Deliver Us from Evil

Confused about Weapons of Mass Destruction? The chief US weapons inspector says “we were all wrong,” the CIA director says “we were right and wrong,” the President says “someone was wrong”; one commission will investigate here, another commission in England; most of our allies question our motives on Iraq; a former US cabinet member claims the administration decided to invade before intelligence on WMDs (right or wrong) was available.

What are we, as American Catholics, to think of all this? How are we to digest it, makes sense of it? Does our Catholic faith even matter in this?

It does—or, at least, it should. Above all, Catholic identity should be catholic—that is, universal. We Catholics belong to a global body: the Body of Christ. We belong to the whole human family that Christ came to save, not just to our tribe, community, gender, or country. Being Catholic, we must take into our hearts and minds the interest of the whole world—we must be, in some sense, "citizens of the world.” As Paul wrote: “there is no room for distinction between Greek and Jew, between circumcised and uncircumcised, or between barbarian and Scythian, slave and free man.”

This Catholic frame of reference alters the entire topic. Our Catholic identity means “framing” our views differently from other Americans. We must consider, not only threats to the US, but also threats to the world as a whole. The facts we already know become relevant in a new way, offering new answers to the familiar questions:

What are weapons of mass destruction? World War II began with Blitzkrieg and ended with the world’s first (and only) atom bombings. By the time of Vatican Council II (1962-1965), the Church’s attitude toward “the kind of weapons now stocked in the arsenals of the great powers” was well established:

Now that every kind of weapon produced by modern science is used in war, the savagery of war threatens to lead the combatants to barbarities far surpassing those of former ages…In many cases terrorist methods are regarded as new strategies of war.

So WMDs include more than Arab or Asian stocks of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. B-1 and B-52 bombers are WMDs, as are Patriots missiles, nuclear subs, aircraft carriers, cluster bombs, napalm—and especially ICBMs.

Who has the WMDs? We spent an entire year worrying whether a third-rate power, Iraq, had any WMDs at all—when all along we already knew that many other nations in volatile regions (Pakistan, India, Israel, North Korea) either possess or are developing nuclear weapons. We also knew that bio-chemical weapons can be used by cults (the subway attacks in Japan) or anonymous agents (the anthrax attacks in the US).

But the biggest WMD arsenals are all held by the major powers: United States, Russia, Britain, France, China. If our President is right that “a free nation is a nation that does not have weapons of mass destruction,” then France, England, Russia, and the US are not free.

What are the greatest WMD threats? For a citizen of the world, common sense tells us that the greatest threat is from the actual use of WMDs. Examples: the WWII firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, carpet-bombing in Vietnam, and Saddam's gassing of the Kurds.

The second greatest threat is from explicit, public threats to unleash WMDs. The Soviet bloc and NATO both made such threats the cornerstone of the Cold War nuclear stalemate, and to this day only the US refuses to renounce the threat of using nuclear weapons first.

A third major threat is from the arms race that develops and stockpiles WMDs. As Pope Paul VI pointed out in his 1965 address to the UN:

The terrible weapons that modern science has given you, long before they produce victims and ruins,…foster bad feelings, create nightmares, distrust and somber resolves; they demand enormous expenditures; they obstruct projects of solidarity and useful work; they falsify the very psychology of peoples.

The arms race has continued for 60 years, from the Manhattan project until now. Aside from threatening war, the arms race also makes both poverty and proliferation inevitable, as Vatican II noted:

As long as extravagant sums of money are poured into the development of new weapons, it is impossible to devote adequate aid to attacking the misery which prevails in the world. Instead of eradicating international conflict once and for all, the contagion is spreading to other parts of the world.

Small wonder that Vatican II ended up calling the arms race “one of the greatest curses on the human race.” Yet the US still develops new WMDs, and Russia recently held nuclear war games.

Compared to all these threats, the use of WMDs by “rogue states” and terrorists is a real threat, but a much less massive one.

What are the ethics of WMDs? Vatican II warned the world that “Men of this generation should realize that they will have to render an account of their warlike behavior,” and issued an unusually harsh conclusion:

“Every act of war directed at the indiscriminate destruction of cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.”

What is a rational policy toward WMDs? Putting the facts into a “Catholic frame” offers new clarity, because it denies the typical “American frame” that assumes WMDs are a problem only if they are in the wrong hands—meaning “dangerous people” like Saddam. The Catholic frame insists that WMDs themselves are dangerous, no matter who has them, and looks for hope in a future when they will be banished or, at the very least, minimized and regulated by an international arms control authority. Otherwise, nations possessing uncontrolled WMDs inevitably fuel other nations’ fear, envy and distrust, and the arms race resumes. This is the policy advocated by JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., John XXIII, the last several secretaries-general of the UN and the last three popes.

In this light, the world’s biggest challenge is to gain control over WMDs everywhere. This will have to include confronting the one nation that (1) has the largest WMD stockpiles, (2) is also the world’s largest seller of weapons to other countries, (3) still continues to develop new WMDs, and (4) has killed more people with WMDs in the last 50 years than anyone else. That nation, of course, is our own. The timeliest comment is from Jesus himself:

“Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

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