Y Safle

‘We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace. Be peaceful, therefore, in warring, so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them to the prosperity of peace.’

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 3 (quoting St. Augustine)

Augustine’s Just War theory still is at the heart of ethical justification of many of our wars, but is the teory sufficient? Augustine argued that Christians should rather suffer loss than go to war, but did not make the same case for the head of a Christian state. Rather, the head of state may declare war in the interests of maintaining peace. If our peace is threatened, or if we have suffered grave loss, then our head of state may declare war.

I am not particularly happy with the just war theory, and part of my objection lies in this statement, made by a friend:

> A pretty standard observation is that non-combatants get
> killed in wars of any “stripe”. That is often said as if it
> were a surprise. The important question, it seems to me, is
> whether fewer civilians get killed in a Just War than would be
> killed if there were no war.

There is an issue of responsibility here, and we should note that humans
are not like beans that can be counted and weighed one against another.
If there is a room full of unconcious people who are about to die in a
fire, and I throw them from a window so that half of them survive,
whereas half of them die from the fall, then I have indeed saved half of
them, and my actions – it seems to me – are ethical (assuming there was
no better means to save them available to me!).

But now consider this same room, and I decide I will save these people
by releasing a flood from some water tanks that will quench the fire. I
do so knowing I will drown several other people in another room. Is it
now ethical for me to spend the lives of other people to save these?

If one volunteers for action then one says that their life is available
to be laid down for the cause for which the action is prosecuted. But
what of those who do not volunteer for this action and do not want it?
What right have we to lay *their* lives down for the sake of others?

This is the kind of messy ethical situation one finds oneself in when
attempts at a peaceful resolution to a festering problem are abandonded
for the economic, logistical and political expediency for war.

I think it is a mistake to try and shoehorn our actions into Augustine’s
Just War theory – we may manage to do so, or we may not, but the danger
is that in uncritically accepting a theory from another age, whose
underlying ethics we have not investigated, we may attempt to abdicate
our responisbilities as Christians to consider the issues carefully for
ourselves in the light of a fundamental biblically derived Christian
ethic. In the case of the invasion of Iraq, such a Christian ethic would need to examine everything from our
current lifestyle, our culture and its assumptions as well as the
morality of both the Iraqi and western regimes.

Saddam Hussain wore his immorality on his sleave, and a reading of
Amnesty International reports is terrifying, but let us not fall into
the trap of imputing some overarching morality on our own nations – many
of Saddam’s atrocities were perpetrated with western backing, and using
western weaponry. The massacre he was executed for was perpetrated under the noses of the US army, and with their permission given to Saddam to breach the no fly zones to perpetrate the massacre.

The headlines on this one keep getting worse for Tony Blair. Now his friend, Lord Levy, the Labour Party’s chief fundraiser, has been arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. It seems that the police are investigating a cover up – presumably to keep Tony Blair’s involvement in the illegal business quiet. Sounds just like Watergate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6314959.stm

Regarding the government’s new morality:

This completely fails to take into account the views and beliefs of all those involved. The idea that new Labour — which has got every second thing wrong and is back-tracking on extended drinking hours, is in a mess over this cash-for-peerages business, cannot keep all its prisons under control — the idea that new Labour can come up with a new morality which it forces on the Catholic Church after 2,000 years; I am sorry, this is amazing arrogance on the part of the Government.

Dr Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has denied he is running out of steam as he faces his final months in office, insisting: “I want to finish what I have started”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6307541.stm

Well what Blair started with was a government stressing its commitment to education (but failing to stop rampant A Level grade inflation, and with little ground being made in actually pushing our children up the education league tables); Labour was committed to saving the health service – the service that nearly collapsed last year and started the year laying off thousands of staff; They were also committed to an ethical foreign policy – and now live with the reputation of being the first government to deliberately abandon an ethical foreign policy.

But never mind, because the one issue that defined Labour over John Major’s bickering and grandstanding Tories was the sleaze issue. At least the new Labour party would avoid all that cash for questions style sleaze.

Well, that is until they offered honours for unaccountable party loans. With the arrest of one of Bliars most senior aids, and the prospect that he too will soon be interviewed under caution (which, frankly, would have already happened if he wasn’t the PM) – it is time for this lame duck to step down and let the law catch up with him.

Blairs time in office has the same legacy as John Major’s. Failing public services, crippling levels of personal debt, poor pension provision, sleaze and corruption, poor investment in educashun (and poor returns on the investment).

Indeed we have worse: a deputy prime minister (who between affairs) gets driven 100 yards in a car to deliver speaches on climate change, criminalisation of more and more people, wholesale destruction of civil liberties and fundamental rights, constitutional vandelism that never materialised into any positive constitutional change!

Although to be fair, devolution was a great success. Maybe Blair should have left after one term (like he promised Gordon Brown). But as it is, the only thing history will really remember Blair for is his disasterous foreign policy in Iraq.

Tony Blair’s Labour Party today has refused to allow exemptions to Catholic adoption agencies regarding placing of children with homosexual couples. Instead they have given the agencies 21 months to comply with the law (which at least makes it no longer Tony Blair’s problem).

On BBC Radio 4′s Today programme this morning, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said:

“There is legislation and legislation and some legislation, however well intended, in fact does create a new kind of morality, a new kind of norm – as this does.”

“The legislation about the adoption by homosexual people of children, it does seem to me we are having a new norm for what marriage is, because I think normally children should be brought up by a father and a mother and I think that we hold that that is extremely important.

“The government has a right to legislate and homosexual couples are also able to adopt in other agencies but we want to hold onto this principle.”

It seems that we are heading down the French secular model – where religious expression and morality is to be outlawed for the sake of inclusiveness – without realising that the inclusivity is sacrificed in the process.

Notice what the Catholic adoption agencies are *not* saying. They are not saying that adoption to gay couples should be outlawed. They are not saying that it should be illegal for gay people to adopt children. If they were, then we could say that they are not being inclusive. But rather, the government is saying that a Christian body may not act to improve the common good in the British state, unless they are forced to act against their own moral values – in a way that they honestly believe to be to the detyriment of the state.

That is a new morality which outlaws the old. (and Labour knows all about outlawing things. They have outalwed more things and destroyed more civil liberties than any peace time administration).

The sooner this bunch of crooks (Tony cash-for-honours Bliar), liars, warmongers and career politicians (voted in by a mere 36% of voters – the lowest share of the vote ever received by a governing party) gets out of office, the better.

In the continued illegal US detentions at Guantanamo bay, we see an administration that
continues to flout international law, human rights and its alleged
commitment to truth and justice for the sake of some fuzzy expedient
predicated on the spurious grounds that an administration can declare
war on a concept. This is clearly a serious departure from any moral
underpinnings one might perceive.

When I make statements like these, someone often replies:
> I’m relieved that those who are
> sworn to kill us and other innocent people are being held somewhere.
> But their desire and efforts to kill us probably has something to
> do with it.

The fallacy of this argument is in the assumption
that these people are guilty.

It is uncontentious that evil people be locked away, where they can
do no harm. Few people would have much difficulty with such an opinion
(and indeed, I do not).

But the false belief here that brings the argument for continued
detention crashing down is that someone can be validly considered evil
and a menace to one and all, simply because some politician dictates
that it is so.

No one in Guantanamo bay can now ever be successfully and fairly
prosecuted for a crime – the illegal detention has seen to that, so
legal doctrine tells us they are all innocent.

But more than that, the vast majority really *are* innocent. If there
were evidence of a crime then they would surely have been prosecuted by
now. Some are simply victims of mistaken identity, and others were in
the wrong place at the wrong time. But one way or another, they are
innocent, and so the case for locking them up comes tumbling down.

Another argument:

> In WWII both sides took prisoners, with America and
> it’s allies keeping most of theirs alive.

As, indeed, did the Germans.

> The intention
> being that removing combatants from the battlefield
> would hasten the end of the conflict.

But the “war on terrorism” is not *war*. I believe in the war on want.
Shall I kidnap everyone who runs a business, has a share portfolio,
owns a house or runs a car with an engine larger that 1 litre, and lock
them all away in…ooh, shall we say… Merthyr Tydfil, until such a
time as we have won the war?

Terrorists are criminals. If we capture a terrorist we should prosecute
them according to our established legal systems and doctrines. If we
cannot prosecute them, because we have no actual evidence that they
really *are* terrorists, then they are free to go.

That is what it means to live in a free(ish) society.

Christians like to ask, what would Jesus do? Would he lock people away in Guantanamo
bay, leave them to rot, with no legal representation, nor contact with
their families, allowing them to be tortured and abused?

Is that what Christ said we should do with our enemies?

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, have written to Tony Blair to argue that “rights of conscience cannot be made subject to legislation, however well-meaning”.

What is the issue? That government legislation supposed to protect gay people against discrimination may see the end of the Catholic adoption agency, as the church is forced to close its offices rather than be forced to place children with gay couples.

Now Labour’s position on the role of the family is trendy and confused. Claire Short (an ex Labour minister, although in the cabinet at the time she voted for war in Iraq) came out strongly on family issues when she was in office – making clear her view, shared by many of her colleagues, that traditional families are no more ideal for raising children than non traditional families.

The argument (against all the evidence) is that single parent households, cohabiting relationships, and – of course – gay relationships are just as good for children than the traditional nuclear family.

The evidence actually says the opposite. The ideal and most stable family structures are found where couples are married. Clearly not on every occasion, but the statistical evidence is quite certain.

Add to this the very clear moral view of the church – which in the sloppy relativism of the Labour party must surely carry equal authority with their own dogma: That whilst sexual orientation is itself not sinful, that homosexual acts are also not right (the Anglicans are more circumspect and say something like “less than ideal”). Now you have a quite clear moral dilemma – in attempting to avoid discrimination, should an adoption agency be *forced* to place children in circumstances they believe to be less than ideal?

This is wrong. Plain and simple.

I have said elsewhere that I don’t think anyone chooses their sexuality, and we should never hold that against them. Discrimination against gay people is clearly quite wrong. But are we to show our non discrimination at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people in our society being sacrificed on the rock of inclusivity?

Children are not property to which we gain an entitlement. They are people. And these people need the support of our society. If the considered, consistent and thoroughly compassionate view of an organisation mitigates against placement of these children with one group or another, then society (in which there is clearly no consensus) has no right to intervene. It is wrong to intervene.

Last week I mentioned problems of EU dumping in the third world, and trade justice in the context of another article. Oxfam had an article on this a while back (actually they had meny, but this one is a case in point):

Failure to reform EU sugar regime would be betrayal of world’s poor
Europe has turned its back on some of the world’s poorest countries by proposing inadequate reforms to its unfair and harmful sugar regime, international agency Oxfam said in a new report released today.

The report, A Sweeter Future, coincides with the first Agricultural Council in Brussels to be attended by the new EU Agriculture commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel. Oxfam is calling on Ms Boel to make sugar reform a priority in her new job.

“Europe is putting the interests of big business and rich land owners ahead of the needs of poor people in developing countries who could gain from growing and trading sugar,” said Phil Bloomer, Head of Oxfam International’s Make Trade Fair Campaign. “In Mozambique and Zambia alone 30,000 new jobs could be created if Europe made the right changes to the rules that govern its sugar regime.”

Europe’s sweet tooth rots developing country hope – Oxfam Press Release

It is notable that the African nation that has achieved the longest sustained growth in Africa, and become one of its richest nations, is Mauritias. This was achieved by successfully negotiating removal of trading barriers (based on its island status). There is no doubt that Africa is kept poor by the policies of OECD nations – the rich west, locking the poor out of its markets and dumping product as they find it necessary to do so.

According to research from recently opened archives, the BBC reports that French Prime Minister Mollet considered a union with the UK, or joining the commonwealth and accepting the Queen as head of state.

That there is no trace of this plan in the French national archives suggests that Mollet thought better of his plan, perhaps after discussing with other French politicians, and being pursuaded of the major constitutional upheaval that would be necessary to change the head of state.

But as this all happened a year before France and Germany created the EEC, it is clear that there was an opening here, that could have radically changed the nature of politics in Europe over the last 50 years.

Astounding as these papers are, I suspect that a change of the French head of state was impossible. What *was* possible was the creation of a fledgling European Uninon on different terms to the one we have now. Possibly a union that would have been less bureaucratic and downright wasteful than the current EU.

Still, we are where we are. The EU is a sound idea – it just needs some hefty reform – particularly over the common agricultural policy, which is vastly expensive, inequitable and the source of EU dumping in the third world.

It is common for defenders of the invasion of Iraq to say that Saddam Hussein was an evil man who was killing his people, and it was right to put a stop to this.

Even assuming that invasion was the only way to stop this (a case that is far from proven), we arrive at an interesting moral dilemma.

I expect it is possible to build a moral case that
one may intervene militarily where the objective is to defend those
who would be victims of the intended target, although this immediately
suffers from this objection: as we know that non combatants
(civilians) will die, then who are we to choose *which* civilians to
die? In saving Jones do I kill Smith? If so, then will not the family
of Smith be tempted to say that it would have been better that no
intervention had occurred? And will not we have to say that Saddam (or
whoever) would have been responsible for the death of Jones, but we
are responsible for the death of Smith?

What if we save Lewis and Jones, but kill Smith? Are two lives worth
more than one? Can we weigh up pros and cons of a military action in
terms of the lives of *others*?

And here is an interesting point from human psychology: imagine that there is a run away train hurtling down a track. You can control the points and send the train down a branch where it will crash and kill one person or a branch where it will crash and kill 10. Which way will you send the train?

Most people reply that they will send it down the branch where one person dies. But recast the scenario: There is a runaway train with 10 people on board heading for a precipice and a very large man standing on an overlooking bridge. you can save the people by pushing the man off the bridge into the path of the train.

In this example, people hesitate – because they must specifically kill the one to save the many. They must act to push the man from the bridge. We recognise in the latter scenario that the life of the onlooker is not ours to give.

So too in Iraq and elsewhere. The lives of the people of other countries are not ours to spend on political aims – however noble.