The Right Course in Iraq

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 1/27/05)

Barring some dramatic change in Iraq — and considering all that's happened there already, who can bar it? — elections will take place in that anguished country on Jan. 30. The result, it is hoped, will be a democratic government, with an elected assembly that will draft a permanent constitution as a pillar of stability and peace.

It could happen. Let us pray that it does. But it's hardly farfetched to think the outcome may fall far short of that rosy scenario. And then?

Making moral judgments about Iraq was difficult two years ago — before the war, that is — but at least the questions relevant to the attempt were plain enough.

Did Saddam Hussein pose a threat to the United States and its friends sufficiently serious and immediate to warrant resort to a war that could be considered 'just'? Was this the linchpin of the war on terror? People of good will came down on both sides. As it happens, I said and wrote — before the fighting as well as after — that I did not consider this a just war. Others argued vigorously that it was. A tough call obviously, but a snap compared with now.

As things stand, it's far easier to say what the U.S. will do for the foreseeable future in Iraq — namely, hang on — than what it should.

Cynics say we should declare victory and go home, leaving it to the Sunnis and Shiites to shoot it out. Unfortunately, the cynics could be right.

Looking for moral guidance, I turned to Pope John Paul's message for the Jan. 1 World Peace Day. Having read it, I concluded that it was a beautiful document but of little practical help. Unless perhaps it helped in a subtle way, as a prod to moral reflection.

The pope's argument, in a nutshell, is that evil can't be overcome by evil but only by good. And the fight against evil, he insists, "can be fought effectively only with the weapons of love."

From a Christian perspective, the pope's first proposition is unassailable. But the second is debatable. A fundamental premise of just war theory is that in some circumstances the use of force can be morally good. Are we therefore to imagine a war that is lovingly waged? Not easy, but as Christians perhaps we must.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is better at framing these issues than any American leaders or their speechwriters, said recently that as matters presently stand in Iraq, "there surely is only one side to be on in what is now very clearly a battle between democracy and terror." That is a powerful statement of the case for persevering.

The risks in that are obvious. People speak of a new Vietnam, but the situation the Russians faced in Afghanistan and face now in Chechnya could be a closer parallel — conventional military force against an indigenous, religiously based resistance movement. Practically speaking, if there is a way out of this morass, it is to train and equip Iraqi security forces capable of effective action under the direction of a passably competent government. There is no certainty that will happen.

Following the horrendous terror attack on a U.S. base in Mosul, The New York Times quoted a Colorado woman who insisted that "people are inherently good and rational." It would be nice if that were true, but without major qualifiers it simply isn't. "Evil … is the result of human freedom," Pope John Paul says. That's one reason why it's so hard to know the right course in Iraq.

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