c. 1999 Religion News Service

(David P. Gushee is director of the Center for Christian Leadership and associate professor of Christian Studies at Union University in Jackson, Tenn.)

UNDATED _ The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia raises troubling questions about U.S. foreign policy, international law and order, the role of NATO and the place of morality in foreign affairs. While I support the action, those who see it as an easy call are mistaken.

At one level, the bombing violates traditional standards of international law and NATO policy.

Historically, the sovereignty of nations has been one of the cardinal principles of the international order. National sovereignty has been understood to require foreign power nonintervention in the internal affairs of other countries. Military force has been seen as justifiable only when a nation or its allies are directly attacked.

As for NATO, its original charter was a defense agreement intended to protect its members from outside attack.

The bombing also appears to violate the principles of the Christian just war tradition, at least on a narrow reading. Christian just war theory has generally assumed a context of national self-defense against aggression.

In a decentralized international order, states have the right to protect themselves through the use of force. That right is sufficient, in this view, to override the presumption against violence that is the starting point for Christian thinking about war. But the assumption has been that this is a right that states can exercise only in self-defense.

It is clear that the air assault on Yugoslavia fails these traditional tests. The atrocities have been confined to the territory of Yugoslavia and no NATO nation was attacked or threatened.

Further weakening NATO’s position on this matter was the decision not to seek the authorization of the United Nations for this action. Thus it is impossible to claim the backing of the”world community”this time around.

In a post-Holocaust world, however, it is simplistic merely to issue a blanket rejection of the NATO action.

Ever since the end of World War II and the full realization of the horrors of the Holocaust, the international community has become more sensitive _ however inconsistently _ to genocide. Increasingly, influential individuals, groups and nations have argued that national sovereignty cannot be held sacrosanct when genocide or something approaching it occurs within a country’s borders.

In this view, the world has a moral responsibility not to stand idly by while innocents are slaughtered.

This is my own perspective. As a student of the Holocaust, I believe that this evolution of opinion is a rare sign of international moral progress. Genocide anywhere is indeed an intolerable violation of international human rights standards and the most basic religious values.

Indeed, a fresh look at Christian just war theory may help us here, for it is possible to interpret it as permitting war, as the U.S. Catholic bishops put it in their 1983 pastoral letter”The Challenge of Peace,””to protect innocent life, to preserve conditions necessary for decent human existence, and to secure basic human rights.” Surely this situation meets that standard. To remain bystanders when we have the capacity to end mass murder is morally repugnant.

Ideally, when intervention occurs it ought to be undertaken by the broadest coalition of nations available _ preferably the United Nations. But the United States must be willing to act alone if that is necessary.

Intervention ought to occur consistently rather than in the haphazard manner of recent years, in which we got involved relatively early here vis-a-vis Kosovo, late when it came to Bosnia, and not at all in Rwanda. And those intervening need to be willing to pay the necessary price in human lives that an effective intervention often requires.

There can be no artificial or pre-set limits on the military steps that will be undertaken to prevent genocide. All of this requires the morally grounded national (and/or international) will to sacrifice lives in order to save lives.

Whether our own nation any longer has that moral will is an open question, and one that is likely soon to be tested by events in Yugoslavia.

IR END GUSHEE