c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a 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 _ In his recent book on World War I, British military historian John Keegan argues the war might have been prevented by better communications among the leaders of European countries.

Hot lines, summit meetings, even regular use of telephones could have averted a war no one wanted. None of the leaders expected a horrific war in which 10 million soldiers would die.

Rather, they thought it would be like the Austrian-Prussian War and the Franco-Prussian War of the 19th century, decided by one big battle. (They paid no attention to the horrors of the American Civil War.)

World War II, however, was not an accident, though it was a direct result of the earlier war. Hitler had been clear about his plans from the beginning: The death of 2 million German soldiers in the 1914-18 war demanded vengeance.

Perhaps the British and the French could have stopped him in the 1930s. Exhausted by the casualties of 1914-18, they lacked the will to do so. One could thus conclude the mistakes of the summer of 1914 wrecked the 20th century.

War is horror. Indeed, it is horror that easily gets out of control. Even in”good”wars, bad things are done. Resisting Hitler was surely good. Yet the British bombing of German cities was patently evil. On a night in April of 1942, for example, the Royal Air Force destroyed 90 percent of the city of Cologne and killed 40,000 people, an atrocity that did not shorten the war by a single hour.

The arguments of the peace movements that all war is wrong seem to make some sense when one considers all the evils coming from war. Would it not be better if a nation under attack simply laid down its arms and trusted in God’s protection? Could anything be worse than the evils that even a war of self-defense unleashes? In the delirium of war, how can those on the side of justice remain any different from the aggressors?

On the other hand, the pacifist response to war, appealing as it is, seems too simple. Would it have been right to surrender to a worldwide Nazi empire? Would it have been moral to accept the obliteration of Jews from the face of the Earth? Would it have been virtuous to turn the United States over to a Japanese military dictatorship? Might war, however horrific, sometimes be the lesser of two evils?

While pacifist morality is appealing and the courage of those who refuse to fight is impressive, one must question the claim some pacifists make to a monopoly on morality. Thus, the repeated argument from pacifists during the war over Kosovo that negotiation had not been given a chance was clearly wrong.

Anyone who had read the newspapers knew negotiation had been tried for months. NATO had two stark choices: acquiescence in ethnic cleansing or a war in which, one hoped, casualties on both sides could be minimized.

The pacifists would have been more honest if they had said war was always wrong, regardless of whether it was waged to prevent low-level genocide or not. They should have argued that NATO ought to have left the Kosovars to God’s _ and Slobodan Milosevic’s _ mercy, for that is the logical conclusion of their conviction.

There were other reactions to the Kosovo war that are not as authentic as the classical peace argument.

European intellectuals, for example, tend to argue the war was merely an exercise in raw power. The United States, they say, was beating up on a tiny nation yet lacked the courage to send troops to Kosovo to prevent the rapes and murders. They don’t consider the truth that, even if the troops had been immediately available, the deaths on both sides in a ground war would have been enormous.

Another group of converts to pacifism are the Clinton-haters. They reason that anything Bill Clinton does is evil: It was his war, therefore the war was evil. Their rage against the war is rage against the president. They are not truly pacifist; indeed, they simply are sick.

DEA END GREELEY