Should Christians Support U.S. Involvement in Syria’s Civil War? (by Alan Cross)

I’m not sure the value of Just War Theory anymore. Look at how JWT was used in the lead up to the Iraq War. Folks on both sides were using JWT and reaching very different conclusions.

I think we have a responsibility to –at least — try to protect. And that’s not a responsibility to aid the “good guys” (because, like has been said here, who is the good guy?) but a responsibility to protect the innocent — future children from being the victims of chemical weapons. I just don’t think civilized societies can tolerate that type of warfare and intentional targeting (w/ intent to terrorize) civilians.

That’s my two cents – and I’m gonna guess that I’ve probably been one of the more anti-war folks to frequently comment here at Voices.

A president who gasses his own people versus an opposition backed by those who blow up our people. This one is pretty simple: we should stay out of it.

I’d consider Grotius’ advice on war here: “If, from the moral point of view at any rate, the matter under consideration seems to have an equal effectiveness for good and for evil, it is to be chosen only if the good has somewhat more of good than the evil has of evil. That is what Aristides states thus: ‘When the good is less than the evil, it is better to give up the good.’ In his description of a large-souled man, Andronicus of Rhodes says that he will not incur dangers for any and every cause, but only for causes that are of the highest importance.”

Considering the involvement of Islamic fundamentalists fighting Assad, and the intense dangers of supporting these militants (see Afghanistan versus the Soviets), the evil of creating more Jihadists seems clear and frightening.

Furthermore, I can’t remember St. Augustine’s stand regarding rebellion. I know Grotius’ rejected almost all rights of subjects to rebel citing Hebraic custom, the Gospel, etc. If Augustine is similar to Grotius’ then his own structure would prohibit helping a rebellion on the grounds that it is inappropriate use of force.

While I agree with the Just War philosophical process, I want to offer that it is an abstraction and as an abstraction it causes people to not stay viscerally in contact with the real reasons for going to war. To paraphrase Von Clausewitz, military action is an alternative to diplomatic action in order to cause an opponent to return to diplomatic action.

So what are the national interests of the United States in the Middle East?

1. Support for Israel. I won’t digress to discuss this as evangelicals generally view the modern state of Israel as at least a partial fulfillment of at least the Ezekiel prophecies regarding the nation of Israel. I also won’t defend the modern semi-secular state of Israel’s socialism or it’s handling of Israeli Arabs. But I presume that the typical Southern Baptist understands and agrees with the basic concept that those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed.

2. A desire for peace in the Middle East. This encompasses U.S. relationships with each country and specifically addresses the relationship between Israel and its surrounding Muslim-majority and especially Arab-majority neighbors.

3. Support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and specifically for member Turkey as they deal with the spillover impacts from the Syrian Civil War. We have a treat obligation to participate in Turkey’s defense if requested by Turkey.

4. General international welfare. This included both the use of toxic materials by Saddam Hussein against the people of Iraq as well as Bashir Assad’s use against the people of Syria. And more generally it is the question of how long the international community stands by when a national leader is committing atrocities–whether with WMDs or just through starvation or mass murder by other means. Now this specific one goes against the status quo mentality of the UN that basically draws sovereignty lines around the nation state and essentially prevents interference. Russia and China are states that protect the concept of nation state sovereignty because they’re the bad guys and they like to support the bad guys in opposition to the national interests of the U.S. and of the civilized world and especially the Western world in general.

Now if you’ve followed what I’ve written so far, you are beginning to notice the weakness of the “Just War” framework. It conceives things in moral terms instead of political/diplomatic terms. The Geneva Conventions generally have the same failing which means that those who subscribe to those Conventions purportedly hold themselves to a higher moral standard than those who do not. I think of this as an excellent ethical design, but in reality it generally is a meaningless gesture. For example, what credit does the US get for following the Geneva Conventions when it tries to adhere to them but opponents don’t? We get blamed for not following them in how we handle improperly dressed enemy combatants who have an obligation to either wear a uniform or risk execution as spies.

So we have to realize that the Just War framework ties our hands without issuing useful demands against opponents. And when you tie your hands unilaterally, that means they might be permitted to commit atrocities against you without a reasonable method of responding. And if you subscribe to such limitations, then what you are sacrificing isn’t your ability to “commit war”. You’re sacrificing your ability to use military methods to force opponents to the diplomatic table.

It’s in essence a prissy act which conveys weakness to others and without any real value other than feeling good about yourself. So I guess the question isn’t whether Christians should support the war against Syria or not. I think the question is what we risk by not supporting it with respect to the continuation of the United States as a successful and sovereign nation state.

In reality, I think the direct risk to the continuation of the United States as a nation state is relatively low from Syria being a bad actor. But the various other accumulated negative effects are not trivial. Not supporting Israel potentially results in an effort to wipe them off of the face of the earth (what the previous president of Iran consistently recommended).

Not directly addressing the need for peace with military might results in a continuation of a potential conflagration that turns into a region-wide war–very likely enveloping Israel, ally Turkey, and other regional allies–that potentially has eschatological implications (not that such concerns should be high on our list of concerns, but they should be in the back of our minds.)

NATO is an alliance looking for a problem to solve at this point, and it arguably has been mostly ineffective in the past two decades. But they have supported the U.S. especially in Afghanistan and I would argue that with a more aggressive Russia that it is in our interests to not only solidify NATO but also to expand it further. This includes supporting either continuing economic ties with Turkey or supporting Turkey’s entrance into the European Union (which is unlikely as long as Edrogan is taking them towards Islamic “nationalism”, but I digress.)

But the most important of the points is “what happens if the US does nothing about Syria’s use of WMDs against its own people?” The USA will not cease to exist as a nation. But the international system that the US led to create–first by proposing the League of Nations–which we didn’t join–and then by hosting the United Nations will continue to deteriorate in diplomatic and strategic value. Now I’m not an advocate nor an apologist for the UN. But having it is still arguably better than not having it in spite of all of its warts.

And unless one of the nation states of the world steps up and defends not the international system of “law” but the concept of common decency–which is a MORAL STANDARD–then you encourage international lawlessness.

In addition, a defeat and unseating of Bashir Assad breaks Iran’s direct ties to Hezbollah and is a strategic defeat for Iran. It supports the pluralistic government of Iraq and dents Iran’s influence there. It supports the Sunni Arab crescent and at least reduces their nervousness at the ascendance of Iran. And it sends a very clear message to Iran of the consequences of using WMDs.

In my opinion, this list of benefits meet the spirit of the Just War framework even if they don’t actually address the specific points of that framework. So I argue that the United States is justified in seeking military action against Syria and against its ally Iran for the specific purpose of reminding each where the diplomatic table is that they need to stay seated at or risk a more robust military conflict with the United States and with the Western world at large. Right now, they don’t take us seriously because they believe we will eventually cut and run from the region.

I have a colleague who is Iranian and he pointed out that it is really suspicious that Assad would use poison gas when things were going better for him, and not awhile ago when things were looking really bad for him. Do we really think it is inconceivable that the rebels used the gas to force our hand?

I’m going to take a CB stance here and argue from a “wisdom” pov. We have nothing to gain from entering this and nothing to lose from staying out. That makes good sense (wisdom). If your (they are not mine) idiots in charge of this country just have to have another one of these never ending battles then the motto needs to be a quote from General Curtis E. LeMay from circa 1958 regarding the soon to explode SE Asian “conflict”, “nuke them all and let God sort them out”.
It cannot be a bad thing when a people who worship satan (allah) fight and kill each other…..let them go at it. I certainly would not sacrifice myself or one of my grandchildren for a billion of these islamic idiots. May we stay out of it and wish them a good day and happy trails.

1000 Syrians killed by nerve gas…..1 million Americans killed legally through abortions by highly educated professionals(ie physicians)….Seems kind of difficult for the US to take the high ground here…..just a thought

I’m with you on neutrality. There are three groups of people we are dealing with in Syria:

1. Assad and his group is a part of a Shia sect. The Shia are only a small percentage of the Muslim population of Syria. They tend to be more moderate regarding getting along with people from other religions. In fact, we have Christian friends who are still ministering in Syria although since this present conflict, they have had to move their base of operations outside the country. While they were in country, they enjoyed open Christian ministry approved of and facilitated by President Assad himself. In fact, Assad sent a million or so copies of a Christian movie/documentary they produced as a gift to Putin and the Russians. That doesn’t mitigate Assad’s reprehensible actions, but it’s a side that you won’t see in the media.

2. The rebels are radicalized Sunni encouraged by the Arab Spring movement. They are upset that Assad has allowed Christianity to have a prominent place in Syria and are devoted to overthrowing that kind of regime and instituting their brand of Sharia law.

3. Most Syrians are Sunni. However, they are generally open to Christian activity among their neighbors, not because they are Sunni but because they are Syrian. Syria has a long tradition of peace between different religions. The average Syrian isn’t in favor of the radicals. They don’t particularly like Assad’s response either. They have family members being killed just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If we support Assad or the rebels, we will end up fighting whoever we sided with 10 or 20 years down the road and the people will hate us either way. We have nothing to gain politically by getting involved. If there were any way to protect the people without supporting either side, that would be the right thing to do.

Honestly, no argument can be made against attacking Syria that could not have been used against attacking Iraq. (Please, no claims that Iraq was ever a threat to us.) Even the claim that we now know that attacking Syria is unwise because of what we have now learned from the negative consequences of attacking Iraq is specious. Why? Because the evangelical leaders that supported the Iraq War never actually publicly came out and recanted their support for the Iraq War. For example, the “Land Letter” was never retracted or apologized for. The many other evangelical leaders who preached sermons urging their congregations to support the Iraq War (the SBC’s own Charles Stanley was quoted in the New York Times exhorting the war’s cause and support for Bush) have not recanted. And it is not as if there haven’t been plenty of opportunities. As early as 2004, it was known that the weapons of mass destruction would never be found, and also the shambles that Iraq’s military and infrastructure were in thanks to years of U.N. sanctions plus Bill Clinton’s frequent bombings of Iraq to prevent them from ever becoming a threat when he was office were in (meaning that they lacked the ability even to defend themselves, let alone threaten anybody else, and particularly a superpower halfway around the world like us) was fully known. And by 2006, it was clear that Iraq was a full-blown quagmire that we had entered into under false claims, whose purpose and goals had shifted several times, for which there was absolutely no chance of achieving victory of any kind, and had long been used as an excuse to bilk taxpayers of hundreds of billions of dollars that were being funneled to friends and supporters of the Bush and Cheney families in no-bid contracts, and that invading Iraq had cost us any chance of actually winning Afghanistan, plus there was a horrific toll on Iraq’s Christian community (curiously, the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, which began during and as a direct consequence of the invasion of Iraq, was not much of an issue for conservative evangelicals during the Bush administration, but now Obama finds himself accused of not doing enough to protect Christians in the Middle East when his reaction to the persecution of Christians over there was pretty much the same as Bush’s). Even then, no retraction of support for the Iraq War was made.

So, sorry. You cannot say “We can’t invade Syria because Iraq shows what would happen” without first coming out and saying “we were wrong to support Iraq.” You can’t say “I supported the Iraq War because I trusted Bush but can’t support attacking Syria because I don’t trust Obama or his policies” without admitting that trusting Bush was wrong, and that Bush’s foreign policy was anything but an absolute disaster. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Never found? Iraq a threat to harm us? A lie. Iraq an imminent threat to harm us? A bigger lie. (Especially if you rely on the actual dictionary term of “imminent” and realize that over a year passed between Bush’s declaring Iraq to be an imminent threat and our actually using our troops to neutralize that threat). Bringing democracy to Iraq and ultimately the Middle East? A total failure. All it accomplished was to make Iraq a client state of Iran, and make Iran stronger than before. Defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban? Invading Iraq was Al Qaeda’s best recruiting tool. And diverting resources and attention from Afghanistan – where we were actually winning – to Iraq allowed the Taliban to regroup and retrench. Also, the decision to invade Iraq helped Islamists consolidate power in Turkey.

Basically, every negative thing that every liberal, anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Republican code pink International A.N.S.W.E.R. type (as well as the Ron Paul libertarians, who lest we forget were despised and purposefully marginalized on the right when Paul ran for president in 2008) predicted would happen as a result of our invading Iraq did. Meanwhile, NONE of the positives that supporters of the war – including conservative evangelicals – predicted or wanted occurred. That’s why using the failure in Iraq to justify opposing going into Syria is just playing party/ideology politics. If you aren’t going to unequivocally withdraw support for – and denounce – the Iraq War and the president who got us into it first, then you are holding the current guy accountable for what might happen while letting the previous guy off the hook for what did happen.

For the record, I supported the Iraq War, but not because of any nonsense about Iraq being some threat to us or any relationship that Iraq allegedly had with bin Laden and 9/11 or yellowcake from Niger or whatever. I supported it because the U.N. sanctions against Iraq that were intended to prevent Saddam from rebuilding his military capabilities (and hopefully provoke enough internal pressure to get Saddam removed from power) caused scores of innocent Iraqis, many of them children, to die for want of food and medicine. The sanctions had little effect on Saddam and those connected to him, but were wreaking havoc on almost everybody else. So I felt that the quick war that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld promised us (Rumsfeld claimed “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months”) would save more lives than it would cost by toppling the regime and ending the sanctions. But after Saddam and the rest of his regime were toppled, captured, killed etc. my basis for supporting the war was over, and as the years dragged on and the civilian death toll from the war and the religious/tribal chaos that resulted from the lack of Saddam’s secular authoritarian regime to stop it far exceeded the number of people that would have died by virtue of leaving Saddam – and the U.N. sanctions – in place, it was very easy to recant my support of the war and for ever supporting or believing the guys who got us into it to begin with. Another thing: Bush’s public proclamation of Christian piety and the heavy support that he got from evangelicals on the Iraq issue made it real easy for nonbelievers (including Muslims in foreign lands) to associate Christianity with bloodthirsty imperialism. All a Muslim Brotherhood cleric in Egypt has to do in order to incite their violent mobs against Christians is remind them of Iraq, Bush and his evangelical supporters. It would be easy. Create a video that starts with A) Bush claiming to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and following Christ’s teachings, switches B) evangelical pastors giving full-throated endorsement of Bush and support for the war, and transitions to C) our bombs raining death on Iraqis. Now I am one who believes that the world is ultimately going to hate the church because it hates Jesus Christ anyway, but one cannot claim that conservative evangelical support of Bush and the Iraq War was somehow good for the reputation of evangelicalism abroad or even at home, especially when it comes to those who do not personally know many evangelicals and as a result have their image of us shaped entirely by the media, Hollywood, academia and liberal and other anti-Christian politicians.

As to whether attacking Syria is a good idea: the Bible is against sedition. It is so clear on that fact that David considered it to be a sin to kill King Saul even after Saul not only A) attempted to kill David but B) murdered God’s priests. Also, note that God chose not to have Israel rebel against Egypt in response to Egypt’s cruel oppression of Israel, and it is revealing that Egypt’s false claim that Israel MIGHT rebel was used as justification for killing Israel’s male babies. God also never instructed Israel to rebel against the Babylonians, Medo-Persians, Greeks or Romans that conquered them, and the messiahs who claimed to be anointed by God to free Israel from Rome were false, and called robbers and murderers by Christ. And Christ’s apostles – Peter and Paul – told both the Jews and the Gentiles in the church to submit to the Roman Empire and pray for its leaders rather than join any of the subversive rebel movements. So we should not give any aid or comfort to the Syrian seditionists. We were similarly wrong to support (and I believe that the Obama administration and the state department and the CIA secretly promoted and helped organize) the “Arab spring” wave of sedition in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia etc. In Libya we used civilian casualties as an excuse to join a conflict that would have never existed in the first place had we not worked to foment it. So in Syria, the only reason why all those innocent civilians died, refugees misplaced and chemical weapons were used in the first place was due to the sinful support (and I believe provocation and organization of) the Arab spring by a reprobate president and administration that utterly rejects and hates God and His Word.

That is what it is about. We foment a rebellion that we know is going to result in the death of innocents, and then we use the deaths of those innocents as an excuse to enter the civil war and kill even more innocents. Which makes going into Libya then and Syria now as bad or worse than the Iraq War in my book.

As far as the “just-war” thing goes, Augustine was a proto-Roman Catholic (he adhered to the Catholic abominations on Mary worship) as part of his propaganda for the Roman imperial church-state (and obviously more state than church). And keep in mind: Augustine supported the murderous violence that the Roman state inflicted on the Donatists, who were the Anabaptists of their time, and this was despite Augustine’s own admission that the Donatists’ error was not Christological heresy, so even though they were his brothers in Christ he still promoted the idea that their desire to leave Catholicism made them worthy of death! I would use the term that Spurgeon applied to things Catholic – popery – but I cannot as technically the papacy did not exist at that time, but it is still Catholic doctrine that cannot be supported by sola scriptura, so from such things Baptists should turn away.

The New Testament does not contain anything concerning how secular states should conduct warfare because the New Testament is meant to govern the affairs of the church and not the secular state. It is of the church and not the world. And the OT does not apply because its rules were meant to govern the OT Israel theocracy. And even the OT does not give things concerning government outside the context of that theocracy (i.e. before the Exodus and Sinai and after the destruction of the nation in 586 B.C.). Basically, when the Anabaptists came to the belief that New Testament teachings meant that they could not in good conscience join the military, they were far closer to sola scriptura than was Augustine’s propaganda for state Catholicism. Which is not surprising in the least because unlike the biblicist Anabaptists, Augustine rejected sola scriptura in favor of Catholic tradition, and he frequently rejected legitimate hermeneutics to follow after the Alexandrian allegorists. But outside of a church-state arrangement where the aims of the church and those of the state are the same (or more accurately the aims of the state become and those of the church and must be defended and promoted by the church) it is difficult to come of with a legitimate sola scriptura argument in support of any war that is not purely defensive i.e. when another nation attacks “your” nation and whose goals go beyond stopping the other nation from killing “your” nation’s citizens. And many Anabaptists even went as far as opposing joining an army to fight an entirely defensive war. Think about it: so long as the invading army doesn’t kill YOU, what does it matter? It would only involve changing governments, going from being led by the government of “your” own nation to that of the conquering nation. As a Christian, what difference does that make to you? Basically, looking for texts in the Bible that can be construed as lending support for patriotism and nationalism that would cause you to favor one particular government or regime over another, to say that one earthly kingdom is superior to another, is a vain errand. So a Biblical argument for military force really can’t go beyond joining a collective effort to defend yourself and others, and the Bible does not condemn taking just actions to defend yourself and others.

First of all, I love Democrats.

Secondly, it’s interesting that the Dems are all for war because Obama is for it. But, when W. was leading us to fight Iraq, they cried foul as loudly as they could. Okay, Assad is gassing his own people. That’s terrible. But also, Saddam was committing genocide on the Kurds. I mean, he was wiping them off the face of the planet. Not to mention, his goon squads were going out, and murdering anyone, who opposed Saddam. They would murder the men, and rape the women….many times while they laid there looking at the dead bodies of thier husbands and sons.

So, it just seems a little bit hypocritical for Dems to be for war, because Assad is killing his own people…..BUT, they opposed the war STRONGLY when W. was leading our country.

Hummmmm…..aint life interesting?

David