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Straw Man Peach is vanquished — congrats. Unfortunately the real one comes from a different perspective. I do not agree we never should have gone to Iraq. Given 10 years of flouting UN sanctions and turning the oil-for-food program into a global money laundering facility and the continuing genocide in Iraq and given the Bay of Pigs we pulled on the Kurds in 1991 and frankly the doability of toppling Saddam, we should have invaded. The alternative was to leave a clear signal to all despots to do as they please — after all, there are and never will be any real consequences. Obama is preparing to send Iran that signal as we speak.

Since almost no one came with us, we did not prevent the UN from being outed as a total joke, which is clear to any rational person now. The place is like a giant flea market for exchanging ideas on petty corruption and undermining the US. Why we don’t pull out, kick everyone out of the buildings, and turn that choice real estate into condos is beyond me.

We get F’s on justification and prosection of the war in Iraq. No question. (The WMD thing was idiotic — anyone who trusts Colin Powell’s judgment on ANYTHING deserves what they get.) Bush and Rumsfeld set new standards for bad judgment and hubris. To be fair, the flowers-in-gun-barrels crowd made it very difficult to get it right — e.g. overwhelming force out of the gate — but if you’re going to jam a war, you have to be prepared to impose your will. Wars never get prosecuted successfully based on polls.

So I agree that if we had gone there to rob Iraq of oil or further Bush megalomania or as political grandstanding or to get some live target practice for the armed forces, that would be relevant to whether we should stay. I assume we went for just reasons, so “consequentialism” isn’t the centerpiece of my position. I’m just conceding that the “whether we should have gone” point is debatable. But if our presence there was so poorly intentioned that it disqualifies us regardless of consequences, I have to concede the point. I think it just takes a lunatic conspiracy theory mentality to get there.

The just war filter is a threshold concept — once cleared, practicalities dominate. We don’t reassess the justice of an action on a daily basis. We reassess strategy and tactics. The decision on when wind things up is also largely practical. The end of WWII is an interesting study on the consequences of pull out timing.

If the decision to leave were a practical assessment of the situation, that’d be one thing. We could debate it. What you’re claiming, however, is that our being there was totally wrong — that we are transparently culpable at the “just level”. If that’s true, beyond literally immediate withdrawal, we should be discussing the enormous reparations we owe to the families of Saddam Hussein and other Baathists, and to the people of Iraq. Perhaps a big check to Osama bin Laden for the unjust losses imposed on his freedom fighters would be a good start.

If that’s what you and David are alleging, fine. Just be as asymptotic with your own position as you’re being with mine.

I would allege, and I think I already did, that Obama’s invitations to discussion, on both race and abortion, however elegant, are disingenuous. Jonah Goldberg published a flip but accurate article recently in the LA Times to this effect (on the race piece of it).

We’ve been “discussing” race and abortion for decades. A point comes where there’s really nothing left to discuss — we have disagreements, and have to move to action (generally political).

You’re a really smart guy with well-considered opinions, and always interesting to read. Sincere thanks for that.

I always argue dirty but I assure you the ardor is in the ideas. I’d fight to protect your right to your astute yet faulty opinions.

The American bishops have come about as close as you can without actually saying it that it is a grave moral evil (read mortal sin) for a Catholic to vote for a politician that does not advocate the reversal of Roe v. Wade, full stop. I have tried to show, admittedly clumsily, that (1) such a position is not within the proper scope of their apostolic authority and (2) it is possible for a conscientious Catholic to both bracket the controversial question of whether Roe v. Wade is good American law and still, through the exercise of their franchise, honestly believe that their vote will help realize the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life.

It is unclear whether a vote for Barack Obama falls within (2). As I alluded to in an earlier blog, the real perniciousness of Roe v. Wade from the point of view of Catholic moral imagination is that the decision enshrines at the heart of American law quite a strong dose of utilitarian selfishness and a positively dangerous desire to control all outcomes and assert the will in a way that would have made Milton’s Satan proud. John Paul II, for all his faults (and ecclesiologically they were many), recognized this rot leaking out like a mold into all areas of western law, such as welfare policy, regulation of death and dying, treatment of the handicapped and the infirm and penal policy and dubbed it, in his pithy actor’s way, the “culture of death.” The real question, in my view, is whether the reversal of Roe v. Wade is the sine qua non in combating that rot. The bishops seem to think so, I am not so sure.

One of the things that makes an objective discussion of the reversal of Roe v. Wade difficult is the disproportionate effect its reversal would have on women. SWMNBN has managed successfully to construct a narrative (contrived or not) that has strong appeal to many women that has the “liberating” effect of Roe v. Wade as its centerpiece. Whether it is possible to construct a counter narrative that shows that an acceptance of the anthropology enshrined in the Roe v. Wade decision is precisely the source of oppression and unequal treatment of all marginalized people remains an open question. I would hope that Mr. Obama is hinting at that type of productive discussion. As I say, the jury is still out. However, his speech on race, which was remarkable in my view principally because of its honest assessment of where we are, Obama’s examen, if you will, gives me hope.

Tim, your comments today about Iraq remind me of a satirical story I heard attributed to Voltaire. I’ve never found a reference for it, but I once heard that somewhere Voltaire has a fictional Jesuit fielding the question whether a Christian gentleman may ever accept a duel. Voltaire’s Jesuit supposedly responds that no, a Christian gentleman may not accept . . . but he may pretend to accept . . . and he may go on pretending right up until the pistols are drawn . . . at which point, naturally, he is entitled to act in self-defense.

Whether or not Voltaire wrote it, that seems to me to summarize your version of just war theory in a nutshell: No matter how we got there, we have to stay if leaving would be messy. I applaud the recognition that Iraqi lives count just as much as American ones — a position taken long ago on this blog but not to my knowledge by our government. But at bottom, aren’t you saying we are morally justified in continuing a war as long as it takes to achieve a victory so complete that no reprisals are possible after our departure? And doesn’t that justify endless war? Every war passes your test until such time as we can claim to have fought the war to end all wars. And any war, even an unjust one, can be prolonged as long as we consider it wholly apart from the reason for starting it. Heck, we can even throw in some words of opprobrium for the guy who started it, and still end up justifying continuation! I do believe that moral philosophy is primarily about deciding what to do rather than judging what’s been done, but I do not think that the intention that starts the whole chain of events can be ignored in the way you propose, even when the question is where we go from here.

Moving from the moral realm to the political one, Tim, I also think you smuggle some of same let-bygones-be-bygones assumptions into your comparison of McCain and Obama. You seem to think the really important question is what to do now. I disagree. I think the question of what to do now is really, really hard, so hard that I find views on both sides of the question reasonable. But the question of whether we should ever have gone in was really, really easy, notwithstanding the fact that 73% of Gallup’s respondents and most of our political establishment got it wrong. In my view, there was never any coherent justification for this war and anyone who thought it was a good idea at the time showed disqualifyingly bad judgment. Obama’s superiority on this issue derives not from any better plan for what to do in 2009, but from the perspicacity he demonstrated in 2002.

On abortion, however, I’m not any more convinced by Fitz’s position. I’m trying to think of something bad about reversing Roe v. Wade that would make this morally ambiguous, and I just can’t. Yes, there will be political controversies if it’s repealed, but I’m not aware of any moral theory that makes controversy intrinsically evil. Yes, there will be some adults living under laws that deny them choices they would like to have, but that’s true of virtually every law so if it counts at all it can’t count very strongly. What you may be saying, Fitz, is that a pro-choice Catholic who actually tried to do something to reduce the incidence of abortion might be a better Catholic than a guy who cynically cast symbolic votes to repeal this and ban that but never tried to do anything to help the mothers or give them options. If that’s what you’re saying, then I can agree. But if Obama claims to be that guy, he needs to show us where the beef is. I think right now the best he can do is say that he’s no worse than McCain on abortion because neither one of them will do anything to reduce it, and Obama is better on other issues. I don’t think that’s a hard case to make, but it’s also not terribly strong. I think Tim hints at a view I happen to share, namely that Obama might have got around to this by now if SWMNBN were not forcing him to stay left instead of running to the middle.

Finally, Tim, I found your abortion peroration in comment 8 moving. It has a strong deontological flavor, which I tend to like. But it is completely at odds with the rank consequentialism of your attitudes toward Iraq. In the one case, you’re against the evil of abortion even if the overall consequences of acting rightly are unfavorable. But in the other case, you’re basing your moral analysis not on whether we are right to prosecute the war, but on whether the consequences of prosecuting the war are more favorable than the consequences of beating our swords into ploughshares. This retreat to consequentialism is something you share with many millions who lack your intellectual gifts, and it opens the door to all kinds of mischief, particularly in the area of foreign policy. It’s easy to say that if we always chose peace we’d be speaking Persian, or Russian, or German, or whatever — and I think that’s basically true: We do have to fight sometimes. But it needs to be the national equivalent of self-defense, with physical invasion of our territorial integrity as the paradigm. It cannot be that war is justified whenever we think it will work out better. There is more I’d like to say on this, but I need a book off my shelf and I’m on the road so I’ll leave it at that for tonight.

Thanks to both of you for the spirited and thoughtful debate.

We are no longer in the same war in Iraq that we started. The adversary we pursued at the get-go is gone, and another has entered the stage. It is you who is doing the conflating on this one. Regardless of whether action #1 was a “just war”, that war is gone and the one currently being “waged” is a defensive one. Is there anyone (worth talking to) who is alleging, for example, that the “war” against Al Qaeda is not a “just war”?

From the standpoint of the Magisterium of the Church, the “lack of conflation” of abortion and infanticide exists purely at a definitional level, but beyond that of no importance. I see no evidence in ANYTHING I have read that there is an interesting moral difference between abortion and infanticide, from a Catholic standpoint.

The Church has made it abundantly clear that there is a moral imperative to overturn Roe v Wade, and has also made it clear that support of that decision is unambiguously un-Catholic. The Church went so far as to make it clear that is was OK to vote for politicians or initiatives that only incrementally improved the abortion situation, in case any Catholic was worried that voting for anyone who would tolerate any element of the abortion status quo was sinful.

It is certainly not difficult to source renegade Catholics or so-called Catholic intellectuals who espouse otherwise, just as it is possible to find Catholics who think references to or worship of “goddesses” are acceptable and consistent with Church teachings.

What we have here, on your part, is an instance of “Catholicism And”, a corollary to C.S. Lewis’ “Christianity And”, where for the person in question the real end is some other goal, and the religion ends up being a device in support of it (or perhaps somehow not in the way of it). In your case, a desired political outcome is trumping orthodoxy. And that is your right. You can order your allegiances anyway you see fit. And continue to call yourself whatever you please.

But as for myself, I prefer “Mere Catholicism”, and I have no desire to engage in personal reinventions of the club of which I am a sloppy but enthusiastic member. If tomorrow I decided either that I didn’t believe in the central themes of the club, or that I wanted to forcibly tailor it to my proclivities, I’d like to think I would have the courage simply to walk away from it.

There will never be a time when there is a moral imperative, as a Catholic, to consider the consequences of defending the right of the unborn to live. Never. The Freakonomics guy alleges that statistics prove that the single biggest factor in the enormous reduction in serious crime in the US since the 1970’s was Roe v Wade. This may well be true. When assessing the merits of its overturning, I assign a point value to this fact of exactly zero. When something is patently wrong, it must be stopped. EVERYTHING has consequences. Catholic doctrine is not utilitarian — it is about truth and justice.

You asked what I took to be a limited question, “If someone can explain to me how abandoning a people to civil war and genocide is within the parameters of Catholic morality, I’m all ears. ” I read that question as, is it possible to act morally within the Catholic tradition even if a foreseeable consequence of the action is evil? The answer to that very limited question is, unequivocally, yes.

From the point of view of Catholic moral theory, the question of whether our continuation of hostilities in Iraq is permissible hangs on the question of whether or not the war could be categorized as a just war. To answer that question we need to look at both the motives for the war (at best unclear, at worst, positively deceitful) as well as the causal circumstances around its waging (questionable that war was the only option and, in all fairness, one could not reasonably argue that we waged the war in self defense, not even GWB has tried that). Again, in Catholic moral theory, intent and causality matter. What is certainly the case is that one cannot conduct an analysis of the war under Catholic moral principles and “forget about whether we should have done it, and figure out how to make the best of things and take our responsibilities seriously”. Perhaps there is a moral philosophy where such an inquiry would be intelligible, unfortunately it is not Catholic moral theory in any recognizable form.

As to your first point, I note your conflation of the sin of infanticide and the sin of abortion. I find that short hand unhelpful at best and, despite some of the less than nuanced statements of certain bishops and the Catholic League to the contrary, the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not so conflate them. What the Catechism does make clear is that governments have a serious moral obligation to protect human life as sacred from the moment of conception to the moment of death. That is the infallible teaching of the Church which all Catholics are bound to accept and foster.

The Magisterium has gone further and taken the legal/political position that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are NECESSARILY destructive of that infallible moral teaching. There is certainly an ecclesiological and canon law question as to whether such a judgment is within the purview of the apostolic authority of the bishops, including the pope. I would argue strenuously that it is not. Therefore, it is that legal/political judgment that all Catholics (even us horrible “self identifying ones” (I may be fond of holes but you are quite fond of labels)) are not only permitted but it seems to me morally bound to question. If we are to determine whether the overturning of Roe v Wade will incrementally further the admittedly infallible teaching discussed above, I think we need to examine the consequences of that judicial decision. Permit me to doubt whether prosecuting women and doctors in an American criminal court will save one fetus? So, while discussion may be “pointless”, I agree with Mr. Obama that such discussion is necessary if we are to tackle the abortion question in any meaningful, moral way.

1) If Roe v Wade is overturned, we’ll be back to having the states regulate abortion. It will not be legal to get a late-term abortion in a lot of places (although it will still be possible to get a first trimester abortion in most places). The states will have to set the penalties for illegal abortions. Is this really all that complicated? I am amazed at the viewpoint that reinstituting penalties for infanticide is a bigger problem than permitting infanticide to continue! These seems to me to be a triumph of legal delicacies over Catholic morality.

Is there ANYONE in the Vatican food chain who agrees there is moral ambiguity here? ANYONE? Remember, we were talking about the CATHOLIC position, not the position of a self-identifying Catholic with a wider range of concerns.

2) It is far from clear that our current position is “causing objective moral evil” in Iraq. It is pretty clear that a precipitous withdrawal would cause substantial evil, both moral and practical. Your jumping analogy is way off the mark. We can debate the morality of having gone there in the first place, but abandoning the Iraqis to the kind of chaos Southeast Asia enjoyed after we pulled out of Saigon in 1975 is pretty unambiguously immoral.

This is Obama’s constant answer to the Iraq question. “Is it right to just pull out now, Barack?” “We never should have been there in the first place.” Not only does that retort not answer the question, it doesn’t even inform the debate.

It’s time we forget about whether we should have done it, and figure out how to make the best of things and take our responsibilities seriously. We have a moral obligation to protect our Iraqi allies.

You love that rule of holes, by the way, but when the guys up on solid ground are planning on filling it in, your suggestion turns out to be a bad one. You have to do something down there other than just tossing away your shovel.

1. Tim, you seem to take it as a given that the overturning of Roe v. Wade and its progeny (and perhaps its antecedents, see Griswold v. Connecticut) is the sine qua non of the Catholic legal view of the abortion question. I think that position is far from clear. How one would deal politically with actual abortions once the legal position is reclassified seems to me important, if not essential, to coming to the appropriate legal view. Unless of course one takes the interpretive view that trying to understand the consequences of a legal decision should have no bearing on coming to that legal decision. That would be an odd jurisprudence indeed.

2. As for Iraq, I think you discount the principle of double effect. If one takes the view that our current position in Iraq is causing objective moral evil (an admittedly complicated question) then it is morally permissible (perhaps even required) for us to withdraw even if that withdrawl may have evil consequences, provided we do not intend those consequences when we withdraw. A man who jumps from a ten story burning building when there is no other means of egress is not a suicide. Intent and causality matter in Catholic moral theory. In addition, it is not clear to anybody, and certainly it is not clear to our national intelligence agencies who have proven that, to them, nothing is clear, that the moral consequences of our withdrawl would be worse than the moral consequences of our staying. Finally, our continued presence in Iraq violates the first rule of holes, when you’re in one, stop digging.

I take it as a strong indication of Obama’s personal struggle on the issue that a screeching NY pro-choicer I know is very leery of the Senator from Illinois. She doesn’t trust him on abortion, whereas she views Hillary as rock solid.

“Productive discussions” is code for obfuscation, something which would be crucial to Obama if he wants to run as a Democrat but believes that there is something terribly wrong with abortion per se. The last thing in the world a Catholic should be hoping for is more pointless discussion that just chews up time and empowers the “stare decisis” crowd. We need to get this thing overturned while it’s still possible. What happens next is a matter of law. What a relief it would be to have it be such a matter after 35 years of hijacking from the bench.

The idea that a proper Catholic vote could go anywhere other than McCain mystifies me. Putting the “one issue issue” to the side for the moment, anyone who believes that a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq is moral is brain dead. If someone can explain to me how abandoning a people to civil war and genocide is within the parameters of Catholic morality, I’m all ears. Why are American lives worth so much more than foreign lives? How does that fit with general Democratic arithmetic?

And anyone who thinks Obama is the “turn the cheek” candidate on war isn’t paying attention, either. Obama is against the war in Iraq for practical reasons. He’s ready to bomb Pakistan, have tea with the monster of Teheran, and leave Israel to its own devices. From a pacifist Catholic viewpoint, that looks like a tie at best to me.

There is also no support for the notion that either Hillary or Obama are winning back Catholic points on the “family support” argument. Most of their policies are fundamentally family destructive. The traditional family — its structure, sacrifices, and value to society — are the last things on their minds. They pander to their secular base with the same vigor the radio nitwits pander to the guns, gays and God crowd.

This is going to be an excellent, difficult election given that the quality of candidates is guaranteed to be the best it has been since at least 1980. But where the Catholic vote should land — that seems to me to be a no-brainer. (Where it actually will go is another story, because “Catholic” is just a box on a survey.)