Obama's Jihad - Part II, Defending Zones of Democratic Freedom

Oh! most wretched of men, what evil is this that ye suffer? Darkness hath shrouded your heads.
[Homer, Odyssey 20.351]

Part I concluded with rejoining Polemarchus and Socrates who have just decided that doing harm to one’s enemies is not a very good definition of justice. Plato tells us that,

“Several times in the course of the discussion Thrasymachus had made an attempt to get the argument into his own hands, and had been put down by the rest of the company, who wanted to hear the end. But when Polemarchus and I had done speaking and there was a pause, he could no longer hold his peace; and, gathering himself up, he came at us like a wild beast, seeking to devour us. We were quite panic-stricken at the sight of him.

"Thrasymachus roared out: What bullshit has taken possession of you all? And why do you dick around with one another like a bunch of sillybillies? . . . I’ll tell you what Justice is, if you really want to know; only you’ll have to pay me first.”

Socrates protested that he didn’t have any money; but when others in the company vouched for him, Thrasymachus straightened up and after deriding Socrates for being a snivelling child in need of a nurse continued, more or less in this vein:

Listen up then, he said, so entirely deceived are you in your pretty ideas about the just and unjust that you haven’t a clue that in realty “justice” quote unquote is simply the deception the smarter criminal imposes on the lesser. You will understand what I mean most easily, if you consider tyranny, which is the most perfect injustice and which makes the unjust man most happy while it makes those who are wronged and will not be unjust most miserable.

Thrasymachus went on to explain: that robbery and violence are normally called "injustice," and those caught committing such crimes are punished and disgraced. But when plunder and violence are practiced wholesale by rulers, it is called "justice" which is simply the name we give to the interest of the stronger, the rulers. So it is that when a man succeeds in robbing the whole body of citizens and reducing them to slavery, people forget ugly names and call him happy and fortunate, as do all others who hear of his unmitigated wrongdoing.

"And that," Thrasymachus concluded, "is why I say, that justice consists in the interest of the ruler and stronger; no more no less."

Deus Lo Vult- The Sequel

Over eight years ago, the Gazette, took note [here] of how the United States, “intoxicated with self-righteousness and fired with bellicosity” was rushing headlong into a crusade against the Infidel in Afghanistan. We noted how medieval man preceded his wars with self-examination and pre-penance for what was about to be done. All those scribblings and remonstrances at least served the purpose of getting one to examine his cause. Intoxicated, Americans skipped this preliminary step. “This,” we wrote “is the surest way to disaster ... If we do not pause beforehand to examine ourselves honestly and humbly, we become mere agents of Fury which like a fire is only interested in consuming what it burns.”

It is now eight years on and our incursion into Afghanistan has produced nothing but wretchedness and destruction at a bankrupting cost to ourselves. None, but absolutely none, of the avowed goods have been obtained.

True to his campaign promise and faithful to the magisterium of the New York Times, Obama has stayed the course and continues to wreak death and destruction on an innocent country. Alas, there is no Ambrose to enforce a penance that is long overdue.

“Are not rather those to be called Christians who condemn their own sin than those who think to excuse it? The just accuses himself in the beginning of his words. He who, having sinned, accuses himself, not he who praises himself, is just.. Add not sin to sin by acting in a manner which has injured so many.” (Ambrose Letter LI, To Theodosius, 390)

Instead of confessing an erroneous policy and withdrawing from an ill-begotten aggression, Obama now compounds sin with a shameless and spurious claim of Just War. We Chipsters are no Ambrose, but Obama’s villainy needs to be exposed for what it is.

To this end, we shall take the doctrine of just war as a given assuming that if applied in good faith it would at least serve as a guide for an excusable resort to force. Line by line, Obama’s claims fail the test.

Pot-Holes in the High Road

1. The Opening Muddle.

"There will be times when nations ... will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

Why the juxtaposition? As has been seen, it is necessity of last resort that qualifies a war as “just” and there is no morally justified war that is not also “necessary”. The purpose of Obama's nonsense is to introduce a diffusion of thought which unwittingly accepts that a war could be moral even if not necessary or necessary even if not moral.

The real juxtaposition should be between “expedient” and “necessary” or “convenient” and “moral”. But the Obama’s false dichotomy allows him to create a fall-back position; namely, that the war would still be “necessary” even if he has failed to morally justify it. In other words, at the outset he informs us that he wins his case even if he fails to make it.

2. Mutilated Synopsis of the Legal Rule

Embarking on his proof, Obama distills the doctrine of just war as one which is sanctioned “if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.”

Obama’s formulation sounds so right it might as well have been lifted out of the very pages of Aquinas himself. But like an expert thimblerigger, Obama has shuffled out the most important pea of all; namely that the war be excused by a just cause.

It is true, as has been seen in Part I, that self-defense is sufficient justification for restoring to force; but it is false to say that waging war “as a last resort” constitutes a just cause. The doctrine of just war provides two restraints: there must exist a just cause (e.g. self defence) and, in addition to that, the war must be waged only as a last resort. Under Obama’s formulation the other parties’ mere refusal to meet specified demands would justify recourse war.

We asked them to cut out their tongues. They refused. We asked again. They refused again. We asked a third time and they still refused; so we nuked ‘em.

But, it will be said, the “or” was inadvertent. No it was not; and it was not because Afghanistan never attacked the United States. The war was launched, as a “last resort” when the Taliban refused demands to turn over Al Qaeda operatives on asserted but unproved allegations that they were “behind” the September 11 attacks.

The attack and invasion of Afghanistan could not be justified as “self defence” because there was nothing and no one to defend against. Afghanistan did not attack the U.S.A. The Taliban did not attack the U.S.A. Whoever catapulted into the Trade Center and the Pentagon, the attack was over and there was no indication that another attack was coming. The event was a classic hit and run and just as classically there was nothing left to defend against.

The invasion of Afghanistan was pure and simple retaliation and nothing in Bush’s “smoke em out and run em’ down” blather indicated otherwise.

The “or” was not a slip of the presidential tongue.

3. Smarms of Irrelevance

Instead of applying the legal rule to the facts of the case, Obama’s synopsis of the doctrine was followed up with a smothering smarm and cagey irrelevancies,

“This concept of just war was rarely observed. The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible...”

after which Obama went on to yap about people praying to another God, Hitler and the horrors of the Second World War [for which we are to read “Holocaust”].

But it is not the means of killing that has avoided observation of just war rules, rather it has been the excuses for killing that have reduced the doctrine to a fulmen brutum. Whether a war is fought with swords and spears or drones and bombs, what makes it unjust is the inexhaustible capacity of man’s mind to come up with empty reasons for doing violence. Obama would rather distract us with thoughts of destructive pyrotechnics and the dread dirty suitcase, than have us look too closely at the sophistry he was serving up at the palace. But look we must.

4. The Empty Case

After invoking the doctrine of justified war - howsoever muddled, mutilated it may have been -- Obama’s logical mind offered little by way of justification for the war his country is waging.

• This war “is a conflict that America did not seek” It is a war “to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.”

• Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

• As a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.

• Pacifism is great but “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies in the midst of two wars.” [One wonders where exactly to put the “sic” to this remark.]

The cornerstone of this argument was yet another false dichotomy. As was seen in Part I, the doctrine of Just War constitutes a rejection of pacifism. Pacifist don’t engage in any war whether or not justified. The stated alternative between fighting this war or passively letting Hitler’s armies roll over us was a completely false choice spiced up with the usual spooky hobglobing of Evil Nazi Darkness.

It has been understood, at least since Ambrose, that the Emperor will not be a pacifist. That does not mean that any war he wages is necessary and just. The issue here is what justifies this war.

As to this question, Obama offered up an idle protest. I “cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.” No indeed. Even under Augusto-Cyrilian formulations, he would be derelict in his princely duties to do so. But the issue is not whether he should stand “idle” but whether he should “wage war” and more specifically wage a war that after eight years has not achieved its avowed purpose and daily inflicts misery and devastation on non combatant civilians.

Nor can justification found in the allegation that the United States is faced with “threats” -- ie. things that might happen. The question under the Just War doctrine is whether the alleged victim is actually harmed by an attack. By casting the issue in terms of mere potential harms, Obama sought to create a non existent category of the preemptive just war.

Even assuming that a preemptive war against alleged prospective harm were to qualify as a just cause, Obama failed to enunciate compliance with the further condition that all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.

In this regard Obama states “Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.” But other than this bald a priori assertion, Obama failed to disclose a single instance where negotiations were attempted and rejected.

This last non-justification in fact undermines the first. The war the US is currently engaged in is a war against the very rulers of Afghanistan (the Taliban) that our initial invasion deposed. But, as noted, neither Afghanistan nor the Taliban attacked the U.S. In addition to shuffling the elements of the rule, Obama engages in a shell game as to the identity of the guilty enemy party.

Obama’s argumentation is so pitiable, we feel obliged to help him out. So let us putty up the cracks and in doing so indulge all inferences in favor of his case;

1. Al Qaeda committed the September 11 attacks

2. Al Qaeda had training basis in Afghanistan and the Taliban refused to turn them over when they could have.

3. The Taliban’s refusal meant that Al Qaeda had a safe haven of operations from which it could continue to make attacks on the United States or its facilities abroad and the threat of these attacks was if not “imminent” reasonably foreseeable and likely in the short term.

4. Ergo, the Taliban and the country it ruled were aiders and abettors of a hostile enemy who had attacked and would continue to attack the United States, without provocation.

Granting all these predicates, the case for a just war in and against Afghanistan can still not be made because it falls short of establishing the requirement that “the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain.”

It may be conceded that Americans are a very high strung and sensitive people who are struck dumb with distress at the thought that anyone might want to attack them. But in the historical scheme of things, pyrotechnic as it was, the aero-ramming of two buildings was a pin prick. Even if it is assumed, arguendo, that future attacks are indefinite but certain and that Al Qaeda thus represents a “continuing” threat which qualifies as “lasting" -- that harm is not “grave”.

The purpose of this precondition in the Church’s doctrine is to exclude precisely what is at issue here. The 9/11 attacks were not the first time rogue or criminal elements safe-harboring in one country crossed into another to wreak some damage. It may be conceded that such actions are wrong but they do not constitute the kind of harm that warrants the full bore response of retaliatory war.

Would any American agree that the United Kingdom would have been warranted to invade the United States and bomb Boston in order “smoke out” IRA operatives lurking in sympathetic Irish pubs under the noses of studiously inactive authorities?

The only way Obama can inflate the "gravity" of the case is by an allusion to the proverbial dirty suitcase or acid in the drinking supply.

"Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale."

This is nothing but a Hefalump to frighten the piglets in America, if not the poohbahs in Oslo. Modern technology is everywhere. Outraged small men are everywhere too. Are we are war "with all that is out there" or is the issue the necessity for this war in Afghanistan?

No nation can be expected to silently suffer criminal terrorist attacks; and any nation is within its right to take coordinated and effective countermeasures. But the doctrine of just war requires just and proportionate response. Applied in good faith it is something more than a free for all upon plausible pretext.

It also requires reasonable prospects of success, which after eight years of not catching Bin Laden can no longer be deemed likely -- which in turn shows, after eight years of no further attacks, that whatever is or is not in Afghanistan it no longer constitutes a continuing or lasting threat.

Last but not least, the just war doctrine requires proportionality of means which is utterly lacking in this war where the United States is routinely laying waste to vast areas, drone-killing innocent civilians, while abducting and torturing non combatants and even children. Far from being in accord with “right reasons” the U.S. conduct of the war in Afghanistan is a moral excrescence.

Stepping back from the particulars, it can be seen that much of Obama’s proffered justifications contained a unitary theme which is tipped off by the reference to “Hitler’s armies” amidst two wars. This was not some bolloxed up syntax. Obama was trucking out the same tired ol’ Appeasement Malarkey that Rusk and McNamara blathered to death to justify Vietnam.

This stock excuse in the State Department’s Prop Shop has been dragged out so often, Obama had to be a little gentle in his handling of it. But once it is grasped that the reference was to the alleged “Nazi Threat” between (“amidst”) the wars, it can be understood that Obama was saying that the Oxford Peace Movement of the Thirties was a waste of time and that “war” could have been avoided if we had gone to war and invaded Germany preemptively from the start. So much for Vitoria’s “striv[ing] above all to avoid all provocations and causes of war.”

Obama’s contemptuous dismissal of “non-violent movements” -- that is, of peace movements -- reveals the true meaning of each of the other rationales.

In stating that this is a war “to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks” Obama meant that it is a war of preemptive defence against any possible further attack against anyone...uh... I donno... anywhere, anytime.. You know...

Notwithstanding the allusion to “Hitler’s armies” -- which certainly must strike everyone dumb and numb with horror -- Obama failed to point to a single, identifiable threat and certainly none that was imminent. Obama backed up this emptiness with yet another by stating that negotiations cannot -- and in the absence of articulable failures he meant a priori “could not” -- convince AlQaeda to “lay down their arms.” And in what cave does this new looming Wehrmacht repose?

Perhaps realizing that this Bugbear of terrorism was wearing thin Obama shored up his case with

"More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government, or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region."

Ah yes.. the Ol Suffering Innocents in Romania...

After which, the President concluded with a crescendo worthy of Don Quixote himself,

"So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace."

It was beyond belief. Obama sought to justify our obliteration of Afghanistan on the basis of his duty to preemptively protect us and anyone against inchoate, indefinite “threats” from an unlocateable enemy who is (it is alleged) beyond convincing. There was evil “out there” and innocents in distress and we needed to roam the world protect the innocent, root out the miscreants and wage war for the sake of peace.

At least Urban II offered remission of sins. Obama has simply taken Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war and dressed it up in a hand-me-down of Cicero's cloak. Far from establishing the legitimacy of a Just War, Obama’s putative justification of the violence his country has embarked on was a cynical piece of work worthy of Thrasymachus.

Armed for Reality with Christian Realism

No doubt it caused a certain amount of anguish in Progressive loins to hear Obama praised by such High Mavens of Zionist Neo Conservatism as Robert Kagan and David Brooks. As if Moses had tapped on a rock, the pillars of American journalism gushed with enthusiasm.

Brooks, of the New York Times, praised Obama’s “Christian Realism’ and lauded Obama’s Oslo address as “the most profound of his presidency, and maybe his life.” Brooks, who is not Christian and whose writings have not evidenced any greater than a distant and passing acquaintance with Sacred Doctrine, pronounced the speech to be “thoroughly theological” -- apparently because the president talked about “the core struggle” between “good and evil.”

Indeed he did... so too did Urban II and so too do most kings, counts and canonists who are urging just cause for slaughter. But Obama did not talk about good and evil in the way Polemarchus and Socrates did, or for that matter Augustine. In fact it was precisely this absence of theology that impressed Brooks as most praiseworthy of all.

According to Brooks, realist, cold war “liberals” (supposedly aka’ing as realist cold war Christians) understood that there was “evil” in this world. “[T]he presence of Hitler and Stalin would have confirmed it. You would have known it is necessary to fight that evil.”

Yup. That is why we invaded Russia.... Oh wait.. uh... Well, Hitler at least... although we only fought him because he declared war on us, although our friends the English had declared war on him in charitable defence of their friends in Poland...But I digress.

Anyways... Brooks' point was that realist liberals (aka Christians) understood that everyone knows we have to lift up sword against sword, as the First Christian said.

To be sure, cold war Christians did so moderately and with restraint as good Ciceronians do. Alas, quoth Brooks, after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. “It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man.”

Imagine that!! They even say such namby pampy pie in the sky stuff as

"If you enroll as one of God’s people, heaven is your country and God your lawgiver. And what are His laws? You shall not kill, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Protrepticus 11, 116)

or

"Greater glory still is merited not by killing men with swords, but by war with words, and by acquiring or achieving peace not through war but through peace itself.” (Augustine, Political Writings (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,2001), 226.)

Foolish “liberals”.

Obama “never bought into these shifts,” Brooks writes, with evident relief. No. He understood the “moral obligation to champion freedom while not getting swept up in self-destructive fervor.” Indeed,

“How can the ignorant teach others? How can the licentious make others modest? And how can the impure make others pure? So first correct yourselves, in order that, free from blame , you may be able to correct those who are subject to you.”

“We should be humble and modest” advises Brooks, theologically cribbing from Urban II.

Just as a Roman War had to be fought with charitable intent, and moderate means and respect for women and children and the aged, so too American Wars have “strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct.” It is this, according to Brooks, that somehow makes it better that war is “both folly and necessary.”

According to Brooks Obama’s “doctrine is becoming clear.” It sure is. But let us be clear as well, Church doctrine never condoned war as a necessary folly.

Somewhat more succinctly, in a piece entitled “Armed for Reality”, Robert Kagan, of the Washington Post, praised Obama’s shift in rhetoric at Oslo as “striking”. Gone was the “vaguely left-revisionist language that flavored earlier speeches.” Enter, “the great tradition of hawkish Democrats fighting wars...” Oh, Rejoice!

According to Kagan, Obama went further than he ever has in arguing that advancing democracy is not only a moral but also a strategic imperative because, as the president said, "peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please; choose their own leaders or assemble without fear." Nor did Obama “shy away from the Manichaean distinctions that drive self-described realists (and Europeans) crazy”. Obama was to be praised for insisting that "Evil does exist in the world" and can neither be negotiated with nor appeased.

From a country that backed repressive dictators from Guatemala to Greece and from Chile to Iran, Kagan’s praise of Obama’s “strategic imperative” to promote freedom of assembly sounded like a “noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” if it wasn’t plainly a rank and stinking hypocrisy. If peace is made unstable, it is by poverty --- never once mentioned by Kagan or his presidential protege, neither of whom apparently could give a crap.

It would be pointless to point out to Kagan that Augustine declared manicheism to be a heresy and that negotiation is part of what we might consider “but war with words.” Kagan casts off Brook’s patina of “christian learning” and projects the real message:

Evil Exists!!! There can be no negotiation or compromise.

We are “Armed for Reality”.

As far as Kagan was concerned, the current “reality” was Iran, which he mentioned seven times to Afghanistan’s twice. The wonderful thing about the Oslo speech, he says, was that it could be “seen as a turning point in Iran policy.” After all, evil must be resisted everywhere and we, as well as our Key Ally, are certainly surrounded by evil. One could almost imagine Kagan painting some sign on a pilar.

The Neocon section of the peanut gallery was all a glee. PNAC maven, Bill Kristol praised Obama’s Oslo speech as “hardheaded and pro-American” adding on Fox News that Obama “made it clear that you need military force; [and] that he will act if threats are looming. He actually articulated his own version of the preemptive doctrine.”

Max Boot called the speech Obama’s finest hour, “a masterpiece that deserves inclusion in compendia of the finest presidential speeches.”

About the only dissenting voice was John Bolton who called the speech “analytically weak [and] sort of at a high school level.” Life is full of ironies; for once Bolton was right.

We could do worse than to bring a little theological salt to Brooks and Kagan’s so-called moral and strategic imperatives.

Manicheism is the belief that the cosmos stands in equipoise between equally matched forces of good and forces of evil, which are ever in conflict. The argument has all the self-evident force and symmetry of night and day.

St Augustine himself was a manichean until, after a long struggle, he renounced it. Since then and as a result of his struggle, the Church condemns manicheism as a fundamental heresy. Why? Because Manicheism denies the unifying goodness of all the world and traps us in endless war. At bottom, the theology is as simple as that.

Politically speaking, manicheism requires us to weigh in in the eternal and cosmic fight between good and evil, and this requires us to do good to our friends and harm to our enemies. And so we are ensnared, like Orestes, in a cosmic cycle and symmetry from which there is no escape, no resurrection.

But surely, it will be said, there is evil. What are we to say of the spider that kills her mate after conception, the lion that ensnares a frightened gazelle, the earthquake that flattens a city? Totally apart from human conduct, there is force and violence in the world that appears to us to be nasty, brutish and cruel. That is true; and yet God himself, pronounced it “good”.

Mystery and paradox confront us either way. We speak of good and evil because to our mind they do appear to exist, To say that we choose to suffer for the sake of good, implicitly accepts that there is an evil course to be rejected. We cannot escape this dualism.

But we can avoid being ensnared by it. For the Christian, faith is both cognitive and performative. We accept that the cosmos in its entirety is “good” even if this acceptance is beyond our comprehension. We escape determinism by behaving as if we were free, acting today in accordance with the tomorrow we await, as if the lion were laying down with lamb. Or, as Augustine put it: the way to bring about peace is with peace.

It is truly obnoxious for a species like Brooks to trespass where he has no business and to pontificate on the type of "realism" Christians ought to espouse. It is a simply a stunning cynicism to hear people denigrated for believing in the fundamental goodness of man. Let it be unequivocally said that neither Brooks nor Kagan accept the existential paradox of the Crucifixion and what they stand for and what they preach is not Christian.

But noxious as Brooks' flight into theology might be, and repugnant as Kagan’s Thrasymachean “realism” is, both men honed in on the true dynamic of Obama's speech. If, as Bolton said, Obama's speech was "analytically" weak, that was only because it was a sack of red herrings. Its purpose was not to be analytical but simply to dazzle and confuse.

Obama's real message had nothing to do with Just War and very little to do with justifying America's conduct in Afghanistan per se. Obama's real message was that he was resurrecting America's cold war crusade for hegemony.

"America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace: .... Commerce has stitched much of the world together. ... The ideals of liberty, self determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced."

But how is it possible to return to a cold-war policy when the cold war is over? After several paragraphs of tear-jerking in the vein of "America the Brave and Righteous", Obama continued on to say that

"This old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats."

In other words, Obama tipped us off that we are not defending against an attack on September 11. Nor are we defending against Reagan's "Evil Empire". We are defending the “crumbling” post-war architecture against an unspecified enemy somewhere or anywhere who could potentially harm us in some manner, even in some nightmarish manner, and who is therefore a “threat”. This is why it is necessary to believe in Manichean Evil. Without belief in evil-everywhere out there there is noting specific to fight against in order to "protect" this crumbling architecture.

As shall be shown, what Obama really trumpeted at Oslo, under the honeyed strains of “just war” was nothing less than the neocon extension of post-war American geo-political policy. This has nothing to do with just war and everything to do with the manifest self-righteousness of American hegemony, backed up by a pathological, indeed psychotic, belief in a world full of invisible evils.

In arguing that this represented a return to “traditional” cold war policy, Kagan engaged in a typical switch and bait. Obama is not returning to the traditional policy of "containment" because that historical era is over and there is nothing to "contain". Policies do not exist in a vacuum. Kristol had it right. Obama came home to Bush. To see where Obama really stands on the trajectory of imperial policy, and to understand the fundamental pathology of neoconservatism we must return to a reasonable point of departure.

Twinkling Zones in a World of Darkness

Facing the future in 1943, S.S. economist, Otto Ohlendorf pondered the post-war economic order. He was particularly concerned with the impact of economic modes of production on the nature and quality of social life. He was ill at ease with Reichminister Speer’s theories of “rationalized” production. Ohlendorf perhaps remembered Adam Smith’s dictum that the progressive division of labor would turn man into a being as stupid as it is possible for a human being to be.

Ohlendorf advocated a craft-based economy. Leave the mass production of consumer goods to Japan and the United States whose temperament, in the first case, and lack of culture, in the second, suited those countries for that type of economy. The role of Germany in the future world economy would be to provide high quality, specialised goods.

In some respects Ohlendorf was astonishingly prescient. But of course, the post war was somewhat other than he had anticipated; the battle for hegemony had ended with a total American victory.

There were those, most famously the two-eyed general Patton, who urged a truly total victory by forging on to take out Russia while we could. It was doubtful we could have gotten very far at all. Despite our boastfulness, we had not gotten very far very fast at all. It had taken us almost a full year to inch along from Normandy into just barely Berlin, while at the same time Germany held back a truly massive, panoramic assault from the East. The notion that we could press an assault against these same Russian millions and roll them back to Moscow, was the fantasy of lunatic, seized by a truly dark passion.

Much has been written as to when the Cold War began and what were its causes. The simple fact is that the Cold War began once the United States came to the charitable aid of the Russian effort at self defence. A school boy could foresee that once these two giants had defeated the third, they would fall to fighting one another. That denouement was made certain by Roosevelt’s suddenly inspired demand for unconditional surrender, which all but insured the absence of any buffering middle. Over the rubble of Germany, America and Russia hugged. And hugged, and hugged, and kept on hugging increasingly afraid to let go.

Stalin had foreseen the result from the start; but it took the Bright Boys at Foggy Bottom a little while to figure things out, and when they did they came up with the idea of Zones of Democratic Freedom.

Sometimes referred to as the Truman Doctrine of “containment” or the Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of Europe (and in particular, Germany), the idea was basically simple: from Norway through Greece to Korea the United, the New Enemy would be encircled by a cordon sanitaire of allied buffer states.

The two lynch pins of this cordon was much the tri-polar economic order Ohlendorf had envisioned: an American homeland, flanked by Germany in Europe and Japan in the East, powerful as before only brought to heel.

But what of the rest of the world which was up for grabs, now that European colonialism had gasped its last?

Here, the policy became one of competitive containment: to establish in as many places as possible societies and economies linked to us by shared capitalist commercial and political values. This is what is meant, when anyone in Washington talks about “extending freedom” or “promoting free trade and human rights” or similar blather.

This was a frankly Roman Policy and it was no coincidence that the organs of the capitalist press were soon to hoist the banner of Pax Americana.

Rome herself had done exactly this. What is called the Roman Empire was in fact an urbanized network or band of middle class, pro-Roman commercial enclaves and cities, whose new oligarchies plugged into the Roman myth and the Roman way of life. This is what Augustine referred to when he spoke of “the imperial city” which had imposed “not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace.”

We would paint ourselves into the corner of ridicule if we sought to cheapen this achievement. From Colchester to Ctesiphon, a savage world was tamed and harmonized with Roman arches, temples and malls! This became the political vessel for the transmission of Christianity and the triumph of Catholicism. It has allowed even the most secular among us to enjoy the pleasures of Plato.

"But how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, ... provided this unity!” To which we might add “...and how many were excluded!”

Huge swathes of land and masses of people beneath counting were utterly marginalized from this Roman peace: slaves, subsistence farmers toiling to pay taxes, metics, cooks and whores, people who never heard of Cicero’s universal right reason in agreement with nature, who never spoke Latin or Greek, who were no more than illiterate Germans, dumb Egyptians and social scum, like Jesus.

Augustine had said he was unequal to the task of giving an “adequate description” of “these stern and lasting necessities,” but he most certainly knew what modern historical sociologists have brought to light: the universal imperial city lived off the despotic, despoliation of the county outside its walls

It was the same with the United States. Our policy of creating “zones of democratic freedom” was entirely for our own benefit. We frankly admitted that our goal was to “create a middle class” in the countries we deigned to rescue from primitiveness and protect from Communism. To these fortunate few we extended our cultural values and a modicum of our living standards.

What ensued was an age of miracles. There was the “German miracle,” followed by the Japanese miracle and then the “Mexican miracle,” after which quickly ensued the Korean, Iranian, and Chilean miracles. There was even, almost, a Vietnamese miracle. But these miracles excluded -- as capitalism necessarily must -- vast portions of the populace. This was less true in Europe which was Greece to our Rome, but it was true throughout out the Second and Third worlds.

The limited reach of our miracles created a problem, in that they rendered our “zones” unstable or, as the State Department was wont to put it, “susceptible to communist agitation.” Moreover, in the all-critical propaganda war, the Soviet Union was making great headway in poverty ridden, resource rich areas like Africa and Brazil. It wasn’t a forgone conclusion that Doris Day would win out over Yuri Gagarin. The world tour of the Soviet Folkloric Ballet (1957-58) sure as hell won out in popular enthusiasm over the world tour of the tuxedoed Yale Glee Club.

The loss of Cuba and the imminent loss of the Congo, led John F. Kennedy to torque up the equities a bit, with showtime charities such as the PeaceCorps as well as the invaluable uplift of his own charismatic personality. JFK himself was worth a hundred folkloric ballets.

As has been said often enough, at bottom, Kennedy was a cold warrior -- one who’s anywhere anytime price almost included blowing up the world. But JFK had a tad of the Divine Augustus in him. He understood that men are ruled and moved by impressions and that for our zonal policy to succeed, it had to at least appear to care about “democratic institutions”. Above the bribery, subversion of leftist governments and covert ops, some seeming effort had to be made at sharing American values with our zonal beneficiaries. This is the traditional hawkish liberalism Kagan and Brooks were talking about, whether they fully grasped the reality or not.

American policy, as the Roman policy, was not the worst that can be imagined. A “global city” of sorts was created; and although its culture was cheap, and its values materialistic, it produced stability and undeniable benefits for at least a segment of the world's increasingly teeming and desperate humans.

Then came Vietnam, a war fought simply to show the other side, that all namby-pamby aside, we meant business; that once we had laid claim to a zone, we would keep it no matter what, even if it did not want to be kept. We had “credibility”.

To the extent that there was a tragedy in this otherwise sordid tale, it was that of all American politicians, LBJ was the single one who most truly cared about the uplifting the welfare of the disadvantaged, and yet his misadvised and misconceived policy in Vietnam undid it all. Even our own miraculous middle class youth in universities around the world turned against us. The debacle in Vietnam became the trigger for neoconservative foreign policy.

The Dance of the Neocons

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The fallacy in “progressive” thinking has been the notion that Bush II represented a “departure” from traditional American foreign policy. Just as the Patriot Act would not have been possible without a quarter of a century of corrupt and degenerate jurisprudence preceding it, so too Bush’s doctrine of “preemptive defence” was merely an extension by degrees of America’s cold war crusade for hegemony, said to be “against communism”.

For the most part, as we have briefly summarized, that hegemony -- or architecture as Obama put it -- was built by more or less pacific means backed up by deterrent (but unexercised) force. Neoconservatism takes that policy and belligerates it. A neo-con is simply a neo-liberal gone punk.

What produced this change in degree? At a political level, Vietnam. Astonishingly, as Brooks’ article exemplifies, the failure of our policy of doing violence in Vietnam was blamed on bleeding heart liberal attempts at “do-goodism.” In other words, the very thing the policy avowed to be aimed at (freedom, commerce, improved living standards and all sorts of do goody things) was blamed for undermining the policy.

It was as if the U.S. fell victim to its own propaganda and recoiled with disbelief and resentment that it should be repaid so unfairly for all its good intentions and efforts. This is the disconnected realism that underlies the Kagan-Brooks disdain for “liberals” who are dumb enough to believe in the goodness of Man.

We sacrificed to do good and got kicked in the teeth. Life is nasty and brutish and therefore we are going to be nasty and brutish.

The paid for murder of Salvador Allende served notice that henceforth democratic freedom would have nothing, in actual fact, to do with securing democratic freedom -- not even an appearance. As Bill Kristol put it, “power is nothing to be ashamed of”.

And power included control of resources. At an economic level the shfit was caused by what is called the "crisis of capitalism." The architecture of "happy capitalist zones" was in fact crumbling . Slowly but surely industrial wealth became increasingly problematic and gave way to asset grabbing and the plunder of resources.

To understand exactly where Obama stands on the U.S. policy spectrum and what his stance entails, it is necessary to grasp clearly and starkly the neocon contribution to America's post war "architecture" The Gazette has written many times on the perfect injustice of neo-con military doctrine, (e.g., Thug Politic and Fear & Loathing) so a synopsis will suffice for the present.

The essential contours of U.S. geo-political policy under Bush are to be found in a document entitled Rebuilding Americas Defenses, published by Billy Kristol’s Project for the New American Century. The value of the PNAC document lies in the fact that it was not an official U.S. Government policy paper. But because it was written by the same cabal that came to power in 2001, it reflects the actual, unvarnished thinking of those who were running the government

The core of the neocon doctrine is based on power projection. This is seen as a necessary and inherent good in itself, although it is occasionally and indifferently tissued with some sort of coda on democratic values.

The PNAC report began by noting that the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole superpower, at the head of a system of alliances, with no “global rival” in sight. Accordingly, the “premise” of the Report was that U.S. “military capabilities should be sufficient to support an American grand strategy committed to building upon this unprecedented opportunity.” This “grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.”

This building, preserving and extending had nothing to do with hospitals, libraries, or economic aid which were never once mentioned in the Report. No,

“America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces.” and by developing capacity for “the full range of missions needed to exercise U.S. global leadership. [i.e., power].”

In other words, the Report called for a grand strategy of military building and extending, formerly known as “conquest”. We can at this point lay to rest any self-mollifying notions of “just war”.

Of course, development and deployment of new missile systems was needed “to provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world.” However, this projection was not just a matter of projectiles; the report also called for the “deployment o[f] forward operating bases” as a “force multiplier” in “power projection operations.”

Nor did the Project “accept pre-ordained constraints that followed from assumptions about what the country might or might not be willing to expend on its defenses.” Power projection operations entailed preventing anyone from possibly becoming a threat. Obviously any aggressor has to be prepared to “defend” itself, but the policy is not grounded in any traditional notions of defence. In neocon ideology the premise, means and goal of American policy is to stalk the world projecting its power.

There were two reasons for this weltanschauung. First, one of the chief backers of the neocons, was the industrial military complex. They funded the PNAC and the business of power projection punches their tickets and keeps them in business.

The second reason is that power projection is seen as a guarantee of security. However, it is important to grasp the pathology at work. The kind of security talked about is simply the kind of bully boy security acquired through ongoing intimidation.

Power projection, has to be projected onto someone or something. This goes beyond mere deterrence; i.e., the policy of being latently strong enough to weigh heavily in anyone’s calculus. The neocon policy, provides its own calculus and requires pro-active projection, wherefrom s0-called “preemptive defence.”

But “preemptive defence” is not truly a conclusion that follows from “power projection”. It is rather an oxymoron used to confuse and cover up what’s truly going on. With due respect for the true meaning of words, one does not "defend" against something that has not happened. A nation either defends against an actual attack or prepares and strengthens itself against a “threat” -- that is, against the possibility of a future harm. Projecting power has nothing to do with either but is an end in itself. Although a bully might claim that his bullying is done for the sake of security, precisely because he is not, in fact, under any threat or attack, the alleged purpose (security) is meaningless and doesn't exist apart from the bully's dementia. In objective fact the bully's power projection is simply what being a bully is about.

This is why the Bush and now the Obama administration have been so indifferent to specifying the existence, location and manner of even a “threat” (since there has been no attack). Their abuse of language serves only the purpose of so corrupting thought that people can be lulled and acculturated into thinking that it “makes sense” to roam the world kicking ass in “defence” of ourselves.... against an “Al Qaeda” that can’t be found, against “a few small men with outsized rage” armed with dirty suitcases.

But if it is dismal enough to think of the United States as the World Bully, it is even worse to learn how its bullying is to be projected.

In neo con jargon power projection is to be accomplished with “full spectrum” missions. The role of the military in this New American Century is to:

1. defend the American homeland;

2. fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;

3. perform the “constabulary” duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions; and

4. gain control of space and ‘cyberspace’

The first two missions are traditional military functions. It is the second two that are the cancerous germ of neocon strategies.

In neo-con thought, the collapse of the Soviet Union allows the United States to “remove its security perimeter eastward” so that Eastern Europe becomes the “outer security perimeter of the homeland” Ergo, missiles in Poland, and Camp Bond in the Balkans. People inside the USA live inside the inner security zone, and Washington one supposes is in a deep core security zone.

“Zones of democratic peace” in Neospeak means national concentration camps in which civil society has been brutalized, terrorized and degraded to a sub-social level. America’s mission of power projection aims only at creating zones of anti-civilization.

Seize and Extend

Establishing a zone of democratic freedom, in any given “critical region” begins with its seizure, as in Iraq or Afghanistan. But this seizure is not conquest in the traditional sense. It is a policy whereby the same “full spectrum” military forces are equipped to invade, secure, and while securing inside the zone, extending the zone’s perimeter so that each seized and secured zone becomes the “base of operations” for further extending operations. In case anyone missed it, that is what the “and” entails.

Secure

What does securing a zone entail? In the height of sophistry, PNAC called this “constabulary” duties. This has nothing to do with avuncular constable of yore. In the neo-con lexicon “constabulary” duties entail proactive policing, “organic” intelligence ops, social infiltration and intimidation, all while carrying low level military and dirty ops outside the zone in order to extend it.

Rubbleizing

Securing begins with consist in degrading infrastructure and institutions. This is the material pre-requisite for ultimately degrading social life itself.

Much of the degradation can be accomplished during the initial seizure. The important thing after this initial phase is over is not to rebuild what has been destroyed, but rather to look for further “opportunities” to create “disconnects” in the physical fabric of the city or country. This is why, eight years after liberation Baghdad is more of a rubble than ever and why the only thing built was a huge praetorian fortress amid the rubble equipped with all the self-contained amenities of modern civilized life that are denied to the denizens outside. This is what the Bush rejection of "nation building" signified.

Of course just enough erratic electricity, interrupted water supply, semi-competent bureaucracy and stretched medical services are provided so as to keep the people hopeful and dependent, because a complete loss of hope would have a revolutionizing effect.

Chaos and control

The degradation of the material basis of social life is only the first step in the greater goal of degrading civic and social life itself.

This degradation begins with promoting chaos in order to retain control; by engineering and maintaining a low level state of ongoing urban, ethnic social warfare. This is what the PNAC mavens mean when they say that the function of constabulary forces is to "shape the security environment in critical regions.” Just as prisoners or recruits are kept harried and unbalanced in order to "shape" them, so too the newly secured zone of democratic freedom.

Shaping the security environment means everything it has always meant for jailers, wardens and camp-commandants. It includes the use militarized police forces and “organic intelligence” units, by which is meant use of native spies, infiltrators, and agents provocateurs.

Stir up, Slap down.

Provoking unrest is as important as controlling it. Ongoing insecurity allows the military to take ongoing security (i.e. intimidation) measures such kicking in doors, randomly arresting, and generally brutalizing the civilian population by subjecting it to constant albeit random constabulary abuse.

The PNAC has been extraordinarily frank. According to its Report, these "constabulary missions" are "likely" to "generate" violence. How so? How does “maintaining security” manage to “generate violence”?

It does so because, even apart from the use of provocateurs, it is expected that some people in the occupied zone of democratic peace will resent being abused in this fashion and will fight back with whatever inadequate means they have at their disposal, at which point they will simply be blasted away by some computer guided drone, sidewinder, or gross-calibre weapon.

This “generation” is what explains the bizarre logic by which the United States invades a country and then arrest those who oppose our invasion of their country for committing crimes punishable under laws just made up in the US.

At the same time, the full spectrum of force will include just enough Santa Clause missions to give the impression that the U.S. really does care for the welfare of the people it is “shaping” This is a policy of spousal abuse on an immense collective scale.

Ultimately, and beyond just creating states of insecurity, the strategy seeks to destabilizes social consciousness itself in just the way that disinformation undermines our sense that we can know things, for which reason the PNAC report also called for cyber-ops to disrupt the "enemy's" computer networks and to use the internet for counter-propaganda. One should not expect this "propaganda" to be limited to government making its case in the OpEd pages of the Times. (De)shaping the internet environment will simply be the cyber correlative of (de)shaping the physical social fabric.

Disinformation and social disorientation are two sides of the same coin. When insecurity is total and pervasive, people don’t know what to expect next, what kind of reaction will ensue, whether vegetables, electricity, social services or your next door neighbor can be relied on. If the unbalancing is truly successful people will not even know if they can count on their enemy to be their enemy or whether whatever it is one hears is genuine or fake.

Over time, people eventually loose their social sense and become flotsam disconnected from one another materially, effectively, socially. The aim of both is to reduce the zonal population to being rats in a cage.

To people still imbued with traditional ways of thinking, Iraq and Afghanistan are failures. But to the neocons they are success stories. The more destruction, destabilisaztion and disaster the better.

The execution of the policy in Iraq and Afghanistan has been near flawless. Given that Iraq and Afghanistan are each zones of democratic peace, the goal was not simply to “secure” them (i.e., destroy civil society and reduce the country to exploitable rubble) but also to “extend” them. The only way to extend a zone is to incur and invade into the neighboring zone, which is precisely what the U.S. is currently doing in Pakistan and what was unsuccessfully tried last year in Syria and Georgia. Thus, after Israel conducted a bombing raid on Syria, a U.S. military spokesman said that the bombing was “just part of a wider campaign to take the fight to Al-Qaida not just inside Iraq but to other areas." Archive

Understanding the true nature of neocon policy allows us to understand why, after eight years “shaping the security” in Iraq, the New York Times called for us to focus on the “real” problem in Afghanistan, and why so focusing on Afghanistan, the war somehow ended up in Pakistan as well, and why shills like Kagan want us to focus on the zones in Iran.

As stated, the first purpose of the policy is based on the perverted theory that “the Homeland’s” security (and that of our “key” regional allies) is promoted only by degrading and rubbleizing our regional neighbours. “Nation destroying” is conceived as serving American security interests because a person or society that is kept, weak, degraded, dysfunctional, scrambling for sustenance, dedicating immense effort to maintain minimal order and equilibrium can ipso facto never become a threat.

This is the nature of Israel’s policy in the West Bank, Gaza, and (they had hoped) Lebanon. They have advised us on how to do accomplish this in Iraq, because the reduction of Iraq to one vast rock desert is seen in Jerusalem to “enhance” Jewish security.

The second purpose of the strategy is economic. While the policy of security through destruction arguably extends our “security perimeter” further east or south or west what the policy really means that no national entity will be strong enough to control its own resources.

Destabilizing zones of democratic freedom makes it impossible for an effective national government to coalesce and assert national interests the way Hussein did and the way Chavez is doing . What is left is merely some pathetic show case rump of a government which little more than a puppet stuck on a dildo. American troops support this government, and engage in control chaos, while private security forces seize and "protect" natural resources, at the request of whatever corporation the whole thing has been deeded over to.

The last and third purpose is domestic. The merits of Zonal Wars of Democratic Freedom are precisely that they enable -- indeed necessitate -- the powers that be to maintain police states in the Homeland.

People are typically dense enough not to understand that every wall has two sides. The whole concept of security perimeters which pervades neocon thinking necessarily implies that the “homeland” itself subsists within a security perimeter. It is the innermost “zone of democratic freedom”. Everything else follows.

Worse than just living within a “security controlled” perimeter, we ourselves become inured to seeing violence perpetrated on people abroad just as our forces become inured to perpetrating it. They likewise become indifferent as to whom violence is perpetrated on and we become dumb and inured when violence is used on us. Make no mistake. Everything visited on Iraq and Afghanistan will be visited upon us, and it is we who will do it.

Once the true meaning of "constabulary" operations is grasped, it can be seen that neocon "zones of democratic freedom" are actually the negative-inverse of the liberal concept of those zones. This is why Kagan-Brooks explicitly reject such stupid liberal notions as the "inherent goodness of man." Once that is rejected, there is no point in doing good things like building libraries and hospitals. Pleasantries like Peace Corps are viewed as almost offensive, as if it were some sort of obscenity to acknowledge that gentiles were entitled to human respect and dignity. Hey, "power is nothing to be ashamed of."

Since power is nothing to be ashamed of, neocons also give up any concept of restraint, or of what was called ius in bello. This is what the disgraceful spectacle of Guantanamo was all about. This is why Harvard professors like Dershowitz could issue a clarion call for "torture warrants" and why toney-talking D.O.J. pundits like John Hoo could defend his "torture memos" on the broadband of the Public Bullshit System. We may laugh at Pax Dei's limiting of war to Tuesdays and Thursdays and use the word "medieval" as an epithet for dumb and barbaric -- we would do better to behold a nearer mirror and contemplate our own moral wretchedness.

It is just as important to see how the inversion of liberal policy took place. It was not a flip flop but a change of degree that resulted in a change of kind. The neo-liberal policy of creating zones of democratic freedom most certainly employed counter- and dirty- ops. That's what the USIA (U.S. Information Agency) and the Green Berets (established under Kennedy) were all about. But these black arts were themselves balanced by at least some, even if only show-case, effort at providing actual material and political beneftis to the zonal-countries involved.

Moreover, the very fact that dirty ops were kept both secret and limited reflected a sense of shame. The operative premise of cold war zonal policy was that our hegemonistic objectives could be obtained by means short of war, and if war then by low key proxy wars. Like the artful policies of the Caesars the post-war policy sought to maintain a decent and pacific appearance; and since form always affects substance this at least kept violence at a lower level. In addition to cunning, the policy also required patience and a certain sportsmanship that accepted losses, at least on this or that round.

Alas, as Vietnam proved, the Devil chafes under restraint and has a way of gaining the upper hand. All the techniques the US had so successfully used in Latin America, backfired. The dirty op assassination of Diem, led to one increasing low level response after another until by a strategy domino sequence we were one step short of nuking “the enemy”. And the reason for this is that we were adamant and unwilling to abide our own appearances and accept a loss.

Evil becomes its own pride. As the with the Capulets and Montagues, doing good to friends and harm to enemies, soon becomes simply doing harm to enemies and to a culture of taking pride in doing so. Every young Polemarchus eventually becomes a mature Thrasymachus.

And every mature Thrasymachus eventually blows his brains out, although in the Republic, we are told he merely "blushed" when the self-destructiveness of his realism became clear. Just as fire burns, no matter what, so too violence deadens, no matter what. The first thing to die on the battlefield are the excuses for being there. But then it is too late; the bargain has been struck. Today, America's Thrasymachian hubris daily brings home its own sons, in the thousands, with their brains blown out by the violence they have seen and done. [ Synderesis & Wrecked Brains ]

As we contemplate such results we should not forget the neocon denigration of the belief in the "inherent goodness" of man. Rather than accept such disdain with jejeune sophistication, we ought to ponder what voice, exactly, it is that speaks to us.

It is certainly the case that evil exists in the world, for some reason, in some manner and so appearing to us. It is also the case, that without necessarily being evil, enemies or opponents exist. But that is not what Brooks and Kagan mean by "manichean". When they -- and their like -- say that there is evil in the world, what they mean is that "we" are surrounded by enemies seen and unseen who want to do "us" in. The whole world is out to get us, and we must get and destroy them first. This sense of being stalked by everpresent, unseen evils, devils, nazis and terrorists is a peculiaryly Puritan and Jewish dementia. It is a phobic, exclusive, self-righteousness that becoming murderous ultimately self-destructs.

Among the chipsters at the Gazette, at least, there was never any expectation that Obama would alter the US policy of extending it’s capitalist hegemony. Zones of democratic freedom are the spots on the US leopard and Obama would not and cannot change it. Our expectation was rather that he “may go back to an Eisenhower-esque diplomacy of working "through" allies and international institutions.” [ Delirium Tremens ]

To an extent our prognosis has been borne out. Obama has sought to “multilateralize” our policy and has claimed (albeit falsely) to have ended the most flagrant violations of humanitarian law. He, as well as Brooks, noted the importance and called for the adherence to certain norms and standards. But these protestations of ius in bello and institutional cooperation are but stretched tissues. In actual fact, the Obama Administration has done nothing to rectify neocon barbarism. Obama has simply toned down the bluster, but he has not removed the abuses. Just as bad, he has done nothing to bring the Bush Administration's crimes to the bar of justice or even to the light of day.

The just accuses himself in the beginning of his words

This, on behalf of the country and for the sake of the country, Obama refused to do.

Not only has Obama refused to repudiate neocon doctrine, he perpetuates it, and not only in Af-Pakistan. Kagan is not quivering with hopes over Iran without a reason. Despite the usual blather about drug interdiction, it was disclosed late last year that the new U.S. base in Columbia was, in fact, a base for full spectrum forces. In other words Columbia is marked to be our “zone of democratic freedom” in South America... waiting to be secured and extended into oil and gas rich Venezuela and Bolivia. It was no coincidence that the U.S. reactivated the Fourth Fleet.

Augustine seems to have grasped that, at bottom, what is at work is the inherent nature of violence, power and empire themselves:

"[T]hough there have never been wanting, nor are yet wanting, hostile nations beyond the empire, against whom wars have been and are waged, yet, supposing there were no such nations, the very extent of the empire itself has produced wars of a more obnoxious description --social and civil wars -- and with these the whole race has been agitated."

Yes, it was not to be expected that any president of the United States would have changed what that country was about; only the inescapable course of history will do that. But it was not unreasonable to hope that Obama, like one of the "better Caesars" would de-punk American foreign policy, renounce the bugaboo of invisible, ubiquitous terrorism, cease creating zones of democratic destruction and pursue hegemonistic policies by more pacific means.

Instead, the vaunted "change" was simply that we no longer have to listen to the gutter punking of an alcoholic thrusting his codpiece forward on a flight deck. No...instead we got to listen to high intonations invoking the shades of Cicero and Augustine and Vitoria to cover his naked power projection. It was a revolting sham.

As for Brooks and Kagan, they might recall that it was Anne Franke who wrote:

Despite everything,
I believe that people are really good at heart.

©WCG, 2009
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Obama's Jihad - Part I. The Deceit of a Just War

This past week, President Barak Obama went to Oslo where he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and gave a pretty speech.

In now familiar style, he began with a truth; in this case, a frank and engaging confession of his unworthiness for the prize and the paradox of its award to one presently engaged in acts of war. What a relief from the vulgar folksiness of his predecessor!

He followed up with a pleasing patina of intellectualism admirably summarizing and surprisingly invoking the Augustinian doctrine of Just War. What a relief from the fuck-you bully-blather of Bush!

He then took the moral high ground and with sparkling phrases, devoid of rancour and tinged with due regret, decked out American policy as one which strove in earnest for a better, uplifted, all-inclusive World to Come. What a change from the hostile, self-righteousness of the previous Commander in Chief.

But in what is by now all too familiar Obama, it was all nothing but tinselled packing over an empty box. In fact it was worse. As shall be set out in this two-part feature, Obama dragged a delicate principle of justice through the mud of expediency in order to carry on the Neocon crusade under a banner sullied with greed and stained with tears.

To grasp the depravity of what Obama has done, we must return in time the days of a fledgling but committed Christianity.

A Rich and Mighty Man

As is well known, the Early Church was emphatically communistic and pacifist. It abhorred violence and counted as martyrs those who died on the battlefield for pacifism.

Such heroes included Maximilian of Numidia, a 21-year-old North African draftee who refused to serve, declaring “I cannot fight for this world…. I tell you, I am a Christian.” He was beheaded (295 A.D). More fortunate was St. Martin of Tours who had a crisis of conscience during a military action against barbarian invaders. “Up to now I have served you as a soldier. Now permit me serve Christ. Give my bounty to these others. They are going to fight, but I am a soldier of Christ and it is not lawful for me to fight.”

These acts of conscientious objection were not simply exercises of personal moral preference. Early canons of the Church forbade participating in violence.

"Concerning the magistrate and the soldier: they are not to kill anyone, even if they receive the order…. Whoever has authority and does not do the righteousness of the Gospel is to be excluded and is not to pray with the bishop.

"A Christian must not become a soldier, unless he is compelled by a chief bearing the sword. He is not to burden himself with the sin of blood. But if he has shed blood, he is not to partake of the mysteries, unless he is purified by a punishment, tears, and wailing. He is not to come forward deceitfully but in the fear of God.” (Apostolic Canons of St. Hippolytus XII-XVI)

Wherefrom did this doctrine of pacifism arise? It arose in the first instance from the authority of the Crucifixion which first and foremost was a renunciation of violence even unto death. The trip to Golgotha began with an explicit exhortation against violence in Gethsamene.

Martyrdom of St. Peter at Rome

But the Church’s doctrine of pacifism was not simply an injunction against violence. That injunction was the other half of an affirmative duty for charity -- to love the other as one’s self. The negative and the positive went hand in hand and either is meaningless without the other.

The intersection of the two was most relevantly exemplified in Jesus’s injunction to “walk the extra mile” with the man who asks for help in carrying his pack. As early Christians would have understood, the man in question was an enemy Roman soldier who had the right to command any civilian in occupied territories to carry his pack for up to one mile. Jesus enjoined his listeners not simply to obey the law but to do the law one better -- to assist the enemy in his oppression of you.

This arresting paradox was not as novel as one might think. The conversation in Plato’s Republic began with asking how a just man should behave. Oh, that’s easy, says Polemarchus, a young man from a traditional family, Everyone knows that justice consists in doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.

In short order, Socrates led the young thoroughbred through the thickets of confusion. Who exactly is your friend and how can you tell? And what do you mean by harm?

Certainly to harm something means to make it less or worse than it is? For sure. As in injuring a horse to make it have less of those qualities of strength that make it a good horse? Indeed. And isn’t the quality of justice the highest human virtue? Without doubt. Justice is to man what power is to a horse? It would seem so. So then, according to your rule, Polemarchus, the just man will seek to make his enemy more unjust?

Uh.... I think we’ve encountered a problem, Polemarchus says much less confidently than before. He and Socrates agree that "the injuring of another can in no case be just."

Polemarchus wonders who it was that came up with the traditional definition? Socrates ventures that “the first to say that justice is ‘doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” must have been “some rich and mighty man who had a great opinion of his power.” “But,” Socrates goes on to ask, “if this definition of justice breaks down, what other can be offered?”

Plato’s answer was the Republic -- that image of the just State which was a mirror reflection of the just man. Jesus’s answer, somewhat more simply, was to “walk the extra mile with your enemy.”

Such conversations were entirely familiar to the early Church Fathers. As the so-called pagan world progressed beyond tribalism and toward an ever more embracing global economy, perceptions of friends or enemies and conceptions of justice and just action also evolved. As of the close of the Third Century, the Church took it as axiomatic that “the injuring of another can be in no case just.”

Ambrose enjoins Theodosius

The highwater mark of Church pacifism came in 390 when St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, threatened the Emperor Theodosius with excommunication for an act of violence, the circumstances of which are worth recalling.

The Empire was by then officially Christian. In 380, pursuant to treaty, Theodosius allowed large contingents of Goths to settle, semi-autonomously, in portions of Thrace, in Northern Greece. This arrangement was considered essential to what today would be called “homeland security”.

In 390 the local population rioted against the Gothic presence and killed the local Gothic commander. Furious, Theodosius, ordered a reprisal in which 7,000 men, women and children were indiscriminately slaughtered as they sat watching the circus games.

“The anger of the Emperor rose to the highest pitch, and he gratified his vindictive desire for vengeance by unsheathing the sword most unjustly and tyrannically against all, slaying the innocent and guilty alike.... like ears of wheat in the time of harvest, they were alike cut down”

Ambrose was equally inflexible. He forbade Theodosius from entering church or receiving the sacraments and required him to publicly assume the garb of penitent on the steps of the cathedral.

Dramatic and exemplary as the episode was, it nonetheless incorporated a subtle shift in thinking inasmuch as Ambrose had only condemned the emperor’s “unjust” killing. As of Ambrose’s day, the Church leadership had begun a cautious retreat from its earlier and purer pacifism. The reason is not difficult to fathom. For over a hundred years the Empire had been under assault from so called “barbarian invasions.” In large measure, these “invasions” were in fact mass migrations -- ordinary people fleeing demographic pressures from further east and seeking a better life within the boundaries of the Empire. These migrations presented an array of vexing social, economic and military problems which successive Roman administrations met with alternating policies of assimilation, accommodation or resistance.

By the close of the Fourth Century, the situation had become critical. The migrations, whether characterized as peaceful or not, were of such magnitude and impact as to constitute a destructive invasion. The incursions, were indeed often accompanied by acts of violence, pillage and “unrefuseable offers”. What was an emperor, now Christian, to do? Retreat the extra mile?

The Church is not on record as having so counselled. But while it is true, overall, that the Church began a slow process of what it considered to be a necessary moral accommodation, what is more significant was the reluctance -- indeed refusal -- of either Ambrose (337-397) or his more famous pupil, Augustine (354-430), to explicitly promulgate a theory of just war. To say that Augustine expounded a doctrine of just war is an overly convenient way of saying that such a theory can be distilled by implication from a mass of writings on other topics.

That distillation was in fact made in the 12th century by a canonist named Gratian, followed upon by St. Thomas Aquinas; and it was their theory of just war -- claiming Augustine as authority -- that became the basis for current Church Doctrine.

The difficulty with the distillation is that it falls into the category of what lawyers call dicta; i.e., words, phrases, bon-mots, general principles, and good quotable stuff which -- whether true or not -- was not what a case actually held given the question presented for decision. Such patch-works of dicta reflect the vision of the stitcher but they do not necessarily reflect the understanding or the desired conclusion of the authority to whom the pastiche is attributed.

Whatever the merits of Gratian’s distillation, what is more worth examining is the reluctance of Augustine, or Ambrose to expound a doctrine of just war when it would have been easy and natural to do so.

What the examination will show is that the emergence of a just war theory, as Church doctrine, was not simply a question of creep and compromise. To a substantial degree it was the result of sloppy analogies and confused terms. More fundamentally it flowed from a poisonous question: can charity ever require violence?

Tracing the evolution of the just war theory as it passed from pagan hands into the Church and from ecclesiastical writers to us will show the moral struggle behind the legal formulae and ultimately how the doctrine of a just war is a deceit.

A Just and Sinful Empire

The early Fathers wrote at the close of a thousand year civilization. They and their audience were imbued with the motifs, themes and intellectual monuments of so-called “pagan” culture so that, a word, metaphor or cliché could reference volumes. (FN-1 A Wealth of Writ) Plato’s Republic would have been as familiar to them as Oprah is to us. So too the Roman lawyer Cicero...

Four hundred years before Augustine, Cicero had formulated his ius bellum theory of just war.

“Unjust war is that which is begun from wrath rather than lawful reason. Unjust wars are those begun without a reason. For there is no just reason for war outside of just reparations or self defense." (De Officiis 36.)

"No war is to be considered just unless it was openly announced and declared, unless reparation has first been demanded." (Op Cit., 38.) (FN-2 "Just Vengeance")

Reduced to a formula, these paragraphs set out three conditions for a just war:

1. There must be a just cause (retribution/defence);

2. There must be a formal declaration of war by the king or emperor preceded by a demand for reparations;

3. War must be conducted justly (eg. unarmed civilians should not be attacked).

Cicero’s formulation was little more than a rhetorical gloss on Polemarchus’s received definition of the just man. The discussion with Socrates did not end with the conclusion that the just man would not do injustice to his enemy but rather with the conclusion that the just man will never do harm to another. To say that the just man will not act unjustly was simply an evasive tautology.

Cicero Expounding by the Pilar of Justice

But it was an important tautology given that the Romans were a very superstitious people with a near phobic obsession for “doing things the right way”. It was extremely important for them to have “right” -- and hence divine favour and assistance -- on their side. Accordingly, no war could begin without a litany of causes accompanied by a reading of avian and ovarian livers. In Latin, the word ius means “right” as well “just” and the Roman doctrine of ius bellum might be better translated as Rightful War.

At bottom, Cicero’s definition did no more than state the lex talionis (“an eye for an eye...”) and it is certainly dubious whether Christ would have agreed with Cicero’s other famous dictum that “A just war is better than an unjust peace". But mise en scene Cicero’s formula fares somewhat better.

Rome was one of those nations that defended its way to empire. From their earliest “defences” in Latium the Senate was always careful to specify how Rome was the rightfully aggrieved party. Still, not all was fair in love and war. When the Sicilian Greek temple of Juna Lacinia was despoiled of its tiles by Fulvius Flaccus, following a campaign, the Romans themselves had a fit,

“Protests were heard in the House, and there was a general demand that the consuls should bring the matter before the Senate. Flaccus was summoned, and his appearance called forth still more bitter reproaches from all sides.....It was said that, even in the case of private buildings such conduct would be thought disgraceful, but he was demolishing the temples of the immortal gods. By building and beautifying one temple [in Rome] out of the ruins of another he was involving the people of Rome in the guilt of impiety, as if the immortal gods were not the same everywhere.” (Livy, History of Rome Bk. 42.)

The Senate unanimously voted that the tiles should be put back and that expiatory sacrifices should be offered to Juno.

“The religious duty was carefully discharged, but the contractors reported that as no one understood how to replace the tiles they had been left in the precinct of the temple.” (Livy, Op.Cit., Bk 42.)

No doubt they tiptoed away in the dark.

Were not the immortal gods the same everywhere? The redeeming force of Cicero’s formula derived from the fact that it was a reflection of an emergent pan-Mediterranean humanism which those very Roman conquests had made possible. Whether or not built through violence, at the end of the day, Romans discovered that others were not very different from themselves; that a ius gentium appeared to infuse all men in common. As Cicero put it,

"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; ... We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is God, over us all, ..."

Not surprisingly, Cicero was popular among the early Church Fathers. Universal humanism metamorphosed into Catholicism.

Alas! the whole of the Ancient World was collapsing. The economy was in the tank and pestilences ravaged the lands. Cities and fields lay depopulated and fallow. The revenues were falling and the armies were stretched to their limits. The State resorted to hiring mercenary barbarian armies to defend the Empire from other barbarian armies and with revenues falling resorted to the expedient of granting vast tracts of land in lieu of payment, the names of which survive to this day -- Burgundy, (v)Andalusia, Lombardi, Belgium, ultimately, even France. It was somewhat like giving California to Blackwater.

The Universal City, Eternal Rome, which had embodied the unchangeable law valid for all nations and for all times was dying.

Vandal Sack of Rome

Faced with this catastrophe -- the collapse of everything known -- Romans fell to mutual recriminations. Pagans accused the Christians of bringing bad luck upon the Empire. For near 1000 years the true gods had been given their just due and the Empire had known increase and prosperity; was it coincidence that the catastrophe began with the turn to Christianity? We are loosing because our cause is unjust and it is so because we have failed to do good to our gods without whom we cannot do harm to our enemies.

Feebly enough, the Christians (Augustine in particular) answered that Rome was loosing her wars because people were sinful -- which was another way of saying the same thing in a different skin. Augustine explained,

“Every victory, even though gained by wicked men [i.e. the Barbarians], is a result of the first judgment of God, who humbles the vanquished [i.e. the Romans] either for the sake of removing or of punishing their sins. Witness that man of God, Daniel, who, when he was in captivity, confessed to God his own sins and the sins of his people, and declares with pious grief that these were the cause of the captivity.” (City of God, Chapter 15)

It was not a very winning argument,  and pagans replied that sin or no sin matters might be helped a tad if Christians stopped their prattling and praying and picked up a damn sword and did some of the necessary dirty work of civilization. The pagan Celsus, excoriated:

“If all men were to do as you, there would be nothing to prevent the Emperor from being left in utter solitude, and with the desertion of his forces, the Empire would fall into the hands of the most lawless barbarians.”

The excoriation all but demanded a just war concession which subsequent commentators have fished out from the massive tomes of Augustine’s City of God, quoting the following:

“But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not rather lament the necessity of just wars, once he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, .... (City of God, Book XIX, chapter 7.)

Indisputably, Augustine’s use of the term “just wars” triggered a recollection of Cicero’s ius bellum. But it is far from clear that Augustine implicitly adopted it. The chapter in its entirety reads as follows:

Of the Diversity of Languages, by Which the Intercourse of Men is Prevented; And of the Misery of Wars, Even of Those Called Just.

After the state or city comes the world, the third circle of human society,-the first being the house, and the second the city. And the world, as it is larger, so it is fuller of dangers, as the greater sea is the more dangerous. And here, in the first place, man is separated from man by the difference of languages. For if two men, each ignorant of the other's language, meet, and are not compelled to pass, but, on the contrary, to remain in company, dumb animals, though of different species, would more easily hold intercourse than they, human beings though they be. For their common nature is no help to friendliness when they are prevented by diversity of language from conveying their sentiments to one another; so that a man would more readily hold intercourse with his dog than with a foreigner. But the imperial city has endeavored to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace, so that interpreters, far from being scarce, are numberless. This is true; but how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity! And though these are past, the end of these miseries has not yet come. For though there have never been wanting, nor are yet wanting, hostile nations beyond the empire, against whom wars have been and are waged, yet, supposing there were no such nations, the very extent of the empire itself has produced wars of a more obnoxious description-social and civil wars-and with these the whore race has been agitated, either by the actual conflict or the fear of a renewed outbreak. If I attempted to give an adequate description of these manifold disasters, these stern and lasting necessities, though I am quite unequal to the task, what limit could I set? But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not all the rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man; for if they were not just he would not wage them, and would therefore be delivered from all wars. For it is the wrongdoing of the opposing party which compels the wise man to wage just wars; and this wrong doing, even though it gave rise to no war, would still be matter of grief to man because it is man's wrong-doing. Let every one, then, who thinks with pain on all these great evils, so horrible, so ruthless, acknowledge that this is misery. And if any one either endures or thinks of them without mental pain, this is a more miserable plight still, for he thinks himself happy because he has lost human feeling.

Once the full chapter is read it can be seen that not only has Augustine been taken out of context, he has been grotesquely inverted.

Augustine’s topic was not war but rather the condition of the human race; and he began with an implicit dual allusion to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel and to Aristotle’s doctrine that articulate language is the foundation of human society since it is through language that man “decides what is just and unjust” (Aristotle, Politics, Bk I.)

“Justice,” St. Ambrose had said, “is about promoting the fellowship of the human race and about furthering community.” But, retorts Augustine, how is this possible when half the human race speaks German?

Augustine acknowledges that Rome attempted to solve the problem of “community” by force -- by imposing Latin as a “bond of peace”. He did not need to add the obvious fact that, from a certain perspective, the imperial “furthering of community” had been astonishingly successful. But where Cicero had taken off into flights of hortatory, Augustine now played the realist. But at what a cost!! How many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity! Augustine did not need to state what was patent to his audience -- Christianity had a better language.

Just then, Augustine shifted his angle and raised a straw man. But, say they, the wise man will wage just wars. Who is “they”? The “they” was Augustine’s contemporaries who were arguing that defence against the current incursions qualified under Cicero’s theory of just war.

Having raised a straw man, Augustine ducked: “Yes well... but rather we should lament our sinful human condition which brings such awful necessities upon us. (See Tower of Babel, the original “imperial city”).   The City of God, however, is built on the Word and defended with love.

“The safety of the City of God, however, is of such a kind that it can be possessed, or rather acquired, only with faith and through faith; and when faith is lost, no one can attain to that safety.” (Op.cit. Book 22, ch. 6.)

It was an astonishing avoidance. Celsus’s accusation, the crisis of the times, the very topic of the chapter and the Cicero on the tip of his tongue, all imminently demanded a formulation of the ius bellum doctrine -- and still Augustine interrupted the flow to say that we should rather mourn our original sin.

Augustine Pointing the Way Amid The Crumble

It is typically said that what can be distilled from the ecclesiastical writers of this period, Augustine included, is a reformulation of Cicero’s ius bellum into a formula requiring (1) right authority, (2) just cause, (3) last resort, (4) right intent, and (5) proportionality of ultimate good to evil done. That is not a bad doctrine, as doctrines go, and it certainly did emerge in later medieval thinking. But what is truly remarkable is the persistence with which the Church Fathers of this earlier period avoided stating it.

I would suggest that what emerges from the writers of this period both by omission and implication is a somewhat more limited acceptance of war as an unavoidable but necessary evil which Christians, collectively and as individuals, should studiously avoid but which, in strictly limited circumstances, they might be forgiven for being engaged in. The question was not what made for a just war but rather whether violence was forgivable when unavoidable.

Again, it is necessary to take context into account. The early Church Fathers, were primarily concerned with providing guidance for individual conduct and for the clergy. The collapse of the Empire was not simply the result of external invasions. It was accompanied by a chronic, pandemic of internal revolts and convulsions. The rule of law was itself crumbling under an onslaught of breaches and pretexts.

To make matters worse, military service was becoming a business. In ancient times, soldiers were paid with plundered bounties and/or rights of pillage. Armies sustained themselves by living off the cities and lands they marched through to protect. War was an unmitigated disaster.

On the other hand, when garrisoned, soldiers lived off their wives, through gambling or by engaging in small handcrafts and trades. As the economy and empire tanked, men sought security in the brutality of an increasingly “privatized” military life. Being a soldier involved evils totally apart from killing and, at the same time, could entail pursuits which weren’t very evil at all.

Thus, throughout the entire imperial period, the primary thrust of ecclesiastical writings with respect to war and soldiering was aimed at formulating precepts for individual conduct: whether a Christian could enlist or allow himself to be drafted or whether a soldier who had converted could remain in the army in some capacity. At least until Constantine’s conversion, there was no need to formulate political or geo-political theories.

As for ius bellum, there was no need to repackage Cicero. Obviously, if war was to be fought it ought at least be just; but the more predicate question was whether a Christian should fight in it at all. The answer, at least in the first and second centuries, was invariably, No.

It might be thought, as Celsus in fact argued, that this was a colossal exercise in self indulgence. I would suggest that it was in fact a more radical answer that went to what was seen to be the root of the problem: man’s alienation from man.

In the Church’s view, the primary cause of war was that man did not see his brother in his fellow man, and not seeing a brother, saw an enemy. Therefore, the radical solution to the core problem was to make a brother out of one’s enemy -- to learn to speak the same language of charity from empathy.

"The more devout the individual, the more effective he is in helping the Emperor, more so than the soldiers who go into the lines and kill all the enemy troops they can … The greatest warfare, in other words, is not with human enemies but with those spiritual forces which make men into enemies." (Origen Contra Celsum)

This was no poetical idleness. The whole thrust of church missions into the teutonic forests to convert the barbarians was precisely to create “community” with aliens where none had existed. Thus, Clement of Alexandria described the Church as “an army which sheds no blood.”

"If you enroll as one of God’s people, heaven is your country and God your lawgiver. And what are His laws? You shall not kill, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Protrepticus 11, 116)

Few of these writers could be characterized as illiterate or stupid. They knew all about “just war” and they understood clearly that that doctrine implicitly accepted the statu quo of man’s alienation from man. War acts upon a breach but doesn’t heal it. Cicero’s formula may have mitigated the occasions of war, but it did not bring about the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Church (or at least Augustine) had a bigger gambit: to bring about the true universal City of God on earth. And the only way to do that was to do today what you hoped to see materialize tomorrow. “By Hope we are saved,” (Rom 8: 24) The current pope explains:

“In our language we would say: the Christian message was not only “informative” but 'performative'. That means: the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known, it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.” (Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, I. 2)

Just as the destructive force of an army consists in the accumulated acts of individual violence; so conversely did the healing force of a Christian army consist in the swelling force of individual acts of charity.

The vision was simple and radical. As well as Socrates, the ecclesiastical writers of this period understood that ‘doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” is a formula that “breaks down”. Conversely, returning good for evil, builds up.

Punt  &  Shuffle

But what was a bishop to advise once the emperor himself became Christian? The question was a virtual oxymoron given that the office of imperator was first and foremost a military office.

Ambrose was the first to provide an equivocating answer, stating that "fortitude, which in war preserves the country from the barbarians or helps the infirm at home or defends one's neighbor's from robbers, is a form of justice" (On the Duties of the Clergy, Book I, ch.27). Ambrose then went further: "He who does not repel an injury done to his fellow, if he is able to do so, is as much at fault as he who commits the injury" (Op.Cit Bk. I, ch. 36.)

In these passages, Ambrose was laundry-listing desirable character traits for the clergy; and  in so doing, he was adopting a typically pagan form of moral literature to Christian use. The enumeration of rules of conduct had been a pastime of the stoics and, in the later empire, had resulted in a profusion of Guidebooks for the Well-Bred Man. It was from this literature that later ecclesiastical writers cobbled up the Seven Cardinal Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins.

The genre had a hoary pedigree, reaching through Cicero back to Plato’s Republic which had begun where Polemarchus’s definition of justice had broken down and which proceeded on the assumption that the qualities of the Just Man corresponded to the elements of the Just State and vice versa.

At first blush, Ambrose’s dictum said little more than “courage is an aspect of justice”.   It was the sort of commonplace which would have been met with a kind of yawning agreement. Ambrose’s contribution was to serve up the cliché in a Jeremiah-coloured wrapping, advising his readers that courage in defence of others was a form of justice. In other words, christian courage was inspired by charity moved to succour widows, orphans and those in distress.

Although Ambrose was speaking about individual duties, it is reasonable to assume that both he and his listeners would have understood the lurking analogy to the State. In fact, in reproving Theodosius, Ambrose in no wise questioned the Emperor’s authority to punish revolt; rather he condemned a massacre that was unjust (“tyrannical”) and went on to praise Theodosius’s father, Gratian, whose troops had trampled the Empire in defence of one just cause after another.

Augustine followed up by explaining that just as a surgeon will cut away gangrene, so to the ruler will punish his people when they go astray. Although punishment should never be for the purpose of returning evil for evil; neither the surgeon nor the ruler act from motives of revenge, rather they do so from love. (Augustine, Letter 104 to Nectarius (409), citing 1 Thess 5.15 Rom 12.17.)

Augustine then went further and extolled that special kind of surgery practiced by soldiers,

“As for the soldier, in killing his enemy he is the servant of the law, and hence merely does his duty without any evil desire. Moreover the law itself, being made for the protection of the people, cannot be accused of concupiscence.” (St. Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, I.5.12.)

and,

“Greatness and their own glory belong to warriors who are both very brave and very faithful (that is the source of the truer praise), to those who struggle and face danger in order, with the help of God who gives protection and assistance, to bring defeat upon an untamed enemy and win respite for the empire by pacifying the provinces. However, greater glory still is merited not by killing men with swords, but by war with words, and by acquiring or achieving peace not through war but through peace itself.” (Augustine, Political Writings (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,2001), 226.)

Thus, while neither Ambrose nor Augustine ever exposited a theory of just war of defence, neither did they condemn what was taking place almost daily. The omission stood in marked contrast to the earlier injunction against Christian participation in those very same wars of imperial defence.

If all this appears contradictory it is because it was. Amid a plethora of rules for personal conduct (which might or might not be analogized to political policies for the state) one is left with two stunning omissions: (1) a failure to expound a just war theory when it was there for the expounding and (2) a failure to condemn participation in defensive violence when it was occurring daily.

Celsus might well have smiled. All in all, albeit with unmistakable reluctance, the Church began to punt and shuffle now that one of her boys was at the helm.

The  Unmistakable  Charity of  War

The crisis that afflicted the Western Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries soon cast its shadow over the Eastern Empire in the eight and ninth, as Islamic and Slavic invaders pressed upon Byzantium.

The Muslim invaders, however, were somewhat more learned than the rustic Germans. During a diplomatic parlay in 851, Caliph Mutawakki’s negotiating team opened up with quotes from the Gospel of Mathew,

"Your God is Christ. He commanded you to pray for your enemies, to do good to those who hate and persecute you, and to offer the other cheek to those who hit you. But what do you actually do? If anyone offends you, you sharpen your sword and go into battle and kill. Why do you not obey your Christ?" (The Orthodox Church and Society VIII.2)

To which St. Constantine-Cyril responded

"Christ is our God Who ordered us to pray for our offenders and to do good to them. He also said that no one of us can show greater love in life than he who gives his life for his friends That is why we generously endure offences caused us as private people. But in company we defend one another and give our lives in battle for our neighbors, so that you, having taken our companions as prisoners, could not imprison their souls together with their bodies by forcing them into renouncing their faith."

The gauntlet cast down by an astute adversary, Cyril was forced to resolve Ambrose and Augustine’s fudging. To do so he resorted to the dualism that would become such a salient characteristic of medieval thinking.

Simply put, in contra-Salomonic fashion, Cyril resolved the contradiction by splitting the baby in half. The Emperor had two bodies. What the Christian emperor cannot do as a private person for himself (return violence for violence), he must do as emperor -- not out of lust or wrath but out of solicitude for his subjects. By the same token, in descending fashion, what we cannot do for ourselves, we can and indeed are obliged to do for others, as mere minions of the Emperor (in his imperial half).

Cyril’s exposition explains the Church’s, to us odd focus on “right intention.” The assumption underlying Cyril’s response was that, with respect to domestic matters within the city walls, the judgements of the authorities would be even handed, objective and aimed at insuring the public good. A law against prostitution or theft was not directed out of malice against Sabina or Donatus personally, but applied equally to all for the good of all.   In this context,  individual subjective “right intention” became subsumed to objective, societal “lawful authority”.

It warrants attempting to grasp the concepts involved.  For  philosophers writing about the formation of society (civitas) out of the chaos of the un-city, the evil of the chaos was individual auto-nomos; that is, every man being an impulse unto himself, the sole and ultimate Dictator and Executor of what he thinks is right.  Killing is murder because it necessarily flows from ego alone and has no character of social lawfulness.  It is this disconnected autonomy,  necessarily mired in "self," that Augustine calls "original sin".  Conversely,  Law only comes into existence socially and hence social killing is inherently just because it is done by All unto All for the good of All.

Accordingly, if one were acting under orders and in service of the emperor then presumptively one was not acting for base, selfish and ignoble purposes. The guard who arrests a criminal or the individual soldier who fights in a war against external malfeasors does so with the right intention when he does so solely out of duty and pursuant to a lawfully declared action. He is not acting out of aggressive anger, nor is he even returning “evil for evil” -- but is acting with the dispassion of a surgeon and the solicitude of a father. It was this nexus between lawful authority and just intentionality that warranted individual Christians taking up arms in civic service.

Cyril’s argument illustrates how the Polemarchus-Socrates dialogue spoke directly to the “broader” question of the analogy between the Individual and the Republic.  Is society a mere amplification of or analog to the individual, or, is there a qualitative difference between the One and the All?  It is, as Plato would point out in Parmenides, a paradox. 

Cyril's argument was built on the analogy of the State to the Individual; but his analogy pointed to its own incompleteness in that it danced lightly around the question of who stands above the state; and this calls into question the political relevance of co-related rules for individual conduct. (FN-3 The End? of Dualisms)

There was an undeniably rhetorical symmetry in Cyril’s argument. However, switching between dualisms within analogies can trip up the best dancer. The analogy between the “one” and the “many” bore a critical defect in that it was not completely followed through. In logical terms an analogy should take the form A : B :: C : D. Instead, the components of Cyril’s argument were A : B :: C : C.

According to him, what made it lawful for an individual to engage in violence is:

1. that it is done for the sake of others and not even for defence of self; and,

2. that the originating force of the act is a higher authority, whose beneficent intent is transferred to the agent.

Thus, if an individual is justified in coming to the defence of others against attacks within the city walls it should be equally just to defend those same persons when the attack emanates from outside the walls. This was perfectly logical, which is why the first part of Cyril’s analogy was framed in the context of a defensive war, most probably from the ramparts of some city.

But the analogy breaks down when “one of us” is replaced by “all of us”. Who does “all of us” (i.e. society or the nation) come to the defence of? Another "all of them" i.e., country? Obviously not. The “all of us” comes to the defence of “all of us” which is simply self defence. However, it was said at the outset that the individual should not seek to defend himself, but rather should turn the other cheek. If the analogy were fully drawn, the conclusion should be that the State should not defend itself either.

The same defect appears if the analogy is examined in terms of intentionality.

What of our companions in Muslim custody outside the city? Surely the individual is not at fault if he follows an order to unselfishly protect his fellow citizens abroad? Surely not. But what of the emperor -- that “one” who represents society as a whole? An emperor or king is only “lawful authority” within his realms. Whose higher Authority does he dutifully obey when he ventures forth into alien lands? The answer would not be long in coming.

Stated in modern terms, the analogy confused subjective intentionality with objective political policy. It did so because a political rule was being extrapolated from earlier ecclesiastics whose principle focus had been on rules for individual conduct and spirituality.

But, as the Muslim ambassador was astutely aware, those same Christian authorities undercut the retributive premise of a just war. Augustine’s Letters to Nectorius, repeatedly stated that the Christian will not return evil for evil.

"We have no desire to nurse our anger by taking revenge over events that are past; rather we try to act mercifully with an eye to the future. There are ways of punishing evil men that are not only gentle but even for their benefit and well being....” (Letter 91 to Nectorius)

and,

Punishment “should always be done without hating the person, without returning to him evil for evil.” (Letter 104, supra.)

To skirt around these rather explicit rejections of retributive justice, Cyril, supplanted the missing premise with an alernative rule for individual conduct which could then be projected to cover the State.

It is inaccurate to think of Cyril as formulating a theory of “just” cause in the retributive Ciceronian sense. Although canonist will continue to use the phrase “just war,” Cyril’s unmistakable allusion was to Jeremiah’s exhortation to care for widows and orphans and those in need. What he in fact expounded was a theory of “charitable cause” which would come to underwrite medieval codes of chivalry and which would ultimately metamorphose into a canon for holy war.

May I with Right and Conscience make this Claim?

Henry V

Let us return to the more West on the eve of that  "revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth."   Whatever Ambrose or Augustine may or may not have propounded, the issue was soon moot.   In 476, the Empire in the West collapsed and the issue of just war was eclipsed by the more feudal issue of just and chivalrous conduct. Now the world spoke German or some concoction thereof. Violence was taken for granted and conduct was governed by codes of courage and loyalty.

The Germans were no less superstitious than the Romans. Having right on one’s side was as important as hardened steel and what else is loyalty except doing good to one’s friends and harm to his enemies? Polemarchus was unheard of but he was not unknown.

The low middle ages illustrated the shortcomings of the Ciceronian formula. The instances are legion of kings, counts and ordinary knights consulting and being assured by their priests as to the justness of their cause before riding off to trample down harvests and mutilate their foes.

Far more than even the Romans, the Germans were sticklers for justice so that war now became as much a lawyer’s game as a knight’s. Slaughter was preceded by the Battle of Scribblers who drew up precise and lengthy statements of grievances, remonstrances and demands for satisfaction which were met in turn by counter claims and further demands. Nor should anyone think that these patents were primitive affairs. The medieval mind was extremely acute, active and inventive. These remonstrances verged on being theological or legal treatises. One need only call to mind Lord Canterbury’s parody in Henry V

The Church’s position was little different than under Ambrose, save only that localization of temporal power in the person of a chieftain, count or duke cast the issue into a less public and more private hue. It also meant that, in any given instance, an ecclesiastical ruling was little more than bought and paid for. As a restraint, the just war formula was all but meaningless. The rule was succinctly summarized by one anonymous Anglo-Norman lawyer,

"Homicide is licit in three ways: when God secretly inspires one person to kill another; or when a judge having power of the sword slays someone or when on command of a prince, a soldier slays an enemy.” (Durham Cathedral Library, MS. C.III. 1, fol. 213.) (FN-4 / The Blockhead Is Us )

The foreseeable result was that Europe was torn asunder by just and inspired war. However, before falling to a facile and condescending cynicism, it is worth taking a step back to ask whether all the scribbling was “just rhetoric” or whether some other process was at work.

God watching His Children's Just Wars

The medieval period is one of baffling contrasts. Stunning acts of cruelty and chivalry co-existed side by side. Dualism went from a being political theory to being a fact of life. To make matters worse, the invaders were now invaded by Normans to the North, Magyars in the East and Muslim in the South and very typically there was no clear distinction between domestic disorder and external hostilities.

It was the very lawlessness of conditions that gave rise to a fastidious and refined legalism, as men struggled to impose Word over the chaos. Legal prohibitions and rules of “due process” not only reflected the existence of barbaric behaviour but often incorporated it. Law might not improve man’s nature but it could at least regularize violence and temper the effects war. This regularizing of war -- what is called ius in bello -- will ultimately become the medieval contribution to the concept of just war and the cornerstone of present day international humanitarian law.

The tempering of conflict began in the Tenth Century when the Gallican Church organized a peace movement to persuade nobles to renounce private war and violence. In 989 a council at Charroux proclaimed Pax Dei which prohibited men from robbing pilgrims, plundering churches, or from usurping the flocks,tools and produce of peasants.

A quarter century later, in 1023, Robert the Pious of France and German emperor Heinrich II proposed a universal peace pact for their kingdoms and eventually for all Christendom. Starting in 1027 the Truce of God was proclaimed by church authorities in Aquitane.

Seeking to regulate warfare, military actions were confined to between sunrise Monday and Wednesday sunset. It was specified that soldiers could only be compensated by a regular salary (not plunder) and that anyone exercising violence on noncombatants in war was to be excommunicated. Certain types of arms were outlawed as being too cruel or even too effective. A century or so later, these rules were given “universal” application by the Third Lateran Council (1179).

God’s Truce / God’s War.

Contemporaneously with the Truce Movement canonists began in earnest to elaborate a theory of Just War. It was now that jurists rummaged through ancient authorities looking for guidance from what they presupposed was a wiser more enlightened time.

What these medieval lawyers cobbled together was a legal methodology -- a “law of war” -- that went far beyond anything Augustine, Ambrose or Cyril may be supposed to have expounded. Like churches built with rummaged chunks of old temples,  the canonists built a new legal city with scraps of dicta .

Chief of these canonists was the above mentioned Gratian who, writing in the wake of the First Crusade, compiled a series of “decrees” synthesizing rules of engagement from pagan and ecclesiastical sources. Under this monk’s archivilist ardour, Cicero’s general formula of a just a war was amplified into a laundry list of just causes, drawn from the full heap of recriminations a thousand years could provide

Theoretically speaking, all the specifications cobbled up by the medieval jurists were simply unfoldings from what was implicit in Cicero’s three-part definition. To this extent, one was left with a verbose rendition of “an eye for an eye” in defence of the tooth.

But,  Cyril’s rationale of charitable violence in defence of others was a poisonous seed which now sprouted. If it was permissible, nay laudable, to defend one’s neighbour and fellow citizens was there any reason not to defend innocents abroad?

Medieval canonist couldn’t see why not. To the list just causes which had previously included national self-defense and defence of innocents at home, Gratian added defence of innocents abroad, particularly the at-risk and long suffering innocents in the Holy Land.

As authority, Gratian cited a letter from Pope Alexander II which approved of war against the Infidel in territories which had been Roman.” (Decretum at C.23 q.8 c.11. [!])

Alexander’s reasoning was a stunning example of quibbling medieval dualism. Why the territorial limitation? It all flowed from duality:

Just as there was an imperfect sun which revolved around the earth in an elliptical orbit and the “ideal” sun which rotated in a circle; just as there was sinful man now, who would later  put on the incorruptible; just as the king had two bodies, the “perfect” one of which could do no wrong; just as there had been the imperial city of rome, and the eternal city of god; so too, the imperial city itself was split into the Roman Empire that actually was now and the “ideal” Roman Empire which was the one whose ambit extended to all lands which had once been subject to Roman rule; and so too was not the infidel abroad today akin to the barbarians of yore who were rightly resisted by emperors past? Therefor, in repelling [sic] the Infidel from “true” Roman territories the Crusades were merely fighting a “Roman War” -- that is, that war of defence against barbarian invaders which Ambrose and Augustine had at least tacitly approved.

Moreover, since God is Justice itself, it followed that a truly just war was willed by God; and if God willed it, it was just. To the medieval mind, the very circularity was a manifestation of perfection.


And so it was that Pope Urban II exhorted the assembled crowd of restless knights

"As you have all heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania...

“From the confines of Jerusalem ... a horrible tale has gone forth... [A] race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God,... has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire... They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they ... spread upon the altars.. Others they bind to a post and pierce with arrows..... Of the abominable rape of the women, why to speak of it is worse than to be silent!

"Your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them the aid which has often been promised them. "

No question about just cause here.

"But how can the ignorant teach others? How can the licentious make others modest? And how can the impure make others pure? So first correct yourselves, in order that, free from blame , you may be able to correct those who are subject to you.”

Nor doubt about right intentions either.


So moved was the assembled throng, that they cried out in unison, "It is the will of God! It is the will of God!"

“With eyes uplifted to heaven, Urban gave thanks to God and, with his hand commanding silence, said:

“Unless the Lord God had been present in your spirits, all of you would not have uttered the same cry. For, although the cry issued from numerous mouths, yet the origin of the cry was one. Therefore I say to you that God, who implanted this in your breasts, has drawn it forth from you. Let this then be your war-cry in combats, Deus lo vult!”

No doubt about anything at all here. It was all a very Roman War (FN-5 / Realtime Sociology in the Middle Ages)

As if to complete the dismal denouement, just war which had was once viewed as forgivable because it was unavoidable now became the toxin for earning forgiveness and salvation.

Dulce et suaviter pro patria mori, Cicero had declaimed in a moment of patriotic fervor, forgetting the great rule of universal reason embedded in all breasts from which no Senate could release us. Six centuries later, the Emperor Justinian cast the sentiment into a Christian mold: Because they died for the republic... they live in perpetual glory. (Inst. Justinian. I.23)

Not surprisingly, the Council of Clarement (1079) which now declared the First Crusade, also authorized a commutation of penance which Urban II decreed for the “remission of sins”.

“We ought to endure much suffering for the name of Christ - misery, poverty, nakedness, persecution, want, illness, hunger, thirst, and other ills of this kind, ...”

because,

"All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested."

If it was sweet and easy to die for the Imperial City. how much sweeter and lasting to die for the City of God.    It all went to show how easily a Just War could  become a Jihad.

When things didn’t quite go as hoped, it was deduced that the fault lay in an insufficiency of  pure intention. And so a Crusade of Children set forth - innocents to succour the innocent. It was all quite logical and totally disastrous.

Learning little, a century later, St. Thomas Aquinas pronounced the then definitive distillation of Church doctrine:

"In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged. For it is not the business of a private individual to declare war, because he can seek for redress of his rights from the tribunal of his superior. [Whereas] it is the function of rulers to defend the common weal against external enemies [and to] rescue the poor, and deliver the needy out of the hand of the sinner;

"Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault.

"Thirdly, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil. ... [Because] "True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good."

Aquinas then quoted a letter of Augustine as evidence that Christians are permitted to wage war.

"Augustine says [that] : "If the Christian Religion forbade war altogether, ... the Gospel would have counselled [us] to give up soldiering altogether. On the contrary, it states: 'Do violence to no man . . . and be content with your pay' [Lk. 3:14]. If he commanded them to be content with their pay, he did not forbid soldiering."

To which it might well be answered that if the Gospel truly counselled war it would not have said “Do no violence.”

Aquinas’ formula was little more than Cicero en theologie. But analogy is to law what weeds are to grass. If war was allowed against the infidel abroad, why not against the heretic at home? In this way, the idea of Holy War returned and set the stage for the disastrous Reformation Wars. Crusades abroad inevitably become, by analogy, crusades at home.

Because of Aquinas’ preeminence in other more metaphysical matters, he tends to get cited as a major authority of the doctrine of just war, when in fact his contribution was essentially a synopsis. As even this brief survey has shown, the real work was done be legions of lesser luminaries.

Among those "lesser" luminaries was the Spanish Jesuit jurist,  Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546 ) who, two centuries later,  unsuccessfully attempted to put some limits on Aquinas’ open ended formulation of just cause.   The occasion of Vitoria’s attempt was the argument, advanced by some of his countrymen, that defending Indians from themselves, justified the conquest of the Americas.

After summarizing the now established just war formula, Vitoria turned to the all-important laundry list of rightful excuses, specifying that none of the following could constitute cause for a just war:

1. differences in religion;
2. imperial expansion;
3. personal glory or convenience.

“The sole and only just cause for waging war is when harm has been inflicted.” (Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, Cambridge University Press 1991, 303, 304.)

Having almost restated the early Christian idea of an excusable war in strict self-defence, Vitoria then added the fatal charitable coda, stating that war was also permitted

“to save innocent people from massacre, human sacrifice, cannibalism, or other violations of natural morality.”

To make matters worse,

"If it is evident that subjects are suffering injustice from their king, it is lawful for foreign princes to make war on that king. And, in general, when subjects have right on their side in fighting against their king, other princes may justly fight for the people. This is because the people is innocent and princes (i.e., rulers of the states) have by natural law the right and power to defend the world against injustice" (Commentary on the Summa Theologia of St. Thomas 40.1.6.)

It may be hard to believe that Vitoria was part of a cadre of Spanish humanists who were actually seeking to restrain Spanish conquests in the Americas. Their arguments that the Indians were sentient beings who had rights under natural and human law were at least partially successful in mitigating the terms and conditions of conquest.   But as a formula for gauging  just war, Vitoria’s limitation of “just causes” ended up simply adding to the laundry list of belligerent excuses.

Nevertheless, like Cicero before him, the value of Vitoria’s contribution emerges once the formula -- on its linguistic face inadequate -- is mise en scene. Read attentively, Vitoria’s commentaries represented a breath taking sea change in human consciousness.

For a thousand years the Middle Ages had lived under the shadow of Rome. In 1079 it was still plausible to think of the Crusades as a war to reclaim national territory. No longer. By the time Vitoria reached 20 years of age, the world had become, in truth, a world. By the time Vitoria died, the world’s first global economy had been established with a glittering band of silk and gold stretching from the Philippines to Acapulco and Peru through Seville to Naples and on to Constantinople and the Levant. Worse than absurd, talking about “Roman War” in defence of a ghostly empire was an irrelevancy. No. There was gold in them hills overrun with alien savages!

As Cicero had championed a pan-Mediterranean humanism so now Vitoria championed a truly universal brotherhood of all men, subject to “an eternal and unchangeable law ... valid for all nations and all times.” The young jesuit lifted his pen against the spectre of expansionist imperial wars looming on the horizon.

If we bear in mind the virulent cultural jingoism of our own day, Vitoria’s humanism is all the more extraordinary. For the people Spain had come into contact with worshipped strange and frightful gods to whom they did offer up gory human sacrifice.

What was a Christian to do? If these others were our natural brothers, did we not owe them duties of succour as well? Vitoria was caught in a bind: if he answered in the negative, he denied the very principle of common humanity he wished to establish. (FN / The Same Gods?)

Once again, the issue concerned our response to evil and once again the Church made an equivocal and compromising choice.   It was left to another Spaniard to devastatingly ridicule the result.

The Dark Side of Jeremiah

As the 15th and 16th centuries wore on, Spain continued to fight the Infidel in the East and Heathens in the West. In this ambience, it was hardly surprising that printers should seize the profitable opportunity of a new medium to churn out scintillating adventure tales of distressed damsels and knights errant . It was said (and we can believe it) that people walked about with their eyes glued to these new porta-books, the Kindles of their day. The tales of Amadis of Gaul was the world’s first “all-time bestseller”.

Like our own “Wild West,” the heydays of chivalry were past but enough survived in attitudes and practice to render them recognizable and hence popular. By his own account, those very attitudes had lead Miguel Cervantes to seek temporal and eternal recompense fighting the Infidel in Algiers, where he lost a hand and was kept as a slave enduring a thousand privations and dangers. Returning impoverished from seven years captivity, he bore with him the treasure of a hitherto lost work by the Arab historian Cid Hamete Benengeli, chronicling the heroic deeds of the greatest knight errant of all.

There were those who doubted whether the world stood in need of knight errantry. And so, as Thomas Aquinas had once extolled the superior virtues of theology, Don Quixote now rose to the occasion and offered to prove to his dinner hosts that the science of arms was superior to laws and letters.

“I speak of human letters, the end of which is to establish justice,  give to every man that which is his due, and see and take care that good laws are observed.”

( Indeed! Had not Ambrose himself extolled that very pursuit of justice which “helps the infirm at home, and defends one's neighbor's from robbers”? )

Don Quixote began by observing that while academics certainly hadt to endure poverty and long nights of studious effort, these hardships did not surpass those of the man of arms who, in addition to enduring cold and hunger, must also face death, the greatest privation of all. Not only must the soldier steel himself with the discipline of his art, he must also discipline himself with privations and penances, such as finding hard rocks to sleep on to insure that his motives are pure.

( For sure!  Who could fail to recall that Urban II himself had counselled precisely such soldierly penances? )

Don Quixote summarized his contentions:

Men of letters say that without them arms cannot maintain themselves, for war, too, has its laws and is governed by them and laws belong to the domain of letters and men of letters. To this men of arms make answer that without them laws cannot be maintained, for by arms states are defended, kingdoms preserved, cities protected, roads made safe, seas cleared of pirates;

...and clinched his proof.

“While the goal of rendering every man his due is undoubtedly noble, lofty, and deserving of high praise it cannot excel the purpose of arms, which have for their end and object,  peace.

"This peace is the true end of war; and war is only another name for arms. This, then, being admitted, that the end of war is peace, it follows that it has the advantage over the end of letters,”

Could  any doubt Don Quixote's truth and wisdom?   Had not St. Augustine himself written,

“It is therefore with the desire for peace that wars are waged, even by those who take pleasure in exercising their warlike nature in command and battle. And hence it is obvious that peace is the end sought for by war.” (City of God, chapter 12)

Cervantes reports that “ It excited fresh pity in those who had heard him to see a man of apparently sound sense, and with rational views on every subject he discussed, so hopelessly wanting in all, when his wretched chivalry was in question; for he was seized by a truly dark passion.”

-oOo-

But the errant knight is an equivocal figure. Despite his undisputed madness, does not half the world admire him? It was Dostoyevsky who gushed that on the Latter Day when Man is called upon to justify himself, it would be sufficient to hand God a copy of Don Quixote.

At bottom, men like Gratian or Aquinas --in so far as he expounds on war -- were merely lawyers quibbling a case. As Socrates understood, the alleged justness of any cause is always arguable and never knowable. Once it is assumed that war can be justified we are cast adrift on a sea of wrath and lust.

The same cannot be said of Ambrose, Aquinas or Vitoria. Augustine and Ambrose still remembered that even if war is in some sense unavoidable either out of weakness or from a concept of duty, doing harm to your enemy is never productive of good. Their reluctant allowance and limited endorsement of a resort to force was equivocal; and, if they waffled, it was because they were alive to the fact that the concept of charitable violence in defence of innocents had been explicitly rejected in Gesthemene when Jesus stayed Peter’s sword.



Such pacifism is very hard for us to accept and perhaps given the feebleness of our reason we ought not always accept it. After all, Christ drove the money changers from the temple and what mother bear will not ferociously defend her cub? (FN-6 /Animal Justice)

Given these perplexities, the modern Church has attempted to fashion a doctrine that justifies war under the strict conditions when it appears to be unavoidably necessary.

“The use of force to obtain justice is morally licit in itself” and “is the right, and the duty, of those who have responsibilities for others, such as civil leaders and police forces.”

The resort to force “must be done with a good intention, ... to correct vice, to restore justice or to restrain evil,

The use of force “must be appropriate in the circumstances. An act which may otherwise be good and well motivated can be sinful by reason of imprudent judgment and execution.”

The Just War doctrine establishes certain conditions for the legitimate exercise of force, all of which must be met:

1. the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

2. all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

3. there must be serious prospects of success;

4. the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition .

Nor is everything licit in war. Actions which are forbidden, and which constitute morally unlawful orders that may not be followed, include

• attacks on or mistreatment of non combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners

• genocide, whether of a people, nation or ethnic minorities

• indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants.

Lastly, it is not enough to wage war to achieve justice without treating the underlying causes. As Vitoria had stated, princes “should strive above all to avoid all provocations and causes of war” and “once the war has been fought and victory won, he must use his victory with moderation and Christian humility.”

When current Church doctrine on so-called "Just War" is carefully read in its historical and philosophical context it can be seen to enunciate a very limited and conditioned allowance for a resort to violence.

After two thousand years, the Church ended up much where Cicero began. In the pagan world, the terms “just” or “right reason” implied balance, right ordering and moderation in all respects.  When Cicero wrote that a just war had to be fought with right reason, it was implicit that war would not be entered into hastily or frivolously, that means would be proportionate and moderate and that it would not be undertaken for base and ignoble motives.

And yet, whereas the glosses of the middle ages were simply inferences from what was implicit in the original formula,  the current formulation which imposes the precondition of seeking all other means to avoid a grave and lasting harm adds a requirement not implicit in Cicero and which draws a line between declamation and necessity.

The Church’s genuine contribution to the argument was more the proffering of a radical pacifist alternative, expounded by Socrates and died for by Jesus. Where the Church stumbled was in making a limited allowance for the use of force in strict defence of others. It was not that the exception was so inherently  wrong, but it was a stumble that turned into a free fall.

Just Cause versus Forgivable Crime

What this inadequate and brief survey of a complex subject may perhaps serve to illustrate is that the doctrine of Just War:

1. stands at the juncture of a fundamental moral choice between suffering or doing harm;

2. that no war is ever truly “just” but at best is only excusable because -- given our limited capacity to endure or countenance evil -- it appears to be unavoidably necessary;

3. that unless rigorously and narrowly construed, this limited exception almost immediately unfurls into an obnoxious rhetorical tissue masking a lust for blood, power and riches, so that

4. ultimately the concept of a just war ends up being a deceit.

For all the hortatory, jurisprudential blather and theological conceits, at bottom, the theory of a just war is simply an extension of retributive justice; and the theory rises no higher than its source.

The idea of just war suffers from two principle conceptual problems. The first problem, explained by Socrates, inheres in ascertaining what “justice” calls for in any given case. The second problem, illusrated by St. Cyril, lies in drawing an analogy between individual and state action.

In and of itself the idea of “justice” is a conjoining gloss on underlying naked conduct. It seeks to impose a kind of “sense” or “order” on acts which are in themselves otherwise random. The concept interposes itself at a mid point in a spectrum of conduct which can be graphed as follows:

1. vengeance/despoliation ---- harm to enemies whether they deserve it or not

2. an eye for eye---------------- doing good to friends & harm to enemies supposing they deserve it

3. forgiveness/charity---------- good to enemies and friends,whether they deserve it or not

Doing good or suffering evil have nothing to do with “justice”. The idea of “justice” is interjected in order to rationalize and find a cause for chosing between doing good or harm.

On what basis do we do good or harm? The traditional answer has been the lex talionis which is grounded in fundamental intuitions of balance and proportionality. At first blush there does not appear to be anything inherently illogical in rendering every man his due. But almost immediately, the concept suffers in its application.

If just violence is based on some sort of symmetrical, moral accounting, we are immediately ensnared by the paradox of the Oresteia -- must we kill our mother to avenge her killing of our father and thereby commit a horrendous crime which requires further repayment from us? While, retributive justice as a restraint on excess vengeance is good enough, as an affirmative injunction it is a trap. Whether cast in a play or set out in a dialogue, the Ancients recognized what Kant would call the fundamental “heteronomy” of doing the very thing we condemn doing.

Closure for the just man

If, on the other hand, violence is justified as some sort of defensive practicality, then “justice” has nothing to do with the inquiry but simply interlopes like a distracting harlequin. Speaking practically, we do not strike back in order to “repay” an injury but simply to prevent further injury to ourselves. How do we know that this response will work? If we engage in a sequence of punch for punches, the issue will be decided by he who tires first, which has little do with justice or practicality. The entire theory will have collapsed into trial by ordeal. If we “pre-emptively” strike back with greater force -- with two blows for one -- then we have gone beyond an eye for an eye, which is unjust, although it may be practical.

If such contradictions and cunundra exist in our own case, how much harder is it to know what is just or appropriate in the case of defending others? Cervantes repeatedly ridicules the idea of charitable violence by having Don Quixote ride off to the defence of someone who doesn’t need it, or who was the aggressor or on the stimulus of some other misbegotten misconception.

When it comes to the state, the situation is worse because the analogy between one and many does not truly exist. War is something more than a defensive punch warding off a continued attack. It is true that Tribe A can launch a surprise attack on Tribe B, requiring the latter to defend against the act of Tribe A’s village invasion. However, once we move beyond such primitive examples of collective action, we become involved in complex mobilizations ensuing upon a web of mutual grievances existing alongside a plethora of other options short of violence. If individual violence is excusable because it is unprovoked, unavoidable and necessary, these conditions almost never exist where state action is involved. The analogy breaks down because the state acts as one and through many at the same time.

To illustrate. “France” did not have a “right” to Alsace Lorraine any more or less than “Germany”. While we may draw a cartoon of a person called France, holding the province in her bosom, in actual fact Alsace Lorraine was owned by thousands of people some of whom were French others of whom were be Germans and still others who were French and German. Which one of these thousands did not have a right? Who among these had a just grievance for what?

In war time France or Germany mobilize “as one” but in peacetime neither country, as such, does anything. What is attributed to “France” or to “Germany” as an alleged cause for war is in fact titration from a myriad of individual business, social and cultural dealings in competition and cooperation each lobbying for official support and expression. This actuality is quite the opposite of the pleasant assumption that “lawful authority” does not act out of concuspiscience; but in all events, from such a myriad of interactions, truly ascertaining just cause is simply an impossible calculus.

It was the impossibility of ever unravelling this calculus that led Tolstoy’s War and Peace to extol the virtues of the General Mikhail Kutuzov who, against the frantic demands of his staff, persistently retreated before the advancing French and abandoned Moscow without a fight.

In the “Epilogue” to the novel, Tolstoy ridicules military “strategies” and studious expositions as to the causes of the war. None of these, he says, accomplish or explain a thing. A battle is made up of thousands of one-on-one encounters and reactions. In the multiple confusion of one on one, any singular impulsive act can turn the tide, one man’s enthusiasm or another’s sudden fear spreading like a caustic reaction. So too as to the causes of the war. What was called “Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia” was simply the coinciding and coalescing impulses of millions of Frenchmen which impelled them into Russia, just as the swelling tide of impulses impelled the Barbarians into the Empire

Was then the Emperor of All Russia to retreat the extra mile? Against all his younger, thoroughbred officers demanding strategies and actions, Kutuzov patiently retreated as the French marched in. When the swell of their collective impulses was spent, he followed forward as they fell back. The calculus was beyond knowing, but the one eyed general alone understood that resisting the course of history, whatever it might turn out to be, was futile.

Gen. Mikail Kutuzov

The early Church, through and including Augustine was indisputably cognizant of nature and defects of “justice” which is why they refrained from expounding theories of just war. In the end, "what does justice require?" is an unanswerable question and they were not interested in theorizing upon an utterly false moral choice between just and unjust wars. (Does anyone advocate unjust war? ) The true choice was between pacifism and any resort to violence. Neither Ambrose nor Augustine were being merely poetic in saying that the only way to build a new, more perfect city was through accumulating acts of charity each one a new brick against the outer darkness. They were alive to the fact that repaying evil with good was itself a paradoxical form of injustice precisely because it did not render an eye for an eye but gave to the offender something other than what was his “just deserts”. Here too their answer played coy but they saw all too vividly that the civilization built and defended on “just violence” stood on a corrupt foundation and compounded evil day by day.

Still, the questions persisted. The early Fathers were not only preaching and theosophising; they were answering questions put to them by earnest and baffled individuals. Is it harm to restrain a thief? Is it “injury” to cauterize an injurious gangrene? Is it violence to protect one’s self?  Confronted with such questions amidst a crumbling civilization, Augustine and other church elders sought to provide practical down-to earth moral guidance for their flocks. Too often, it seems to me, subsequent interpreters have failed to pay strict attention to what was asked in what context. Strictly speaking, words like de-fense and pro-tect refer to actions which block, ward off, deflect, stop some other action. They might not suffer the attack, but neither do they involve attacking back. It is a facile and murderous sophistry that plays fast and loose with such advice.

These early church fathers most certainly understood that it was the rare and fortuitous defense which ended up being entirely and strictly defensive, and to was this reality that focused their concerned on fashioning a standard for measuring excusable violence.

Asking when violence may be forgiven is a very different question from pronouncing on when is violence permitted. The difference in terminology is critical. In legal parlance a just or lawful or rightful act is one that is inherently good in itself. On the other hand, an “excusable” act is one that is recognized to be fundamentally wrong but which can be condoned in certain circumstances.

I do not say that this is the only way to read Ambrose and Augustine; but I do say that it is one that minimizes the contradictions and mitigates the equivocation. They were not fudging for the sake of war, but for forgiveness of human fraility and error in difficult and dubious situations.

This reading comports with custom and usage. Up through the Crusades, both Church doctrine and popular opinion truly accepted that war and violence was inherently evil (notwithstanding its great popularity). Even when their cause was blessed as “just”, soldiers did pre-penitence before battle for the sins they were about to commit. At times they were barred from communion for a period after hostilities until they had purged the blood from their hands. Augustine wrote that soldiers were to be pitied because they ran the risk of dying in a state of sin, without opportunity for penance and restored grace.

If war is indelibly evil then it can in no case be "just". Never; and it is simply verbal nonsensese to say otherwise. Accepting that war is indelibly evil, the result is a doctrine of excusable necessity that provides a check list for moral self examination. In that light, the Church’s current doctrine is fairly rigorous.

But once “excuse” is massaged into “permission” the result is a doctrine of rationalized violence that amounts to little more than legal propaganda. The rationales sound fair and appear reasonable but every step of the way have been proved, in logic and experience, to be wanting. The theory of just war is, dear Polemarchus, the deceit some rich and mighty man uses to get others to do his dying for him.



© WCG - 2009

Part II -  [ here ] discusses how President Obama has perverted and trashed even Cicero's Concept of Just War.

[This feature, as originally posted, can be found here> here ]

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