Catholic Just War

Vente Privee

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Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D
December 23, 2003

“You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem,” goes a popular military axiom. That’s especially true in Iraq, where for years the United Nations refused to help solve problems. Because of that, it ended up making the situation there much worse.

For example, when Saddam Hussein ignored U.N. disarmament resolutions in the late 1990s, the world body refused to enforce its own orders. First it opened talks with the dictator. When those predictably failed, the U.N. ended up pulling its weapons inspectors out entirely. Saddam would still be in power today, tyrannizing his own people and posing a threat to the rest of the world, if the United States hadn’t assembled a coalition to depose him.

The fall of Saddam gave the U.N. another chance to join the right side of history. But even in today’s post-Saddam era, it’s choosing to remain irrelevant in Iraq—which means it remains a big part of the problem there.

Iraq’s acting foreign minister recently traveled to U.N. headquarters to make this very point. Hoshyar Zubari had harsh words for the Security Council. “The U.N. as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years,” he said. “The U.N. must not fail the Iraqi people again.”

Zubari wants the U.N. to pitch in by providing more humanitarian aid, and by advancing the electoral and political process. But the best thing would be to get its members—especially those on the vaunted Security Council—to forgive Iraq’s Saddam-era debt.

During his decades in power, Saddam ran up more than $120 billion in debt to foreign governments and private lenders. Russia holds about $4 billion of that, while France holds $2 billion. In an interesting coincidence, both nations opposed the coalition’s efforts to oust Saddam last spring.

And keep in mind where more than half the money Saddam borrowed went. Not toward building a better country—that’s what Iraqis are struggling to do today. No, it was invested in Saddam’s military and his gilded palaces.

“The past is the past,” intoned France’s ambassador after Zubari asked for U.N. support. “We should not look at the past but look forward.” But how can Iraq possibly build a future with billions of dollars in debt hanging over it? If its new democratic government inherits a crushing debt, it’s likely to fail. And in Iraq, the failure of democracy could mean a return to dictatorial rule, and a government friendly to terrorists.

“Old Europe” has done virtually nothing to help Iraq, politically or financially. But it still expects to profit from the rebuilding effort. Its representatives howled when the Pentagon announced that only countries which took part in the coalition to oust Saddam could win contracts under an American-financed $18 billion Iraq rebuilding effort.

“This is a gratuitous and extremely unhelpful decision,” huffed European Union commissioner Chris Patten. What we need, he said, is “for the international community to work together for stability and reconstruction in Iraq.”

That is indeed what we need. And the logical place for that cooperation to start would be at the U.N. As Zubari told the Security Council, today Iraq enjoys “the most representative and democratic governing body in the Middle East.” That government, of course, was put in place by the U.S.-led coalition, over the objections of the U.N.

The United Nations again faces a choice: It can become involved in the critical process of rebuilding Iraq, or it can remain on the sidelines. If it does, it will be irrelevant, again. By choice.

Taken From: http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed122303a.cfm

Khaddafi gave in because he did not want to end up in a hole.
By Andrew Apostolou

Libya’s announcement that it will close down its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs is an important vindication of American and British foreign policy. After nine months of talks, Colonel Khaddafi’s regime has acknowledged the existence of weapons that were long denied. According to initial reports, Libya had the ability to manufacture chemical weapons, had attempted to acquire the ability to produce both nuclear and biological weapons and had ballistic-missile programs. The American-intelligence assessment that Libya was up to no good has been proved correct. Israeli intelligence, which had long been dismissed for pointing to Khaddafi’s nuclear ambitions, has chalked up a much-needed success.

The initial reaction of many pundits to the Libya announcement has been and will be both predictable and mistaken. There will be some breast-beating from hawks, who will hint that there has been appeasement of a repressive dictator with a notable record of terrorism. While the hawks are right to ask questions and subject the deal to rigorous scrutiny, it is implausible that either George Bush or Tony Blair would make such dramatic announcements without making a genuine breakthrough. In one important sense, the hawks have emerged smelling of roses. A key criticism of the hawks, that they and President Bush regard armed force as the only foreign-policy tool, that we are now in an era of permanent war, has been disproved, exposed as nonsense by Colonel Khaddafi.

An excessively critical attitude from the hawks will simply hand the argument to the “antiwar” commentators and the advocates of uncritical engagement for whom the fault always lies with the U.S. and her allies. These engagement advocates are already claiming that the negotiated deal with Libya shows that the war in Iraq was unnecessary, that polite conversation can secure disarmament. The myth that they are already spinning is that the Libyan statement foreswearing WMDs on December 19, 2003, resulted from a decade of alleged reforms and attempts to integrate Libya back into the international community. Rather than congratulate the Bush administration for a remarkable diplomatic coup, they are chiding it for waiting too long to press the flesh with Khaddafi.

Yet the evidence indicates that what brought Libya to the table was not multilateral engagement, but the brave and much criticized strategy of forcing terrorism sponsoring dictatorships to meet their obligations or meet their Maker. Indeed, the Libyans appear to have boosted rather than curbed their WMD ambitions after the U.N. suspended sanctions in 1999. The appeal of WMDs for Khaddafi and others was their potential value, not just as weapons with which to attack or deter, but also as bargaining chips. WMDs were hooks upon which to catch credulous foreigners looking for dialogue and oil contracts.

The announcement of Libyan disarmament could not have happened without the liberation of Iraq. That the deal was concluded just days after the capture of Saddam Hussein was a happy coincidence. What made all the difference, however, was that Bush and Blair enforced the U.N. resolutions on Iraq, ending the defiance of Saddam Hussein and the torment of the peoples of Iraq. Bush and Blair have turned the threat back onto the dictators, treating the WMD programs as the death warrants for these wicked regimes, not their tickets to survival. The liberation of Iraq communicated the simple point that international obligations are to be observed; they are not an initial negotiating position with which one quibbles, negotiates over, and ultimately evades. While many in the think-tank lunch circuit in Washington, D.C. may find it hard to grasp, this message has been received loud and clear in Tripoli.

As importantly, the agreement to disarm Libya was achieved by a cooperative Anglo-American approach and without the involvement of such bodies and the United Nations (U.N.) or the European Union (EU). Multilateral bodies, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will now play a role in dismantling the Libyan nuclear program, but their utility in negotiating with such regimes is limited.

The fact that France, Germany, and Russia were not directly involved in the contacts with Libya was also a key element in their success. We can only imagine the diplomatic fiasco that would have resulted from the French, German, or Russian foreign ministers landing in Tripoli to invite themselves into the negotiations as intermediaries. These supposed friends of the U.S. would have sent muddled signals to Khaddafi. Instead of facing a firm, but fair, Anglo-American position, the Libyan dictator would have ended up deluding himself — something that he does not find difficult — into believing that was an alternative to full compliance with his international obligations. Perhaps now is the time for that other victim of an overly active imagination, Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, to confine himself to literature.

In coming months, the U.S. and Britain will have to ensure that there is no backsliding on Libya disarmament and should demand political reform in Khaddafi’s highly repressive state. President Bush spoke on December 19, 2003 of “internal reform” and a Libya that could become “more free.” The Libyan people should not be asked to pay the price for Khaddafi’s decision to come clean on WMDs by being condemned to his regime, nor should they suffer his buffoonish sons as their future overlords. Rapprochement should not just mean visits to the State Department, but a concern for the welfare of the much-ignored Libyan people.

Within one week, Saddam Hussein has been captured despite his vow to fight to the death, Iran has grudgingly signed up for additional nuclear inspections that it once called a violation of its national sovereignty, and Libya has agreed to surrender WMDs that it officially never had. After months of mistakes and misguided panic over postwar Iraq, the new British-American grand alliance confronting the terrorism supporting dictators has shown that it is both working and winning.

— Andrew Apostolou is director of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute created after 9/11 and focusing on terrorism.

Taken From: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/apostolou200312220001.asp

They thought that we would rue it. They doubted we’d do it. But now they must admit it, that succeed we did.
PEGGY NOONAN,Sunday, December 14, 2003 12:20 p.m. EST

“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.”–Paul Bremer

First, let’s just be happy. Let’s feel a burst of joy.

Let’s not be boring people who Consider the Implications. Let’s not talk about the domestic political impact. For just a day let’s feel the pleasure history just handed us.

All morning the words of an old song of the old America have been running through my head. From “My Fair Lady,” from the age when Americans whistled Broadway show tunes on the street. Rex Harrison (a bow today to our valiant allies, the English) jauntily crows over Eliza Doolittle’s first triumph.

“Pickering Tonight, old man, you did it!
You did it! You did it! You said that you would do it;
And indeed you did. I thought that you would rue it;
I doubted you’d do it. But now I must admit it
That succeed you did. You should get a medal
Or be even made a knight.”

As far as I’m concerned he could be singing this to American troops, and the American administration, and America’s allies, and the Iraqis who suffered through so much to get to this moment.
This is a great day in modern history. A terrible man whose existence had been for decades actively harmful of humanity was forcibly removed from power, run to ground, and has been captured living in a hole. As I write, the television is showing videotape of his hair being checked for lice and his mouth being inspected with a pencil light for signs of disease. The white plastic pinpoint light illuminates his throat and gums. It looks like the mouth of hell. He has been utterly defeated and quelled. He can’t kill anybody now. He cannot gas women and children with chemicals that kill them; he cannot personally torture dissidents, or imprison them. He cannot tell his soldiers to throw opponents off the tops of buildings. He can’t impose his sickness and sadism on the world. The children of Baghdad dance in the streets. A nightmare is over.

America did this. American troops did this. The American people, by supporting those troops and this effort, did it. And a particular group of soldiers led by a particular U.S. army officer did it. As Dana Priest of the Washington Post has just reported on NBC, he is a big, tall, bearlike guy who loves his job and whose attitude toward his mission was, apparently, a natural and constitutional optimism. We don’t yet know his name, but he’ll be famous by tomorrow morning.

What do we learn? Well, as Samuel Johnson said, “Man needs more to be reminded than instructed,” so what are we reminded of through the happy ending of this story?
That human agency works and is an active force in history. You don’t have to sit back and accept; you don’t have to continue to turn a blind eye; you don’t have to sit and do nothing, because all action involves choice and all choice invites repercussion. You can move forward. You can take action. You can go in and remove a threat to the world. You can make the world safer. You can help people. Just because they live in Iraq and we don’t bump into them every day doesn’t mean they don’t merit assistance and even sacrifice.

We are reminded, all of us, that patience is necessary, that nothing big can be accomplished without it. America and Iraq searched day and night for Saddam Hussein for eight months. And for some time they searched for a man half of them thought had already been obliterated in the early days of the war. But they didn’t know and they had to find him if he was alive. They had to find him even if he was surrounded by a thousand troops and explosives. So there was their patience, and there was the patience of Washington: political patience. If he’s there, we will find him. The administration’s foes had attempted to embarrass them for eight months. The administration simply said: If he’s there, we will find him; we won’t give up until we do. Good for them for not spinning it but simply having faith in the troops and being patient.

And we are reminded that when you do what is right, you can be rewarded. When you summon the guts to take a controversial stand, and accept the price of that stand, and the price comes in every day, you can win. And that victory can make things better.

Now Iraq’s Baathist movement is over; its chief is humiliated, revealed as a coward, caught and ridiculous. Now the people of Iraq will be able to testify in court about what he did, in front of his face. Now we all may find out a great deal more about what exactly Saddam did with the weapons of mass destruction we know he had in the past, for he used them on the Kurds and against Iran in the old war. Where did those weapons go? Where are they now? What about Saddam’s relations with al Qaeda? What papers will we find now, what evidence? And what will he say in an attempt to save his skin?
Next stop, Osama. May we find him in a hole. May we search his beard for lice and his gums for disease. May we see in the reflection of the light the mouth of hell, and may we close it for him tight.

All the journalists and politicians, they are always embarrassed to feel joy when something like this happens. They fear it will show a lack of understanding that history is a heavy and ponderous thing, a big tragedy machine, and all progress is illusory. Celebrating a military triumph–and this was among other things a military triumph–seems to them tantamount to Kiplingism, quaintly ignorant and unhelpfully nationalistic. That’s why everyone on TV today is furrowing his brow. They know joy is the wrong thing to be feeling. It’s unsophisticated.
But normal people don’t have to be sophisticated. They can be normal. And happy. And say what normal Americans say when something great in history happens. “Thanks, God. Thanks a lot.”

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of “A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag” (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

TAKEN FROM: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/

Otherwise, Iraq Faces Chaos, He Warns

BAGHDAD, Iraq, DEC. 9, 2003 (Zenit.org).- An eventual withdrawal from Iraq of Americans or allies “would be a great lack of responsibility,” as “it would mean going from anarchy to chaos,” warns Latin-rite Archbishop Jean Benjamin Sleiman of Baghdad.

“To abandon Iraq to itself would imply to prepare a tragic future for us all,” the archbishop said to Missionary Service News Agency on Friday. “It would be a terrible legacy for the West which would be added to the Middle East focus, making everything extremely difficult.”

Postwar Iraq is unstable, he observed. In “the days following the fall of Baghdad, the Iraqi army was dismantled, removing from the country a structure of security without replacing by something able to carry out the same task.”

“So, 400,000 armed men, who could control in some way, after purifying the top leaders and prosecuting the guilty, are at present scattered in society without a source of income,” Archbishop Sleiman said. “Who is to say if some are not participating in the guerrilla movement?”

According to the archbishop of Baghdad, “To the currents of militant fundamentalists, both among the Sunnis as well as she Shiites, have probably been added very professional forces from abroad, as the growing complexity and organization of the attacks demonstrates.”

“Perhaps the al-Qaida network has found the way of arriving in the country, and perhaps nations exist that will profit from drowning the Americans in the burning sand of Iraq,” he noted.

Archbishop Sleiman also lamented the increase in kidnappings to demand ransoms. “We suspect that the kidnappers are former secret service agents who for years have watched people and know well which families to pressure and for how much,” he said.

However, a new element is disturbing the already precarious coexistence between foreigners and Iraqis: “Over the past months American religious organizations have arrived in Iraq — which I would not like to classify as ’sects’ — who announce openly among the population that they are in Iraq to convert the Muslims.”

“These groups constitute a genuine provocations for Muslims and we are not surprised if some Muslims react” aggressively, the archbishop said.

Given the existing situation, the archbishop made an appeal: “If the United Nations handles Iraq’s problems with the consensus of the international community, including the Arab countries, then there will be a force recognized by all and it will not be impossible to obtain the solidarity of the majority of the Iraqi population.”

The United Nations “on its own would be ineffective; the peace contingents must stay,” he concluded.

TAKEN FROM: http://www.zenit.org

An Email from a Captain in Iraq

We knew there was a dinner planned with Ambassador Bremer and LTG Sanchez. There were 600 seats available and all the units in the division were tasked with filling a few tables. Naturally, the 501st MI battalion got our table. Soldiers were grumbling about having to sit through another dog-and-pony show, so we had to pick soldiers to attend. I chose not to go.

But, about 1500 the G2, LTC Devan, came up to me and with a smile, asked me to come to dinner with him, to meet him in his office at 1600 and bring a camera. I didn’t really care about getting a picture with Sanchez or Bremer, but when the division’s senior intelligence officer asks you to go, you go. We were seated in the chow hall, fully decorated for Thanksgiving when aaaaallllll kinds of secret service guys showed up.

That was my first clue, because Bremer’s been here before and his personal security detachment is not that big. Then BG Dempsey got up to speak, and he welcomed ambassador Bremer and LTG Sanchez. Bremer thanked us all and pulled out a piece of paper as if to give a speech. He mentioned that the President had given him this thanksgiving speech to give to the troops. He then paused and said that the senior man present should be the one to give it. He then looked at Sanchez, who just smiled.

Bremer then said that we should probably get someone more senior to read the speech. Then, from behind the camouflage netting, the President of the United States came around. The mess hall actually erupted with hollering. Troops bounded to their feet with shocked smiles and just began cheering with all their hearts. The building actually shook. It was just unreal. I was absolutely stunned. Not only for the obvious, but also because I was only two tables away from the podium. There he stood, less than thirty feet away from me! The cheering went on and on and on.

Soldiers were hollering, cheering, and a lot of them were crying. There was not a dry eye at my table. When he stepped up to the cheering, I could clearly see tears running down his cheeks. It was the most surreal moment I’ve had in years. Not since my wedding and Aaron being born. Here was this man, our President, came all the way around the world, spending 17 hours on an airplane and landing in the most dangerous airport in the world, where a plane was shot out of the sky not six days before.

Just to spend two hours with his troops. Only to get on a plane and spend another 17 hours flying back. It was a great moment, and I will never forget it. He delivered his speech, which we all loved, when he looked right at me and held his eyes on me. Then he stepped down and was just mobbed by the soldiers. He slowly worked his way all the way around the chow hall and shook every last hand extended. Every soldier who wanted a photo with the President got one. I made my way through the line, got dinner, then wolfed it down as he was still working the room.

You could tell he was really enjoying himself. It wasn’t just a photo opportunity. This man was actually enjoying himself! He worked his way over the course of about 90 minutes towards my side of the room. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to shake a few hands. I got a picture with Ambassador Bremer, Talabani (acting Iraqi president) and Achmed Chalabi (another member of the ruling council) and Condaleeza Rice, who was there with him.

I felt like I was drunk. He was getting closer to my table so I went back over to my seat. As he passed and posed for photos, he looked me in the eye and said, “How you doin’, captain.” I smiled and said “God bless you, sir.” To which he responded “I’m proud of what you do, captain.” Then moved on.