John McCain angrily insisted on "right" and "wrong" answers to his questions of Chuck Hagel yesterday. As a theologian and a religious leader, I want to say that John McCain is "wrong."
I watched the hostile questions that Sen. McCain asked Hagel in the hearings on his nomination for Secretary of Defense. The angry attacks from McCain were about the Iraq War, for which McCain was one of America's leading advocates. Hagel had previously called the war in Iraq the biggest American foreign policy mistake since Vietnam. Obviously furious, McCain tried to force Hagel to say the last "surge" in Iraq, which McCain had made his cause, was right after all. Despite the aggressive and disrespectful questioning from his former "friend," Hagel wouldn't submit to McCain's demands and said these questions would be subject to history -- and to theological morality, to which John McCain has never submitted his views. In fact, his repeated desire to invade other people's countries is offensive moral hubris.
Let me state some clear convictions from many of us in the faith community. The war in Vietnam was morally wrong. The war in Iraq was morally wrong. And John McCain has been morally wrong on both of them. Christian judgments of war should always run a narrow spectrum -- from the peacemaking ethic of Jesus, which rejects war to the just war theology of Augustine and Aquinas. But even in the just war tradition, conflicts have to pass a number of moral tests and be the option of "last resort." The burden of proof is always on those who support war to justify the taking of life.
Both Vietnam and Iraq failed those tests and were unnecessary wars of choice. Those wars were unnecessary, the terrible deaths from those wars were unnecessary, the enormous casualties were unnecessary, the painful family losses were unnecessary and all the horrible costs were unnecessary.
And yesterday, we saw a politician who has based his entire political career on war furiously trying to force a potential Secretary of Defense to say that he has been right all along.
But McCain hasn't been right in his endless promotion of war as the primary solution to our national conflicts. He has been consistently wrong and America has paid a very high price because of the ideological zealots of war that McCain represents.
After yesterday, I wished that the coming vote on confirmation could be the other way around; that America could somehow vote John McCain out of office and off the American political stage. The cost of McCain's theology of war has been far too high.
The important discussions yesterday should have been about other critical issues, like how quickly and responsibly we can leave the endless war in Afghanistan, how we can address the real threats of terrorism in better ways than failed wars of occupation and what we should do about the real problem of Iran. They should have been a very serious strategic and moral examination of our growing reliance on drones as a primary instrument of our foreign policy.
Instead, we saw old men defending their old wars. That was both very sad and morally objectionable. In the future, I would suggest the Senate Armed Service Committee call some religious leaders to their hearings to raise the questions that they need to hear.
Jim Wallis is the author of Rediscovering Values: A Guide for Economic and Moral Recovery, and CEO of Sojourners. His forthcoming book, On God's Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn't Learned about Serving the Common Good, is set to release in April. Follow Jim on Twitter @JimWallis.
Follow Jim Wallis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jimwallis
Arianna Huffington: Neocon Nightmare: The Truth Behind the Attacks on Chuck Hagel
Vietnam, 1967
He should be a cautionary tale of the state of our Congress.
In Afganistan, Iraq, Jihadism lost, Civilization won.
In Vietnam, Communism won the battle, but lost the war. Civilization won.
In his theory of just war, St. Augustine (who never had to fight a war) opines that a war is just if it does more good than harm. But whether a war does more good than harm is always unknowable before it begins, and may be unknowable forever. How do we measure that?
If a war is immoral unless we know in advance it will do more good than harm, then we can never go to war, we must always commit preemptive surrender, to avoid the risk of fighting what may prove to be an "immoral" war, since we can never know in advance whether we are fightint a "moral" war.
But to surrender in all cases is to concede everything to the worst, the most ruthless, the most agressive, to the Hitlers and Stalins, the Ghenghis Khans and Attilas of history.
War is always evil, war kills, but the only calculus that can be made is that a war should be fought to prevent what appears to be a greater evil.
Kill the few to save the many.
The alternative is to sacrifice the many, to save the few.
Evil wins.
War kills people. All wars. Right or wrong. WWII killed more than 50 million people, more than any other war in history. Was WWII right, or wrong? There is an argument that tens of millions fewer people would have died if England, Russia, China, and the US, simply surrendered to Nazi Germany and Japan. The lives of 400,000 American soldiers and sailors would have been saved.
Would that have been right, or wrong?
What if the US had lost WWII, Germany had won. Would that have made it right, or wrong, for us?
Now to Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars have largely dismantled what once seemed the nearly unstoppable march of Jihadism, in America, Europe, and the Middle East. That's good, yes?
Vietnam dismantled what then seemed the nearly unstoppable march of Communism, which was as nasty as Nazism had been just twenty years before, imprisoning and killing scores of millions of innocent people. Contrary to popular mythology, the US won the Vietnam war, North Vietnam surrendered in the Paris Accords, then a year later Congress withdrew all support from Vietnam and the North seized the day, breached its terms of surrender, and America sat on its hands, abandoned its ally, its own day of infamy.
But the Communist momentum was lost.
Religious war: Fighting over who has the best imaginary friend.
Off topic but I can't help it.
Had Iraq not allowed UN weapons inspectors, that would have clearly constituted a cassus belli under the treaty we signed with Iraq after Gulf War I.
To the extent that we believed Iraq was subverting the weapons inspections, the war was a mistake but not a moral mistake. That would have also given us cassus belli.
Further re. cassus belli, the crap that Colin Powell presented at the UN was not taken seriously by anybody, and certainly wrecked Powell's reputation forever. It was just part of the show, a bunch of word soup making excuses for the invasion that was already in motion and was not going to be stopped.
Taking out a brutal dictator is not something that I'd call immoral. But the lying that made it possible certainly was.