Christian ethicist Shaun Casey, who served as a religious
liaison in the 2008 Barack Obama campaign, recently reflected on
the “legacy of the immoral misadventure in Iraq” for Christian
Century magazine.
With help from famous pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas
of Duke University, Casey helped organize 100 ethicists in 2002 to
warn against any U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Citing more than 4,000
U.S. dead, over $1 trillion in cost, and many more Iraqi dead,
Casey understandably now feels vindicated in his dire
warnings.
“We ethicists couldn’t stop the war, but we
did help jump-start a conversation,” concluded Casey,
who teaches at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington,
D.C. “President Bush had effectively intimidated most
Democrats into silence by questioning their patriotism. But
eventually the country came to see, as it did with Vietnam, that
the moral folly of the whole exercise rendered it
unjust.”
Unlike Hauerwas and others who joined him in 2002, Casey
does not profess to be a pacifist but does advocate an arguably
narrow view of Just War teaching. He credits Obama’s “early and
principled stand against the Iraq War” for his election to the
presidency. And he commends Obama for having kept his “major
election promise to end this misbegotten war.” Casey describes
Obama’s stance as motivating his own activism for Obama in 2008,
when he saw firsthand how “hungry Americans were to bring this
nightmare to an end.”
Casey’s glad the “country’s realization that it was a
fiasco has tamed a fair amount of my cynicism about our politics.”
Urging withdrawal from Afghanistan, he concludes it’s time to
“focus on nation-building here at home.”
Whether the religious ethicists and others who opposed the
Iraq war are truly vindicated is known completely only to God.
History will eventually come to some settled temporal conclusion
long after the current heated memories have faded. The generation
who resisted the Vietnam War has ensured a consensus among cultural
elites about the ostensible futility of that struggle. There
America lost, with over 50,000 dead, more than 10 times its
terrible losses in Iraq. And though Casey cites the belief by some
that 1.4 million Iraqis died, almost certainly an inflated number,
Vietnamese dead probably exceeded even that figure. And unlike
Iraq, the Vietnam War concluded with an enemy victory over former
American allies.
Ronald Reagan, during the 1980 presidential campaign,
famously provoked cultural elites with his proclamation of Vietnam
as a “noble cause.” The U.S. defeat there was followed by communist
genocide, reeducation camps, decades of avoidable poverty, millions
of refugees, most notably the boat people, and surging global
adventurism by an emboldened Soviet Union, whose victims included
Angolans, Nicaraguans and Afghans, among others. In his 1999 book,
The Necessary War, Michael Lind defended the legacy of
liberal anti-communism by asserting the Vietnam War was, at least
for a time, strategically necessary in the Cold War even if not
ultimately politically winnable.
Whether or not America was able or willing to win in
Vietnam, our adversaries there were unsavory, and the consequences
of our defeat and departure were hideous for the Vietnamese,
Cambodians, and Laotians. Even though defeated, America’s exertions
there arguably bought time for other Asian nations to build
eventual democracies and prosperous economies.
What would leaving Saddam Hussein in power have meant for
America, the world, and Iraq? Religious and other critics of the
Iraq War typically seem unconcerned with that question. Under one
of the most murderous regimes of the late 20th century, possibly
exceeded only by communist Cambodia, how many more Iraqis would
Saddam have killed over the last eight years? Critics of U.S.
policy often cited the pre-war U.S.-supported international
sanctions against Iraq as ostensibly responsible for hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi deaths from malnutrition or curable disease. How
many more would have died absent removal of Saddam, who brutally
manipulated those sanctions for his own enrichment and repression
of his enemies?
And how would Saddam’s remaining in power have affected
the U.S. war on terror, the stability of U.S. allies in the Middle
East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, or America’s ongoing confrontation
with Iran, particularly its nuclear program? Where would all of the
jihadists who flocked to fight America in Iraq have instead
gravitated? And as international sanctions against him collapsed,
what ambitious weapons programs would Saddam have resurrected? As
in Vietnam, America’s foes in Iraq were unsavory and murderous.
Their defeat, or at least momentary suppression, would seem good
news, however transitory.
Treating Iraq, or Vietnam, as a simple morality play of
arrogant American imperial overreach is grossly simplistic and
leaves too many questions unanswered. Christian ethicists, relying
on a rich 2000-year tradition, are called to help unravel the moral
complexities of a deeply fallen world where God’s redemptive love
is still active.
During World War I, a bishop explained to a Methodist
seminary in Chicago God’s purposes in permitting war to dethrone
the German, Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian monarchies so as to
spread democracy. Such hopes were soaringly optimistic obviously,
though democracy of a sort did eventually reach most of these
countries, if only after decades of further war and brutal
tyranny.
At least the bishop, still suffused with the confident
optimism of an earlier age, believed history moved in a
providential direction. With more subtlety, he also discerned that
redemption sometimes follows suffering, and that Heaven’s purposes
transcend human intent.
Faith should indicate that Providence also has a plan for
Iraq, and for Vietnam, in which miserable wars played some
mysterious purpose. We can hope that all who paid a terrible price
for a better day will, in God’s own time across history’s crooked
course, merit thanks from future generations.
