The Last Crusade
In an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times, Jimmy Carter (yes, that Jimmy Carter) appears to be channeling St. Thomas Aquinas; inaccurately and entirely without acknowledgement.
It’s a curious little piece, titled “Just War -- or a Just War?”
In it, Carter states that “As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war.”
He sets out his criteria for determining whether a war can be considered “just” – five maxims by which to evaluate Bush’s will for war.
Perhaps this is intended as a kind of homage, or something.
Encountering a prominent Christian espousing various axioms to determine whether a war can be considered just -- it’s almost impossible not to think of Aquinas’ and his ideas about the justum bellum (himself expanding on ideas first noted 500 years earlier by St. Augustine).
I guess I’m still just about Catholic enough for this coincidence of concepts to resonate and allow me to recall a little of what I learned from the few undergraduate philosophy classes I actually managed to attend. But it’s strange that Carter makes no reference to either extremely well known source.
Of course, it’s not a direct lift from Aquinas. Carter has updated, tweaked and added to the source, mixing in some later additions from Hugo Grotius and other commentators along the way to end up with his own essay on the principles of a just war.
For the record, I agree with Carter’s conclusions in this piece – Bush’s proposed war against Iraq cannot currently be qualified by these criteria as a just war.
All the same, it might be worth running the assessment again, using Aquinas’ original criteria from the Summa Theologicae.
Aquinas set down three conditions for a war to be considered just:
1. Auctoritas (Authority). War can only be declared by rightful authority – by the legitimate ruler of a state.
The reason Aquinas gives for this is that only sovereign rulers have no higher authority to arbitrate their international disputes. He made the clear distinction with people below the rank of sovereign, for whom disputes can always be settled in the courts of law.
So there are two problems here, as I see it. In order to constitute a legitimate authority, Bush would first of all have to be the elected leader of a sovereign government. In the headlong rush to war, the small fact that he was never actually elected by a majority of the popular vote continues to be swept aside.
Having failed to achieve the majority vote of the people of America, it is a stretch to characterize Bush as a “legitimate ruler”.
In addition, Aquinas’s thinking is clearly a product of its time. Sovereign rulers in the 13th Century were the absolute authority in disputes involving other nations. There was no United Nations to step in as arbitrator and no such thing as an actual international court, let alone an international court of opinion.
If Aquinas were writing for the 21st Century, I’m sure his jus ad bellum would be informed and defined by the concept of an international consensual authority.
The appropriate legitimate authority to cite here must be the United Nations, and the UN has emphatically not agreed to this war. So I think the answer to this specific criterion is an unconditional “no”.
2. Causa (Cause). The principle here is that a nation may declare war only if its enemy has given due cause; has done some tangible harm to either the nation itself or its allies.
Aquinas isn’t entirely clear about whether internal harm (i.e. if a nation has done injury to its own people) can be considered just cause to go to war.
Either way, despite Saddam Hussein’s undoubted track record of criminal and violent conduct, it is not clear what tangible harm the U.S. claims to have suffered at the hands of Iraq.
If the “credible threat” Iraq presents to World peace is enough of a justification in Bush’s view, then what’s the deal with North Korea – a nation that continues to flaunt its outlawed nuclear weapons program and shoot missiles into the sea just for kicks?
Indeed, Bush is not even interested in trying to support this criterion – he is entirely forthright about his wish for a pre-emptive war; striking first before Saddam has the chance to do something Americans wouldn’t like.
There is no cause here.
3. Intentio (Right intentions). A war cannot be considered just if motivated primarily by self-interest.
One word on this: oil.
Aquinas argues that the intention of a just war must be the achievement of peace and the settlement of the just cause. The spirit of this condition is to rule out such motives as revenge, the desire for material or territorial gain, or a wish to finish Daddy’s work.
So whichever way you choose to slice it – citing medieval philosophers or contemporary nobel laureates – there is no way to justify this war.
Further: in an open letter to several European papers, a group of academics and international law professors have already argued that the anticipated war would in fact be illegal, there being “no justification under international law for the use of military force against Iraq”.
They go on to point out that: “A decision to undertake military action in Iraq without proper security council authorisation will seriously undermine the international rule of law. Of course, even with that authorisation, serious questions would remain. A lawful war is not necessarily a just, prudent or humanitarian war.”
I’m not even going to try digging into the notion of “humanitarian war”. Instead, here’s another little comparison worth exploring between Bush’s warmongering and the backdrop to Aquinas’ thinking...
At the time Aquinas was writing his essay De Bello, the flower of Europe’s youth were limping back home at the tail end of the devastating Sixth Crusade – the last major Christian incursion in a 250 year history of holy war against the eastern infidel. Aquinas’ views on war were no doubt influenced by this latest failure in the centuries long Christian jihad.
The parallels between the rhetoric of the Crusaders and Bush’s own pulpit-thumping are startling. (Try reading Pope Innocent III’s Summons, for example, with a Texan drawl...you’ll see what I mean: “Aspiring with ardent desire to liberate the Holy Land from the hands of the ungodly, by the counsel of prudent men...”)
Someone should perhaps point out to Mr. Bush that, even after 250 years of appalling, violent conflict: the Crusades failed.
In an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times, Jimmy Carter (yes, that Jimmy Carter) appears to be channeling St. Thomas Aquinas; inaccurately and entirely without acknowledgement.
It’s a curious little piece, titled “Just War -- or a Just War?”
In it, Carter states that “As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war.”
He sets out his criteria for determining whether a war can be considered “just” – five maxims by which to evaluate Bush’s will for war.
Perhaps this is intended as a kind of homage, or something.
Encountering a prominent Christian espousing various axioms to determine whether a war can be considered just -- it’s almost impossible not to think of Aquinas’ and his ideas about the justum bellum (himself expanding on ideas first noted 500 years earlier by St. Augustine).
I guess I’m still just about Catholic enough for this coincidence of concepts to resonate and allow me to recall a little of what I learned from the few undergraduate philosophy classes I actually managed to attend. But it’s strange that Carter makes no reference to either extremely well known source.
Of course, it’s not a direct lift from Aquinas. Carter has updated, tweaked and added to the source, mixing in some later additions from Hugo Grotius and other commentators along the way to end up with his own essay on the principles of a just war.
For the record, I agree with Carter’s conclusions in this piece – Bush’s proposed war against Iraq cannot currently be qualified by these criteria as a just war.
All the same, it might be worth running the assessment again, using Aquinas’ original criteria from the Summa Theologicae.
Aquinas set down three conditions for a war to be considered just:
1. Auctoritas (Authority). War can only be declared by rightful authority – by the legitimate ruler of a state.
The reason Aquinas gives for this is that only sovereign rulers have no higher authority to arbitrate their international disputes. He made the clear distinction with people below the rank of sovereign, for whom disputes can always be settled in the courts of law.
So there are two problems here, as I see it. In order to constitute a legitimate authority, Bush would first of all have to be the elected leader of a sovereign government. In the headlong rush to war, the small fact that he was never actually elected by a majority of the popular vote continues to be swept aside.
Having failed to achieve the majority vote of the people of America, it is a stretch to characterize Bush as a “legitimate ruler”.
In addition, Aquinas’s thinking is clearly a product of its time. Sovereign rulers in the 13th Century were the absolute authority in disputes involving other nations. There was no United Nations to step in as arbitrator and no such thing as an actual international court, let alone an international court of opinion.
If Aquinas were writing for the 21st Century, I’m sure his jus ad bellum would be informed and defined by the concept of an international consensual authority.
The appropriate legitimate authority to cite here must be the United Nations, and the UN has emphatically not agreed to this war. So I think the answer to this specific criterion is an unconditional “no”.
2. Causa (Cause). The principle here is that a nation may declare war only if its enemy has given due cause; has done some tangible harm to either the nation itself or its allies.
Aquinas isn’t entirely clear about whether internal harm (i.e. if a nation has done injury to its own people) can be considered just cause to go to war.
Either way, despite Saddam Hussein’s undoubted track record of criminal and violent conduct, it is not clear what tangible harm the U.S. claims to have suffered at the hands of Iraq.
If the “credible threat” Iraq presents to World peace is enough of a justification in Bush’s view, then what’s the deal with North Korea – a nation that continues to flaunt its outlawed nuclear weapons program and shoot missiles into the sea just for kicks?
Indeed, Bush is not even interested in trying to support this criterion – he is entirely forthright about his wish for a pre-emptive war; striking first before Saddam has the chance to do something Americans wouldn’t like.
There is no cause here.
3. Intentio (Right intentions). A war cannot be considered just if motivated primarily by self-interest.
One word on this: oil.
Aquinas argues that the intention of a just war must be the achievement of peace and the settlement of the just cause. The spirit of this condition is to rule out such motives as revenge, the desire for material or territorial gain, or a wish to finish Daddy’s work.
So whichever way you choose to slice it – citing medieval philosophers or contemporary nobel laureates – there is no way to justify this war.
Further: in an open letter to several European papers, a group of academics and international law professors have already argued that the anticipated war would in fact be illegal, there being “no justification under international law for the use of military force against Iraq”.
They go on to point out that: “A decision to undertake military action in Iraq without proper security council authorisation will seriously undermine the international rule of law. Of course, even with that authorisation, serious questions would remain. A lawful war is not necessarily a just, prudent or humanitarian war.”
I’m not even going to try digging into the notion of “humanitarian war”. Instead, here’s another little comparison worth exploring between Bush’s warmongering and the backdrop to Aquinas’ thinking...
At the time Aquinas was writing his essay De Bello, the flower of Europe’s youth were limping back home at the tail end of the devastating Sixth Crusade – the last major Christian incursion in a 250 year history of holy war against the eastern infidel. Aquinas’ views on war were no doubt influenced by this latest failure in the centuries long Christian jihad.
The parallels between the rhetoric of the Crusaders and Bush’s own pulpit-thumping are startling. (Try reading Pope Innocent III’s Summons, for example, with a Texan drawl...you’ll see what I mean: “Aspiring with ardent desire to liberate the Holy Land from the hands of the ungodly, by the counsel of prudent men...”)
Someone should perhaps point out to Mr. Bush that, even after 250 years of appalling, violent conflict: the Crusades failed.
