Mennonite Weekly Review

While it probably offended the Nobel committee to have a peace prize winner lecture the audience on the necessity of war, as President Obama did on Dec. 10 in Norway, peacemakers should be grateful for the opportunity to re-engage in this debate.

Those of us who believe, as Bishop Dozier once said, that “the just-war theory belongs in the same place as the flat-earth theory” must confront powerful ideas and images that make the just-war theory resonate with people.

At least three things help account for the popularity of war in America. First, war brings no immediate consequences to all but a tiny minority. No taxes, no deaths in the family, no retaliation, no victims on TV. Second, the bulk of the public agrees with what I call the “sports-bar mentality” of international conflict. You win by being tougher, more coercive, more violent than the other side. Conflicts are zero-sum — one winner, one loser. Your reputation is everything. Only wimps talk it out. Third, Americans cling to a moral self-image; we refuse to acknowledge the evil within our own society or ourselves.

War’s popularity produces a profound need for a just-war theory, a doctrine to justify the violence.

The emotional evidence that Obama provides for the just war is not Afghanistan but, as always, World War II. Images of demonic Nazis validate not just the existence of evil, but evil’s concentration within one human being or one nation. People have an enormous capacity to see other people as enemies, completely evil, beyond redemption.

But the reliance on the Nazis reveals the fallacy of this view. By now we should understand that all people are both good and evil in some measure. We dehumanize enemies so that it’s easier to kill them and still hold on to our moral self-image, which we desperately need, for fear of confronting the evil within ourselves.

Images of good and evil are powerful. It’s not surprising that the images Obama evoked overwhelm the weak logic of his argument.

If you read the speech closely, Obama understands that World War II did not follow the conduct of a just-war criteria. More civilians were killed than soldiers; this violates the doctrine’s noncombatant immunity and proportionality guidelines.

Obama also accepts that the U.N. has basically solved the problem of big interstate war, but he cites “new” threats — civil war, terrorism and nuclear proliferation — to argue that the just-war theory needs rethinking. Like Bush, he needs a new just war.

Finally, we get the false choice: faced with these threats, and the presence of evil in the world, Obama says he can’t “stand idle.”