Despite all the talk about this being a just war—never has a president inclined his head so often to the moralists—the Gulf war is really nothing less than war the old-fashioned way. It is being waged without real or final restraints, and it is being carried by its own momentum. As such, it is neither just nor right. 

There was, without doubt, justification for this war. As authorized by the UN, it was intended to liberate Kuwait and to restrain a tyrant. Noble goals. Necessary goals. But as in the Agincourt battle scene in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, once begun, everything becomes mud, confusion, and blood. For as it happens, this is not simply a war about forcing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. It is a war about oil, about Western hegemony in the “new world order,” about establishing the preeminence and stag- gering power of technological weaponry, and, at bottom, about a weakened U.S. regaining its sense of self-confidence. 

• Waged without restraints. “This will be no Vietnam.”“We will not have one hand tied behind our backs like last time.” “No price is too heavy to pay to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.” In sum, this is the Bush policy on proportionality. It forswears the use of nothing: gas, germs, nuclear weapons. If need be, this war will be prosecuted with the full extent of American power. We have it on the president’s word. Anyone who believes otherwise is naive. The only constraint—are you listening, bishops?—is not morality but public opinion. And to govern and direct that, all information on the war has been skill- fully tailored to maintain public support at home. When events—such as the Ash Wednesday shelter/bunker bombing in Baghdad—or CNN updates have intruded, thereby threatening to raise questions about the war’s conduct or progress, the government has worked assiduously to contain the damage. Only high-ranking officers and defense department officials release news on this war, it seems, presenting their information in sanitized video packages and with abstract terminology (killed is “KIA,” war is “storm”).
   
• Carried by its own momentum. Billed as a war to liberate Kuwait, the purpose of the Gulf war has devolved to the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the crushing of Iraq’s military capability. The Iraqi despoliation of Kuwait, its firing at Saudi and Israeli cities, and its fouling of the Gulf’s waters have been mirrored by the coalition’s bombardment of Iraqi cities, the contamination of water and sewer lines, and the destruction of hospitals, schools, bridges, trucks. Eye has not yet seen nor ear heard the full extent of the devastation. And as in Vietnam, the American public probably never will learn of it all. The conduct of the war has rendered the initial UN terms of engagement null. We have made waste of Iraq to save Kuwait. And the overriding concern has become only that we win, convincingly; that we come out of it with rewards richer than the liberation of Kuwait; that the war not end with anyone anywhere questioning America’s resolve in the immediate future. As Mr. Bush told a convention of religious broadcasters last month, defending this war as just: “When this war is over, the U.S., its credibility and its reliability restored, will have a leadership role in helping to bring peace to the rest of the Middle East.” 

If today the United States can claim less and less economic muscle, we have proved without a doubt that we can still make war. The logistical accomplishments in the Gulf mobilization were unprecedented, and the technical achievements rivaled those of any war-making undertaking in history. Perhaps to provide some of the latter with a more human touch, last month Dick Cheney and Colin Powell autographed a pair of GBU-27 bombs while at a Stealth fighter bomber base in Saudi Arabia. GBU- 27s are two-thousand-pound bombs which are able to penetrate more than six feet of reinforced concrete. Several days after the signing party, Stealth bombers from the same base attacked the bunker/shelter in Baghdad. Over three hundred people died. According to eyewitness accounts, the GBU-27s “cut through the building like butter.” 

The lesson of the Gulf war is now indeed clear: America has been preparing for war for a generation and we can do the job. With little loss of American blood (held to “acceptable levels”), we can strike almost anywhere in the world, massively and convincingly. The political and psychological implications are immense, and, for some, reassuring. 

These words are not written to in any way to justify appeasement or to acquiesce in the arrogance of aggressors. But they imply that in our impatience—in our abandonment of effective, sustainable, and proportionate sanctions—we made a fundamental error, an error that will have geopolitical and moral ramifications for generations to come. In Iraq, over half the population is below the age of fifteen. They will not forget the deadly cost of our smart bombs and surgical strikes. But we are likely to forget tomorrow. We will never be shown their suffering in depth, nor have we experienced a similar devastation in our lives and families. Thus, we as a people are likely to repeat our folly. No wonder the Psalmist prayed that he be delivered from his unknown sins. 

Ours is not a religion of abstractions, even if it finds Aristotelian, Augustinian, or Thomistic distinctions useful. It is incarnational, a faith grounded in personhood, in the body and the blood. As Lent is meant to remind us, our faith is concerned with redemption and repentance, never with self-justification. And like it or not, our Scriptures teach that in his own actions, Jesus chose self-suffering rather than recourse to force. He refused the sword, even to protect his followers—who were initially scattered. Yet his blood freed them, as it did his torturers; frees us, as it does our enemies. We have yet to understand the significance of it all.