The Christian Right Jean Bethke Elshtain

I have been taking advantage of the Forums at BYU. I think it is a wonderful way to hear different points of view. I realize BYU will not bring anyone too outrageous, but they have brought some very brilliant and accomplished scholars. On most Tuesdays I walk to the Marriot Center to hear an academic speak about their focus of study.

Sometime in October I listened to Jean Bethke Elshtain address her take on stem cell research and abortion. It was fascinating to hear her defend her pro-life and anti-stem cell research position in a logical way. This was the first time a conservative person didn't only focus on the fact that "babies are dying! Don't you care?!" She, with the help of Elder C. S. Lewis, made it a philosophical question. For example "what is the value of a life?" and "what is human?" This stuff is right up my alley. Before you start wondering about my possible conversion, I must let you know that I did disagree with her on some points. She conveniently only brought up anecdotes that supported her position. This may have been because of time. But, it made her presentation seem like she was over simplifying the issues.
You can hear her speech: http://speeches.byu.edu/index.php?act=browsespecialized&mediatype=&year=.5

You can also read about her theories about justifiable war and Iraq.

Jean Bethke Elshtain Responds
By Jean Bethke Elshtain
Summer 2006
Whether in agreement or demurral, one reads Michael Walzer with interest and respect. His work is a welcome contrast to the vicious rhetoric of accusation and denunciation that is so much a part of our public life. The basics of Walzer’s argument are straightforward: is regime change a just cause for war? (Presumably this means can regime change as such ever be a just cause.) My answer to this question is, No, not in and of itself as an abstract proposition. However, in a given case and in light of other factors and additional information, regime change may well be one feature of the deployment of justifiable force. This is not equivocation but a recognition that the just war tradition does not present a series of boxes to check, and, should you get more than a given number, then war it is. Just war doesn’t function like that, as Walzer points out in his classic work, Just and Unjust Wars, a text that has played a central role in the revival of just war thinking in our time. The just war tradition is thick with the soot of history and cannot be wrenched free from particular cases, as Walzer insists. It is true that regime change was not a stipulated goal at the onset of World War II. As the war went forward, regime change came into focus as a compelling and legitimate war aim. (Even as bringing an end to chattel slavery gained momentum as a war aim during the Civil War, although it wasn’t the casus belli at the outset.) It would be odd for someone to claim that “just cause” in the Second World War was besmirched because regime change wasn’t articulated from the get-go as a sine qua non for the use of force. The fact that regime change is not articulated as overriding at the outset does not invalidate an otherwise strong case. Whatever one thinks of regime change in Iraq, the argument that the use of force in such matters is always illegitimate unless it is undertaken collectively is false, as the UN charter demonstrates. Any argument against a nation’s use of force, including pushing for regime change, must proceed on other grounds if it is to be compelling. Walzer recognizes this in a way many of the loudest voices do not.I dissent somewhat from Walzer’s claim that in the classical formulation of just war “aggression is regarded as the criminal policy of a government, not as the policy of a criminal government.” This gets tricky. It may not be a rule, but there is a very strong probability that a criminal regime—whether Fascist, communist, or Baathist—will engage in criminal policies externally and internally. Such regimes “bear watching.” This leads us to ask what criteria are deployed to determine whether the internal abuses of a regime are of an egregious and systematic sort that may—if other factors are present—trigger intervention. Here we arrive at “humanitarian intervention.” But under whose auspices, given what criteria, and to what end or ends? This is deeply contested, as is the norm of a “responsibility to protect” (RTP) now proffered routinely as an international duty of a sort. RTP derives from a hard-hitting document issued under the auspices of the United Nations that declares that a UN member state or group of states may be justified in intervening in the internal affairs of a criminal or rogue state engaged in systematic and egregious crimes against its own people or an identifiable portion of its people. For some of us, RTP was important in evaluating Iraq and the use of force.Walzer’s overall position in these matters might be described as “minimalist universalism.” For example, a nation or group of nations may have just cause to deploy force to stop genocide, but the same cannot be said for the practice of genital sexual mutilation. That disturbing custom, and how to modify or end it, is best left in the hands of a given country and open to pressure from international human rights groups. This is Walzer’s position as I understand it. There is no “bright line” here. Each case must be evaluated along the entire menu of just war considerations. Additionally, cultural transformation is not so easily severed from political change—as Walzer appears to suggest. The cultural transformations attendant upon regime change in post–World War II Japan demonstrate the legitimacy that enforced cultural transformation may acquire over time. The character of the Iraqi state told us a lot about the nature of the Saddam regime and the culture out of which it emerged. These political-cultural factors were not irrelevant to the negative assessments of that regime by several American administrations. To be sure, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) featured foremost in the denunciations by then-President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who declared that Saddam’s Iraq possessed sufficient WMD to “destroy all of humanity.” Given that the nature of the Iraqi state was such that effective internal transformation could not be anticipated, such statements played into fears about WMD and assessments of Saddam’s willingness to use them, given his horrific attack on the Kurds. The culture of a “republic of fear” is surely relevant to how one makes determinations about the use of force.THIS MEANS THAT the Iraq case is something very different from the possession of WMD as a stand-alone fact. Here, the empirical record—I’ve mentioned the Kurds, but one must include the brutal suppression of the Shiite uprising, the destruction of the way of life of the Marsh Arabs, the horror of Saddam’s children’s prisons, systematic torture as a policy, arbitrary arrest, and on and on—all figure into how one weighs concerns about possession of WMD. Significant as well, and adding additional heft to the WMD issue, was Iraq’s defiance of the terms of the truce ending the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Any state in breach of peace terms and believed to possess WMD will trigger a more negative assessment than a relatively transparent democratic state not similarly in breach and in defiance. Or, for that matter, a very nasty regime that has, up to this point, stood down from terrorizing its own population systematically or actually using WMD. Regime change in Iraq cannot be severed from these, and other, considerations. Walzer throws down the gauntlet to those of us who supported intervention by claiming that the “post–Persian Gulf War containment system” prevented both WMD development and mass murder. But who knew for sure? Unless Clinton, Gore, Albright, and Prime Minister Tony Blair, as well as President Bush, were, or are, all “lying,” there was sufficient compelling evidence of WMD to raise the level of concern and enhance the case for intervention.I am not convinced that the mass murder question is settled by observing that the gassing of the Kurds and the slaughter of Shiites, together with other egregious abuses, were all in the past. There are other forms of culpable killing; for example, the fact that by UN figures as many as eighty thousand Iraqi children per year were dying as a direct result of Saddam’s “gaming” of the oil for food and medicine program—a shameful episode in the history of a shameful regime. As well, embargo and sanction policies, although they may be justifiable in specific cases, are not necessarily ethically preferable to the use of force. The burdens of these policies fall disproportionately on a society’s most defenseless members: that is another debate for another day. For now, the upshot of my remarks is that a regime’s continuing policies, should they lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent victims as a matter of policy, not unavoidable happenstance, must be taken into account as one fleshes out a case for—or against—intervention. Walzer’s claim that containment was a better option in the Iraq case than war is a prudential judgment flowing from the factors he takes into account and how he evaluates each. If one values sovereignty highly, as Walzer does, preventive war is very difficult to justify, but not impossible. Walzer is correct that there are occasions when “preventive force” can be justified. I believe that, on balance, the 2003 war against Saddam’s Iraq was one of these; Walzer does not. This is a “family quarrel.” I suspect that I am giving heavier consideration to the earliest formulations of the just war tradition (for example, St. Augustine’s), which argued that an outside party may be justified in intervening in a state in order to prevent certain harm to the innocent. Fascinatingly, these early formulations connect directly to the current norms of humanitarian intervention and RTP.TWO FINAL POINTS: it is annoying, as Walzer points out, that many of the Western European leaders calling vociferously for maintenance of the containment regime were unwilling to put their shoulders to the wheel by way of personnel, equipment, and treasure in order to ensure its enforcement. The elites and leaders in Western Europe present a troubling picture. Much of the time they seem not to be at their posts. It is vexing, to put it mildly, when the (alleged) moral high ground is seized by those prepared for the United States to provide for the defense of the West generally as well as its own security, even as anti-Americanism is rampant and American culture is treated with burning contempt.The hard fact of the matter is that many alternatives to the use of force cannot be implemented or even initiated until coercive force is deployed to stabilize a situation. You cannot use “soft power” effectively in the thick of a situation akin to Hobbes’s war of all against all. Although I do not share Walzer’s overall hopefulness where “indirection” is concerned, I join hands with him in a commitment to minimal justice for all beleaguered peoples, tormented by the brutal, that we too readily ignore or forget.