Debating Iraq with civility

I’ve watched and listened for anyone making a good case for any position on the Iraq war, and frankly, there’s more heat than light. It’s so muddled with complexity and emotion and politics, it’s hard to find reasoned debate.

But here’s a good one (may require NCR subscription), among scholars who are staying informed and wrestling with the changing information, but not with each other. It’s informative, civil, and reflects the level of discourse and goodwill we need, desperately, back in politics and the public square.

Here’s the premise, the National Catholic Register explains:

To gain a clearer picture of the moral and practical issues at play in the debate, the Register interviewed several prominent Catholic commentators. They were asked whether they supported Bush’s troop surge, about the arguments for and against a continued military presence, and whether they hold the same opinion as they had in 2003 about the decision to intervene in Iraq.

First, scholar and author George Weigel.

“The moral and political imperative in Iraq is success: meaning a self-governing and economically viable Iraq at peace with its neighbors and not harboring international terrorists,” Weigel said. “If increasing troop levels, coupled with a strategy change that actually results in stabilizing the security situation in Baghdad and elsewhere, can move us toward that goal, then that’s the right call from every point of view.”

Said Weigel, “What I know for sure is that failure in Iraq will be catastrophic, for the U.S., for Iraq, and for the war against jihadism. People who think that a U.S. withdrawal is the magic answer to Iraq are just not serious.”

Then, well-known Catholic writer and speaker Mark Shea.

Like the Vatican, Shea thinks that while the initial decision to enter Iraq was morally unjustified, a hasty U.S. withdrawal would also be a mistake because it likely would lead to anarchy and a bloody civil war…

“I don’t think as things stand that we can just pull out, but I think that what we’re doing is not going to help anything because it’s not an adequate application of force,” he said. “And the administration has given us every reason to suppose that they simply do not understand the internal politics of Iraq.”

Added Shea, “I don’t know if there are any good alternatives.”

That’s a point I think just about everyone seems to admit to right now, including many tv strategists and pundits, as well as our group of scholars here.

Russell Hittinger started from a personal premise.

As the son of a soldier who lost his life in Vietnam, Russell Hittinger has a special empathy for the suffering that has resulted from the conflict in Iraq.

“My father fought and died in Vietnam,” said Hittinger, who is the Warren Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa’s College of Law. “And I’ll tell you that I grieved as much as I did after he died as when all those Vietnamese people were abandoned.”

Hittinger said that protecting Iraqis from a similar abandonment to tyranny and violence is one of the moral arguments in favor of a continued American military presence.

Another moral argument is trying to prevent a wider conflagration throughout the region, which would result in even more suffering.

“These are two that many people have mentioned,” Hittinger said. “In principle, they sound like good considerations. How they apply to the actual facts of this case, I don’t know.”

He considers the opposite viewpoint, then admits to bottom line uncertainty.

Hittinger said that “like 90% of Americans,” he has no solid opinion on what the U.S. should do about Iraq.

He said that one difficulty in assessing the issue is that there hasn’t been much exploration in just war theory of the question of how and when to withdraw from a military conflict.

“It’s interesting that that should be so, because nine times out 10, people do have to extract themselves,” Hittinger said. “Wars don’t usually end very tidily.”

There’s a point I haven’t heard anyone else raise. But right now, it can’t be answered.

Then…

Faith and Reason Institute President Robert Royal said that the United States has a moral responsibility to maintain its military presence in Iraq in order to curb sectarian violence.

“Our withdrawal would lead to an absolute bloodbath,” he said, adding that “it might even create worse situations in other countries if people have the sense that the United States cannot be relied on to follow through when things get tough.”

And while some Catholic critics of the war argue that it is unwinnable and therefore violates the just war principle that there must be a reasonable chance of success, Royal said “it doesn’t seem to me that it is absolutely clear that there is no way to stabilize the situation.”

If anything is clear, it is that. Uncertainty over likely outcome.

“So the moral case at this point has to focus primarily on the situation in which we now find ourselves.”

As for Bush’s planned troop surge, Royal said that while he’s inclined to support it he’s not sure whether it will deliver the results the president is seeking.

“I know people, including my son-in-law who has done several tours in Iraq, and they seem to think it’s a good idea, but I’m still not sure in my own mind,” Royal said. “I think it’s still a little premature to say definitively.”

And here’s one of the most reasonable and brilliant minds that I’ve heard engage any debate.

Princeton University law professor Robert George, author of Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality, said that the question of whether to increase troop levels in Iraq is primarily a practical judgment, not a moral one.

“There is not a moral principle you have to apply to get to the right judgment here,” George said. The question is, ‘Is there a good likelihood the additional troops will make it possible to secure Iraq?’”

Added George, “It’s a practical, military judgment about whether sending more troops will work. If it won’t work, then obviously it’s pointless to do it, and worse than pointless, because you’ll get a lot of people killed in the process. If it will work, if the underlying justification for the war is sound, then it’s the right decision.”

The catch is that nobody can know whether it will work. So people resort to political or emotional arguments about being in this war in the first place.

George said that he supported the decision to invade Iraq and continues to believe intervention was morally justified.

Along with the belief at the time that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them, the atrocities the Iraqi dictator committed against his own people were ample justification for taking action, George said.

“Obviously the war has not been conducted as well as it should have been,” George acknowledged. “But people would have said the same thing about the Civil War in the United States. Lincoln changed generals time and time and time again because he was so dissatisfied in how poorly the war was being run by the Union militarily.”

And though Abraham Lincoln was not otherwise quoted in this Register article, here’s something to consider on this, his birthday.

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong.

God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party – and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. (The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, “Meditation on the Divine Will”)