Rejecting Total War: Our Problem with Bin Laden

One does not have to dig very deeply into pronouncements coming from very highly placed spokesmen of the Catholic Church in Europe, including the Vatican, to detect a definite prudential if not doctrinal movement in the direction of a Christian pacifism. While the Vatican has strongly denied that the Pope's own pronouncements on the war in Iraq indicate any embracing of pacifism as Church doctrine, nonetheless, in the prudential order it seems undeniable that for many churchmen, including some in the Vatican, pacifism has become more and more the basic prudential stance when it comes to modern warfare. Most recently the Prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine informally raised the question of whether or not there can be a just war in an age of weapons of mass destruction, a question much more definitively answered in the negative recently by the President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Thus the issue of just war seems to be following the same reasoning track in today's Vatican as the issue of the death penalty: that while theoretically there could be a just war under certain conditions, and thus war is itself not declared to be intrinsically evil and the principles of just war retain their validity, nonetheless, given the power of modern weaponry and its potential for vast collateral killing of innocent noncombatants, the final prudential judgement must be that there can no longer be a truly just war, or at least one in which these weapons are used by a nation.

Leaving aside differing evaluations of the factual situation of collateral evil, which would lead to a different prudential conclusion while using the same principles of just war, it seems clear that the logical conclusion of this particular moral reasoning embraced by many Church leaders is that individual pacifism or unilateral disarmament from all such weapons are the only moral alternatives left in nations that even possess such weapons. If these weapons are truly such that they can only be used in a manner that is intrinsically evil, which seems to be the factual and moral basis of the prudential judgement that just war is no longer possible, then it also will not be rationally possible to argue that they may be possessed morally so long as other nations possess them. So either countries like the United States are morally obliged to unilaterally disarm themselves of all weapons of mass destruction, or individual Americans must choose to refuse to participate in military actions. And since nations like the United States are not likely to unilaterally disarm from all such weapons, there is no alternative left to the individual except a prudential pacifism, a refusal to fight, so long as his nation possesses such weapons.

By this line of theological reasoning, some of the Church's teachers, as with the death penalty, are not asserting a doctrinal position involving an obligation of pacifism, but are in fact espousing a practical obligation of pacifism under the conditions of modern warfare. Following this line of thought, it would seem impossible to justify military service if in fact all uses of such weapons are intrinsically evil, for a nation that possesses them, with at least the implied intention of using them in certain circumstances, is already violating the moral law. But the consequences reach beyond even individual pacifism. For if a nation like ours is morally obliged to such disarmament, even unilaterally if necessary, then faced with an enemy that does not also do away with these weapons, it can only surrender should that enemy choose to wage war on us. This conclusion would follow from another principle of the just war, namely, that a war cannot be fought which a nation has no hope of winning, and which will inevitably bring mass casualties to its people were it hopelessly to engage in such a war. Thus a practical pacifism is the only moral position open, to individuals if their nation does not unilaterally disarm, and to the whole nation if it does.

Obviously, then, these are not secondary moral issues that are being raised today, and there seems to be something quite new involved in the whole moral discussion where we now see prudential judgements, conclusions drawn from the application of moral principles to concrete situations, being raised to the level of universally binding judgements. For instance, in relation to the death penalty, we now have inscribed in the Catholic Catechism the judgement that all penal systems can now protect the common good, and thus that practically speaking there can no longer be a justifiable application of the death penalty. But there is an honest question that is not being addressed here; does that practical moral judgement on the death penalty have the same binding authority as the teaching on the moral principles themselves? And now we have another "official" prudential judgement that modern weapons, which include but are not clearly limited to nuclear weapons, cannot be used without a disproportionate, collateral destruction of innocent life which renders their use, and even their possession, intrinsically evil, and thus this factual situation renders modern warfare, from a practical perspective, morally indefensible. But once again the issue has to be eventually addressed as to what specific weight of authority is to be attributed to such prudential judgements, and thus to the moral conclusions based upon particular judgements concerning the facts of a moral situation.

To say the least, this shift in moral teaching - where we have prudential judgements being presented rather authoritatively to practically exclude an action, while continuing to affirm theoretically that the action is not intrinsically evil - is causing some serious confusion among the laity and clergy alike. For instance Catholic laity now ask continually whether they are sinning if they continue to support the death penalty, and that question has recently generated some serious controversy in this country for Catholic Governors and even for a Catholic Supreme Court Justice. The controversy on just war also reached the headlines recently when an Eastern Rite Catholic Bishop in this country took the next logical step implied in the pronouncements coming from some officials in the Vatican and declared that no Christian could serve in good conscience in the war in Iraq. That declaration was followed by a quick response from the Archbishop of the Military Ordinariat, who said that this was not true, and that soldiers could assume the justice of the war based upon the prudential judgement of their nation's leaders, for they have the ultimate responsibility for making such prudential judgements, that is, for applying the principles of just war and deciding whether their nation is justified in going to war. This position was simply a restatement of an ancient moral principle; that unless it is clearly obvious that there is no just cause, the ordinary citizen can assume the moral justification of the war decided upon by those who are charged with the care of the common good. But who is right? To me it seems like the Eastern Catholic Ordinary was closer to the reasoning coming from the Vatican curia than the Military Ordinary, while the Military Ordinary is clearly closer to the traditional principles related to just war, but it's not yet been made clear by the Vatican itself which of their bishops is to be followed.

At any rate, this development in moral reasoning related to just war poses more problems than simply these conflicting norms coming from bishops. From the earliest days, the Church has been speaking authoritatively on the morality of war and has been a great force in providing moral principles which, if followed, moderate the consequent evils of war. She could speak effectively to political leaders because she never taught that all war is intrinsically, morally evil, but that war is nonetheless subject to moral norms which apply both to its conduct, and to the very decision to engage in war. The Church has always taught that nations or peoples have a right to engage in war for certain purposes, which are not simply restricted to self-preservation and defending the lives of its people, but extend to the preservation of certain essential elements of the common good, such as self-determination and human freedoms, including the freedom of religion. The principles of just war were developed over the centuries to morally restrict warfare and the means by which war is conducted. Had the Church's teaching on war been that of ideological pacifism, that war itself is intrinsically evil in the moral order, it is safe to say that it would never have contributed to the restriction and moderation of the evils of war, any more than modern pacifism has made war less destructive. If all war is seen to be morally evil in itself, the discussion of the means of war seems to most people a waste of time.

Indeed there are persuasive arguments that can be and have been made that pacifism has actually contributed to making modern war even more destructive than it would have been under a just war approach. It does this by very effectively convincing people, including military and civil leaders, that all war in fact is morally evil. However, this moral judgement never has and probably never will convince most men to cease from all warfare, and what it very logically leads to is the pragmatic decision to use whatever means it takes to win wars, as quickly as possible, and regardless of the extent of the casualties caused to the enemy. If leaders become convinced that all war is in fact morally evil, and yet cannot bring themselves to simply refuse to defend themselves and their nation, they will inevitably ask themselves what moral difference it could possibly make as to what means one uses in war. Since war is always morally evil, it follows that all aspects of war must be evil. When leaders are convinced that there is no sane alternative to the moral evil of war, and that they are being forced by circumstances to do evil to protect the common good, the very existence of one's country, it will appear perfectly logical to use the most effective evils to being about the quickest attainment of the good end? In fact, the ultimate logic of this line of reasoning is simply to kill all one's enemies to assure that they will never rise up to seek revenge for their defeat in the future? That is the rational for total war, and it is not something from the past.

The moral status of war is a critical issue in all wars, and it is once more an issue in our war against terrorists. Without a commitment to just war theory and its moral restrictions on war, can we ever hope to win the war against modern terrorism? To state this issue more succinctly, is there any hope today of our using moral reasoning, moral persuasion, moral principles as an effective part of our struggle against the terrorism that threatens us, until our own nation has itself totally rejected all such acts in our own defense? And if we are convinced that we do not accept the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction against civilians, then we have not understood our essential military strategy at the end of the 2^nd World War, and all though the cold war. However, our present enemies are reminding us that we in fact still embrace a military strategy that in the final analysis includes the deliberate destruction of civilian populations with weapons of mass destruction, and they accuse us of rank hypocrisy in our criticism of their tactics which are based upon the same ultimate principles of warfare as our own.

Perhaps we will never fully succeed in changing the consciences of terrorists by moral reasoning, and we will have to use military force even to reduce such actions in the immediate future. But it is surely irrational to think we can contain or overcome this problem over the long haul without moving many consciences to condemn all such actions, at least the consciences of those nations that provide these terrorists moral support and even sanctuary, if not out and out financial backing. No nation can sustain an endless military campaign against modern terrorists, nor an effective campaign without the cooperation of all nations where those terrorists find support from segments of their population. But the problem we face when it comes to moral persuasion as an element in this struggle is that most of these nations who in some way support terrorists will not be brought to fully cooperate so long as they are convinced (a) that we ourselves have never renounced as morally wrong all deliberate targeting of civilians in acts of war, and (b) that our condemnations of Bin Laden and others are therefore not arising from moral principle but are simply self-serving and hypocritical.

But what are they taking about? Surely at least the leaders of these nations must know that we are not targeting civilians in these most recent wars against Iraq. On the other hand, they also know that the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the carpet bombing of Dresden and Tokyo with incendiary bombs have always been seen as morally justified by our nation's leaders, and that this moral justification is a fairly universal assumption of most Americans, regardless of their religious practice or beliefs. The word assumption is used quite deliberately here because few Americans have ever seriously examined the moral issue in any depth. The moral justification of these particular bombings of civilian targets is simply accepted as a moral given, a long established, true moral judgement that most Americans receive with the same non-reflective confidence that most Americans accept the moral judgement that it is morally wrong to kill innocent children, at least if they are living outside the mother's womb. In fact, most Americans refuse even to face the fact that by those bombings we did knowingly and freely kill many innocent children, and other civilians, which at least implies that we do not hold the prohibition of killing innocents in war as an absolute moral prohibition. We may not notice the dual moral standard when we condemn the targeting of our civilians as absolutely morally wrong, while continuing to justify our own past killing of innocent civilians in war, but terrorists and their supporters are very much aware of this moral duplicity and have said so publicly.

For most Americans, and especially for veterans of the 2nd World War, this is very unpleasant charge to listen to, even a half century after those events, and it has to be especially unpleasant to hear this kind of charge made by a modern terrorist who reminds us of our past precisely in order to find common moral ground for his own knowing and deliberate attacks on innocent people, including children, today. So most Americans would find it extremely disturbing to hear Osama Bin Laden refer to our own deliberate killing of noncombatants in World War II in order to justify his own deliberate decisions to target innocent civilians today, including children. Indeed, Bin Laden has more than once boldly appropriated the very same moral justification used by most Americans concerning the use of nuclear weapons and fire bombing on civilian populations in the 2ndWorld War to justify his targeting of civilians in his own war against America and the west in general.

I heard this startling moral justification of Bin Laden for the second time quite recently when a cable news program revisited parts of an interview with Bin Laden conducted last year by one of their reporters. The reporter pointedly asked Bin Laden how he could possibly justify this deliberate killing of innocents, and Bin Laden did not hesitate in his answer. He charged the west, and in particular Americans, with being blatantly hypocritical in condemning his deliberate targeting of civilians to accomplish his war aims, while steadfastly justifying the deliberate targeting and killing of innocent civilians - men, women and children - in Germany and Japan by the use of carpet bombing and finally by using nuclear weapons to accomplish our own war aims. Interestingly, however, Bin Laden was not condemning the acts as such, but rather what he sees as our outrageous hypocrisy in condemning his targeting of civilians in war, while justifying our own targeting of whole civilian populations, acts of war resulting in far greater numbers of dead civilians than his own.

Bin Laden straightforwardly justifies such acts of war in the final analysis because he is a man whose morality, and his world view in general, are deeply rooted in a very ancient culture and its system of morality which holds that war, all war, is in fact total, and that in reality all members of any society that one's nation is warring against are valid targets of acts of war. In this moral view of war there is thus no moral distinction between combatant and noncombatant, whatever the Geneva Conventions may say to the contrary. For men like Bin Laden these very conventions were developed by a culture that is not his own, and he would hold that even the Moslem countries which subscribe to them are not of his culture or religious world view, and are thus betrayers of their own cultural and religious heritage, and thus, along with the west, are his enemies. What he finds especially contemptible, however, is what he sees as the sheer massive hypocrisy of those he refers to as "crusading" Americans who want to apply the Geneva Conventions and western moral principles to him while justifying their own actions which are no more consonant with those conventions or moral principles than his own. Bin Laden argues that at least his actions are consistent with his own moral principles and his understanding of war. It is not so much that Bin Laden is seizing the high moral ground, but is asserting that we both have a lower common ground, but we refuse to recognize it.

The challenge of Bin Laden is both fascinating and frightening. If he were simply saying that he agrees that killing civilians is wrong, but that as long as we do not renounce it ourselves, by admitting the wrongness of the past and renouncing it for the future, he will continue to do the same, we might have a possible solution to the issue of terrorism. But that is not his position. His position is that the targeting of civilians is justifiable so long as the war itself is justifiable, and he clearly believes that war against the west, and America in particular is absolutely justified. He sees our power and cultural hegemony as a mortal threat to the beliefs and culture of the true religion which is Islam. He sees the freedom that we promote throughout the world as effectively the freedom to destroy belief in God, the freedom to destroy the innocence of children and all morality, the freedom to banish religion from the lives of people by the relentless degrading of life and culture through our media and educational system and their very effective dissemination of godless and morally perverted principles. What he sees is that Americans value the process of democracy far more than the results it actually produces in their society, the end product, which he sees as the inevitable destruction of morality, innocence, the family, and religious truth and practice. In short, he sees our only moral absolute to be the political process itself. As a consequence, Bin Laden and his followers firmly believe that if America is allowed to transplant its version of democratic society in their world, it will produce the same results for Islamic society that it has produced in Christian societies, their religious and moral destruction.

So we are the great enemy, the great Satan, and war is seen as absolutely justified to defend Islam against our destructive and deadly influence, and if war is justified, then so is terrorism by that simple fact. That's why it would be naive to think that killing Bin Laden will eliminate this threat, for there are many, many Moslems in this world who are convinced that Bin Laden's reading of the west and its pernicious influence is correct, and that they are fighting for their families and for their very lives as men of the true faith in God. In their eyes, Christianity has succumbed to this deadly culture of unbelief and immorality precisely because it is not the true religion of God, and thus has no power or will to resist. On the other hand they firmly believe that Islam is the true and final religion of God, and thus that it will have the will and power, from God, to resist the infidels who would drive God from His creation. Convincing these people to accept our version of the good life and democratic government that produced it is not going to be a simple matter of getting rid of Bin Laden and his cohorts, and working to set up democratic institutions in Moslem countries.

But leaving aside the bulk of Bin Laden's indictment of our society, which would require far more space to reflect upon it seriously, we can at least ask whether or not his charge of hypocrisy in this matter of terrorism has any weight to it, and how it affects our standing with his patron-nations? In this regard, it was a fascinating coincidence that on the same night that the Bin Laden interview was rerun, and at virtually the same exact time slot, a rather heated discussion took place on another cable station which touched upon the very same issue of the Hiroshima bombing. It took place within a much broader political discussion between a conservative host on a talk-show [who happens to be Catholic] and a leftist lawyer who was attacking the Bush administration for actions which he insisted were war crimes. The conservative at one point challenged him by asking if he would have had the presidents who ordered the fire bombings and the atom bombings tried for war crimes. The lawyer stumbled a bit, and then turned and accused the talk host of barbarism for justifying those actions. The talk host did not blink and admitted that of course he did, and so did the court of public opinion then and now. Are they all barbarians? The lawyer countered that unfortunately there was no legal court for the winners to be tried in, and he insisted that these actions in fact violated international legal conventions. The lawyer steered clear of any charge of a violation of any moral law, given his ideological tilt. But it was also clear that the conservative opponent was absolutely convinced there was no violation of any law, of God or man.

That a Catholic would defend the morality of dropping incendiary bombs and atom bombs on civilian populations is not really all that surprising, for Catholics over the years have not been all that different from all other Americans on this issue, and are still today not all that interested in even examining the possibility that these actions were morally wrong and possibly violations of international conventions. I don't blame them for this really, since their Church leaders themselves have been almost universally extremely hesitant to condemn these actions. They knew full well that even questioning these actions was bound to arouse a very negative reaction from most Americans who were convinced, by our own propaganda, that this was the only way to end the war without further massive casualties among our military. Most all Americans had obviously already adopted the "end justifies the means" morality which would one day also justify the killing of the unborn for a good end. The bishops' silence on this moral issue was itself a prelude to their virtual silence on the birth control issue twenty years later, and their hesitancy to discipline pro-abortion Catholic politicians, and for much the same reason, the negative reaction they anticipated from the public, including their own subjects.

Ask the right questions, and most people will readily confirm what Bin Laden says, that Americans will justify killing innocent civilians, at least under certain circumstances, at least to secure vital war aims. For instance, if this choice of means, directly attacking civilian targets, is seen to be the only way to avoid losing a much larger number of lives of our soldiers, or if it is in retaliation for a direct attack on our cities, then most Americans will justify deliberate attacks on enemy civilians. This has always been the primary argument justifying the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan - that they shortened the war and saved American soldiers' lives. The issue is settled on the principle that the end justifies the means, even when the means involves directly targeting and killing massive numbers of civilians. And that justifying principle stayed in force throughout the cold war, when our nuclear weapons were aimed at cities, with the clear intention of destroying millions of lives, in retaliation for a previous nuclear strike, and thus to save the lives of millions more by bringing the enemy to its knees.

In other words, the MAD strategy was based upon a moral principle that using nuclear weapons to kill civilians could be justified if it is done in order to win a war, if that was the only way left to us to win it, to save our freedom, or even simply to prevent massive American casualties, and is a strategy that will work only if we are truly willing to carry out that destruction of civilian targets. Whether that strategy still persists today is not totally clear, but the attitude of the American public is, i.e., that if the only way left to us to save our country is to kill millions of innocent civilians, then that act would be justified. This moral reasoning is exactly the same as Bin Laden's justification for terror, though we believe our cause would be just, while his is not. But Bin Laden sees it in just the opposite way. He firmly believes that the only means he has to save his religion and culture from total destruction by American power and influence is to terrorize and paralyze this country by killing civilians. It may be a false reading of the situation in fact, but it is based upon the same moral principles that guided our dropping of those bombs to save lives, that underlay our policy of MAD for decades, and that for all we know may continue to justify that policy today. And it is this same basic moral reasoning in our society that has migrated from justifying nuclear bombing of civilians to all kinds of other issues, including abortion and euthanasia and genetic experimentation etc., where the ends also justify the means. It is not all that surprising then, when you think about it, that the generations that defended the means of using the A bomb on millions, to save lives, would one day defend the termination of the unborn's life to save whatever end the parents have in mind.

We cannot be sure just what overall results it would have on the fight against terrorism for our nation, as a nation, to renounce the MAD policy, and declare not only that this policy is contrary to divine and human law, and our highest values, but also to admit with hindsight that actions like the carpet bombing of cities and the dropping of nuclear weapons on cities were in fact, objectively, moral crimes even under those awful circumstances, including the perfidy of our enemies, and in spite of good intentions. The trauma and heat of war often lead to violations of God's law, even by those who are in the right when it comes to the justice of undertaking the war in the first place. The saying that war is hell has a great deal of relevance here, because the horrors experienced in war can lead even good men to do evil things. But truly civilized nations cannot forever be in denial of these wrongs, not without undermining their own moral fiber and yielding the high moral ground which makes them different from their enemies. Unless a nation is honest in its own self-examination, it runs grave risks of a kind of national self-righteousness which can undercut the self-limitation that is necessary for right relations with other nations. If there is a kernel of truth in all the ranting of the ideological left these days, it surely has to be in this matter of honest self-examination and self-limitation.

Moreover, this thesis does not originate from the ideological left that spouts such great nonsense, and which itself contributes to this denial of the truth that nations like individuals can save their souls and grow as truly civilized societies only by a regular and honest self-examination, followed by a determination to repent of past misdeeds and proceed on a different course in the future. This repentance does not, cannot, always involve total reparations for past wrongs, but like all genuine repentance it must involve a firm purpose of amendment.

If this sounds like religious reasoning, that is precisely the case. The origin of the notion of repentance and of self-limitation (which means freely placing limitations on one's own actions) did not come from any political ideology but from religious thought. And it is precisely the left's rejection of any absolute norms in the private life which makes it impossible for leftists to speak coherently of self-limitation for nations, just as it makes it impossible for individuals of this mentality to make an honest examination of their own conscience, to truly repent for their own personal misdeeds, and to limit themselves by some norm that applies to everyone and does not depend on their own determination of the moral norm.

There is a most interesting article touching this whole issue of national repentance written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn back in the 70's called "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations." It is found in a book of essays by Russian intellectuals who were quite deliberately reflecting upon the future of Russia after Communism, a future renewal which would not begin for another fifteen years after this publication. The authors are, for the most part, quite unlike most western intellectuals, and most precisely in their uninhibited melding of religious and political thought in their essays, that is, in bringing religious insights to bear upon the political order. Right from the beginning of his essay, Solzhenitsyn is quite conscious of this "innovation" in comparison to the typical thinking in contemporary, western social science when it comes to the public order, where, he says, "the evaluation of political life by ethical yardsticks is considered totally provincial." He is absolutely on target in what he sees as the rejection of ethical standards and demands in the west, both standards which apply to individuals in private life, and above all moral or ethical standards which would apply universally to the lives of nations, and Solzhenitsyn sees in this rejection a prime example of the "arrogant insensitivity" of the modern intellectualism that dominates in the west.

On the other hand, this is not say that Solzhenitsyn sees the "transference of values" from the private to the public domain as a simple matter, but he does see it as absolutely necessary undertaking for the survival of a human civilization. Thus he chooses to focus this short essay on one critical instance of this transference, and that is the absolute necessity for repentance for both individuals and nations in order for human life to be truly human. But he clearly recognizes that the "gift of repentance, which perhaps more than anything else distinguishes man from the animal world, is particularly difficult for modern man to recover." While insisting first of all that repentance is absolutely necessary for man's distinctive dignity as man [the unspoken religious foundation of this necessity being the fact that all men are sinners] and secondly that individuals find this task difficult to recover for all kinds of reasons, nonetheless, he is convinced that both personal and social repentance and self-limitation are in fact going to be recovered because today there is growing "a hollow place in modern man ... ready to receive them" and because mankind has, in fact, " ... so bedeviled the world, brought it so close to self-destruction, that repentance is now a matter of life and death, ... [ for] our life here and now and our very survival on earth."

Repentance, according to Solzhenitsyn, is necessary as the first step away from hatred and toward concord between individuals and nations. He thus states his basic thesis [which is likely to shock western minds in quite the same negative way that his famous speech at Harvard effectively reduced him from prophet to pariah, at least among the elites who dominate our academic world today]: Repentance is the only starting point for spiritual growth, for each and every individual, and for every trend of social thought. What nations need to repent of and how they can do so as a nation are acknowledged by Solzhenitsyn to be much more difficult matters to determine, and he spends the rest of this lengthy essay focusing on the issue, and mainly as it applies to Russia itself. However, the principles are universally applicable, and he insists that every nation has to undergo this self-examination, repentance and then self-limitation for the future of that nation and for the future of the world to be secure. Nations, like individuals, have "a full spiritual life" which is complex and unrepeatable, and each nation is, like each individual, responsible for its own "soul." He says without any hesitation that "a nation can no more live without sin than can an individual ..." and thus that every nation, "however persecuted, however cheated, however flawlessly righteous it feels itself to be today, has certainly at one time or another contributed its share of inhumanity, injustice and arrogance."

As an example, he refers to an instance which involves both the British and Americans, that is, to the allies' betrayal of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and civilians, who had surrendered or fled to the west during the second world war, and who were deliberately deceived and misled by us while they were being forcefully returned to Stalin and his vengeance. These victims were sent back to Russia, and Stalin sent them directly to his Gulag, his monstrous prison camps where at least half of them perished. Solzhenitsyn bitterly reminds the west that no one has ever repented of this betrayal of human life, nor were any of the perpetrators of this great betrayal ever brought to justice, even though the records are now public.

But how does a nation repent? Solzhenitsyn has his own understanding of what kinds of actions effectively manifest true repentance in the life of nations, and the bedrock of this national repentance is admitting the truth to ourselves, and then publicly recognizing the wrongness of past deeds, and having the national will to reject these kinds of actions in the future by developing laws and institutions to assure, as much as is humanly possible, that they do not occur again.

However, the words in this essay that really demand our national attention were that every nation "however flawlessly righteous it feels itself to be today, has certainly at one time or another contributed its share of inhumanity, injustice and arrogance." While Solzhenitsyn does not mention the allies' use of carpet bombing of civilian populations in Germany and Japan or the use of the two atom bombs on civilian populations to bring the war to an end in Japan, surely these are matters that now need to be submitted to our own national self-examination. We can argue that these actions were only retaliation against the tactics of Hitler and the Japanese military atrocities, and that the atom bombs were only used to shorten the war and save lives overall, but those are simply versions of "the ends justifies the means" arguments, the very same argument that terrorists like Bin Laden now use to justify their own actions. If we justify our own deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians to accomplish our war aims, no matter how noble our overall intentions might be, we have little moral ground to argue from when others do the same. It's not exactly that we have surrendered the high moral ground, because until we repent of these past actions and foreswear them for the future, we do not yet hold any high moral ground. Thus we can have only military force for resolving this threat from a determined enemy, which could mean an endless conflict, and we likewise face the real danger of falling into that self-righteousness and arrogance that places us in even greater danger, in the long term, than the threat from our external enemies.

America is truly a great country, but like great individuals we also have had and still have our moral failures as a nation. We certainly do have noble aspirations, and we have acted with great generosity even toward our former enemies in the past and present. As Solzhenitsyn says, nations are complex in their life and character, and the purpose here is not to make some sweeping judgement of condemnation of this nation and its history. Slavery was a moral evil that we had to overcome, and we have done that better than most nations, even if not perfectly. But we have yet to deal seriously with the grave moral issues of our use of total war in the past, and its possible use in the future.

It is a noble thing that today we strive to minimize civilian casualties, and have done so like no other great power in history. But it is also a fact that we still have not rejected in principle that our nation can, under certain extreme circumstances, deliberately target civilian populations. Perhaps we have not done this since World War II, but it's also true that our nation has never been in extreme danger since that war. It would be a start in this direction of self-examination just to ask Americans a simple question to see where we stand today: if we were in a war, and the enemy attacked our civilian populations with weapons of mass destruction, would we be justified in using the same weapons on their civilian populations; or if the only way we could end a war and save the lives of tens of thousands of our military, was to drop a nuclear weapon on a civilian population to bring the enemy to surrender, would that be morally justifiable? If we answer yes to either of those questions, then we in fact hold the same moral ground as Bin Laden, and our moral indignation at his actions is simply self-righteousness. Moreover, given such moral principles, we will have little hope of ending terrorism by any other means than through military conflict, which could mean a virtually endless war if the enemy is determined enough, and the history of radical Islamic sects should give us reason not to doubt their determination.

But one can also question whether such national repentance - truly repenting of ever using weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations ourselves - would significantly contribute to ending terrorism through moral persuasion. And it can also honestly be questioned whether such a unilateral step - not a unilateral abandonment of these weapons, but even a unilateral, absolute rejection of their use against civilian populations - make our security less?

The answer to the first question is probably in the negative if we are talking about a rejection of these tactics by the followers of Bin Laden's version of Islam. This enemy is not likely to accept a Christian or "western" morality no matter what we do, and military action will be necessary at least in the short run to contain if not totally eliminate this enemy.

But Bin Laden's Islam is not the only form of Islam, and in the long run we must convince those who do not embrace his form of Islamic extremism that his understanding of Jihad against all who do not accept his Islamic religion - including other Moslems - can only lead to a universal catastrophe in a nuclear world. Our leaders know that we cannot ultimately eliminate Islamic terrorists without the cooperation of Moslem nations that provide them cover and support. And we cannot gain this cooperation unless we overcome their distrust of our intentions, by introducing an ethical dimension in the attempt to deal with this threat. Bin Laden does not really aim his barbs about our hypocrisy concerning the use of total war at us, but at the Moslem world he depends upon for covert support and cover. His charges of our hypocrisy ring true to the Moslem world, and it helps Bin Laden to retain their support, since in their eyes he is only using our own tactics against us. Not all Moslems believe in targeting civilians, that's sure, but virtually all Moslems believe in an eye for an eye. Our repenting of acts of total war would be a major step in convincing the Moslem world that we are different from Bin Laden, and that we truly believe that this is a moral norm which binds all nations and all people.

Secondly, as for as the lessening of our security by such a unilateral action, can we seriously ever feel truly secure so long as such weapons exist and are aimed at civilian populations? Sooner or later we will be the victims either of a rogue state or a rogue organization that possesses such weapons. Today we realize these weapons of mass destruction do not have to be nuclear weapons. Even our great power is not enough to stop a determined enemy unless we seriously think we can police the whole world. Certainly we have to do what we can militarily and diplomatically to minimize the threat without violating the moral law or international law. But we cannot eliminate it totally, until we eliminate these weapons, and the first step in that direction is to establish a moral norm which limits their use at least, a norm that nations will come to recognize as binding on all humanity, for the sake of humanity. Only when all nations become committed to a moral and legal code that condemns every form of direct attack on civilian populations will terrorists have no place to hide, no practical means for carrying out the kinds of attacks we see today in our world, and will the actual elimination of such weapons become possible in reality. But we will never have the possibility of convincing those Moslem nations which continue to shelter terrorists to embrace this essential ethical dimension of our struggle without our first rejecting all such uses ourselves.

Moreover, have not these recent conflicts shown that we have the military ingenuity to defend ourselves without retaliating against civilian population or deliberately targeting that population even in the worst circumstances. We possess limited weapons that will destroy military targets and devastate whole armies, that effectively target the military leadership which includes the rulers of their nations, and yet which cause minimal casualties among civilians and the infrastructures of their nation. We have now proven that such military action is possible. It is an undeniable fact that the collateral damage was far less in Iraq than the damage caused by conventional weapons in the wars of the 20^th century.

However, we cannot ultimately protect ourselves with war policies that violate the moral law, even if we know that our end is justified. Those policies simply have lent moral support to those who would deliberately attack our civilians for what they consider to be justifiable ends. In short, they are a step backward to a moral vision of war that justifies an eye for an eye, and total war when necessary. It is that moral view of war that ultimately threatens us in the age of an incredibly powerful technology, in an age in which it becomes nearly impossible to prevent powerful weapons of mass destruction from getting into the hands of men who hold all war to be total war. Until all nations, those that evolved from Christian origins and those that come from Moslem or other religious origins, reject all such notions of war, all use of violence against civilians in wartime or peacetime, we will not be able to effectively cut the terrorists off from the support without which they cannot survive.

But repentance is surely not going to be easy for our nation, and we cannot be overly optimistic that it will be undertaken any time soon. Solzhenitsyn explains why national repentance is such a problem: "Repentance is always difficult. And not only because we must cross the threshold of self-love, but also because our own sins are not so easily visible to us." Today we are a nation in which individuals have a difficult time even recognizing their own personal sins. In our society the reigning morality holds that whatever we do in our personal lives is ipso facto morally justifiable. We easily transfer that same moral reasoning to the nation as whole, and that makes it nearly impossible to admit the sins of our nation. That's the problem Solzhenitsyn became well aware of when he lived in this country, and in the end it's the critical problem for us, and for the world at large. How does a nation ever come to repent, to change, when its citizens do not know what that word really implies?

Rev. Mark A. Pilon