Waging War In Order To Secure Peace

Last month, Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, arrived in Iraq to serve as a human shield to protect the Iraqi people. But he told United Press International the trip “shocked me back to reality.” Some of the Iraqis he interviewed “told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn’t start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam’s bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists.”

Joseph’s brief experience in Iraq taught him a lesson that many of those who oppose war in Iraq seem to have forgotten, namely, that the consequences of military action are often better than the circumstances that arise in the absence of armed conflict. The horrors of the twentieth century should have brought this to the forefront of our historical consciousness, but many have been unwilling to recognize it. We have been slow to see that while war certainly is, in the words of Pope John Paul II, “always a defeat for humanity,” the use of force is nevertheless sometimes necessary to encourage true and lasting peace.

The real question at hand is this: what kind of peace do we want? Do we want the kind of “peace” that we had at the end of World War I, when European appeasement led to the rise of totalitarian movements and the bloodbath of World War II? How about the kind of “peace” that was established after WWII, when we left Stalin in power and saw him kill millions of dissenters? Should we strive for the kind of “peace” that our Cold War containment policies brought about, with 20 million dying under Mao Zedong in China, millions more dying in Korea and Vietnam and another two million dying when Vietnam attacked Cambodia in 1979? Or the “peace” of military inaction in the 1990s that saw hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq, Iran, Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda, and ultimately gave us the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks?

There is a grave difference between true peace and the false quietude of inaction. The latter will give us a world without international armed conflict in which genocidal maniacs and religious fanatics are allowed to slaughter their enemies, oppress their citizens and hold nations at hostage. But true peace can be secured only when military force is judiciously employed to prevent such episodes. To identify an absence of international military conflict with “peace” is to fail to see what St. Augustine saw, that true peace is found only in “the tranquility of order” – not in simply refusing to take forceful action.

In a recent Washington Post column, Charles Krauthammer aptly described the Clinton presidency as an eight-year “holiday from history.” Clinton refused to acknowledge the extent of the threat that international terrorism posed: in response to each of the three major terrorist attacks that occurred during his presidency (the Feb. 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the Aug. 7, 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the Oct. 12, 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole), and despite having solid evidence that Osama bin Laden was involved in each instance, he focused his attention almost solely on domestic economic and social concerns, instead of the growing threat of terrorism.

Across the Atlantic, the hapless Europeans have spent the last half-century running scared from the horrors of the World Wars by dissolving their militaries and creating burdensome welfare states that are crushing their economies. A quick glance at the EU shows that the continent plans to continue in this direction: the EU has commissioners for the environment, fisheries, social affairs and culture, but no Military Commission at all.

Meanwhile, the UN passed no fewer than 17 resolutions between 1991 and 2003 addressing Hussein’s continual noncompliance with international laws and treaties – yet they still refused to sanction military action last month despite Hussein’s history of international and domestic cruelty, and his clear material breach of those resolutions.

Thankfully, Bush has shown great resolve and has motivated the U.S. and much of the world to join in his war against terrorism, but it took the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to push his agenda into action. And yet, just nineteen months later, many seem to have forgotten the lessons of that fateful day and of the past century of horror – that waging war is sometimes the only way to establish a lasting peace, while false pacifism only leads to greater suffering. These are perhaps the foremost lessons we can learn from the twentieth century.

John Schwenkler is a senior philosophy major.