"A poverty of moral imagination"

Prof. Norm Geras, an old-line English Marxist, identifies the two main failures of the Western Left post 9/11.

First is the sin of Marxist reductionism. In his own generation's Marxist development, Geras says that,

[I]t labored in its literary output, in dense and prolific works of argumentation, theory, historiography, social and political analysis-to separate itself from the earlier simplifications and reductions of the tradition it came from and that it sought to enrich. This was a generation for whom anti-reductionism was a constant watchword. A reductionist Marxist was something that, even at the height of Marxist intellectual fashion, no one wanted to be. Whether by way of the cultural themes of the Frankfurt School, of Gramscian "hegemony," Althusserian "relative autonomy," or the more empirically grounded methods of Anglophone socialist research, an enormous effort was made to establish a complex and multilayered theoretical sensibility, so that henceforth we might be in a position more effectively to grasp the multiple determinations of both the present and the past. It was a generation claiming to know that such determinations, in their range and variety, were intractable to being unified within one simple, all-encompassing story.

But all this theoretical work seems to have been for nought:

In affecting the general alignment of most of the socialist left in the conflicts that have preceded and followed the events of September 11, 2001, all this effort that I have tried briefly to characterize might just as well not have taken place. For even if more advanced models of theoretical explanation are now available to the left, it nonetheless seems to suffice in any given international conflict to know that on one side is the United States, and that the United States is a capitalist power that always has designs on the natural and human resources of the rest of the world. If you know this, everything else falls instantly into place; all other levels of analysis, all other considerations, are superfluous. They can either be ignored altogether, or they can be conceded in passing, but as merely secondary and hence ignorable in practice. ...

Knowing what the United States is-hegemon of global capitalism-and knowing what it must be up to, you have no need to allow any explanatory or strategic weight to other social, political, legal, or ideological realities. No need to give any decision-making, choice-determining weight to mass murder, or torture, or the fundamental rights of human beings; to the laws of war, the effects of specific political structures and belief systems, or the effects of the operational and moral choices made by movements cast by part of the left in an anti-imperialist role; to the character of the regimes opposed to the United States and its allies, however brutal those regimes might be; to the illegalities and oppressions for which they are responsible, whether at home or beyond their own borders; to genocidal processes actually ongoing and about which something cries out to be done; to the threats posed to democratic societies by movements that have already shown their deadly intent.

The second main fault of the Western Left is related to the first. Geras terms it "a poverty of moral imagination," which he defines as,

... a seeming lack of ability, of the imagination, to digest the meaning of the great moral and political evils of the world and to look at them unflinchingly. ...

They come to be treated, generically, as the product of class societies and, today, as the product of capitalism. The affinity between this overall intellectual tendency within Marxist and other left thinking, and the practical reductionism I have just described-in which America is identified as the source of all worldly wrongs-should be transparent. ...

The Taliban in Afghanistan; Saddam's Iraq; the reduction of a human being by torture; the use of terror randomly to kill innocents and to smite all those by whom they are cherished; mass murder; ethnic cleansing; all the manifold practices of human evil-to look upon these and at once see "capitalism," "imperialism," "America," is not only to show a poverty of moral imagination, it is to reveal a diminished understanding of the human world. A social or political science, or a practical politics, that cannot rise to the level of what has been understood, in their own mode, by the great religions-and I say this as a resolute and lifelong atheist-and what has also been understood, in their own mode, by all the great literatures of the world, is a science and a politics that can no longer be taken seriously. It should not be taken seriously by anyone attached to the democratic and egalitarian values that have always been at the heart of the broad socialist tradition.

My politics certainly aren't Marxist like Norm's, but I always enjoy reading his material. Read the whole piece, it's quite worthwhile. See also his blog. And see as well Ron Rosenbaum's October 2002 essay, Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee.

New refineries for old military bases?

Refineries' capacity can't keep up with regulatory requirements

Under the Defense Department's Base Realignment and Closure process, military bases have been closed or scaled down or consolidated for almost 15 years. Some bases have been merely mothballed while others have been transferred to state or local control.

Today President Bush said that some of those bases should be used to build new oil refineries.

Speaking at a Small Business Administration conference here [Washington, D.C. - DS], the president recommended this and other initiatives to address the country's energy needs and reduce dependence on foreign energy sources.

Bush said expanding refinery capacity will help address the shortage that's partly blamed for skyrocketing gasoline prices. The last oil refinery built in the United States was completed in 1976, he said.

During a White House press briefing today, spokesman Scott McClellan said the federal agencies would work with states and local communities to transfer closed military sites and make them available to refiners.

McClellan said many closed military bases are already being redeveloped or used for new purposes to help create jobs. Building oil refineries on some of them will "address a pressing problem that we face, and it will also address an economic need in these communities," he said.

According to a cable news report I heard today (sorry, no link), shortage of oil supply -well capacity - is not the culprit for the sharp increase in gasoline prices in recent weeks. The problem is increasing demand without commensurate increase is supply, for the bottleneck is the capacity to refine petroleum, according to the report. In fact, American refineries are approaching total effective capacity. According to the American Petroleum Institute,

The utilization rate for the first three months of 2005 averaged 91.7 percent of capacity, the highest for the first quarter in seven years, API said. March’s utilization rate, at 92.2 percent, was also the highest for that month in seven years, API reported.

Gasoline production, which rose 1.2 percent over year-ago levels, set a record first-quarter high of 8.45 million barrels per day, as did output of distillate fuel oil, up nearly 7 percent to 3.79 million barrels per day, API said.

It might seem that there is still eight percent increased capacity that could be used, but the margin costs for achieving incremental raises in production get higher and higher in refinery operations, maintenance and payroll, one reason why increased deliveries of gasoline don't result in lower prices. Also, every part of a refinery must be taken off line periodically for repairs and maintenance, so actual 100 percent capacity can't be achieved; I'd guess that 92-plus percent is getting close to what is attainable in practice and even that level will probably be difficult to maintain over the long term.

As Adel al-Jubeir, foreign affairs adviser to Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah, said Monday,

"There is no shortage of crude oil in the world today. What we see is a shortage of refining capacity, as well as shortages in infrastructures and so forth that drive the price of product up," he said. "It will not make a difference if Saudi Arabia ships an extra million or 2 million barrels of crude oil to the United States. If you cannot refine it, it will not turn into gasoline and that will not turn into lower prices."

But refinery capacity is not the only reason gas prices have risen so high, and perhaps not even the main reason. Turn we now to economist Brian Simpson, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle this month.

Though other factors cause high gas prices, such as high taxes and increasing world demand, environmental regulation is among the primary reasons. For example, environmental regulation has significantly restricted drilling for oil in Alaska and on the continental shelf. More drilling will increase the supply and thus lower prices.

Furthermore, 18 different gasoline formulations are in use across the United States, making it much more costly to produce and distribute gasoline. These blends aren't needed due to requirements of automobile engines, nor are they required by oil companies. The blends, including different ones used at different times of the year and in different geographic areas, are imposed by environmental regulations. Among other things, the regulations force refiners to incur greater costs in switching from the production of one blend to another. They also force refiners to produce a more costly "summer blend," which is partially responsible for the rise in price.

The requirement for 18 different gasolines directly relates to refinery capacity because when the last refinery was built 29 years ago, there were only a few kinds of gas being produced. Today, environmental regulations have "salami sliced" refining capacity so that economies of scale are lower than ever and demand for some kinds of gasoline can indeed strain the supply. Says Simpson,

California also imposes the harshest emissions requirements in the country, necessitating the use of a more costly, special blend of gasoline not produced anywhere else. It's no accident that gas in California is generally 30 to 40 cents above the national average.

There's no question that the country needs a lot more refinery capacity, but it will take many years to bring one more refinery online. Heck, it'll probably take the rest of Bush's term just to get the enabling legislation through Congress. In the meantime, the environmental lobby has such strength, especially over Congress' minority party, that the prospect of easing regulations to help increase effective capacity is very dim. Hold on to your wallet, folks, because fueling your car is going to empty it more rapidly than ever.

BTW, the greedy oil companies' profit margins are among the lowest of American industries.

Update: Steve Verdon at OTB explores the issue from other angles.

Gimme that ole-time insurgency

Are the insurgents in Iraq playing from a Cuban playbook?

George Will compares the insurgency in Iraq today with that of Algerian insurgents in the 1950s.

The Algerian insurgency was fueled by the most potent "ism" of a century of isms -- nationalism. In contrast, one of the strange, almost surreal, aspects of the Iraqi insurgency is its lack of ideological content. Most of the insurgents are "FREs" -- former regime elements -- who simply want to return to power. [See here - DS]

Unlike most of the violent cadres of the 20th century, the insurgency does not have a fighting faith; it does not bother to have an ideology to justify its claim to power. ...

By promiscuously dispensing death ... the insurgents hope to delegitimize the Iraqi government for its failure to provide the primary social good: freedom from fear of violent death.

I have to wonder whether the FREs are playing from a Cuban guidebook called, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, by Carlos Marighella. Originally published on paper (natch) in 1969, it was summarized thus by Claire Sterling in her 1981 book, The Terror Network:

In forty-eight densely packed pages, the Mini-Manual says it all. It explains whjy cities are better than rural areas for guerrilla operations, and how to behave there: no "foreign air" and "normal" occupations when possible. It suggests how to drill in urban courtyards; blow up bridges and railroad tracks,; raise money by kidnap ransoms and bank "expropriations" attacking the "nervous system of capitalism"; plan the "physical liquidation of ranking army officers and policemen,; deal with spies and informers, to be summarily executed ... .

It goes into careful detail about choices of weapons, and the need to "shoot first" at pointblank range if possible; "shooting and aiming are to the urban guerrilla what air and water are to human beings."

All this sounds almost identical to what the FRE and al Qaeda insurgents are doing in Iraq. It is well known in counter-terror agencies in Europe and the Americas that the Mini-Manual became the Bible of Western and Latin terrorist organizations; the Uruguayan Tupamaros were Marighella's first international students. The MM teachings quickly crossed the Atlantic to find a home in the German Red Army Fraction and the Italian Red Brigades. In America the Symbionese Liberation Army (of Patty Hearst fame) tried to adopt the MM's techniques. The MM was known to have been studied by some Middle Eastern terrorist groups as well.

All these movements failed, however. In Europe, the terrorists organizations were materially and financially supported by the old Soviet Union. When it disappeared, so did the USSR's support. In America, ordinary law-enforcement measures broke the SLA, the Weathermen and other self-styled urban insurgencies; their members were never very skilled at long-term covert operations and information security. In Uruguay, the government finally awoke to the threat posed by the Tupamaros and crushed them, but in so doing the country became a military dictatorship in 1972. It had formerly been the most free and wealthiest country in South America.

All these failures lie squarely at the feet of Carlos Marighella himself, who fell victim to his own romantic notions of "freedom fighting." The crackdown by the Uruguayan government and its increasing repression was not only anticipated by Marighella, it was actually an intermediate objective of the his urban guerrilla concept. But he badly missed the boat in two key areas. Marighella wrote that the insurgents use their violence in order to identify with popular causes, which wins them a base of support among the people. (Remember, the people are to the guerrillas as water is to fish.) Once that was done, he declared that,

... the government has no alternative but to intensify repression. Tbe police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people, make life in the city unbearable. The general sentiment is that the government in unjust, incapable of solving problems, and resorts purely to and simply to the physical liquidation of its opponents. The political situation is transformed [and so] the urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnapings and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the guerrilla must act.

All these steps are intended to lead to what Marighella called, "the uncontrollable expansion of urban rebellion."

Except that they don't lead there. There are two fundamental errors of the theory that it cannot overcome and that play to Iraq's long-term favor. The first error is the belief that in Iraq the increasing level of terrorist violence by either al Qaeda in Iraq or FREs will merge the terrorists with "popular causes," that is, make them one with the people. In Iraq, except for the minority of Sunnis aligned with the old Baathist party or Saddam's clan, the people's cause is freedom and democracy. Violence by Saddam's regime is what terrorized the people for more than 20 years; it will not lead them to submit to Baathist rule again. Quite the contrary, terrorist violence is unifying the Iraqi people with the new, sovereign government. As for al Qaeda's terrorism, the Iraqi people certainly have no desire to live under Islamism (see here) and al Qaeda's gruesome murders only convince the people evermore to shun it.

Al Qaeda is more guilty of this delusion than the FREs. Baathism in Iraq was never anything but simple, nepotist despotism to begin with; the ruling elite never were deluded that the Iraqi people were anything but subjects to be ruled with an iron hand. But one of Osama bin Laden's (and hence al Qaeda's generally) basic premises is that the Muslim ummah, the masses, are thirsting to live in a strict sharia society. But their powerlessness in the face of the apostate, repressive Arab governments keeps the ummah from their Islamic fulfillment. Since 9/11, though, events have proven that the Muslim masses are thirsting not for Islamism but for its opposite.

The second basic error in Marighella's theory is that increasing government countermeasures inevitably become so repressive of the ordinary people that the masses are driven thereby into embracing the revolutionary cause. Uprising results, the government is overthrown and the revolutionaries gain power. This is of course pure European Marxism-Leninism (by way of classically communist Cuba) so I don't want to claim it translates directly into Arab Iraq, but that's the concept, if not the source, that George Will sees, which is what got me going on this tear anyway.

But again, history shows that harsh reactionary repression is not inevitable. The European countries never did it, the United States never did it and Israel hasn't done it either, although Israel's security measures are very strict. The first test case was Uruguay, where the Tupamaros succeeded in goading the government into the crackdown. However, the crackdown utterly crushed the Tupamaros and there the revolution ended, though the government dictatorship remained. But the worldwide communist underground didn't learn the lesson.

I'll leave the last word to Claire Sterling. She was referring to Marxist urban guerrillas using the Marighella playbook, but her words fit to a tee the FRE and al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq:

[They become] corrupted - by the power they discover in the mouth of a gun, or by outsiders with something less selfless in mind, or by the growing estrangement from the society they want to improve. Often they are rejected by an overwhelming majority of their countrymen, reduced to a minority so absurdly small that tragedy almost becomes black comedy. Their response is to kill with increasing ferocity - to punish the profane, and because nothing elese is left for them to do. From killing for a cause, they slip into killing for their vested interests. Nobody's freedom but their own inspires them.

And they are losing, though there are miles to go before we sleep.

The media need to be biased

I want the news media to be biased, but the question is, which bias?

Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Richard Myers entreated a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors to tell the full stories in Iraq and Afghanistan a week ago.

Myers told the editors he reads far more about the problems of servicemembers’ equipment and the latest insurgent attack than about “the thousands of amazing things our troops are accomplishing.” This concerns him, he said, because American resolve is key to success.

The chairman said that part of the problem lies with the military. He said commanders must be more responsive and give more access to reporters. “We’re working on that,” he told the editors.

But still, “a bomb blast is seen as more newsworthy than the steady progress of rebuilding communities and lives, remodeling schools and running vaccination programs and water purification plants.”

This is such a dead horse that it is painful to flog it any more, but we can't blame Myers for trying. I would like the managing editor of any major news outlet, print or broadcast or cable, to explain why the only regular reports of Good News from Iraq come from blogger Arthur Chrenkoff, not from a MSM outlet. Really, I would like to hear an answer.

OpinionJournal, the WSJ's online commentary pages, does carry the GNFI series but Mr. Chrenkoff is not a WSJ staffer. He blogs from Australia and was born and raised in Poland. How interesting that America has shed the vast majority of blood for Iraq and spent the overwhelming majority of treasure, but no American writer (including me, I plead guilty) originated the series.

I have said before and I'll say again: There are only four basic outcomes of this war:

1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in Muslim lands, especially Arab countries, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit tendencies toward violent Islamism from their cultures so that terrorism does not threaten us or them. This goal is what amounts to total victory for the United States.

2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamismicization (there's a word for you!) of the entire Middle East (at the minimum), the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans. This outcome is what amounts to total victory for al Qaeda.

3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and full-scale war erupts between the US and, at the minimum, Syria and Iran. This would amount to a defeat for all concerned.

4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.

Perhaps you can think of other, different outcomes, but I think these pretty much cover the possibilities.

So the question for us commentati, whether based on the web or in traditional media, is simply: which of these outcomes is best? Which will be most favorable to human flourishing?

As for me, I choose the first, and have no qualms admitting I am heavily biased in favor thereof. And that bias certainly shapes my blogging!

The basic issue for news media:

For the news media, I ask you: which outcome do you want? It is not possible to pretend neutrality here, for the power of the media to frame the public's debate is too great to claim you are merely being "fair and balanced." There literally is no neutral ground here, no "God's eye view" of events, and hence no possibility of not taking sides. One way or another, what you print or broadcast, what stories you cover and how you cover them, what attention you pay to what issues and how you describe them - all these things mean that you will support one outcome over another. Which will you choose? How will you support it? These are the most important questions of your vocation today. But you are not facing them at all.

These questions seem especially relevant in light of the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for "breaking news" photography earlier this month to the Associated Press for this series of photos from Iraq. Stop reading now and look at the photos before reading on to see whether you believe with my own conclusions, that Wretchard cut to the quick so well:

One of these stunning photographs shows the Blackwater contractors strung up on the Fallujah bridge; another is a photograph which appears to show US soldiers cowering in fear; and the third is the famous execution on Haifa Street. The rest show US troops humiliating Iraqis to one degree or the other. There are no pictures of the Iraqi elections.

Since news by definition shows the truth one would expect the insurgency so lovingly depicted in these AP photos to have triumphed. But since that never happened and prospects grow dimmer by the day, the Pulitzer should be awarded instead for Poetry, since according to the Greeks history is reserved for things as they are but poetry may deal with things as they should be.

The award of the Pulitzer to this disgusting series of photographs should be welcomed by posterity. Fifty years hence people can look back at the work of people who called themselves journalists and judge.

Michelle Malkin has a compendium of commentary, including Riding Sun's "content analysis:"

U.S. troops injured, dead, or mourning: 3 (2, 3, 11)

Iraqi civilians harmed by the war: 7 (4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 18)

Insurgents looking determined or deadly: 3 (6, 15, 20)

US troops looking overwhelmed or uncertain: 3 (7, 12, 14)

US troops controlling Iraqi prisoners: 2 (16, 17)

Iraqis celebrating attacks on US forces: 2 (1, 19)

Equally telling is what the photos don't show:

US forces looking heroic: 0

US forces helping Iraqi civillians: 0

Iraqis expressing support for US forces: 0

Iraqis expressing opposition to insurgents: 0

With the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for these photos, it's not hard to conclude that the decision makers of the media establishment are indeed facing which outcome of the war they support, and the answer is Islamism.

The last word for this post goes to Kevin Myers of the UK Telegraph, writing last November:

We in the media must learn what our role in that struggle will be. Vicarious indignation at so-called atrocities is a moral frivolity: it proves that we are unaware of the scale of the crisis we face, now and into the foreseeable future. Our common enemy has vision, dedication, courage and intelligence. He is profoundly grateful for whatever tit-bits come his way: our media have a moral obligation to ensure that we are scattering absolutely none in his direction.

We'll wait to see whether Gen. Myers' entreaties have any effect. Personally, I don't think they will.

(see James Joyner's Beltway Traffic Jam.)

"How not to conduct guerrilla warfare"

reposted from donaldsensing.com

In 281 b.c, the Italian kingdom republic of Tarentum asked Pyrrhus, king of the Hellenistic nation-state of Epirus, for assistance against Rome. Pyrrhus landed on Italy with 25,000 men and entered into combat with Roman forces. His army defeated the Roman army at a battle near Heracleia, but when he realized that the Romans could easily replace their lost soldiers, Pyrrhus sued for peace. The Roman senate demanded that he withdraw from Italy before negotiating a peace treaty. Pyrrhus declined the demand and fought another battle at Asculum. His casualties were so great that he uttered the now-famous exclamation, "One more such victory and we are lost!"

Hence the term, "Pyrrhic victory."

Belmont Club explains the new desperation among the Iraqi insurgents, and the bad tactical blunders they are making as a result. He cites a CBS news report about a recent attack on the American-held Abu Ghraib prison.

Last Saturday's attack on Abu Ghraib in particular is a case study in how not to conduct guerilla warfare. Al Qaeda assaulted the prison complex from several directions with rockets, mortars, car bombs and small arms. The battle raged for two hours. No Americans were killed; 16 were slightly wounded, seven others hurt more seriously. Between 40 and 60 terrorists took part, and they admitted to ten killed, a KIA rate of 17-25 percent. The overall enemy casualty rate including wounded was probably over 50 percent. No prisoners were freed. Al Qaeda claimed the raid was a success, but a few more victories like this and theair insurgency will be over.

I was about to write that the Iraqi insurgents are fighting Pyrrhic battles, but then I remembered - Pyrrhus won the battles that ruined him. The insurgents are being destroyed and ruined in defeat.

See also Austin Bay, Bill Roggio and James Dunnugan.

Austin also comments on a battle today between Saudi security forces and al Qaeda terrorists in the town of Rass, 220 miles northwest of Riyadh.

The US-led attack on Saddam and Iraq’s emerging democracy have changed the “strategic calculus” in the region. The war’s “back home.” In May 2003 the Saudis had a major fight with Al Qaeda, and from what I’ve managed to piece together, they have been increasingly active in combating Al Qaeda. That’s good news, after a fashion. The Saudis home turf fight will be slow and brutal, a hideous, complex mix of civil war, tribal conflict, and religious war.

Remember, while Osama bin Laden has said that the United States is his main enemy, the "land of the two holy mosques," Saudi Arabia, is his main objective.

UD: Thanks to Michael Edward McNeil for pointing out that Tarantum was actually a republic not a kingdom.

Defining victory in the war on terror

reposted from donaldsensing.com

Austin Bay discussed the concept with "a very well-informed senior officer" serving in the Middle East. Read the whole thing.

One of the basic tasks of staff work in preparing military operations plans is to answer the question, "How will we know we've won?" It's not always an easy question, and the higher the level it is asked, the harder it is to answer it.

Bringing in the end of the age

reposted from donaldsensing.com

The Chicago Boyz has an essay by self-described "conservative Catholic" Lexington Green, "Some Thoughts on the Pope's Pacifism," written a little over a year ago, with observations on the limits of the pope's authority regarding pronouncements about war and peace. I made the point on The O'Reilly Factor Monday night that John Paul II's theology about war is heavily eschatological. "Eschaton" is the term of art Christian theologians use for the return of Christ in power, when the fullness of the Kingdom of God will ushered in. Lexington had proleptically addressed that point in talking about "immanentizing the eschaton," "immanent" meaning "to make or be present." Writing of the pope's theology, Lex said,

In a sense it is the error that Eric Voegelin condemned as trying to "immanentize the eschaton", i.e. arrive at a world something like the one which will follow the return of Christ in Glory by pretending that it is here already. It is a utopianism which can only lead to disappointment if not disaster. In a fallen world there will always be, at best, law-abiding armies, policemen and prisons. The alternative to just and lawful order imposed periodically by force is not a benign utopia but bloody-handed anarchy. Catholics used to know this. They need to relearn it.

I also made the point in my essays "Pope John Paul II and resisting terrorism," that John Paul's writings,

... indicate, sadly, a lack of understanding of the motivations and desires of our Islamist enemies. Their desire is not a Christianized world in which there is justice as John Paul defined it, but one in which all are submissive to the dictates of Allah, living under sharia law. John Paul’s vision of justice and Islamists’ vision of perfect Islam are not compatible and cannot be reconciled.

No theological ally of John Paul's renunciation of miltary force has stated the conundrum more succinctly that Jim Wallis, editor-in-chief of Sojouners Magazine. Before the Iraq War, Wallis explained well the dilemma facing pacifist-leaning Christians:

While the terrorists use and manipulate American global injustices to justify their crimes and to recruit the angry and desperate for their violent purposes, they have no interest in the global justice and peace that many of us have lived and fought for—indeed, they are its enemies. Their vision for the world is absolutely oppressive; they would destroy democracy, deny human rights, repress women, and persecute people of other faiths and even those of their own religion who disagree with them. Even worse, they blaspheme the name of God by doing their violent work in the name of religion. To dismiss them as merely Islamic fundamentalists or marginal extremists is not enough; these terrorists are educated, well-financed, and coldly calculating ideologues who will quickly and massively kill whenever it suits their clear purpose—which is taking power over Islam and the entire Muslim world. We must be realistic at this moment and confront the fact that terrorists are even now planning further violence against innocent people, on as massive a scale as their weapons and capacities will allow. They are people who seem not to be bound by conscience or limits on the destruction they seek.

Immanentized eschatology is not new in Christian thought and actually has many virtues to commend it - except when confronting nihilistic evil, as Mr. Wallis recognized. In 1932, after Japan had begun its conquest of China, prominent theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote a piece in The Christian Century called, "The Grace of Doing Nothing," in which he shrank from forceful intervention to resist the Japanese. He claimed, though, that "the fact that men can do nothing constructive is no indication of the fact that nothing constructive is being done." Christians, he said,

... are assured that the actual processes of history will inevitably and really bring a different kind of world with lasting peace. They do not rely on human aspirations after ideals to accomplish this end, but on forces which eliminated slavery in spite of abolitionists. The forces may be as impersonal and as actual as matching production, rapid transportation, the physical mixtures of races, and so on, but as parts of the real world they are as much a part of the total divine process as are human thoughts and prayers. ...

... Like early Christianity and like communism today radical Christianity knows that nothing constructive can be done by interference, but that something very constructive can be done in preparation for the future.

Which is to say that if you want the Kingdom of God to be realized, you have to live now as if it already has. The problem with this belief is twofold, I think:

1. As I said, it has no ability to confront and defeat nihilistic evil, though it can win victories against lesser evils,

2. It doesn't take into account the fact that the world will remain fallen until God himself rings down the curtain, and Jesus said that of that hour and day, no one knows but the God. There's neither Scripture nor experience that "forcing the issue," so to speak, will ring in the eschaton sooner.

In response to H.R. Niebuhr, his brother Reinhold fired back in the same magazine a week later as essay, "Must We Do Nothing?"

The hope of attaining an ethical goal for society by purely ethical means, that is, without coercion ... is an illusion which was spread chiefly among the comfortable classes of the past century. My brother does not make the mistake of assuming that this is possible in social terms. He is acutely aware of the fact that it is not possible to get a sufficient degree of pure disinterestedness and love among privileged classes and powerful nations to resolve the conflicts of history in that way. He understands the stubborn inertia which the ethical ideal meets in history. At this point his realistic interpretation of the facts of history comes in full conflict with his insistence upon a pure gospel ethic, upon a religiously inspired moral perfectionism, and he resolves the conflict by leaving the field of social theory entirely and resorting to eschatology. The Christian will try to achieve humility and disinterestedness not because enough Christians will be able to do so to change the course of history, but because this kind of spiritual attitude is a prayer to God for the coming of his kingdom. ...

What makes my brother's eschatology impossible for me is that he identifies everything that is occurring in history (the drift toward disaster, another world war and possibly a revolution) with the counsels of God, and then suddenly, by a leap of faith, comes to the conclusion that the same God who uses brutalities and force, against which man must maintain conscientious scruples, will finally establish an ideal society in which pure love will reign.

Reinhold goes on to posit that until the return of Christ, human societies will never be able to conform purely to the ethic of Christian love. In the interim, we must structure our world based on justice, as best we can, even though communities of justice are inferior to communities of love. The best justice human societies can attain will only roughly correspond to divine justice. Human justice will always involve contests of power because different groups make opposing claims that they consider rightful. However, "no contending group can have all it wants . . . and hence must [sometimes] be restrained by force."

This state of affairs is not God's ideal for human community; it is simply the best we can do until the Kingdom of God comes in power. Hence, Niebuhr concluded that coercion is not to be automatically avoided to achieve justice. The ethical goals of human society must not be sacrificed "simply because we are afraid to use any but purely ethical means. To say all this is to confess that the history of mankind is a perennial tragedy, for the highest ideals" that we can imagine are exactly ones which we "can never realize in social and collective terms."

American liberationist theologian James Cone agreed that in the fallen world we inhabit, justice is sometimes tragic, prevailing only because of deadly coercion. He pointed out that for Christians opposing oppression, the choice is not between violence and non-violence because violence is already present. The Christian must decide whether violence to overcome the oppression is a greater evil than the violence of the oppression itself. Unfortunately, Cone says, there are no absolute rules to decide the answer with certainty. Therefore, each case must be decided on its own merits.

The discussion will continue . . . .

Well, that was fun

reposted from donaldsensing.com

Trey Jackson emailed that he has the video online of my appearance tonight on The O'Reilly Factor. It's here. The topic was the Vatican's role in resisting terrorism after 9/11. I wrote a long essay on the topic this afternoon.

I got back from the studio for an hour ago. As with most live broadcasts that are not actual news coverage, the show is electronically delayed a few seconds so the engineers can kill the audio if a guest says something on mike that mustn't go on the air. (I would point to George Carlin's "Seven words you can't say on TV," but I don't think there are seven any more!)

Anyway, there is a studio in downtown Nashville that provides uplink services for networks when they need them. That's where I was. I had only audio, no video, so I wasn't actually aware of when my smiling visage was being sent out to America. (Obviously, when I was talking, I knew it was.)

Thank you for all the kind emails, I do read them all. I wish I could answer each one. The topic deserves a lot of attention; I commend Bill O'Reilly for including it. We could have talked the whole hour and not covered it, but his show sets a faster pace than that.

Pope John Paul II and resisting terrorism

resposted from donaldsensing.com

I will be on Bill O'Reilly's show, The O'Reilly Factor, on Fox News Channel tonight talking about this topic.

I wrote a couple of posts about the important role Pope John Paul played in bringing about the downfall of the Polish communist government (see here). Now the question about his stance on resisting Islamic terrorism after 9/11, and what he said regarding American armed force in striking against terrorists.

There is a long history of RCC teachings against the use of military force. In an excellent synoptic essay published on Georgetown University's site, "Hawks, Doves, and Pope John Paul II", Father Drew Christiansen, S.J., says that some Catholic critics of the Vatican's stance on this issue,

...worry that official Catholic thinking is slipping into closet pacifism. In his book, "Morality in Contemporary Warfare" (Yale, 1999), James Turner Johnson contends that modern Catholic teaching -- going as far back as Vatican Council I in 1869 -- has inclined toward pacifism out of revulsion for the lethality of modern war. The late Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder came to the same view from a pacifist direction, in his book, "When War Is Unjust" (Orbis, 1996).

What is clear is that the teaching has evolved markedly since Vatican II in the 1960s and especially under the leadership of Pope John Paul II.

What made the official pronouncements of the RCC take a new direction in the 1960s were the recent horrors of World War II, the invention of nuclear weapons, the ever-present danger of the Cold War becoming an atomic war and (less overtly) the Vietnam War. The RCC formally denounced that an atomic war could possibly have a place within the parameters of Just War Theory as the Church had always understood Just War. Wrote Lorenzo Albacete,

Since Pope John XXXIII's encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) and the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Papal Magisterium has strongly insisted that in the age of nuclear weapons the dangers of a mass conflagration have made war unacceptable, and nuclear war itself immoral, according to the very principles of the just war doctrine.

From there it is prenot a large step to the renunciation of all war as inherently unjust. Catholic teaching on this issue, including from the Vatican, changed little between Second Vatican Council and the election of Karol Wojtyla as pope in 1978, after which he took the name John Paul II.

John Paul brought with him into two crucial experiences that shaped his views on the use of armed force well before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 occurred. First was the invasion and conquest of Poland in 1939 by Germany. The Polish military fought bravely but futilely and was smashed within weeks. The Nazi occupation was extremely harsh, surpassed in brutality only by the occupation of Soviet lands. It was during the war years that Karol Wojtyla reached adulthood and responded to his call to religious service.

By the end of the war, Poland had been occupied by the Soviet army, which installed a puppet government. While the communist government of Poland was less violent than the German occupation, it was no less oppressive. John Paul's call to ministry in Poland had come under the Nazi boot; his years in ministry were all spent under the communist one. In short: all John Paul's experiences with state power were experiences of state violence and state oppression. This cannot have failed to have had a strong influence on how he viewed the use of force by states. John Paul said as much, writing in 2002 that the suffering "caused by Nazi and Communist totalitarianism" was never far from his thoughts and prayers (nor should they have been, I would add).

At the same time, John Paul knew after installation as pope that his countrymen seethed to be free. He knew of the proto-resistance groups efforts formed in the 1970s, and understood that communism's Achilles heel consisted of two vulnerable areas:

1. Its monopoly on the political life of the nation was a weakness, not a strength.

2. It had no legitimacy granted by the people, having been installed by force by the USSR.

There was another key factor that John Paul undoubtedly had to recognize: though the Polish communists ruled by oppression, they were not bent on destruction. They, like the masses, thought of themselves as Poles. This fact meant that if their political rule could be subverted non-violently, it was less likely than otherwise that the communist government would respond lethally, especially with mass lethality.

I'll not re-address the crucial actions John Paul took in giving legitimacy to the Polish resistance movement, Solidarity, except to point out that the moral authority Karol Wojtyla already enjoyed in Poland was greatly amplified when he was elected Pope. In turn, he used his new office to confer upon Solidarity specifically and the Polish people generally a moral and international legitimacy and standing contra the communist government. The RC churches in Poland were central to the country's democratization, and, key to understanding John Paul's later stance on terrorism, breaking the shackles of Polish oppression was done so without bloody civil war. Poland's revolution was non-violent.

This lesson was never lost on the pope.

The attacks on 9/11 did not change John Paul's theology of responding to oppression, even violent oppression. The attacks did, however, give his theology a new urgency. From the beginning, John Paul emphasized that the first priority of human affairs must be justice. Peace among people and nations springs from justice. Simply defined, justice is "the right ordering of things and relationships." Father Christiansen quoted John Paul thus:

[In July 2002], while welcoming the new Philippine ambassador to the Vatican, the Holy Father counseled, "The pillars of peace in your land, as everywhere else, are justice and forgiveness: the justice that seeks to ensure full respect for rights and responsibilities, and equitable distribution of benefits and burdens, and the forgiveness which heals and rebuilds troubled human relations from their foundations."

These were not new thoughts for John Paul. On World Peace Day 1999, he wrote,

Recent history clearly shows the failure of recourse to violence as a means for resolving political and social problems. War destroys, it does not build up; it weakens the moral foundations of society and creates further divisions and long-lasting tensions. [cited here]

It may well be, as Father Raymond J. de Souza wrote, that John Paul's view here is highly Eurocentric and hence too tightly contextualized in Europe's history of the last few decades to serve as an effective guide for global resistance against terrorism. I personally think there is much merit to de Souza's argument. But I cannot accuse justly John Paul of silence about terrorism.

In Peru in 1995 the Pope cried out, "I ask you in God’s name: change your course!" Although none of the terrorist or guerilla groups dropped their guns at his appeal, John Paul II believes that the Gospel call for the rejection of violence will bear fruit in the Holy Spirit’s good time. [link

Nor was John Paul stinting in his condemnation of the terrorism of 9/11 and after. His message for World Day of Peace 2002 included,

... Terrorism is built on contempt for human life. For this reason, not only does it commit intolerable crimes, but because it resorts to terror as a political and military means it is itself a true crime against humanity.

5. There exists therefore a right to defend oneself against terrorism, a right which, as always, must be exercised with respect for moral and legal limits in the choice of ends and means. The guilty must be correctly identified, since criminal culpability is always personal and cannot be extended to the nation, ethnic group or religion to which the terrorists may belong. International cooperation in the fight against terrorist activities must also include a courageous and resolute political, diplomatic and economic commitment to relieving situations of oppression and marginalization which facilitate the designs of terrorists. The recruitment of terrorists in fact is easier in situations where rights are trampled upon and injustices tolerated over a long period of time.

The question is this: does a nation's "right to defend oneself against terrorism" include the right to defend itself by military force?

On this question, John Paul's position was muddled. On the one hand, the context of his declaration indicates - without saying so explicitly - that the defensive actions are akin to police work; he spoke of terrorists as having "criminal culpability." On the other, this caution seems to have been directed at making sure a nation's (that is, America's) actions against terrorism are oriented toward terrorists, not against nations, ethnic groups or religions (read, Islam).

It should be noted that the pope did not denounce America's military attack against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Noted Dr. Paul J. Griffiths, Schmitt Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago,

[T]he Catholic hierarchy in the U.S. - and, though with more ambiguity, the Pope himself - have judged the American action in Afghanistan to be just. My own bishop, Francis Cardinal George of Chicago, unambiguously did so last October. [link ]

(Griffiths himself disagreed and dissented.) It should also be noted that John Paul endorsed the use of military force in humanitarian efforts, even if it meant active combat against the oppressors. Father Christiansen again:

Although a persistent voice on behalf of nonviolent solutions, the Holy Father also called for "humanitarian intervention" or peacekeeping in trouble spots like Bosnia, Central Africa, and East Timor, even if that meant using force to "disarm the aggressor." His advocacy of humanitarian intervention as much as his praise for nonviolence is contributing to a rethinking of Catholic thought on the use of force in world affairs.

It frankly beggars credulity that forceful intervention in Bosnia, which John Paul endorsed, was of a different moral character than overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein and bringing liberty and self-determination to 24 million Iraqis, which John Paul opposed.

Which brings us to Iraq. John Paul endorsed military force in Bosnia for certain ends and was not averse to its use in certain other troubled spots. He endorsed (if only weakly) the war against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, but denounced the invasion of Iraq. Why?

I believe that from the beginning the Holy See failed to follow a primary rule of ethical inquiry: first discern what is really going on. As it became clearer and clearer that President Bush was determined to end the status quo in Iraq, the Vatican's primary failure was to understand what the status quo was, namely, that America had been legally and actually at war with Iraq since 1991. The question, as I wrote for the UMNS , was not whether to go to war with Iraq in 2002, it was how the ongoing war would be ended.

This lack of strategic insight permeated the Vatican's position on the Iraq war. As events moved toward the invasion, John Paul's chief theological spokesman, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, "began stating unequivocally that,

"The concept of a 'preventive war' does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. His comments had been published as early as September 2002 and were repeated several times as war seemed imminent. ...

In an interview with Zenit on May 2, 2003, the Cardinal restated the position of the Holy Father on the Iraq war (II) and on the question of the possibility of a just war in today's world.: "There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a 'just war.'" [link]

This is as confused a theology as you're likely to find anywhere. On the one hand, "There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq," presumably means that there could be sufficient reasons to make war against Iraq, even if they were not present at the moment. On the other, we shouldn't admit that just war is even possible. Cardinal, you can't have it both ways.

Further light is shed by John Paul's World Peace Day message of 2002:

... I have often paused to reflect on the persistent question: how do we restore the moral and social order subjected to such horrific violence? My reasoned conviction, confirmed in turn by biblical revelation, is that the shattered order cannot be fully restored except by a response that combines justice with forgiveness. The pillars of true peace are justice and that form of love which is forgiveness.

3. But in the present circumstances, how can we speak of justice and forgiveness as the source and condition of peace? We can and we must, no matter how difficult this may be; a difficulty which often comes from thinking that justice and forgiveness are irreconcilable. But forgiveness is the opposite of resentment and revenge, not of justice. In fact, true peace is “the work of justice” (Is 32:17). As the Second Vatican Council put it, peace is “the fruit of that right ordering of things with which the divine founder has invested human society and which must be actualized by man thirsting for an ever more perfect reign of justice” (Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 78). [italics original]

Again, while I admire the sentiments and agree that this is a wonderful expression of Christian principle and hope, I think it is theologically confused. I wrote yesterday about the workings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa after apartheid ended. Whatever else the TRCs did, they put these sentiments into action - yet justice, the ending of apartheid, was a precursor to forgiveness and reconciliation there because forgiveness and peace could not have been obtained as long as apartheid held.

What John Paul did over time was arrive at a frankly muddled theology in which military force can be endorsed for "humanitarian" reasons, rarely permitted for self defense against terrorist attack, but within strict limits, and denounced completely in other cases, Iraq being the principle example.

What John Paul did in the Falklands War between England and Argentina is also informative.

When John Paul II was preparing for his visit to England in 1982 while the country was at war, his collaborators advised him against going. When they told him that to visit a country at war could be taken as an offense by the other country, the pope replied that he would visit them both! And he did. He visited England from May 28 to June 2 and went on to Argentina from June 10 to 13. He said to members of the Curia that he could not abandon two countries at war with one another, and that he must show the world at large that the universality of his mission did not conflict with a people’s patriotism. In Coventry, England, which had been totally destroyed by Nazi bombardment in the Second World War, he said, "Today the scale and the horror of modern warfare—whether nuclear or not—makes it totally unacceptable as a means of settling differences between nations. War should belong to the tragic past, to history, it should find no place on humanity’s agenda for the future."

John Paul saw his role as a mediator between contending states. That probably explains why in the runup to 1991's Gulf War, he invited Tariq Aziz ("one of Saddam Hussein's most blood-spattered henchmen," wrote Christopher Hitchens) to private audience. But the rhetoric of justice and forgiveness and peace and love, repeated over and over by John Paul, is itself highly contextualized, and explains why it has been utterly ignored by the very terrorists he denounced: it is Christian rhetoric, and of no importance to al Qaeda except to be destroyed.

Here is where I think John Paul's greatest weakness was in dealing with 9/11-related terrorism. It was not that he was Christian, it was that he seemed not to realize that the terrorists are not. He consistently made the error of assuming that everyone - even Islamist terrorists - could find a common ground for peace and justice defined in specifically Christian terms. As he said in his 2003 address to the Vatican diplomatic corps,

I have been personally struck by the feeling of fear which often dwells in the hearts of our contemporaries. An insidious terrorism capable of striking at any time and anywhere; the unresolved problem of the Middle East, with the Holy Land and Iraq; ...

Yet everything can change. It depends on each of us. Everyone can develop within himself his potential for faith, for honesty, for respect of others and for commitment to the service of others.

This and other quotations I have cited seem to indicate, sadly, a lack of understanding of the motivations and desires of our Islamist enemies. Their desire is not a Christianized world in which there is justice as John Paul defined it, but one in which all are submissive to the dictates of Allah, living under sharia law. John Paul's vision of justice and Islamists' vision of perfect Islam are not compatible and cannot be reconciled. Hence, if it is accurate to say that John Paul not only was deeply grieved over the use of military force but saw himself as a bridge-maker between contending parties, he was trying to build a bridge that could be abutted on only one side. ("Pontiff" btw, is short for a late-empire title of the Caesar, pontificus maximus, or "master bridger," which was assumed by a pope after Constantine, IIRC.) Within the religion of Islamism, there is no footing to be found for John Paul's theology of justice, love, forgiveness and peace.

See also my essays:

Wishful thinking passes for theological reflection nowadays, which does not talk about the pope but about some other clerics' positions,

Is America Justified to Use Force?, which I wrote shortly after 9/11,

The Big Picture

Osama bin Laden's strategic plan

Politics, national interest and just war

Bill O'Reilly and me

reposted from donaldsensing.com

I am scheduled to be on The O'Reilly Factor show tonight to discuss Pope John Paul's role in resisting communism and terrorism. It starts at 8 p.m. EDT; I don't know when in the show my segment falls.

Update: Apparently, I'll be on with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Here is my long essay of today addressing the topic: Pope John Paul II and resisting terrorism.

The Pope and communism's fall

reposted from donaldsensing.com

I wrote briefly this week about Pope John Paul's role in bringing about the end of Polish communism, springboarding off an Agence France Press report that said the assassination attempt against the pope's life originated in the Soviet KGB.

Leopold Stoltch writes today that John Paul's role in the fall of communism is "overstated." He cites a quote by Lech Walesa:

"We know what the pope has achieved. Fifty percent of the collapse of communism is his doing," Walesa told The Associated Press on Friday. "More than one year after he spoke these words, we were able to organize 10 million people for strikes, protests and negotiations.

"Earlier we tried, I tried, and we couldn't do it. These are facts. Of course, communism would have fallen, but much later and in a bloody way. He was a gift from the heavens to us."

To which Leopold responds,

It seems to me that Walesa and others completely overstate the Pope's impact on the fall of communism in the Soviet Union. In fact, it has been my position that the Pope (and the Church in general) has been extraordinarily weak in the face of tyranny, always counselling the United States against using military force but never calling the Soviets or other dictatorial regimes to account for their persistent violations of natural law.

The most recent example of this one-sided pacifism occurred when the Pope admonished President Bush not to invade Iraq, but never called on Saddam Hussein to stop murdering his own people. To constantly call for the good to stand down in the face of evil, in the name of allowing peace to come in God's time, seems a contradiction that I can't get over.

I would reply thus: First, it is far too much to credit John Paul II for the fall of communism as a whole. The credit he deserves relates to what he did to bring about the fall of Polish communism. That is what Walesa was addressing. What he did, in conjunction with Walesa's Solidarity movement, was de-legitimize the Polish government and lead, not exactly to its collapse, but to its growing inability to monopolize the political life of the nation. Once men like Walesa found political effectiveness outside the Party, communist rule there was doomed.

The pope visited Poland in 1979, a year before Solidarity was born. By 1982 (IIRC) the Communist government had outlawed Solidarity and had imposed martial law. But John Paul visited Poland again in 1987. Reported the BBC:

When he re-visited Poland in 1987, the Polish leader, General Jaruzelski, and the Communist leadership gave the Pope the welcome due to a foreign Head of State. But the pomp and ceremony could not disguise the authorities' nervousness. Television viewers noted the General's trembling voice. The battle for the Polish soul was an unequal one. In a sonorous baritone, as yet untouched by the Parkinson's Disease that afflicts him today, the Pope told the customary huge crowds that came to greet him what many wanted to hear... ."

There was still a long, hard row to hoe before the Warsaw Pact broke up, followed by the Soviet empire itself. The Polish political revolution was not the foundation of the fall of Soviet empire, it was a big crack in the wall. The foundation was Communist East Germany. When the people there threw off the authority of the government, the whole facade collapsed and the Soviet empire - indeed, the Soviet Union itself - was shown to be a house of cards, politically speaking.

John Paul's role in the revolution in East Germany was nil. The locus of resistance there was the Protestant Lutheran church, not the Catholic church. But I hold that without the example of the Polish resistance the East Germans would likely not have been so bold.

As for John Paul's one-sidedness in dealing with Saddam, I have no explanation. But this article by Father Raymond J. de Souza, writing from Rome in 2003 sheds a lot of light, I think. It first appeared in the National Catholic Register.

George Weigel, the papal biographer, once asked his subject what he learned from the Second World War. Pope John Paul II answered instantly: "I learned the experience of my contemporaries: humiliation at the hands of evil."

The moral of the war story for so much of Europe is just that: humiliation and evil. ...

The Holy See, too, felt the pain of humiliation, with the tiny Vatican City State surrounded. The Church felt compelled to moderate her voice to preserve the neutrality upon which her freedom depended. It was a defensible policy but there was no glory in it — there was only humiliation in the face of evil.

Indeed, with the exception of Poland — which fought bravely and lost — and Britain — which fought bravely and won — the moral of the war story for Europe was that, as John Paul is fond of saying, "nothing is solved by war." The subsequent Cold War only reinforced the view that war brings more evils in its wake and further underscored the impotence of free Europe to combat evil in its own neighborhood. ...

So the Iraq war has produced an odd situation. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair are men of deep Christian faith, explicitly motivated by the morality of their policy and committed to the role of religion in public life. Yet the Holy See has opposed them every step of the way.

De Souza's point is that Europeans generally do not see military force as being inside the moral universe, that war is purely destructive, never politically liberating. See also, Janet Dalety piece in the UK Telegraph, "Freedom? Why Europe's not bothered."

(Catholic theologian George Weigel, cited by de Souza, has also written extensively on the theology of war. I've discussed his works five times. See this index.)


Update: Arthur Chrenkoff was a child in Krakow when John Paul visited there in 1983.

My John Paul, not surprisingly, is the political Pope, the Polish Pope, the one who helped to bring down the Soviet Empire. There is no doubt in my mind about the role he played in this grand spectacle of history. Forget all the rather silly theories about cooperation with the CIA, or some "holy alliance" with President Reagan; he made a difference not on the account of some covert shenanigans but because of who he was, what he said and what he did out in the open, in front of the billions.

If you distill it all into one word, it is this: hope. He gave us hope. By us, I mean initially the Poles, the troublemakers who in 1980 started rocking the communist boat ...

Read the whole thing.

Reconciliation as an exit strategy

reposted from donaldsensing.com

I posted late last month of the report that native Iraqi terrorists seem to be looking for an exit strategy from their insurgency (al Qaeda terrorists not so). The insurgents concerned are Baathist holdouts - dead enders," as Donald Rumsfeld called them - and Saddam loyalists who fought the Americans and other coalition forces. Since the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq they have become increasingly persuaded that Baathism is not ever to return to Iraq and that loyalty to Saddam is a lost cause.

Kim Du Toit asks what should be done with them in the new, democratic Iraq:

I know, the immediate impulse is to say, “Kill the [expletive]!”

But it’s not really that simple. Let’s assume you were a senior Army officer in Saddam Hussein’s army, and you were ordered to commit some atrocity against, say the Shi’ites or Kurds.

Don’t even think that refusal was an option. In a civilized society, refusal to obey an illegal order might mean enforced resignation, but plaudits for your humanity from society as a whole. Under Saddam’s dictatorship, refusal might have meant watching helplessly as your teenage daughter and ten-year-old son were gang-raped right in front of you, and your wife killed by being boiled alive, followed by your own death from having a four-foot spike hammered up your anus.

Kim was born South African and lived there the first three decades of his life before immigrating to the US. He has a different perspective on handling the dead enders because of his native land's experience in overcoming apartheid.

When the African National Congress came to power, the question then became: what to do with these instruments of Afrikaner oppression?

Commendably, Nelson Mandela suggested that there be what he termed a “Reconcilation”—that these people would be forgiven, provided that they made a public show of penitence, and confessed all that they’d done.

It worked, more or less, although a few of the most egregious offenders found that there was still a prison sentence in their future—but the names were announced ahead of time, so everyone knew exactly where they stood.

As far as I know, the issue was settled at that point.

Now some thoughts. First, one of the things that definitely enabled the South African reconciliation was the active work of the church there. The church was segregated during apartheid (more so than in the antebellum American South, actually) but the teachings of the church and it doctrine formed a common basis of blacks and whites for structuring the nation's reconciliation.

As Hugo van der Merwe wrote,

In many respects, this battle for justice was one that built the legitimacy of the church as a political actor with real power to promote social change. It is therefore not surprising that the task of overcoming social divisions and (re)building relationships in a democratic South Africa is something that is now seen by society and by church leaders as a key part of the church's role. ...

The South Africans established a network of organizations called Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs). As United Methodist Bishop in South Africa Peter Storey wrote,

... By 1990, when then South African President F. W. de Klerk announced negotiations with Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC), small groups of South Africans-- nongovernmental organizations, religious leaders, and human-rights lawyers--had already begun to address the problem of the nation's past. They said there could be no new, united South Africa without a commonly acknowledged history and that this required honestly facing and dealing with the brutal oppression of the apartheid years. ...

Any successful attempt to address the past would need to both acknowledge the suffering of apartheid's victims and lead to national reconciliation. It had to steer a delicate course between those who cried "prosecute and punish" and those who demanded "forgive and forget." Negotiators created a process that evokes biblical reconciliation, a process that proceeds according to this rubric: "It is necessary to both remember and judge--and forgive."

TRCs were not specifically religious organizations but the scope and nature of their work was significantly influenced by the church. Van der Merwe wrote,

Once the TRC was established, the churches became even more actively involved, particularly within local communities. Many churches provided direct assistance in facilitating the implementation of effective gross human rights violation hearings. The TRC made extensive use of church networks when setting up Human Rights Violations Hearings in local communities. Through the South African Council of Churches and other religious networks, local ministers were drawn into the process of coordinating meetings, arranging publicity, statement taking and other crucial functions to ensure effective community engagement in the hearings. In some cases, churches also assisted in creating a (limited) support structure for victims seeking counselling.

In collaboration with the TRC, church structures also made key inputs into two TRC events: the Religious Sector Hearing and a Children's Hearing. A wide range of churches participated in the Religious Sector Hearing in East London in November 1997. At these hearings, churches made submission about their role during apartheid. Some used the opportunity to look at the their own history of human rights abuses, and apologised for their role in apartheid. Others used the opportunity to recount their experiences of struggle against apartheid abuses.

This part was critical. While helping to enable reconciliation among different sectors of socieyt (principally between whites and blacks, of course, but there were many other groups also), the churches looked at themselves in the mirror and recognized that they had been both part of the problem as well as of the solution.

There were many other characteristics of TRCs that enabled their success that I won't delineate here. Bishop Storey's article explains them well. The question is: can South African TRCs serve as a model for uniting Iraq?

Whether the Muslim clerics in Iraq can serve a role similar to that of the Christian clergy in South Africa is a key question. Forgiveness and reconciliation are central Christian virtues, much more strongly than in Islam.

In December 2003, after Saddam Hussein was captured, I wrote a piece for the United Methodist News Service on what would constitute justice for Saddam, in which I broached the idea of using South African TRCs as an example (not muyoriginal thought with me, I should add).

Most of Saddam's crimes were committed against Iraqis inside Iraq. "The Iraqis need to see justice being done in front of them," Iraq's representative to the United States, Rend al-Rahim, said Dec. 14 on CNN. "This is going to be truly a process of healing. (It will) lead to a national reconciliation, to Iraq being able to move forward and, in a sense, look at its past and say, 'Never again.'"

Trying Saddam is only one part of justice for Iraq. We should also help the Iraqis achieve restorative justice to engender reparation, restitution and rehabilitation of their nation, and redemptive justice to enable them to break the grip of their oppressed past.

A potential model for this long-term task is how South Africans worked out of apartheid without tearing themselves apart socially. The Iraq Foundation, founded by Iraqi refugees in 1991, and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority have broached the idea of Iraqi truth commissions.

None of this can be done while the insurgency is active, but it seems to me a good idea for the Iraqis to consider in persuading the dead enders to abandon their fight.

Muhammed v. Christ

James Arlandson, Ph.D., answers the question, "Does Islam improve on Christianity?"

Basic Islamic theology teaches that since Allah sent Gabriel down with the Quran to Muhammad the messenger of Allah, Muhammad and the Quran fulfill and complete the mission of Christ and the New Testament. Muhammad seems to recognize the value of the Bible (Suras 4:47; 4:136; 4:163; 5:44-48; 5:82-83; 6:92, 154), but ultimately Christianity and the New Testament must yield to Islam and the Quran, the new and superior revelation.

This is indeed a fundamental teaching of Islam. Arlandason says Islam fails the test, and explains why.

Pope John Paul II and Polish communism's fall

Reposted from April 2, 2005. Links were valid at the time of authorship.

Leopold Stoltch writes today that John Paul's role in the fall of communism is "overstated." He cites a quote by Lech Walesa:

"We know what the pope has achieved. Fifty percent of the collapse of communism is his doing," Walesa told The Associated Press on Friday. "More than one year after he spoke these words, we were able to organize 10 million people for strikes, protests and negotiations. "Earlier we tried, I tried, and we couldn't do it. These are facts. Of course, communism would have fallen, but much later and in a bloody way. He was a gift from the heavens to us."

To which Leopold responds,

It seems to me that Walesa and others completely overstate the Pope's impact on the fall of communism in the Soviet Union. In fact, it has been my position that the Pope (and the Church in general) has been extraordinarily weak in the face of tyranny, always counselling the United States against using military force but never calling the Soviets or other dictatorial regimes to account for their persistent violations of natural law. The most recent example of this one-sided pacifism occurred when the Pope admonished President Bush not to invade Iraq, but never called on Saddam Hussein to stop murdering his own people. To constantly call for the good to stand down in the face of evil, in the name of allowing peace to come in God's time, seems a contradiction that I can't get over.

I would reply thus: First, it is far too much to credit John Paul II for the fall of communism as a whole. The credit he deserves relates to what he did to bring about the fall of Polish communism. That is what Walesa was addressing. What he did, in conjunction with Walesa's Solidarity movement, was de-legitimize the Polish government and lead, not exactly to its collapse, but to its growing inability to monopolize the political life of the nation. Once men like Walesa found political effectiveness outside the Party, communist rule there was doomed. The pope visited Poland in 1979, a year before Solidarity was born. By 1982 (IIRC) the Communist government had outlawed Solidarity and had imposed martial law. But John Paul visited Poland again in 1987. Reported the BBC:

When he re-visited Poland in 1987, the Polish leader, General Jaruzelski, and the Communist leadership gave the Pope the welcome due to a foreign Head of State. But the pomp and ceremony could not disguise the authorities' nervousness. Television viewers noted the General's trembling voice. The battle for the Polish soul was an unequal one. In a sonorous baritone, as yet untouched by the Parkinson's Disease that afflicts him today, the Pope told the customary huge crowds that came to greet him what many wanted to hear... ."

There was still a long, hard row to hoe before the Warsaw Pact broke up, followed by the Soviet empire itself. The Polish political revolution was not the foundation of the fall of Soviet empire, it was a big crack in the wall. The foundation was Communist East Germany. When the people there threw off the authority of the government, the whole facade collapsed and the Soviet empire - indeed, the Soviet Union itself - was shown to be a house of cards, politically speaking. John Paul's role in the revolution in East Germany was nil. The locus of resistance there was the Protestant Lutheran church, not the Catholic church. But I hold that without the example of the Polish resistance the East Germans would likely not have been so bold. As for John Paul's one-sidedness in dealing with Saddam, I have no explanation. But this article by Father Raymond J. de Souza, writing from Rome in 2003 sheds a lot of light, I think. It first appeared in the National Catholic Register.

George Weigel, the papal biographer, once asked his subject what he learned from the Second World War. Pope John Paul II answered instantly: "I learned the experience of my contemporaries: humiliation at the hands of evil." The moral of the war story for so much of Europe is just that: humiliation and evil. ... The Holy See, too, felt the pain of humiliation, with the tiny Vatican City State surrounded. The Church felt compelled to moderate her voice to preserve the neutrality upon which her freedom depended. It was a defensible policy but there was no glory in it — there was only humiliation in the face of evil. Indeed, with the exception of Poland - which fought bravely and lost -and Britain - which fought bravely and won - the moral of the war story for Europe was that, as John Paul is fond of saying, "nothing is solved by war." The subsequent Cold War only reinforced the view that war brings more evils in its wake and further underscored the impotence of free Europe to combat evil in its own neighborhood. ... So the Iraq war has produced an odd situation. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair are men of deep Christian faith, explicitly motivated by the morality of their policy and committed to the role of religion in public life. Yet the Holy See has opposed them every step of the way.

De Souza's point is that Europeans generally do not see military force as being inside the moral universe, that war is purely destructive, never politically liberating. See also, Janet Dalety piece in the UK Telegraph, "Freedom? Why Europe's not bothered." (Catholic theologian George Weigel, cited by de Souza, has also written extensively on the theology of war. I've discussed his works five times. See this index.)

Update: Arthur Chrenkoff was a child in Krakow when John Paul visited there in 1983.

My John Paul, not surprisingly, is the political Pope, the Polish Pope, the one who helped to bring down the Soviet Empire. There is no doubt in my mind about the role he played in this grand spectacle of history. Forget all the rather silly theories about cooperation with the CIA, or some "holy alliance" with President Reagan; he made a difference not on the account of some covert shenanigans but because of who he was, what he said and what he did out in the open, in front of the billions. If you distill it all into one word, it is this: hope. He gave us hope. By us, I mean initially the Poles, the troublemakers who in 1980 started rocking the communist boat ...

Read the whole thing.

Not talking about Americans

reposted from donaldsensing.com

Quoth the Associated Press:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Influential Sunni Muslim clerics who once condemned Iraqi security force members as traitors made a surprise turnaround Friday and encouraged citizens to join the nascent police and army.

If heeded, the announcement could strengthen the image of the officers and soldiers trying to take over the fight against the Sunni-led insurgency.

Still, it wasn't a full-fledged endorsement. The edict, endorsed by a group of 64 Sunni clerics and scholars, instructed enlistees to refrain from helping foreign troops against their own countrymen.

Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samarrai, a cleric in the Association of Muslim Scholars, read the edict during a sermon at a major Sunni mosque in Baghdad. He said it was necessary for Sunnis to join the security forces to prevent Iraqi police and army from falling into "the hands of those who have caused chaos, destruction and violated the sanctities."

This is good news for many reasons, not least of which it shows that , as BOTWT (whence the link) points out, "Iraq's Sunnis get with the program." Other reasons:

– Enlistees are told to "refrain from helping foreign troops against their own countrymen." IMO, anything that indicates a solidifying of an Iraqi national identity is a good thing. The Iraqis have been more nationalistic than most other Arabs, but tribalism and ethnic identities are still strong.

– Who are the "foreign troops" referred to? Of course the clerics mean the Americans in one sense, but let's decode the language here: Sunnis are called to join Iraqi security forces in order to resist "those who have caused chaos, destruction and violated the sanctities." That would be the foreign jihadis,mainly from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan. "Violated the sanctities" means bombed mosques - and only the insurgents have done that, being the deeds of al Qaeda.

So this is good news. The Iraqi Sunnis are realizing clearly that the native insurgency - die-hard Baathists and Saddamites - will not prevail. The Iraqi insurgents have already started looking for an exit strategy, and now the clerics are offering them an exit rationale and justification. Hard to see a down side here.