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| Volume XIII, Summer 2006, Number 2 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Neo-Conned!: Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq , edited by D.L. O'Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe. Light in the Darkness Publications, Vienna, VA 2005. 447 pp. $29.95, hard cover. And
Neo-Conneed! Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape or Iraq, edited by D.L. O'Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe. Light in the Darkness Publications, Vienna, VA 2005. 857 pp. $29.92, hard cover.
Jerry Pubantz
Professor of political science, University of Northern Carolina at Greensboro
Neo-Conned! and Neo-Conned! Again will strike the reader as a late apology for Catholic reticence to speak out against the immoral war in Iraq. In the months leading up to President Bush's war of choice, few religious communities, much less political leaders, media, public citizens groups or opinion-makers were willing to offer the moral argument that the war had no justification under the philosophical and moral traditions of Western history. The editors excoriate American churchmen, in particular, who "offered meager resistance to the Bush Administration's war of aggression in the Gulf"(p. 268). O'Huallachain and Sharpe hope to right what they perceive as a previous moral tepidness by pulling together in this two-volume set a comprehensive collection of anti-war articles, Episcopal statements, and Catholic doctrine to date.
After September 11, 2001, there was a chilling of moral courage in the United States that allowed the neoconservatives at the White House and Defense Department to launch an invasion of Iraq largely without opposition. As it emerges from the ordering and compilation of nearly 1,200 pages of essays and analytical pieces, the editors argue that the "neo-cons" sought two primary goals in the war: the final victory of Israel in its six-decade conflict with the Arab and Islamic world, and the enshrinement of the "preventive war" principle as a central instrument in the war on terror. Neither goal provided the moral purpose demanded by Catholic just-war theory. Thus, the war - even if it might meet President Bush's specious test of moral value, that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein - was wrong in its inception, remains morally corrupt in its prosecution, and can only be redeemed by its early end.
No one will sit down and read these two ponderous volumes from beginning to end. Some of the pieces reflect little more than intra-Catholic squabbling. The structure of the work (two uneven volumes, each with different names yet published at the same time and with little explanation of why the contained essays are ordered as they are) may confuse more than edify the reader. Yet, Neo-Conned! and Neo-Conned! Again provide an extraordinary reference collection of anti-war scholarly and political opinion. Volume two brings together articles and essays by an array of authors from Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein to Stephen Pelletière, Immanuel Wallerstein and Milton Viorst, with prefatory statements by Joseph Cirincione and Scott Ritter. Among the best in the full collection are articles by former presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan and Father Franziskus Stratmann.
First published in The American Conservative in March 2003, Buchanan's essay takes on the Richard Perle/Douglas Feith promotion machine. These two influential members of the Bush entourage, along with David Wurmser, advised Israel's Netanyahu government in 1996 to topple preemptively Saddam Hussein's regime and in the process change the calculus of the Middle East. Wurmser suggested that the Israelis be on the look out for a pretext to strike a fatal blow at Iraq and "radicalism" in the region. Buchanan challenges the shibboleth of "antisemitism" that is smeared across anyone's reputation by this crowd whenever there is a challenge to the war or to the neocons' broader agenda in the Middle East. He demonstrates effectively that those who supported the war want no part of a real debate; they would rather brand their opponents as enemies of Israel and fight with ad hominem attacks.
Franziskus Stratmann's exegesis on just-war theory is inexplicably relegated by the editors to an appendix in volume one. Along with Buchanan's article, it should be right up front. The most important theoretical argument made by this work is that every aspect of the Iraq War violates the fundamental moral principles associated with war since the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. The persistence of just-war theory in international thought certainly crosses all religious denominations and is central to the doctrines of international law established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As recently as December 2005, those principles were reiterated by the most secular of groups, the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, which among its members counted former U.S. national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov. These gentlemen are hardly "doves," or worse, liberal appeasers. Faced with an American unilateral war that shook the 60-year-old principle of collective security, the panel argued in good Thomist form that the decision to use force should be based on the seriousness of the threat and the belief that the proposed war addressed that threat. Any use of force must be proportional to that threat, the calculated benefits of war must far outweigh the costs of inaction, and any use of force must be a last resort. In the UN Security Council debates leading up to the war that pitted the United States against its European allies France and Germany, it was clear to all except the administration that a war in Iraq met none of these criteria.
The only quibble that the thirteenth-century Aquinas would have had with the UN panel is that war is only moral when one can demonstrate that the benefits of the use of force broadly outweigh the evil of the war itself. Benefits are not measured against the outcome of the war - contrary to what President Bush would have us believe by his repeated assertion that the world is better off with the removal of Saddam Hussein - but against the violence, death and destruction that are inevitable with any war. With more than 2,300 American soldiers dead as of this writing, tens of thousands of Iraqis also having perished, no meaningful reconstruction of devastated Iraq, and sectarian civil war now killing dozens every month, the war in Iraq is immoral and illegal under the precepts required for a just war. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called it such. The many authors reproduced in Neo-Conned! and Neo-Conned! Again make the case as well. Best among them are Professors Juan Carlos Iscara and Thomas Ryba. Each dissects and devastates the president's doctrine of preemptive war and the post-invasion defense made by the administration for going to war in Iraq in the first place.
These two volumes remind us that there is a long tradition of moral principle and international law when it comes to launching and fighting wars. By taking on the administration directly over the legitimacy of the war when measured against those principles, the editors, without intending it, remind us that this war was itself a product of a particular set of ideas and a worldview based on a self-selected morality. To understand the whole story of the American adventure into Iraq it is essential to remember that it was initiated by a particular group of politicians and Washington intellectuals. Unfortunately, nowhere in Neo-Conned! or Neo-Conned! Again are the intellectual origins of this war addressed. Nor are they challenged. James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans and Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies do a better job of drawing the links among the biographical, educational and intellectual backgrounds of the neoconservatives - among them Paul Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby and William Kristol - tracing the development of their common belief in the righteousness and power of the United States all the way back to university days with beloved professors such as Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss. The lesson of their biographies is that the power of ideas when incestuously wedded to conviction and persistence can create its own internally accepted morality about war and high policy, divorced from historically accepted standards of moral behavior and from pragmatic reality. The United States is currently paying an exorbitant price in Iraq and throughout the Middle East for their hubris. Because of the apparent failure of their policy, in future years this collection of principled arguments against the war put together by O'Huallachain and Sharpe will take on growing value. We will wonder why we did not want to listen between September 2001 and March 2003 to those few voices calling us back from the brink and toward our long-tested beliefs in what makes war just or unjust. We would have been better served to have done so.
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