With a little unwitting help from the Roman Catholic Church, I am going to argue in the notes that follow that President Barack Obama should say "no thanks, not this time" to General Stanley McChrystal's proposal, presented this weekend, to deploy an additional 40,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
Instead it is time for NATO, led by the United States, to negotiate the best terms it can get and to begin an orderly withdrawal from that country -- with a clear remaining undertaking.
The church I grew up in has many interesting things to say on the topic of "just war." Its views are well-summarized in the new Catholic Catechism, paragraphs 2307 to 2317.
Let's take a look at some of this (I'll include the beautifully-written Latin, as well as the almost equally impressive English:
2308 Singuli cives et gubernantes agere tenentur ad bella vitanda. «Quamdiu autem periculum belli aderit, auctoritasque internationalis competens congruisque viribus munita defuerit, tamdiu, exhaustis quidem omnibus pacificae tractationis subsidiis, ius legitimae defensionis guberniis denegari non poterit».
2308 All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.
The substance of this point was carefully debated among Canada's social democrats in 1939, when the CCF parliamentary caucus and its national council considered whether to support Canada's entry into the Second World War.
The party leader of the day, J. S. Woodsworth, strongly opposed entering that war.
As his daughter, Grace MacInnis, put it: "When he spoke in Parliament [during the debate on the war, a day after the CCF had decided what to do]... it was as a man apart, as a prophet. Frail and aging, he poured into that single speech his whole molten hatred of war, of its utter senselessness and uselessness, of his personal determination to oppose it to the end and of his hope that someday men would learn to live as brothers."
Woodsworth's speech on peace is one of the great moments of Canadian parliamentary history, and should be required reading by every Member of Parliament before they turn to issues of peace and war.
It is also true that at that moment Woodsworth was utterly wrong, as his party and caucus regretfully concluded.
Social democrats in Parliament applauded him, thanked him, and then broke with him, voting correctly to join Britain's increasingly lonely fight against Nazism -- two years before the United States could bring itself to do so.
All this to say that contrary to the caricatures scribbled in crayon so many times in the columns of our nation's Fifth Estate over the past eight years, it is not in the basic DNA of mainstream social democrats in Canada to be pacifists. Like the authors of the Catholic Catechism, the mainstream of the orange tribe in Canada has long understood that there is a time and a place for legitimate self-defence.
CCF legend James. S. Woodsworth is shown in an undated file photo.
Onward:
2309 Strictas condiciones legitimae defensionis vi militari oportet severe considerare. Talis decisionis gravitas eam condicionibus legitimitatis moralis subigit rigorosis. Requiritur simul:
damnum ab aggressore nationi vel nationum communitati inflictum esse diuturnum, grave et certum;
omnia alia media ad illi imponendum finem manifestata esse impossibilia vel inefficacia;
serias ad exitum prosperum simul haberi condiciones;
armorum usum mala non implicare et perturbationes graviora quam malum supprimendum. Modernorum destructionis mediorum potentia in hac condicione aestimanda gravissimum habet pondus.
2309 The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
