A great many Americans are turning into unhappy moralists about the war in Viet Nam. It is a new sensation. Americans are accustomed to feeling right about the fights they get into. The majority probably still feels right—but troubled. The President summed up the uneasy moral choice in his State of the Union Address. "It is the melancholy law of human societies," he said, quoting Thomas Jefferson, "to be compelled sometimes to choose a great evil in order to ward off a greater evil." On the other side, a chorus of clerics, academics and polemicists of every tone proclaims that the U.S. position is evil, or at least morally questionable. When Cardinal Spellman exhorted American soldiers to hope and fight for victory in Viet Nam, he was widely criticized by other churchmen, many of them Roman Catholics. William Sloane Coffin, chaplain of Yale University, has said: "It may well be that, morally speaking, the United States ship of state is today comparable to the Titanic just before it hit the iceberg."
There are in the U.S. remarkably few Machiavellians who believe that war is simply a matter of state, beyond questions of good or evil. At the other extreme, there are also relatively few all-out pacifists. Most critics concede that in certain conditions, war is morally justifiable—but assert that this is not the case in Viet Nam. Why one war is justified but not another is an immensely difficult question; the answer, tentative at best, requires logic, precision and a measure of emotional detachment. These qualities are largely missing in the Viet Nam debate. The tendency is to call anything there that is distasteful or tragic "immoral." Yet the concept of a just or an unjust use of force involves complex judgments of means and aims—an accounting of lives and deaths and intentions—that go to the very heart of civilization.
. . .Early Ground Rules
History was well along before it occurred to anybody that there were two ways of looking at war. War was war —bloody, awful, sometimes glorious—and the normal way in which a nation established itself in the days when Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and Persia were harrying each other for territory and tribute. Aggression invariably had the sanction of a deity. The Israelites' takeover of the Canaanites was commanded by Jehovah himself. And wars were usually as total as soldiers with limited technology could make them.
War to the death only began to go out of style when the belligerents recognized some kind of relationship, as in the case of the Greek city states, which tried to soften their deadly rivalry through diplomacy and mercy. But such temperateness was strictly limited to social equals; Aristotle, who is credited with inventing the term "a just war," could apply it to military action "against men, who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit." The Romans took over the idea of a just war as an instrument of efficient administration, and Cicero laid down some pragmatic ground rules. Only states could wage war, he insisted, and only soldiers could fight them—a useful device to preclude revolution. Before one state could attack another, hostilities had to be formally declared, leaving time for reply.
Biblical teaching brought a new note of individual responsibility to war; the One God became the witness to every killing, the unerring judge of every motive. The basic Old Testament rules of warfare were laid down in Deuteronomy. Enemies within Israel were to be wiped out, and their cities razed, with the exception of the fruit trees. Cities outside Israel's borders were permitted to become tributaries. If they refused, the Bible permitted the killing only of the men —the women and children had to be taken as slaves. The Jews were also prohibited from fighting on the Sabbath.
The early Christians extended the Sabbath ban against fighting to every day of the week. A literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount obviously necessitated a pacifist position. Writing against the Christians some time between 170 and 180, the Roman philosopher Celsus made the point that "if all men were to do the same as you, there would be nothing to prevent the king from being left in utter solitude and desertion, and the forces of empire would fall into the hands of the wildest and most lawless barbarians."
But Christians ceased to be pacifist when the Emperor Constantine turned Christianity from a fringe sect into the Establishment. It now behooved the church to defend the Christian empire, and St. Augustine, faced with the waves of barbarian invasions, built upon the codes of Aristotle, Plato and Cicero the Christian concept of the just war. First, he said, the motive must be just: "Those wars may be defined as just which avenge injuries" or repel aggression. A just war must be fought with Christian love for the enemy—the Sermon on the Mount was supposed to be followed as "an inward disposition." No one, wrote the saint, "is fit to inflict punishment save the one who has first overcome hate in his heart. The love of enemies admits of no dispensation, but love does not exclude wars of mercy waged by the good."
Old & New CrusadesBut Christians ceased to be pacifist when the Emperor Constantine turned Christianity from a fringe sect into the Establishment. It now behooved the church to defend the Christian empire, and St. Augustine, faced with the waves of barbarian invasions, built upon the codes of Aristotle, Plato and Cicero the Christian concept of the just war. First, he said, the motive must be just: "Those wars may be defined as just which avenge injuries" or repel aggression. A just war must be fought with Christian love for the enemy—the Sermon on the Mount was supposed to be followed as "an inward disposition." No one, wrote the saint, "is fit to inflict punishment save the one who has first overcome hate in his heart. The love of enemies admits of no dispensation, but love does not exclude wars of mercy waged by the good."
St. Thomas Aquinas and others expanded Augustine's standards, and the list has been elaborated ever since. Modern criteria of a just war include 1) discrimination between killing soldiers and civilians; 2) reasonable possibility of victory; 3) "proportionality" between the amount of harm done by the war and the benefits hoped for.
Augustine's guidelines were hardly ever fully observed, but the concept of the just war persisted as a potent influence on European thought. The taking of a fellow Christian's life, even in legitimate warfare, was not viewed lightly in medieval times. In 1076, a council at Winchester decreed that any soldier in the Norman Conquest a decade earlier who had killed a man should do penance for a year; all archers were to do penance three times a day for 40 days. Eventually, the church achieved a remarkable palliation of mankind's bellicosity in the Peace of God, which limited the legitimate targets and areas of warfare, and the Truce of God, which prohibited fighting on Fridays, Sundays, and long periods around Christmas and Easter.
But such forbearance was for Christians only. The Crusades to liberate Jerusalem from the infidels amounted to a war of aggression launched by the church, with license for every kind of excess in the name of Christ. That the same body that could impose the Peace and Truce of God should be capable of rejoicing in a cargo of Saracen noses and thumbs or of filling the Temple of Solomon with blood has been the dark paradox of religious faith in every time and place. Just and holy wars are incompatible. The just war is predicated on awareness of human intemperateness, inadequacy and guilt; the holy war drowns all that in the joyous, irresponsible assumption of being an instrument of God's will. In this respect, Protestantism was no different from the Church of Rome. Luther and Calvin reworked Augustine's just-war doctrines, but the religious wars following the Reformation and periodic outbursts of heresy-hunting discarded the Sermon on the Mount for the text from Jeremiah: "Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood."
In the 19th century, when humanism rather than Scripture undergirded much of man's morality, it seemed as though holy wars had become a thing of the past. But the new religion of nationalism was to demand its own crusades. Clergy blessed the guns on both sides as World War I broke out and quickly degenerated into frothing fanaticism. "Kill Germans!" cried the Bishop of London. "To kill them not for the sake of killing, but to save the world, to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old ... I look upon it as a war for purity." In the U.S. writes Yale Historian Roland H. Bainton, "Jesus was dressed in khaki and portrayed sighting down a gun barrel."
The reaction to the passion and the bloodletting of World War I was a wave of idealistic pacifism. When World War II came 21 years later, the Allies went into it reluctantly, grimly and without elation, faced with an evil as obvious and inarguable as evil can ever be. Even scrupulous moralists agree that World War II was the closest thing to a just war in modern times. And yet, in retrospect, the means were horrifying. The saturation bombings of Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin were designed primarily to kill and demoralize civilians. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified as taking fewer Japanese and American lives than would have been lost in an invasion. But the fact remains that the bombing of Germany and Japan obliterated the discrimination of a just war between soldier and civilian. This led many Christian thinkers to decide that the concept of the just war was simply no longer applicable in modern times because a nuclear exchange would kill so much of the world's population that whatever good might be aimed for—freedom, for example—would itself be wiped out and rendered meaningless through nearly universal destruction.
The Chief Arguments
There is some limited dissent even from this almost univer sally held view. According to Lateran University's Monsignor Ferdinando Lambrushchini, the destruction of military objectives with nuclear weapons might be morally more justifiable than the bombing of cities with TNT. However, the moral condemnation of nuclear war is relatively obvious and easy. What is often overlooked is the fact that the very horror of using nuclear weapons may have inaugurated a new era in which limited, conventional wars are likelier than before. It is precisely in such limited conflicts that the old just-war principles seem pertinent again. Some churchmen deny this. Says the Rev. Paul Oestreicher of the British Council of Churches: "If the technical criteria of the just war are taken at face value, this is tantamount to pacifism, because no modern war conceivably measures up to them." Nevertheless, most of the moral objections advanced against the Viet Nam war are generally put in terms of the just-war principles, and they move quickly from moral abstraction to practical questions. Among the chief arguments: > Aggression or Civil War.
A government's right to make war in self-defense was reaffirmed by the Vatican Council in a statement that otherwise direly warned against the evil of total war. Some Viet Nam critics believe that the Korean War involved a legitimate case of self-defense because the Communist attack occurred clearly across an established border line, and was carried out by an organized army; besides, South Korea's defense was a U.N. action. In contrast, they consider the Viet Nam conflict a civil war. This overlooks the fact that there is such a thing as indirect aggression, and every realistic observer knows that outside Communist help for the Viet Cong is a decisive factor.
A government's right to make war in self-defense was reaffirmed by the Vatican Council in a statement that otherwise direly warned against the evil of total war. Some Viet Nam critics believe that the Korean War involved a legitimate case of self-defense because the Communist attack occurred clearly across an established border line, and was carried out by an organized army; besides, South Korea's defense was a U.N. action. In contrast, they consider the Viet Nam conflict a civil war. This overlooks the fact that there is such a thing as indirect aggression, and every realistic observer knows that outside Communist help for the Viet Cong is a decisive factor.
> Civilian Casualties. Killing civilians for the purposes of terror and demoralization is morally indefensible, all theologians and moral philosophers agree, violating the just-war principle of discrimination. The conditions of warfare in which a factory can be as much of a military installation as an airfield has created inevitable new hazards for noncombatants. And Mao Tse-tung's dictum, "There is no profound difference between the farmer and the soldier," underlies the special problems created by guerrilla warfare. The U.S. is not deliberately trying to destroy and demoralize civilians; it is guerrilla tactics and terror that attempt this. Writes Dr. Paul Ramsey, professor of Christian ethics at Princeton: "If the guerrilla chooses to fight between, behind and over peasants, women and children, is it he or the counterguerrilla who has enlarged the legitimate target and enlarged it so as to bring unavoidable death and destruction upon a large number of innocent people?"
> — The Possibility of Victory. Obviously, neither side in Viet Nam can win, some critics argue, and thus to continue a painful war of attrition, which is gradually destroying the whole country, is indefensible. It violates the just-war principle that victory must be a reasonable possibility. Yet victory could mean various things, including an undramatic fading-away of the Viet Cong or an internationally enforced compromise. Thus defined, victory may still be called remote or even unlikely, but it is by no means impossible.
All these arguments eventually hinge on the question of proportion: whether the toll in death and pain is proportionate to the possible gains. The most vocal critics of U.S. policy answer no, but for various reasons. Scarcely anyone argues that a favorable outcome in Viet Nam is essential to American survival. On the other hand, few would agree with the position at the opposite extreme—taken by U Thant, among others—that Viet Nam is completely unimportant to U.S. interests. Chicago Professor Hans Morgenthau, a strong critic of U.S. participation in Viet Nam, defines that what is moral is what is dictated by "the national interest, rightly understood." The essence of the debate is about a right understanding of the national interest.
The liberal Roman Catholic magazine Commonweal echoes a widespread opinion when it admits that the outcome of the war will make a difference but maintains that it can not be "the decisive difference needed to justify a war that will last longer than any America has ever fought, employ more U.S. troops than in Korea, cost more than all the aid we have ever given to developing nations . . . kill and maim far more Vietnamese than a Communist regime would have liquidated .
. . The evil outweighs the good." The difficulty in this position is that it involves all kinds of intangible calculations, judgments and prophecies. Who can really balance the destruction of war against the slaughter of political enemies that would result from a Communist take over? Who can really count future casualties in Viet Nam and weigh them against the casualties of another war that might have to be fought later in Thailand? These are agonizing questions, on which decent men can reach different conclusions. Even, says Professor Ramsey, if the conflict in South Viet Nam itself were to destroy "more values than there is hope of gaining, one must not forget that there are more values and securities and freedoms" to be reckoned with beyond Viet Nam—in Asia and elsewhere in the world.
Path of Love. . The evil outweighs the good." The difficulty in this position is that it involves all kinds of intangible calculations, judgments and prophecies. Who can really balance the destruction of war against the slaughter of political enemies that would result from a Communist take over? Who can really count future casualties in Viet Nam and weigh them against the casualties of another war that might have to be fought later in Thailand? These are agonizing questions, on which decent men can reach different conclusions. Even, says Professor Ramsey, if the conflict in South Viet Nam itself were to destroy "more values than there is hope of gaining, one must not forget that there are more values and securities and freedoms" to be reckoned with beyond Viet Nam—in Asia and elsewhere in the world.
This is acknowledged in principle by many of the critics, who concede that one cannot rule out the need for violence in the fight for justice and who can even visualize hypothetical future wars or revolutions (for example in Latin America) against unjust or tyrannical regimes; yet they feel that this does not apply to Viet Nam. The evil represented by Communism simply is not as clear or overwhelming in the minds of most people today as was the evil of Nazism. Britain's Oestreicher allows that "tyranny is not peace" and believes that the use of violence against tyranny may be moral (for instance, the Hungarian uprising), but at the same time condemns the Vietnamese war as unjust. The Archbishop of Canterbury defends the U.S. right to be in Viet Nam because it is there "with the right motive, withstanding Communist aggression," but refuses to concede that any modern war can be just.
Such self-contradictory statements reflect the tortured attempts to reconcile morality with the hard facts of history. It is a task for which modern Western man, and particularly the American, is ill prepared. The U.S., as the most powerful nation in the world, has never systematically thought out the legitimate uses and the inevitable limitations of power. The answer cannot lie either in mere swagger or in mere compassion. The age-old problem of reconciling love and justice is cogently analyzed by German Catholic Theologian Karl Rahner, who feels that "it is impossible to make our existence a paroxysm of nonviolence." The Christian "should always first opt for the path of love; yet as long as this world exists, a rational, hard, even violent striving for justice may well be the secular personification of love." Love, or even justice, may only be dimly discernible in the brutal landscape of Viet Nam—but that does not change the principle.
Edit from : http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,843310-6,00.html
