John Kerry at Pepperdine University, Sept, 2006
The fourth and final example of where people of faith should accept a common challenge is perhaps the most difficult and essential of all:
rekindling a faith-based debate on the issues of war and peace. All our different faiths, whatever their philosophical differences, have a universal sense of values, ethics, and moral truths that honor and respect the dignity of all human beings. They all agree on a form of the Golden Rule and the Supreme importance of charity and compassion.
We are more than just Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims or atheists: we are human beings. We are more than the sum of our differences -- we share a moral obligation to treat one another with dignity and respect -- and the rest is commentary. Nowhere does this obligation arise more unavoidably than in when and how to resort to war.
Christians have long struggled to balance the legitimate need for self-defense with our highest ideals of justice and personal morality.
Saint Augustine laid the foundation for a compelling philosophical tradition considering how and when Christians should fight.
Augustine felt that wars of choice are generally unjust wars, that war -- the organized killing of human beings, of fathers, brothers, friends -- should always be a last resort, that war must always have a just cause, that those waging war need the right authority to do so, that a military response must be proportionate to the provocation, that a war must have a reasonable chance of achieving its goal and that war must discriminate between civilians and combatants.
In developing the doctrine of Just War, Augustine and his many successors viewed self-restraint in warfare as a religious obligation, not as a pious hope contingent on convincing one's adversaries to behave likewise.
Throughout the centuries there have been Christian political leaders who argued otherwise; who contended that observing Just War principles was weak, naïve, or even cowardly.
It's in Americas' interests to maintain our unquestionable moral authority -- and we risk losing it when leaders make excuses for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo or when an Administration lobbies for torture.
For me, the just war criteria with respect to Iraq are very clear:
sometimes a President has to use force to fight an enemy bent on using weapons of mass destruction to slaughter innocents. But no President should ever go to war because they want to -- you go to war only because you have to.
The words "last resort" have to mean something .
In Iraq, those words were rendered hollow. It was wrong to prosecute the war without careful diplomacy that assembled a real coalition. Wrong to prosecute war without a plan to win the peace and avoid the chaos of looting in Baghdad and streets full of raw sewage. Wrong to prosecute a war without considering the violence it would unleash and what it would do to the lives of innocent people who would be in danger.
People of faith obviously don't have to agree with me about how we keep America safe, how we prevail over terrorists, or how we end our disastrous adventure in Iraq. But I do hope people of faith step up to the challenge of rejecting the idea that obedience to God somehow stops when the fighting starts. We need a revival of the debate over what constitutes Just Wars and how they must be conducted, and all people of faith, whatever their political allegiances, should participate in the debate.
Sen. Kerry did not need to hire a religious consultant to come up with this. He wrote this himself and gave us a little window into his thinking on the broader picture of how he see war itself and how he considers the question of morality and action in light of the moral imperative to be moral beings.
I re-watched this speech this week. I think I did so because I was tired of people on the TV and in the newspapers who talk about troop 'surges' and about doubling-down and missed hearing about war from someone who had actually been to war and had seen people die. (And had killed for his country.) I think the argument is sterile now. The talking heads on TV aren't talking about anything and aren't debating anything more than what this means to the horserace in '08 and what it might do for Bush's sagging poll numbers. That is not a debate, it's a way to not talk about being at war and that the aim of war is to kill people to force them to your will. I needed to read this again. I think this is a better way to address the argument about escalating a failed war. No wonder Sen. Kerry called this escalation attempt insane.