Chuck Fager

Published in the Washington City Paper, 1992.

Just War and The Gulf War, James Turner Johnson & George Weigel. Washington: Ethics & Public Policy Center, cloth, 170 pp., $19.95.

Lines In The Sand, Alan Geyer and Barbara Green. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, paper, 187 pp., $11.95.

George Weigel heads The Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, a second-string neoconservative think tank. For neoconservatives, the Gulf War offered the remarkable prospect of achieving several of their major goals with a single crushing blow: "reasserting" American power; protecting Israel; elbowing aside the USSR; plus, at home, it would smash the peace movement; kill the "Vietnam Syndrome"; slap down the liberal media; and seemingly guarantee George Bush’s reelection.

In an article last March, Weigel effused that Desert Storm, besides a great victory, had been the most just war imaginable, being "as closely conformed as is possible, in this kind of world, to the classic moral criteria of the just war tradition." Furthermore, "Everything," he exulted, "literally everything, that had been asserted by the misnamed ‘peace’ movement has been falsified . . ." by the war (emphasis his).

Thus like other neoconservatives, George Weigel’s jubilation at the success of the Gulf War was initially unbounded. Moreover, Weigel saw in the victory the key to his long crusade to clean out the pockets of alleged leftism and pacifism among the American Catholic bishops and other religious "intellectual elites."

Weigel is determined to see such softheaded "neo-isolationism" replaced by what he grandly calls the "classic Catholic tradition" of thought on peace and war, all of which since Augustine dovetails, in his ouevre at least, with the neocon vision of America as destined to be the definer, bearer, and enforcer of freedom, justice and true democracy in any world order, new, old or otherwise.

Those who don’t accept his Neo-Cold War agenda are, Weigel says, clearly "alienated from even a critical affection from the American experiment and what it means for the world." With such variants as "deeply alienated," "profoundly alienated" and "fundamentally alienated," this is one of his leitmotifs, flung endlessly at opponents, and it seems to explain just about everything he dislikes about all doubters, at least to his satisfaction.

So basic are these expressions to his outlook and theories that hereafter we will refer to them simply as DA, PA or FA for short. Being DA, PA or FA, Weigel says, is a product of the Sixties, that doleful decade when–well, you know the rap.

But despite its "great military victory," Desert Storm ultimately fell short: After all, not only is Saddam Hussein(at this writing) still in power, but possibly even worse, many American Catholic bishops and lay activists still haven’t seen the light. Hence Weigel has written a book, Just War and the Gulf War, with fellow neoconservative James Turner Johnson of Rutgers, to straighten them out.

It was not only some bishops who were restless. It is odd that Weigel, in an essay claiming to expound Catholic moral heritage, tradition and leadership on war and peace issues, does so without ever once mentioning the pope. This is the more remarkable in that in his other writings Weigel often seems to be an out-of-the-closet, flaming papaphile, shouting hosannas whenever John Paul denounces communism, liberation theology, or abortion.

But in Just War and the Gulf War, there is not a word about him. How come? Well, one possible explanation is that the record shows unmistakably that this time John Paul II was on the other side. Yep, right there with the PA and DA types all the way.

Further, leaders of many other Christian denominations(the "Lumpenreligentsia," in Weigel’s sneering term), likewise pleaded repeatedly for a delay in the rush to combat, urging more time for sanctions to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

But if the Pope is off limits, Just War and Gulf War is intended to exorcize skepticism about the great Gulf victory elsewhere in the churches, by exposing what Weigel calls the "curdled hash" of "unvarnished tercermundismo" and "a neo-isolationist version" of "liberal Protestant sentimen-tality...." on the part of the leading doubters. Johnson also hints darkly about anti-war activists(of whom, in truth, there were a rare fringe few) who urged "appeasement" of Saddam.

As evidence, Weigel claims to have, you should pardon the expression, the smoking guns: he reprints nine antiwar statements by various church leaders, principally the bishops, the National and World Councils of Churches, and Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine.

But Weigel’s broadside misses its mark, because if one actually reads the nine statements, it becomes evident that they do not fit the DA, PA and FA molds into which Weigel is trying to force them. They are in fact a lot closer to the Pope than to Ramsey Clark.

Take for instance "tercermundismo": Not a single statement ever uses the term "Third World," and they mention "the poor" only a handful of times.

Weigel also insinuates that the statements echoed Saddam’s line and declares that it "can be said with assurance" that they worked to "reinforce Saddam Hussein’s view that the force of public opinion could be used to compel the United States and its allies to stand down from their commitments to Iraq’s unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait."

But in fact they say just the opposite.

For instance, in the nine statements the invasion of Kuwait is explicitly condemned no less than 38 times; it is described as "aggression" 31 more times; and twenty other times the writers insist that Hussein must withdraw his forces from Kuwait. That’s at least 89 explicit rebukes in less than 60 pages.

Nowhere was there even a hint that Hussein should be allowed to stay in Kuwait. Just how Saddam Hussein was supposed to find sympathy or support in such a catalog of condemnation is a mystery that perhaps only neoconservatives are acute enough to solve.

Furthermore, I couldn’t find in them any symptoms of affliction with the deadly PA, DA or FA viruses. They shared a preference for sanctions with, among others, two former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, six former Secretaries of Defense, and nearly half the Congress. Are all of these latter worthies thereby shown to be DA and PA too?

For that matter, is it really the case that "everything" they predicted about the war was "falsified" by events? True, one statement made a veiled allusion to a possible world war; two others spoke of possible Arab uprisings elsewhere; neither happened.

But with one voice they all pleaded for avoiding a U.S. war for fear it would mean massive destruction and loss of life, including many American casualties; and while they were wrong about the American portion, they were proven right–in spades–about the rest.

How right? A recent Kuwaiti estimate put the toll of killed and missing during the Iraqi occupation at about 2100; we’ll assume here that all the missing Kuwaitis were murdered.

On the other side, the most credible estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties range from about 70,000 (the figure used by U.S. Census Bureau statisticians in making their annual population projections), to 157,000 and counting, by a Harvard study team that surveyed Iraq last fall. Other estimates run over 200,000. That’s a kill ratio of 35 to 75+ dead Iraqi civilians to every Kuwaiti killed. This is not the arithmetic of a just war; it’s the mathematics of massacre.

So Weigel’s indictment of antiwar church leaders is massively refuted by his own evidence. If anything in Just War and the Gulf War is ultimately to be regretted, it is more likely to be Weigel’s enthusiastic endorsement of the one-sided slaughter which the war became.

It is certainly possible to make a credible, non-neocon defense of the Gulf War; but you won’t find it in this book.

On the other side, it is also possible to make a careful, detailed, telling critique of the war from a religious, just war perspective. Alan Geyer of Wesley Theological Seminary and Barbara Green, a Presbyterian denominational staffer, do just that in Lines In the Sand (Westminster/John Knox, $11.95). I don’t say that the case in Lines In The Sand is unanswerable, but the book presents a detailed, informed critique of the war, based on just war criteria, that none of the war supporters I have read have yet come close to answering.

Perhaps the most tellingly elegant stroke against Weigel’s whole project comes from a voice out of the Catholic past: G.K. Chesterton, ironically one of Weigel’s favorite authors, put his finger on it nearly a century ago, after Britain had fought the Boer War, which he opposed:

"There are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity."

Weigel’s and Johnson’s endorsement in Just War and the Gulf War will certainly suit the vanity of a new, sanctified Pax Americana. It contains whitewash enough for lots of sepulchres.

George Bush seems to think this would be a fine idea; but it still has a long way to go to conquer the churches. For that I say, thank God. And in the meantime, where’s Cardinal Ratzinger when we really need him?

Copyright © by Chuck Fager. All rights reserved.

<<< Back to A Friendly Letter