Once again an American president proposes to intervene against a Middle Eastern dictator, with military force if necessary. Once again a pope proclaims the Catholic church’s opposition. Only this time the president is Barack Obama.
For those on the receiving end of earlier papal rebukes about US interventions in the Middle East, it may be sweet satisfaction to watch President Obama now taking the Vatican’s incoming. Yet however tempting, that would be a costly and shortsighted schadenfreude.
For Pope Francis’s statements on an Obama strike on Syria underscore something sorely lacking here: a practical, time-tested way to evaluate the moral use of force in a broken world.
As it happens, the Catholic Church has such a yardstick. It’s called just-war teaching, though there’s nothing exclusively Catholic or even particularly religious about it. The great value of this tradition is not that it spits out clear-cut answers; in fact, men and women of good will can reach opposite conclusions from its principles. Its value is that it sets out the hard questions leaders must ask themselves before they act.
I speak as an admirer of Pope Francis and a non-admirer of President Obama. So it pains me to say that what we’re seeing from Rome is far removed from its best traditions, with fuzzy banalities too often standing in for serious reflection.
We see this in papal tweets such as “War never again! Never again war” — which is curious, given that the Syrian people are already at war and have been for two years.
We see it in statements such as “Never has the use of violence brought peace in its wake. War begets war, violence begets violence.”
Not only is this false — wars from the American Revolution to the defeat of Japan and the invasion of Grenada have sometimes begat free societies, not more war — it makes no distinction between violence (what, say, Bashar al-Assad did when he gassed those children) and a just use of force (what we might do to stop further atrocities).
A more realistic warning about war would be a reminder that even when successful it carries a high human price.
Most troubling, it’s hard not to notice that papal anti-war flurries seem to occur only when Uncle Sam enters the frame — as if Russia hasn’t been abetting war by its arms shipments to Syria, as if Iran hadn’t been sending troops as well as arms, and as if the Assad mafia hasn’t been butchering innocent Syrians for decades.
In fairness to Pope Francis, on these questions he is continuing down a muddled path set by his two predecessors.
Yes, when the West was battling the Soviet Union, we did not hear much from Pope John Paul II about the dangers of sending stingers to Afghanistan, supporting the Contras in Nicaragua or invading Grenada. But when the Cold War ended the pope became, operationally at least, a pacifist.
So we’re left with this contradiction: Though the catechism continues to cite just-war criteria as the church’s measure for force, leading Christian figures — including popes — have increasingly moved, as David Gibson argued in the Washington Post’s On Faith column Wednesday, toward a “de facto pacifism that stands against war under any circumstances.”
The irony is that looking to just-war criteria wouldn’t mean muting criticisms but lending them a context and coherence lacking in the anti-war platitudes that despots from Saddam to Assad simply ignore.
Certainly there’s a strong argument that an Obama-led strike could help usher in a regime worse than Assad’s, as we saw in Egypt when the Arab Spring gave way to the Morsi winter.
There’s also an argument that a missile strike that reflected John Kerry’s “unbelievably small” promise would simply enrage Assad without doing much to reduce his capabilities — leaving the message that using chemical weapons is worth the risk. And there’s a powerful case that the real losers of a military strike won’t be the members of Assad’s regime but Syria’s vulnerable Christian minority.
All these are serious, legitimate objections. And they all stem from classic just-war criteria: Is the action proportionate to the offense? Does it have a reasonable chance for success? Will it cause more harm than good?
In short, there’s a reason that when Aquinas discusses just war, he does so in his chapter on love of neighbor.
The job of a pope, of course, is not to bless military interventions. But neither is it to declare them unjust. It is to rise above the passions of the moment to lay out principles, insist on the hard questions and remind leaders they’ll answer for whichever path they choose.
The Catholic Church has a tradition that could do just this. Maybe it’s time to dust it off and take a look.