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Contents © 2003
by Jim Holman.
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LETTERS
MAY 2003

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U.S. DOES NOT TARGET CIVILIANS

While I generally like your paper I must confess to being appalled at your answer to Mr. DeNunzio's letter [April Faith].

I dare to say you have little if any familiarity with military technology and or tactics of the last 100 years. No one who has can say that the U.S. has given no indication of avoiding the direct and/or indiscriminate targeting of civilians. Lets start with World War II. Unlike the British, the U.S. tried to target only military sites with their daylight attacks on Europe. Many Americans died trying to get bombs on target rather than simply targeting German civilians. Did many civilians die? Yes. Did more die than would have died if the U.S. had eschewed any sort of strategic bombing? Given the rate at which the ovens were working in the camps, that's far from clear. Even the fire bombing of Japan, while probably immoral, had justification in terms of the way Japanese industry had people working in their homes producing military equipment.

In Vietnam, the U.S. refrained from striking key targets in the North because of their proximity to civilian targets until the smart bomb was invented. After Vietnam the U.S. has consistently worked to minimize civilian casualties. The Gulf War had an incredibly low level of civilian casualties and the U.S. enforced rules of engagement which resulted in higher risks to U.S. pilots in order to reduce the risk of Iraqi civilian deaths. For the last 60 years or so the U.S. has consistently striven to minimize civilian casualties and has consistently provided all necessary aid to non-combatants.

If the current U.S. policies are insufficiently discriminent to you, then you are preaching the heresy of pacifism -- that no conflict can be justified. You are falling into that error because you're forgetting the principle of proportionality. If the U.S. doesn't directly target civilians -- the last case you can cite of that would be the attacks on Japan in World War II -- if it continues its historical approach of trying to minimize civilian casualties given available technology -- a trend that started before WWII -- and if the number of civilians who die are in proportion to the good obtained, then the just war criteria are met in this one area. No military in the history of the world is more concerned about civilian casualties than that of the United States today. If they fail to meet your criteria, then no force in the history of the world would.

The question then becomes, what is the good? Well in the case of Iraq there are three areas of goodness. First, the persecution, execution, and torture of the Iraqi population will cease. There will be no poison gassing of Kurds, no draining water from the lands of the Shia, and no secret police. Secondly, the neighbors of Iraq will not be invaded. Saddam has invaded two neighboring countries, causing huge numbers of deaths. Would you like a repeat of the Iran-Iraq war, except with nuclear weapons? Iran may be headed for a period of internal conflict as the population begins to find the current religious rule unacceptable. Last time Iran had internal problems, Saddam invaded. What would the world do if Iraq invaded Kuwait -- the 19th province -- and had nuclear weapons to keep anyone from freeing it? Thirdly, Saddam has supported terrorism. He has publicly incentivized suicide bombers in Israel by providing huge cash payments to their families. The U.S. government has shown that Saddam allows terrorists safe haven in Iraq. His attempt to assassinate President George Bush when he visited Kuwait proves he's not one to let bygones be bygones. I would think that the fact that Iraq provided safe haven for the Al-Qaeda poison expert might lead reasonable men to conclude that Saddam might think about using weapons of mass destruction, through terrorists, to strike at the U.S.

Bottom line, there is every reason to believe that by removing Saddam and eliminating his weapons of mass destruction, a very large number of civilians, both Iraqi and members of other Middle Eastern countries, will be spared over the next 10-20 years.

But I would go further. I would say that to allow a murderous, imperialistic, and sociopathic dictator to develop weapons of mass destruction and to stand by as he prepares to use those weapons would be intrinsically immoral. The countries of the world have tried a 12-year-long embargo to force Saddam to give up his weapons through non-military means. He hasn't budged. They have given him the last months to cooperate with inspectors. According to Blix, the Iraqis, even with an invading army on their door, have failed to provide significant cooperation. What means are then left to prevent Saddam from more killing? Given the suffering that Saddam has been willing to inflict on his people in order to retain his weapons of mass destruction, do you really think he just wants them to look in one of his palaces? We know he's already used them against the Iranians and the Kurds. Of course we know he's still got them because all he had to do to make Bush look like a fool and to end the embargo in the preceding 12 years is to convince people who wanted to be convinced that he was cooperating on the inspections. But he never did that.

Why? Because -- as the intercepts Collin Powell played showed -- he is hiding weapons of mass destruction. Go back and read up on how the Germans rearmed under the noses of the League of Nations inspectors to get a historical perspective on what's currently going on in Iraq.

If you're opposed to a military solution, then either you must cling to a fantasy -- Saddam will give up these weapons either out of niceness or the impact of a 13,14,...100 year embargo -- or you must contend that it's O.K. for Saddam to develop weapons of mass destruction because he's not going to ever use them or that, yes, he will use them but his victims will have to let him get in the first punch before it's moral to react. From the perspective of both just war theory and over all Catholic morality, I don't believe any of these positions is tenable. It's not using evil to fight evil to prevent a dictator from continuing his aggressive and murderous aggression through military means.

So while you can argue that inspections should have been allowed to last longer, or more diplomatic routes should have been attempted, there is really no basis to contend that any and all wars by the U.S. are immoral because we target civilians or we kill civilians indiscriminately.

Tom Trinko,
Fremont

Editor's reply: The United States has claimed that it attempts to minimize civilian casualties in war; and this may be true in comparison to other countries. Yet, the United States has used means of warfare that have as their necessary effect the destruction of civilians and civilian infrastructure. One may cite the principle of double effect in defending U.S. bombing policy -- that the death of civilians is an unavoidable, unintended, incidental consequence of the destruction of military targets; yet, I don't think this principle applies to U.S. conflicts, from World War II to the present. The U.S. has used and uses means which, given their destructive power, do not kill civilians as an incidental by-product of destroying military targets, but rather has destroyed military targets as an incidental by-product of the destruction of civilian sectors. Given the power of the means used, the direct targets have been civilian and, indirectly, military. It's rather like dropping a 2,000 pound-bomb on a house full of people to eradicate a closet of weapons within it. One cannot argue, in that case, that the intended target was not the house, but the closet of weapons, for the means one has chosen to accomplish the task are too destructive for the limited end proposed.

Mr. Trinko cites examples from World War II and, happily, admits that the firebombing of Tokyo was probably immoral. Yet, it's curious that he makes no reference to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, actions the U.S. has defended ever since. As for Vietnam, one can cite the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and of the saturation bombings of Laos and Cambodia as examples of indiscriminate warfare. The Gulf War, I think, is no example of American restraint, for did we not destroy civilian infrastructure, such as water treatment facilities?

I do not think proportionality means that it's all right to kill x number of civilians if, by doing so, we can save the lives of x or 10x civilians (this is often the justification given for Hiroshima and Nagasaki), for that would be simply to say that one may do an evil deed for the sake of a good end. Thus, I reject the argument that we can excuse the means used in warfare as long as they remove a threat, such as Saddam Hussein is said to be. That such a moral stance may create great hardships, even grave ones, is no matter in a Christian view of life, which calls on us to suffer even great evils rather than commit the smallest sin.

Finally, the just war doctrine merely states that, within certain due limits, warfare is permissible; it does not claim that any particular war has been, or will be, just. One is well within the bounds of orthodoxy if he thinks no war fought by man has been just, or if he thinks, merely, that a just war is morally impossible in our day.


NOT CLINICS BUT KILLING CENTERS

Thank you for making abortion a significant part of your newspaper, but please consider my request.

As a person who founded his own pro-life organization, I discourage people from using the word "clinic" when writing of Planned Parenthood's or others' Killing Centers. If all pro-lifers would use "Killing Centers." (capital K and capital C), many more lives would be saved. "Clinic" sounds clean, legitimate, medical, and safe. "Killing Center" tells it like it is.

Kenneth E. Kogut
Life Research Institute,
Concord

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