COMMENTARY: Not enough American casualties?

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ Drew Christiansen, a Jesuit moralist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., writing in […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ Drew Christiansen, a Jesuit moralist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., writing in the magazine America, has recently argued the war in Kosovo was immoral because there were not enough NATO casualties.


The casualty-aversion strategy of NATO _ which means the United States, the strategy’s designer _ was, in Christiansen’s view, a violation of military honor. He reasons that it is not honorable for warriors to degrade the infrastructure of a country and risk civilian casualties if they are not at risk themselves.

The most obvious question is how many Americans would have had to die in the war to regain the honor of the American military. A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? If his theory is to be taken seriously _ as he certainly takes it _ then generals would have to calculate before a”humanitarian”intervention how many of their own would have to die to make the war honorable.

There is not a country in Europe that would have tolerated the intervention in Kosovo if such a policy were pursued. When President Clinton refused to consider the use of ground troops, he knew full well that large numbers of body bags at Andrews Air Force Base would have ended the weak support of the American public for the intervention _ as it would have ended the even weaker support in the other NATO nations.

In the present state of moral attitudes, most people would be perfectly willing to stand by and permit ethnic cleansing and genocide.”Humanitarian intervention”is acceptable only when casualties are reduced to an absolute minimum. If the United States had not intervened in Kosovo, other Jesuit moralists _ perhaps even Father Christiansen himself _ would have flailed NATO for not intervening. Either way the United States is immoral.

Christiansen’s norm that military honor requires American casualties will prove a hard saying for all those American families that prayed their sons would come back from the war alive.

It is not enough that the goal of a war is to prevent mass murder and that all possible care be taken to avoid civilian losses. No, Americans must die and then, perhaps, it will be an honorable and moral war.

He assumes the NATO attacks were”careless”with civilian lives. Yet he provides no evidence to prove that every possible care was not taken to avoid civilian losses. Moreover, he also assumes the Serbian reports of losses were accurate. In truth we don’t know and are not likely to know for a long time how many civilians did die. A single unnecessary death is one too many.


Yet if one is to prevent mass murder, one must take actions involving some casualties. Until the contrary is proved, it seems reasonable to argue more care was taken in Kosovo than in any other war in history to minimize such losses.

Clinton was criticized for not using ground troops to prevent the murders in Kosovo. If he had, there would have been plenty of NATO casualties _ more than enough, one suspects, to please Christiansen. There would also have been many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Kosovar and Serbian casualties. The NATO strategy seems to have been the one most likely to keep losses on all sides to a minimum.

If it was nonetheless immoral, then all”humanitarian interventions”are immoral, which I suspect is what Christiansen really thinks.

He also laments that the United Nations was not more intimately involved in the decision-making. He seems unaware of the long history of U.N. incompetence in such situations, especially in Bosnia where mass murder went on right under the eyes of U.N. troops. If one waits for the United Nations, genocide is risk-free strategy for all mass murderers.

Diplomacy and war are complex matters. The decisions made by leaders of goodwill and good faith are almost always flawed and imperfect.

For years, with memories of the Korean War in mind, I have written against military intervention, especially in Kuwait and the Balkans. I changed my mind about Kosovo because it seemed to me possible the four norms for a just war might be met and I still think so.


Christiansen has added new norms about the casualties required for a”humanitarian intervention”to be honorable which seem to me to be highly dubious.

It is very easy, however, from the ivory tower of Georgetown to second-guess difficult and painful decisions. I would have hoped he would demonstrate more concern about the pressures of making complex decisions that beset leaders of good faith and goodwill.

DEA END GREELEY

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