Pacifists and Mideast War

While my church teaches a just war philosophy, I do believe that, if the standards for declaring a war to be just were truly, rigorously and honestly applied, virtually all war would be seen as being morally wrong. In his Nov. 7, 1990, letter to Secretary of State James Baker, Archbishop Mahony stated as much: “While in our tradition, war is not ruled out absolutely, there is a clear presumption against war.”

I do regret that we have gone to war in the Persian Gulf. While our casualties were light, and we may have even tried to limit Iraqi casualties--though I would shudder to think of telling that to the victims on the Kuwait city-to-Basra highway in the closing hours of the ground war--we handed Saddam Hussein a pretext to conduct a series of (at the onset of the war) unthinkable crimes against civilians (Israeli, Saudi, Kuwaiti and in the end Iraqi and Kurdish) and against the planet itself (the oil spill in the Persian Gulf and the setting ablaze of the Kuwaiti oil fields).

I don’t have and indeed never had any illusions about Hussein’s capacity to wage evil. Hussein was and remains an evil man. But nothing that he had done prior to Desert Storm compares to what he has “taken the liberty” of doing since. I fear that our culpability is that we gave him the stage and the pretext to do all of this.

DENNIS KRIZ

USC Catholic Student Assn.

Peace, Service and Justice Group