From communism to terrorism, the threat is real and must be faced

SOME of the people who marched for peace last Saturday were probably relaxing in front of their televisions when RTÉ screened The Trials of Henry Kissinger on Sunday night.

They may well have felt a sense of retrospective justification as the past evils of United States foreign policy unfolded before them.

During Kissinger's time as US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, the US secretly bombed Cambodia as part of its Vietnam War strategy, acquiesced in the invasion and rape of East Timor by Indonesia, and helped plot the successful coup which ousted the Chilean government in 1973.

In all these events, the over-riding US goal was to combat the spread of communism, and if innocent people had to be assassinated or bombed to achieve this, then Kissinger and his masters were happy to tolerate, even sanction, it.

This amoral approach to politics was confirmed by an interesting quotation from Kissinger himself. "The average person thinks that morality can be applied as directly to the conduct of states to each other, as it can to human relations. That is not always the case, because sometimes statesmen have to choose among evils."

But the mere fact that America played dirty politics in the past doesn't mean that the war it now threatens on Iraq is unjustified. And that is where many of last Saturday's marchers have got it wrong. Sincere, well-intentioned and peace-loving though most of them were, they should also remember that a reluctance to wage war in any circumstances would allow terrorism to fester in our midst.

Two extremes of opinion must be avoided. One is the Henry Kissinger approach, which divorces morality from international politics. That way lies chaos, because any kind of foreign policy, and any kind of war, could then be justified by reference to selfish national interests.

On the other hand, it would be equally wrong to conclude that, because some countries wage war unjustly, all war is therefore unjustified. As far back as the fifth century St Augustine was thinking about the concept of a just war in his work, The City of God. He defined peace as the 'tranquillity of order' which it was the duty of public authorities to defend. The just war doctrine developed by Augustine and later thinkers like St Thomas Aquinas held that warfare could not only be morally justified but was sometimes morally obligatory on public authorities, if it was needed to stop a great evil, to restore peace and to defend minimum conditions of justice and world order.

For war to be justified the doctrine states that:

There must be just cause.

The war must be a last resort.

There must be 'right intention'.

The decision should be taken by the competent authority.

There must be a reasonable chance of success.

The means used must not be disproportionate to the ends achieved.

Opponents of a war in Iraq say there isn't even 'just cause' because this has always been understood as defence against aggression and never embraced the concept of pre-emptive strikes. Since Saddam has not attacked the United States, and hasn't been shown to aid terrorists in doing so, there is no just cause, they claim.

American just-war theorists approach this problem in different ways. Some argue that war on Iraq would not be a pre-emptive strike, but would be the consequence of Saddam's failure to comply with conditions laid down by the UN after the Gulf War in 1991.

Back then, the UN insisted that Saddam must disarm and prove it to the UN as a condition of remaining in power. He was to account for all his known weapons systems and arsenals and to destroy his stocks of mustard gas, sarin, botulin, anthrax and other chemical and biological agents.

Saddam has never done any of this, preferring to bring suffering on his people, through UN sanctions, than to comply with the commitments he made.

American writers such as George Weigel, who wrote an acclaimed biography of the Pope, believe that pre-emptive strikes may be justified anyway. "It makes little moral sense to suggest that the US must wait until a North Korea or Iraq actually launches a ballistic missile tipped with a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon of mass destruction before we can legitimately do something about it," Weigel argues. "Can we not say that, in the hands of certain kinds of states, the mere possession of weapons of mass destruction constitutes an aggression... waiting to happen?"

All of this, of course, is posited on the belief that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, but it seems foolish to conclude otherwise, since Saddam has never accounted to the international community for the weapons he possessed in the past. It is harder to judge whether Iraq might give these weapons to terrorists. This is a judgement call which involves weighing certain dire consequences for the people of Iraq on the one hand, and potentially dire consequences for the western world on the other.

Quite apart from the threat which Iraq may pose to world peace, there may be 'just cause' for war if it removes a brutal dictator who inflicts suffering and starvation on his own people. Opponents of the war seem quite blind to this, which makes you wonder at the cultural relativism that allows us to demand democracy for ourselves, but not to insist on it for others. Critics will observe that America shows no sign of dislodging certain other oppressive regimes Saudi Arabia is a case in point but that does not, of itself, nullify the cause of democracy in Iraq.

The question of who has 'competent authority' to respond to a threat another of the just war criteria is also controversial. Many people believe war without the sanction of the UN Security Council is unthinkable because it could undermine the legitimacy of the UN. That certainly wouldn't be desirable.

But the UN itself is only partially democratic, with five countries enjoying permanent membership and a right of veto on its Security Council. If the US believes the security of its people is threatened, it can hardly be blamed for ignoring a veto from France, Russia or, of all places, China.

At the very least, these arguments show up the conspiracy theories about America's oil interests in Iraq for what they are an unhelpful sideshow.

Not only are these interests somewhat overstated (and the strategic interests of France and Russia conveniently ignored) but they distract us from the more important consideration of whether Saddam poses a serious threat to world peace and human rights and, if so, what can be done about it. The truest picture is of America as a flawed hero, which in the past has often sacrificed human rights on the altar of international commercial and security concerns. But, for the Americans and the British, the war in Iraq is all about national security. Certain 'rogue' states have deadly chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the people in al-Qaida claim to have willing foot-soldiers planted all over the western world in readiness to use them.

So while we must shudder at the prospect of war, and at the havoc that it will wreak in innocent lives, we should still be grateful to Bush and Blair for standing up to the terrorist threat.