Walking the 'Red Line' in Syria

by Bowman Walton

Now you know a US military secret that the Commander-in-Chief himself learned only last week-- the British Parliament has a clearer veto on US warmaking than the American Congress does. Christians in both countries who pray for peace in Syria should ponder President Obama's 'red line' against states gassing their citizens, but first a word about politics.

How did the 'special relationship' come to this ironically counter-revolutionary result? The direct answer is-- democracy. American war planners would be glad to rely on the firepower of the Royal Navy, of course, but bear in mind that the debate is over ships firing Tomahawk missiles at some probably empty command posts as a warning to President Assad and as an example for others. The more salient fact is that American voters in both our major parties normally oppose go-it-alone military operations and will especially oppose one not joined by Great Britain. Voters who think that way see our allies as the 'reality check' on presidential warmaking that Congress has failed to provide. So whilst the White House is furious with No. 10 for botching the sales job in the Commons last week, it is precisely as a check on such West Wing presumption that US voters have insisted on having a real alliance with a real democracy. As the closest military ally the US has, the UK has the credibility to simply say "no" and stop things, at least for a while, which is a very special relationship indeed.

In fact, even before the Second Iraq War, news junkies here followed the debates in Westminster as closely as those on Capitol Hill. Since the British government was more candid than the American one-- you had real intelligence estimates, debates, and leaks; we had dubious informers, secret dossiers for peeking senators taking turns, and a vice president trying to run spies in Africa-- we followed yours a bit more closely to find out what was really going on. Even in those years just after 9/11, polls still showed that George W. Bush's political support for going to war in Iraq was contingent on some form of allied approval, preferably that of the UN Security Council. Since that time, use of the veto by China and Russia has eroded the Security Council's credibility with US voters, so that the power to say "no" seems to have passed to the UK, which means, once one thinks of it, to Parliament.

Somebody did not think of it. Although the US Constitution is clear that "The Congress shall have power... to declare war," votes on war here have badly damaged political careers-- John Kerry and Hillary Clinton both voted "aye" to war in Iraq-- and so as recently as the Libya matter, presidents and complicit congresses have often avoided them. Voters here tolerate their lack of representation in a president's warmaking only so long as the mission is urgent, brief, and seconded by trusted allies. But while it is not easy to see how ships at sea firing missiles into Syria could lead inexorably to boots on the ground in Iran, such an outcome would be out of the bounds as voters see them.

Therefore once your parliamentarians voted "no" on Syria, our congressmen and senators realised that voters back home could someday ask why they had never debated an act of war that was even debated in the House of Lords. And on second thought, the President saw the peril of unauthorised 'gunboat diplomacy' against an Iranian client state whilst restive 'Tea Party' Republicans look for a way to satisfy the resentful id of their base by impeaching him. After all, David Cameron has just set an uncomfortably good example of democracy at work by respecting the will of his own lower House. So the President-- after informally asking its permission to formally ask its permission-- asked Congress to vote on a strike in Syria. Meanwhile, off that country's coast, warships wait with ready missiles, which concentrates the mind wonderfully.

So let us think about the issues posed by the proposed response to the gassing. Our minds are meeting in two 'special relationships' actually, and if the little word 'we' is problematic in places below, that is my actual point. Still, no fewer than seven considerations arise when we think about responding to the gassing of Syrians by their government--

(1) Rwanda, Rwanda, Rwanda. Debates on war often turn on historical analogies, and most Christians in both our countries will think first of Iraq, especially when trouble has an address in the Middle East. But the 'red line' against gassing civilians reflects Washington's guilty memories of past inaction in the face of evil-- Saddam Hussein's postwar attack on the Kurds, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, genocides in Rwanda and East Timur. Historians of these catastrophes write chapters excoriating American and Western inaction precisely because only our armed forces are deemed capable of deterring, stopping, or at least punishing such crimes. To them the main moral hazard we face today is that of taking satisfaction in our opposition to war as Sarin waits for the next Syrian neighbourhood.

(2) Is it just to use lesser acts of war to somewhat deter the greater crimes of states against humanity? For this is the most that a sea-based missile strike is even meant to accomplish. Blair and Bush were mocked for making a sort of 'social gospel' case for a vast war that would not just liberate Iraq but pacify and perfect the Middle East. But Barack Obama has read Reinhold Niebuhr on 'moral man in immoral society,' and believes in deft uses of power that do no more than mitigate the worst of evils in a fallen world. By historical standards, his 'red line' against using chemical weapons against civilians is disturbingly permissive of state-sponsored evil, but it reflects the limitations in what the power he has can do.

(3) How do we assess the proportionality of means to ends when the means, though quite lethal, are also quite small? We have understood since the middle ages that great battles with archers, catapults and foot soldiers demand great justifications, but this president would prefer that the enemies of man flee, not from his artillery, bombers, and divisions but from his drones, guided missiles, and special units. In the Second World War, the strategic bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki stretched just war 'proportionality' in one direction with weapons so devastating that scarcely any cause could justify using them. War, though more terrible, became more rare. Today, Obama's wrath from the sky on small bands of the wicked has stretched proportionality in the other direction with effects so targeted that the threshold for using it is suspiciously low. War become so tiny threatens to become more commonplace. When weapons labs perfect them, what will be the proportional casus belli for lethal drones the size of birds or fleas?

(4) How have we chosen to prioritise universal human rights? Lord Sacks has spoken eloquently against Western indifference to the 'ethnic cleansing' of Christians from the Middle East. Meanwhile, some are concerned enough about the abstract evil of a state using gas against its citizens to at least consider military action to deter it. Clearly, both ethnic cleansing and gassing civilians are grave violations of human rights. Why then the difference in our responses to the two? The dispute about the use of chemical weapons underscores our silence about the ethnic cleansing. And as we consider destruction in Syria, we might ask-- what loyalties could draw us back for reconstruction when the civil war ends?

(5) In the face of evil, do we now prefer protest to action? Today, Christians admire prophetic figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Dom Helder Camara, or Desmond Tutu who have advanced justice largely as powerless yet inspiring beacons for gospel values. However, Christians of the generations just before us admired Dietrich Bonhoeffer

and Dag Hammarskjöld

for forthrightly facing the dilemmas of power and acting to stop evil. The question is whether our recent preference for visionaries and prophets over decision-makers and diplomats has become a default choice for protest over intervention in great humanitarian crises. And again, the historical analogy we choose matters, since prophets have been effective against evil within orderly societies marred by a great injustice, but not so effective when evils lie between societies or on territories reduced to chaos. A Christian NGO on the ground in Syria will need all the moral capital it can find, but it will not likely be effective in prophecy. One can question, of course, whether 'effectiveness' is quite the calling. Roger Hurding seems on point when he suggests in Five Paths to Wholeness that we need models for the holiness of those who are in Christ, not as prophets or politicians, but as 'wise ones.' The desert fathers chronicled hermits in remote places far from Caesar's reach who had the charismatic authority to make peace among warring neighbours and villages. We need to rediscover that charism today.

(6) If God is King, who do we think these governments are anyway? Most of us are familiar with Tom Wright's criticism of some pretensions of the 'War on Terror,' and most of us relate that criticism back to his view that, on one hand, the early Church saw Christ as the universal governor that Caesar could only pretend to be, and on the other hand, the Romans quite rightly saw that this was subversive and persecuted Christians. It is not clear to me whether Wright was objecting only to the rhetoric of 'evil' employed-- much as abolitionists once employed it against the slave trade-- or whether he was also objecting to the power that exterminates terrorists wherever ears in the sky may hear them hiding. But the question remains-- in our participation in liberal states working out universal justifications for meting out death and destruction, are we neglecting the Kingship of God somehow? To avoid that temptation, my Amish neighbours refused even to vote, reasoning that even that participation in human coercive power compromised their witness to God. Why, exactly, are they wrong?

(7) And if we are in Christ, just who do we think we are? Apart from the way we see states throughout the world, there is the question of the way we see other parts of the Body of Christ throughout the world. In my country, there are Evangelicals whose eschatology has led them to a passionate commitment to the State of Israel-- one that political strategists and policymakers in Washington and the Middle East take into account-- but not as yet to any comparably visible concern for the persecuted communities that first read the letters of St Paul and speak to this day the language of Jesus. Ironically, the persecutors of our brothers and sisters in the Middle East seem to have a stronger ecclesiology than we do to the extent that they often see us all as one Body of Christ. The concern is not simply that this neglect leads to tragic consequences for Christians in the Middle East, but that it points to something unsound in our practise in the West that we have not seen in ourselves.

Whether our governments ultimately draw the 'red line' in Syria or not, Christians-- we-- will find the concept of it a tightrope to walk on.