I think this is a good time to think again about just and unjust wars

[TayTay]

John Kerry at Pepperdine University, Sept, 2006

The fourth and final example of where people of faith should accept a common challenge is perhaps the most difficult and essential of all:

rekindling a faith-based debate on the issues of war and peace. All our different faiths, whatever their philosophical differences, have a universal sense of values, ethics, and moral truths that honor and respect the dignity of all human beings. They all agree on a form of the Golden Rule and the Supreme importance of charity and compassion.

We are more than just Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims or atheists: we are human beings. We are more than the sum of our differences -- we share a moral obligation to treat one another with dignity and respect -- and the rest is commentary. Nowhere does this obligation arise more unavoidably than in when and how to resort to war.

Christians have long struggled to balance the legitimate need for self-defense with our highest ideals of justice and personal morality.

Saint Augustine laid the foundation for a compelling philosophical tradition considering how and when Christians should fight.

Augustine felt that wars of choice are generally unjust wars, that war -- the organized killing of human beings, of fathers, brothers, friends -- should always be a last resort, that war must always have a just cause, that those waging war need the right authority to do so, that a military response must be proportionate to the provocation, that a war must have a reasonable chance of achieving its goal and that war must discriminate between civilians and combatants.

In developing the doctrine of Just War, Augustine and his many successors viewed self-restraint in warfare as a religious obligation, not as a pious hope contingent on convincing one's adversaries to behave likewise.

Throughout the centuries there have been Christian political leaders who argued otherwise; who contended that observing Just War principles was weak, naïve, or even cowardly.

It's in Americas' interests to maintain our unquestionable moral authority -- and we risk losing it when leaders make excuses for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo or when an Administration lobbies for torture.

For me, the just war criteria with respect to Iraq are very clear:

sometimes a President has to use force to fight an enemy bent on using weapons of mass destruction to slaughter innocents. But no President should ever go to war because they want to -- you go to war only because you have to.

The words "last resort" have to mean something .

In Iraq, those words were rendered hollow. It was wrong to prosecute the war without careful diplomacy that assembled a real coalition. Wrong to prosecute war without a plan to win the peace and avoid the chaos of looting in Baghdad and streets full of raw sewage. Wrong to prosecute a war without considering the violence it would unleash and what it would do to the lives of innocent people who would be in danger.

People of faith obviously don't have to agree with me about how we keep America safe, how we prevail over terrorists, or how we end our disastrous adventure in Iraq. But I do hope people of faith step up to the challenge of rejecting the idea that obedience to God somehow stops when the fighting starts. We need a revival of the debate over what constitutes Just Wars and how they must be conducted, and all people of faith, whatever their political allegiances, should participate in the debate.

Sen. Kerry did not need to hire a religious consultant to come up with this. He wrote this himself and gave us a little window into his thinking on the broader picture of how he see war itself and how he considers the question of morality and action in light of the moral imperative to be moral beings.

I re-watched this speech this week. I think I did so because I was tired of people on the TV and in the newspapers who talk about troop 'surges' and about doubling-down and missed hearing about war from someone who had actually been to war and had seen people die. (And had killed for his country.) I think the argument is sterile now. The talking heads on TV aren't talking about anything and aren't debating anything more than what this means to the horserace in '08 and what it might do for Bush's sagging poll numbers. That is not a debate, it's a way to not talk about being at war and that the aim of war is to kill people to force them to your will. I needed to read this again. I think this is a better way to address the argument about escalating a failed war. No wonder Sen. Kerry called this escalation attempt insane.

[Island Blue]

1. Thanks for the reminder Tay.

This was a brilliant speech.

[karynnj]

2. I love this speech as well

This part of the speech was sort of like finding the underpinnings of everything Kerry said on the war in 2004. How many times did he repeat that they did not exhaust diplomacy and this was not a "war of last resort". Especially since he learned that Bush really did lie us into war he has used the words, "war of choice". What this shows is that he is definitively saying that per St Augustine's defintion the Iraq War is an unjust war - which I think is why he is calling it immoral.

Somehow hearing him explain the belief system underlying those comments makes them stronger and makes me more certain that I was correct when I argued with others that Senator Kerry woould never go to war unless it genuinely was a last resort.

I bet Senator Kerry could win a debate on theology with any '08 hopeful on either side of the aisle. :) The NYT article on the woman hired by Hillary said that she worked on the Kerry campaign - but he didn't take much advise from her. (she sounded pretty flaky )

[TayTay]

3. I liked this part of the speech a lot

I agree, it is the background for why the Iraq War is not just wrong, but immoral. This was a wonderfully insightful and illuminating section of the speech that raises a lot of questions about what actions should be taken to oppose moral wrongs.

I thought this was an amazing speech. It is unique in a lot of ways. Kerry asks more questions here than he can answer. This is not a speech that is meant to just sooth the waters and equate religious faith with complacency. There was a lot in here and I am still digesting it.

The Just versus unjust war concept will, I think, get a lot more debate in the next few months. I think we will be hearing a lot more about this.

[YvonneCa]

4. This was the speech I was privileged to attend ...

...because of KG. I have re-watched it several times since that day. You are right...there is a lot there. The Senator lays out the moral foundation for our policies as a Democratic Party. He began by speaking of the 10 essential questions set out by the Vatican during the 2004 Election. He then spelled out 4 goals around which (with the right leadership) the country can unify and make progress. It was beautifully done. What was equally amazing to me..being a member of the audience...was the feeling of 'reverence' in the room. There was less applause than usual, because the topic was so serious, but every person was hanging on every word the Senator spoke. I think he may have changed some conservative minds that day. :)

[karynnj]

5. Did you talk to any of the students afterwards?

or overhear any of their comments? I would guess by the last line and the smilie that you had some indication that they were impressed.

What was it like after the speech broke up? after the cameras and press were gone?

That must have been an awesome experience sitting there - I think we all knew by things Kerry had said and done that he clearly had a deep faith and there were clues that he had studied his faith seriously - but this was the first time he showed as much of his faith as he did.

[YvonneCa]

8. After the actual speech...

...and during the Q and A, one of the student questioners said (paraphrasing) that if the Senator did as he said he would in the speech, he would 'have a lot of friends at Pepperdine'. I think that part is on the pepperdine.edu website.

But after the entire speech was done, there was a smaller meeting of Pepperdine Young Democrats in another room. I listened to many of them and they really liked John Kerry. I think KG talked to more students than I did. Following this event, the Senator was affectionately 'mobbed' (as usual, I think) as he left the room and headed ...with Marvin...toward the parking lot. What a great day!

[wisteria]

6. I enjoyed reading this.

I agree with you on the media. Everything about Iraq is being reduced to entertainment. There is something wrong in a culture that reduces everything to entertainment value. It reminds me of the Romans.

[beachmom]

7. To add to the conversation, Riverbend has a new entry

http://www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

Powerful post. Excerpt:

Here we come to the end of 2006 and I am sad. Not simply sad for the state of the country, but for the state of our humanity, as Iraqis. We've all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.

Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn't believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.


Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so.

Just because Americans die in smaller numbers, it doesn't make them more significant, does it?






I find her latest entry to be quite truthful. Maybe that's why I don't like her -- despite my opposition to this war, my annoyance with American blind nationalism, my hatred for Bush (yeah, it's hatred), despite it ALL -- I still love my country, and will never "love" Iraqi bloggers who are anti-American, even if their grievances are on the mark. It is in my love of country, that I continue to work to end this war the best way I know how; and wallowing in national self hatred will never be an activity I will EVER indulge in.