This is not a holy war: but let us try at least to make it a just one

NOT FOR SEVERAL centuries has any major conflict — and that that is what faces us can surely now be doubted by nobody — been so clearly defined in religious terms. Most obviously, this is true of those who committed — and those who sympathised with — last week's massive blow against the United States, the nation which is for Muslim fundamentalists "the Great Satan". According to a spokesman, "Osama Bin Laden thanked Almighty Allah and bowed before him" when he heard the news of the brutal carnage in New York and Washington.
But Muslim extremists have not been the only ones to see last week's appalling events as having been brought about with divine approval: some Christian fundamentalists in America — including such prestigious figures as the televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson — have declared that the destruction of the world trade centre was God's retribution on America for its encouragement of abortion and homosexuality. This astonishing judgment is supported by Old Testament references to occasions when God used Israel's enemies to chasfise His chosen people for their faithlessness.
At a purely popular level, the identification of terrorism with the Muslim religion has led to a deeply sinister spate of attacks, in both the USA and here in Britain, on mosques and on Muslim individuals. In Twickenham, an Afghan taxi driver was paralysed from the neck down after being beaten and kicked by three passengers. In America, an Indian immigrant was shot dead because of his supposed physical resemblance to Osama Bin Laden.
IT GOES WITHOUT saying that Catholics — who in some parts of these islands have regularly suffered the injustice of being supposed, because of their religion, to be in some way aligned with terrorist organisations — must firmly repudiate such redneck tendencies to identify the Muslim religion with sympathy for the aims of the various fundamentalist groups who have declared a holy war against the United States.
What none of us can do, however, is to deny
that there is a war, in the sense that we are now involved in a confrontation which may take years to resolve, and which will almost certainly involve armed conflict at some stage. Unlike our enemies, we cannot describe this war as a holy one: its prosecution by the West is, nevertheless, at the very least entirely justifiable, since inaction is simply not an option. War has been declared by an enemy against whom we must now defend ourselves: and it takes little intelligence to understand that given the mentality of those with whom we are in conflict, it is a war which has to end in their destruction.
But how? Who are they? Where are they? United States policy appears to be heading towards the working hypothesis that since terrorists cannot live without some form of state support, the states that harbour them are legitimate military targets. In the words of Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan "without the things that only states can provide — sanctuary, intelligence, logistics, training, communications, money — even the Bin Laden network and others like it could manage only the occasional car bomb." Perle's conclusion is stark: "those countries that harbour terrorists — that provide the means with which they would destroy innocent civilians — must themselves be destroyed."
What does that mean in practical terms? Does it mean bombing such nations "back into the stone age"? Is there really no other way in which the coming war can be fought? In his column today, John Gummer suggests that "If [the Americans] bomb indiscriminately or on the off-chance, then the free world will not uphold justice but instead make revenge respectable". That is not, of course, what Perle is arguing for: his intention is not revenge but the destruction by all necessary means of the terrorists' support system. But though the intention may not be revenge, the effect will surely be the same, and so will the aU but ineradicable bitterness and resentment and the problems for the future they will bring.
Ti-us WILL NOT BE a "holy war": but is there really no way in which it can be at least a "just war"? It is fashionable to say that the theory of the just war was formulated in a simpler age and has no application to modem conditions. But St Thomas Aquinas's criteria have surely never seemed more relevant, or their adoption as working principles more urgent (incidentally, they clearly establish the current "holy war" against America as patently not a just war). There should be, said St Thomas, a legitimate authority and a just cause. War should be a last resort, and should be formally declared. There should be a reasonable hope of success, proportionality between the evil produced by the war and the evil hoped to be avoided or the good hoped to be achieved, and there should be a right intention (so, no revenge). There should also be — and this must surely be demanded by every Catholic Bishop in the Nato countries — immunity of non-combatants from direct attack, and proportionality of tactics and of the means to the end at which the war is aimed. These criteria do not, of course, render the conflict they constrain in any sense a holy one: their purpose is to limit the harm the war might otherwise do.
The fact that there had not, as we went to Press, yet been any military strike was being seen as a sign that the likelihood of speedy (and probably ineffective) revenge attacks was receding. Our hope must now be that the objectives of Western policy — the eradication of the terrorists' capacity for death and destruction — can be achieved by surgical strikes carried out by specialist forces rather than by the massive use of American military might. But we cannot be confident that such an outcome is certain, or even possible. We must live in hope: and we had better pray, too, as never before.