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IRAQ WAR | ANTIWAR MOVEMENT
Charities leader says preemptive strike on
Iraq could destabilize globe
By MARGOT PATTERSON
Kansas City, Mo.
Fr. Bryan Hehir has been a leading analyst of the doctrine of the
“just war” first enunciated by St. Augustine. In Kansas City, Mo.,
Sept. 5 to give a talk on “The Crisis in the Middle East: A Catholic
Perspective,” Hehir discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S.
war on terrorism and plans for a possible invasion of Iraq. He said in his
opinion the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan was necessary and morally justifiable,
but he raised concerns about a preemptive strike on Iraq, which he said carried
with it the risk of destabilizing the globe.
Now president of Catholic Charities USA, Hehir was from 1993 to
2001 professor of the Practice in Religion and Society at Harvard Divinity
School and Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and dean
of the Divinity School from 1999 to 2001. He is author of articles titled
“The Just War Ethic Revisited” and “Military Intervention and
National Sovereignty.” As adviser to the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops, Hehir was one of the principal authors of the bishops’
1983 pastoral statement on war and peace.
Since Sept. 11, it is almost impossible to talk about world
politics without also talking about religion, Hehir said. From that point of
view, he said current conditions present the West with a set of circumstances
not seen since 1648 when the Peace of Westphalia put an end to the wars of
religion in Europe that had killed approximately one-third of the population.
The Westphalian order of world politics that has prevailed for the past 350
years posited that the world should be understood in terms of sovereign states
pledged to nonintervention in the affairs of other sovereign states and with a
clear separation of religion and state.
“What is interesting about 2001 is that these propositions
have been challenged,” Hehir said. The world of the last 15 to 20 years
has been globalized, Hehir said. Sovereignty still exists but not as an
airtight defense against outside forces.
While the notion of absolute sovereignty may need some
reinterpretation -- intervention may sometimes be warranted on humanitarian
grounds to prevent genocide, for example -- Hehir said the United States should
be slow to abandon the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of other
nations. He also warned of the danger of a preemptive use of force. “The
preemptive use of force is a notion we’ve tried to discourage in world
politics,” said Hehir, who added that legitimizing preemptive actions
turns the world away from a conservative use of force. The United States’
increasingly unilateralist style of foreign policy offers cause for concern,
Hehir said, because unilateralism strikes at what the United Nations stands
for.
The case for invading Iraq is not totally without substance, but a
serious cause for war is not the same as a casus belli, an act or event that
provokes or is used to justify war, Hehir said. He went on to observe that the
Middle East’s possession of vast oil resources makes it inherently the
object of conflict. “If you took all the Arabs and the Israelis out of the
Middle East, it would still be a complicated region and a conflictual
region,” Hehir said.
Margot Patterson is NCR senior writer. Her e-mail address is
mpatterson@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, September 20,
2002
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