When you love America but hate war
By James O. Goldsborough
Columnist
THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
February 14, 2003
[First of two articles]
The Bush administration's coming war against Iraq is unique, unlike any other war America has fought. This poses a deep dilemma for patriotic Americans who want to support their country but regard this as a bad war.
The conflict between conscience and patriotism does not normally occur in "just wars." Just-war theory is nearly two millenninia old and lays out the criteria for "good" wars, ones that make it easier for mothers to send sons into battle and nations to keep the homefront united.
"Bad" wars, ones that do not conform to just-war theory, are not normally waged by democracies. Bad wars tend to be waged by caesars, emperors, kings and dictators seeking conquest and glory. Such conquest and glory, as Shelley brilliantly wrote in "Ozymandius," is always fleeting.
The ultimate bad or unjust war was Hitler's war. Hitler came to power democratically but, as Napoleon had done the previous century, made himself dictator and militarized his nation. Both men took their nations on disastrous paths of aggression that led to ultimate defeat.
America is not normally a militaristic nation. The Indian wars were our blackest moment, but occurred during an imperialistic century when Westerners everywhere had assumed the "white man's burden" of civilizing heathens. The only foreign war America has fought with a resemblance to Bush's Iraq war was the Spanish-American war, a nasty little business launched, like Europe's Crimean war, mainly to sell newspapers and which clearly did not meet just-war criteria.
Just-war theory is essential to the Christian tradition, which explains the vigorous condemnation of Bush's war by church leaders. Just-war tenets, which date to the 4th century and St. Augustine, were laid out in detail a millennium later by St. Thomas Aquinas and others.
A just war requires: a legitimate leader, a moral cause and rightful intention. It must be waged as a last resort, be proportional to the good it seeks to achieve and must seek to spare civilians.
When a nation starts a war, as the Bush administration is doing, it is important to know if the war is just and legitimate. If it is just, the people quickly unite behind it. Americans' continuing nostalgia for World War II, our most trying time since the Civil War, is rooted deeply in a feeling of national unity the war created.
No war, not even the Revolutionary War, created such national unity as the war brought to us in 1941. World War II has entered American mythology as the great struggle of good against evil, and not even our own evils in the war – the targeting of civilians in the 1945 firebombings of German cities and atom bombing of Japan – have weakened the myth.
Americans understand that the Bush administration's war is different from past wars, and are agonized over it. Like the Spanish-American war, it is a "manufactured" war, but is different in that the U.S. media openly sponsored the 1898 war and whipped up public enthusiasm for it.
The media are accomplices in the Bush administration's war, but are not whipping up support for it, at least not universally. The media reflect the public doubts but have not really challenged the administration as they might do on a domestic story. "There is timidity at appearing unpatriotic," says Orville Schell, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. If the media are timid, the politicians are pusillanimous.
On the whole, the media have swallowed without challenge the Bush administration's war rationale: Iraq has "weapons of mass destruction," could pass those weapons to "terrorists" and therefore America must disarm Iraq.
This is a war over allegations, not facts. The war comes not over Iraqi actions toward America. There is no demonstrated threat to America, only the possibility of one. People are rightly skeptical about fighting a real war to prevent an imagined war.
The media are at a disadvantage for this war. The Bush administration controls the news flow, and with Washington mesmerized by Iraq, few other stories compete. The Iraq war drives the news cycle. Once war starts, the media will deal with events, but during the current period of "phony war" the only news is words, not events.
Colin Powell shows pictures of Iraqi "weapons installations." The Iraqis take reporters to the sites who find nothing. What is the truth? Powell links Iraq to al-Qaeda through a Jordanian named al-Zarqawi. A leading Israeli writer disputes it. Who's right? Powell praises Britain for information on Iraq's security apparatus. The British reveal it is five-year-old information taken from the Internet. What is the significance?
Polls show the Bush bully pulpit gradually tilting public opinion toward war, but the nation is clearly conflicted. For now, Bush gets the benefit of the doubt. When things turn bad, the benefit of the doubt will become plain doubt, but it will be too late.
George W. Bush and Tony Blair, modern Knights Templars dressed in white robes embroidered with large red crosses, have set off on a new crusade. They should remember what happened to the original knights.
Next: Conscience vs. patriotism
James Goldsborough can be reached via e-mail at jim.goldsborough@uniontrib.com.
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James O. Goldsborough is foreign affairs columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and a member of the newspaper's editorial board, specializing in international issues.
Goldsborough spent 15 years in Europe as a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, the International Herald Tribune and Newsweek Magazine. He is a former Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign relations and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment.
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