Evil is as Evil does

Evil is as Evil does
2009/12/20
http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=454

William Pfaff

Paris, December 17, 2009 – When they heard Barack Obama’s Nobel
Peace Prize speech, a shiver of astonishment went through
conservative circles in the United States that this man, whom they
identify as a prototypical liberal, should have mentioned the
existence of evil. I would imagine this is because it has become an
easy assumption that liberals hold society's failures responsible for "evil" and regard the
word itself as an outmoded term used only by such as President George
W. Bush and his Christian Right supporters.

Yet they also know that Obama is a Christian – his relations
with the Christian preacher who converted him to religion was a major
subject of news and comment during the presidential primary campaign
in 2008. It’s hard to become a Christian without hearing something
about sinners and evil.

George W. Bush’s religious statements constantly reflected a
conviction that good is identified with the United States and evil
with its enemies. His final speech to the nation said: “America must
maintain our moral clarity. I have often spoken about good and
evil. This has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are
present in the world and between the two of them there is no
compromise.”

True enough in principle, but there is in this a trace of
something any good Christian should be aware of, the parable of the
Pharisee and the poor man. The poor man took his place in the back
of the synagogue, said to God that he was a sinner, and asked
forgiveness. The Pharisee placed himself in the front row and
reminded God of all the good things he had done, and his rich gifts
to the temple, saying that he thanked God that he was not like other
men.


Both Obama and Bush were saying in different ways that we
Americans are good and Taliban or jihadists are bad. But the reason
we are good is that we are we, and are justified in punishing them
because they are they. The practicalities of the matter are a little
different. Americans are the avengers of the fact that the Taliban
before 2001 gave hospitality to Osama bin Laden and his people, who
had been driven out of the Sudan by American demands on the Sudan
government.

The Taliban government in Afghanistan had no grievances against the
United States until Washington attacked Afghanistan in 2001 because
the Taliban were observing what they considered their code of honor,
to give hospitality and protection. Today they are trying to seize
back control of their country from the rival Tajik people (of the old
Northern Alliance), to whom the United States in 2002 had awarded
Afghanistan, in return for their help in taking it away from the
Taliban.

Barack Obama doesn’t like the Taliban because they oppress women and
attack American invaders. I don’t know what the theologians would
make of justice in all this, but it srikes me as a huge, mutually and
culturally ignorant, self-righteous, fanatically nationalist, and
ideological clash of societies, instead of any war between good and
evil.

David Brooks of the New York Times has written on Obama’s having
revived the thought of the great modern Christian realist Reinhold
Neibuhr, who rescued the American Protestant church in the 1930s to
1950s from the confusions produced by the coexistence of the Biblical
counsels of pacifism (“turn the other cheek”) and the exigencies of
fighting aggressive totalitarian movements: “take up your sword.”

The contemporary error is much simpler. It is that of the proud
Pharisee. We Americans wage “just wars” because we are good and
righteous people who therefore have the right to use our overwhelming
army, its bombers, rockets, drones, and mines, to strike and awe
people, invade their countries, whom we know to be bad because they
use insurrection, conspiracy and terrorism to resist us, and continue
religious practices that displease us.

The problems of just wars are not new. In the western Christian
tradition they go back to the theologians Aquinas and Suarez. It was
said that to be just, a war’s cause must be to vindicate an undoubted
and internationally recognized crime; that all peaceful means
(negotiations) must have been tried in vain; the good to be done must
clearly outweigh the evil that will be done by the war; there must be
reasonable hope that in the end justice can be achieved for both
sides; the means are licit (weapons must be limited and legitimate);
and international law must be observed. By these criteria, I don’t
see any just wars anywhere these days.

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