Warzones

Old Models of War

Rev dear Rev: Thanks for the opportunity to find a blog where Questions can be addressed in a way that is spiritual. I sometimes despair at my own anglican church as it seems to have nothing to say to protagonists and antagonists in the current war talk situation of the nations around the globe, usually because it has already thrown in its lot with minority pressure groups and immature protest song movements a la Vietnam. Does anybody benefit from a Long War, and if the Christians do get involved in such wars, are they really capable at the moment of making a contribution?

No, in a word - nobody benefits from a long war. Correct to say that many anglicans are kind of pre-iudicia stuck in the olde worlde of the Nineteen Sixties with the protest songs of the Bob Dylans and Joan Baezes of the world, while helas the one Faith that used to have something to say about War and something quite scientific to ponder about has herself gotten stuck as well since 2001, this time in old medieval models of War theory. All me to explain. The model of war in the relevant segment of the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church establishes four conditions under which the right to wage war can be conducted by an Army. Thus if we look at the Catechism we can see what the assembly of bishops assumed:

-  Just war must be defensive, and the damage threatened and perpetrated by the aggressor nation must be grave, certain, and long-enduring;

- All other alternative means of resolving the war situation must have been utilised and deployed, and emerged as inefficacious and impossible;

- Serious attempts and conditions must be imposed on the exit and end of the conflict;

- The use of weapons and means to continue the war must not be such as to be graver and more damaging than the aggression needing to be suppressed - modern means of total destruction have to be weighed in advance of the war being effectuated.

Now don't get me wrong, this is a brave statement, especially given the new situation in the objective world. But, sadly, the rubric under this segment of the Universal Catechism simply states - haec sunt elementa traditionalia - something which deprived Christian laymen and laywomen of their right to be at modern diplomatic tables when arguing with other nations and powers of a civil kind, and even with Terror cells like those forces in Afghanistan now conspiring to starve the people - liberal left regimes do not mind losing a few million families here and there, callous lot. But notate bene, this model of warfare deprived the Christians of their right of intervention. It also was unacceptably traditional and conservative and confirmed the older critiques of the Church in the Nineties from the Israelis at Mossad that its magisterial models were simply out of date and medieval. This model assumes and indeed explicitly features a very basic and largely simpleton medieval model of war activity, according to which:

- Army number one fires 5 arrows at defensive army number 2;

- Army number 2 fires back a proportionate response of 5 arrows too.

That is the proportionate model of warfare envisaged by the Just War Theory revealed in the relevant paragraphs of the Universal Catechism at CCC 2309, but it is a very simple and basic and primitive model of warfare that has simply not studied the Art of War by the modern practitioners in which things escalate very quickly in the run up to victory. Evidently the bishops were terrified about wars going nuclear very quickly and in the Cold War this might have been a legitimate worry, but it still produced excessive conservative analyses on the part of the bishops and the result was a disaster for catholics and christians working in the war industries. But, and this is a huge but, ever since 9/11 and 7/7 the Americans and Israelis and the British have argued that such absurd proportionate models of dispassionate and minimalist warfare do the Church no favours in its campaign to become relevant and useful to warring partners, since during this last timeframe from 2001 to 2021, Assymetric Terror Guided Warfare on Civilians has now reared its ugly head. Thus a number of developments have nowadays rubbished this medieval model of proportionate just war above in the CCC:

- Terrorism has produced unannounced and large scale violence on the civilian populations;

- The violence of terrorist warfare is unilateral and offence driven, no warnings with the moderns;

- There is nowadays abroad a First Strike and No Warning model of Terrorist Offense;

- Also, in the worst case scenarios of many modern Terror attacks, civilians not soldiers are targeted;

- Responders and Defence Counter-attacks are disenfranchised by the HRA activists for the Terror;

- Look at Wikileaks and Julian Assange, these have prevented any norm guided moral response;

- The HRA has meant the tying of hands of western governments in the response to Terror;

- This tying of hands of western governments has largely been accomplished by the woke and liberal Left.

So given all of the above and the constant threat of Exposee in the newspapers of the Left, it seems that a proportionate and adequate response to the Offense driven campaigns of the Terror cells is highly unlikely at times, the Universal Catechism became out of date within 10 years of its publication in 1997, and so we must conclude that proportionate responses from western One World Governance can only occur when the counter-threat of a carte blanche and posturing, preening, and presumptious criticism is neutralised, as happened during the Falklands War in 1982 when this time unlike the Vietnam War, the MOD took over the reportage of the campaign from the journalists and briefed them all from time to time on the MOD terms of the fight. The eventual demise of the American Army during the Vietnam War was in large part due to an out of control liberal Left media back home in California. The rest is history. Christians can come back to the negotiating tables of the nations of the modern world, but only when they have adopted a more mature attitude to warfare and when they have abandoned such simpleton schoolboy textbook models of modern war zones. Israeli Snatch Doctrine has changed everything. Pompeo Rendition Teams too. Catholics should be proud of their religion and their Church since Snatch Doctrine assumes a Populorum Progressio notion - that dictators are to be neutralised when the people are suffering from their policies. But the Just War doctrines of the theologians and their bishops and cardinals are not a great advert for science in theology. Too much lay anglican protest movement. Not enough catholicism. Still, the times, they are a changing.