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Houston had a major problem with mosquitoes in the 1950s. The city's mosquito control district told the public that repellent sprays could not control the mosquito population. Instead, the office said Houston's only recourse was to drain its low-lying areas of water that were serving as mosquito breeding grounds.

"I was in Houston last week and didn't see one solitary mosquito, which is amazing if you knew how Houston was," says Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. "Like mosquitoes, if you're going to deal with terrorists you can't just swat them or use insect repellent. You have to drain the swamp. Saddam Hussein is one of the major swamps. The U.S. would be doing the world a favor and acting in the best interest of future citizens of the U.S. by removing Saddam from power."

But would it be ethical?

Inside Washington, D.C., and around the world, a pre-emptive strike on Iraq has been hotly debated. Saying that Hussein poses a threat to U.S. national security and peace in the region, some members of the Bush administration believe that attacking Iraq is necessary to force a "regime change." This week, both Pakistan and Russia have condemned the U.S. plans. The World Council of Churches last week urged the Bush administration to halt its "rush to war" in favor of diplomatic measures.

Christianity Today contacted several Christian leaders to ask what circumstances would make a pre-emptive strike on Iraq the moral option. Most of those interviewed applied just-war theory to determine the situation's morality. However, two sources who do not subscribe to the theory said any preemptive attack would be immoral.

"Our Lord Jesus Christ said, 'If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, you turn him the other also,'" said Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School. "But President George Bush, who claims to be following Jesus Christ, says, 'According to the gospel of Cheney and Rumsfeld, if you think someone wants to strike you on the right cheek, hit him as hard as you can.'"

Volf says that the motive behind the suggested first strike is not national security but access to Middle East oil. "We have to have courage to look the truth in the eyes," he says. "Now is the time to act. Once the war is started, then it becomes more difficult."

Stanley Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, says that nations can slide down a slippery slope when justifying action by claiming it is a response to threats. "As a pacifist, I find this problematic," Hauerwas says. "No country is going to tell you that it ever fought an offensive war. But if the U.S. attacks, it is an offensive move. Where does a nation draw the line?"

Under just-war theory, as commonly held, several criteria must be met before military engagement: It must be conducted by a proper authority with just cause, right intentions, a reasonable chance of success, and using means proportional to the ends.

Sources for this article agreed that if an operation in Iraq is launched, it would have to be carefully planned to limit noncombatant causalities, be fought with moral means, and have a clear objective from the beginning.

"If all we do is blast out a regime and conditions of long-term civil war are all that's left, then the operation can hardly be justified," says Jim Skillen of the Center for Public Justice. "Are the countries around Iraq prepared to work with us to make sure a better regime gets in, and not a worse one? Does the U.S. have the support of allies to do that while rebuilding Afghanistan? There has to be an agreement and not a presumption that the U.N. will pick up the work."

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September (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46