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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 4, 2001
Useless guilt
Do we want to kill Afghan civilians? No. Is there any possible advantage to us in killing them? No. Can we afford to call off the air strikes that threaten them? No. Have we taken every reasonable precaution to prevent killing them? Yes. And indeed yes almost to a fault. Beginning with the war in Vietnam I think the prevention of "collateral damage" -- killing innocent bystanders -- has been elevated almost to an obsession in Western military doctrines. It has become that most dangerous of things an end in itself. From at least the time of the ancient Greeks we have considered the distinction between combatants and non-combatants to be an issue in warfare; but it was a vague distinction in the internecine and vicious battles between small Greek city states. The sacking of an enemy town was not done with moral qualms: "we do to them what they'd do to us". The Greek morality was help your friends and hurt your enemies. Through the Middle Ages we developed very crisp clear rules for the battles within Christendom itself. The idea of a non-combatant was assisted by the feudal frame of mind in which the lord of the manor was also the protector of his underlings -- the "small" people who nevertheless were believed to have immortal souls. They owed him allegiance he owed them security and some measure of justice. It was he not they who went to war. I am no expert on these matters but my impression is that we derive from that age the notion that even an able-bodied man might be a non-combatant -- an unfair target of his lord's enemies. In feudal times it was the lord of the manor who had to think about these things. In our democratic age we must ourselves be thinking. High and Late Medieval warfare was by modern standards an elegant and fairly genteel affair. There weren't so many casualties even on the battlefield. There have been many non-Christian cultures in which something like this state of grace was at least outwardly achieved in which battle is a grand tournament an occasionally lethal but usually quite tame sporting event to determine a winner then all may go home. But the idea that even in principle carnage is no good thing is I think in the mainstream of what we call the "Judaeo-Christian" tradition. Two millennia of Christian civilization has had the effect of inculcating this among other notions about the preservation of human life. Until just more than a generation ago for instance the universal Western abhorence of abortions helped mark us out from much of the rest of the world. Our pre-Christian ancestors actually exposed their children when they were not wanted. Regardless of cost and inconvenience we did not do that kind of thing. (Except secretly with criminal intention.) The Muslim tradition stands also in a direct line of descent from that ancient monotheistic spark that candle from Egypt that leads through Jerusalem. Their traditions since the appearance of Muhammad in the 7th century have often run parallel with ours. We both inherit our rational ideas from the Greeks our moral premises from the Jews. Like so many people in the West today I have found myself reading or rereading the Koran the Hadith the early Life of Muhammad -- dipping into them here and there always of course in faulty English translation stripped of their poetry the very words stripped of their resonances and associations. Both before and after his taking of Mecca before and after driving Christians and Jews and Pagans away from the city of the Kaaba the Muslim Prophet seems to share our civilized idea of "non-combatants". At the least he says that women and children do not make very suitable targets; and consistently I think that you really must have a reason for killing someone; and that the reason must be founded in some intelligible conception of justice. I am fairly certain we have no dispute on that score; though we are frequently corrected by Osama bin Laden. And the Islamic "schoolmen" like ours dealt with such problems as "collateral damage". Again (but do I have to remind you?) I am no great scholar in these fields but the little I have read from Avicenna to Aquinas suggests we can't get too prissy about such things. It requires some sense of proportion some balancing of comparative goods to decide where to strike and how hard. But no matter what we decide to do even for sterling motives there are things that just can't be helped and we leave them to God or "Allah". For this is the flip side of the "sanctity of life". It has sanctity not in itself but because we are made in the image of our maker; because we don't belong to ourselves but to God. Hence the injunction against suicide -- a heinous crime in Judaism as in Christianity as in Islam. You do not have the right to take what is not your own and the suicide commits Selbst-mord as they still say in German self murder . But conversely death happens. It is not "the end of the world" if that world is seen in its larger dimensions. We cannot cling to life so desperately that we will not kill or be killed in a worthy cause. This is why as a Catholic friend reminds me the late bishop of Carcassone could say when dealing with a similar quandary to what we find in the hills of Afghanistan in effect Kill them all; God will know His own. (Only we could read this as facetious.) I am the reader must forgive trying to do the kind of thinking that I should have expected to be coming from the pulpits of Church and Synagogue and Mosque in days like these -- when we reach out and seek to remember what it is that we are doing on this planet. I might as well write it for myself because the preachers aren't interested at least in my parish. What I hear instead is just one long whining guilt trip ; a shallow pacifism that is untroubled by deep reflection. Neither we nor the Americans are "murdering people in Afghanistan". We are fighting a war as just as any in history. We should not feel guilty except for our sins. There are enough of those without looking for strange new collective ones to dress ourselves up in. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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