportions right in making its case. (But here, too, the critics seem to have a strange view of things. You could put enough mustard gas or botulinim or VX to kill 250,000 people in a single UHaul! We're not going to suddenly happen on a huge storage facility with WMD emblazoned on the front.) Saddam is the biggest killer of Muslims the world has ever seen. With some 50 mass gravesites now unearthed in Iraq, the full horror is coming into view. I talked recently with Hassan Mneimneh, who co-directs the Iraqi Research and Documentation Project at Harvard University—now relocated to Washington, D.C. He will be executive director of a project I will likely co-chair on International Civil Society. This will be a serious cooperative enterprise with the Arab Thought Forum, headquartered in Cairo. Hassan described some of the documents seized in the 1991 Gulf War (there are "millions of documents," he says), and he can barely talk about what was going on, it was so hideous.
