Part 3: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American empire

Instead, under the Bill Clinton
regime, NATO found new life and new members; and after 9/11, it was assigned a
new purpose in the Bush administration’s war on terror. Flash forward to
November 2010 when one of America’s few truly astute commentators, the now
deceased William Pfaff, resorted to the term “medieval mysticism” to describe what had become of NATO’s
mission in Afghanistan.

“American policy seems to these
allies to be lost in fantasies as Alice was lost in a mathematician’s logical
joke, in which all was reversed from what existed in real life, on the other
side of the looking glass” Pfaff wrote.

Today, NATO remains more than ever
lost on the other side of the mirror, with the only exception being that the
location has changed from Afghanistan to Russia’s Border States; while the
fantasy has transformed from making an Afghan democracy out of terrorists,
warlords and drug kingpins into a World War II-style, Nazi blitzkrieg on
Moscow.

As odd as it may seem to American
audiences of 2016, William Pfaff’s use of medieval mysticism to describe
American thinking is not as far beneath the surface of present day American
policy as one might think. In fact following the crisis brought about by the
failure of advanced technology to defeat Communism in Vietnam, America’s
premier defense intellectuals were quick to fall back on the Middle Ages for a
moral justification of their fantasies.

One vivid
example came from future Reagan administration
officials Colin S. Gray
and Keith Payne
in the summer 1980 edition of Foreign Policy magazine who declared in an
article titled “Victory is Possible” that:

“Nuclear War is possible. But unlike Armageddon, the apocalyptic war prophesied to
end history, nuclear war can have a wide range of options… If American nuclear
power is to support U.S. foreign policy objectives, the United States must
possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally.”

Having the American Empire come of
age at a time when it enjoyed an overwhelming nuclear advantage and
unquestioned technological superiority, its plunge into military defeat in
Vietnam simultaneous with the Soviet Union achieving a rough nuclear parity was
cause for a deep philosophical crisis.

The old right and the “new right”
embodied in pro-war advocacy groups like Team B, the Committee on the Present Danger and the American Security Council needed to undo the debilitating effects caused by their own
failure in Vietnam. Discrediting the strategic doctrine implemented by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara known as Mutual Assured Destruction or (MAD) topped a long
list.

These
former government insiders and harsh
critics of détente believed that the constraints on nuclear war fighting posed
by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty (ABM) and the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks
I and II (SALT), were predicated on a false assumption that nuclear weapons
were too horrible to ever be used again.

Neoconservative defense
intellectuals viewed this restraint as a form of suicide and vowed to break
free of it utilizing some pre-enlightenment thinking that challenged the very
nature of modern reality.

The Cold War buildup for a nuclear
war against the Soviet Union was never based on the rational. No one on the
left or right could predict with any certainty where or when a nuclear war
would stop if one ever broke out. Regardless of the kind or size of nuclear
weapons used, with the enemy’s leadership decapitated and communications
destroyed, there’d be no one left to stop it.

Non-communist solutions to social
problems were a matter of faith in which the political right and the political
left shared similar goals but differed in tactics. But the political right’s
accommodation of the political left was never more than an elaborate game of
deception. In fact, according to the CIA’s own documents, “the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s
political operations against Communism” for
the first twenty years of the Cold War relied completely on the manipulation
and control of the so called progressive, liberal, non-Communist left.

Blamed by the neoconservative right
for the failure in Vietnam and the relative decline in America’s nuclear
posture, the non-communist left’s legitimacy as a valid political factor in
American politics began to crumble. With the left’s policy of nuclear restraint
now dismissed as irrational, what possible justification could be found to wage
a nuclear war in which tens of millions of innocent Russians and Americans, as
well as millions of others, would be killed?

By the late 1970s, those obscure
strategic nuclear analysts who’d helped to formulate America’s nuclear policies
had attained the stature of religious figures. With their supposed wisdom
raised to an almost mystical level and accepted as dogma, the neoconservative
high priests of the new right stood ready to displace not only the
non-communist left but traditional conservatives as well.

By the summer of 1980 (6 months
after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) two of those high priests were
willing to take the dogma one step further by reinterpreting the Just War
Doctrine of the Catholic Church to justify what reality, reason and common
sense had forbad the U.S. from doing since the final days of World War II.

“Ironically,
it is commonplace to assert that
war-survival theories affront the crucial test of political and moral
acceptability”, wrote Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne that summer.

“Surely no one can be comfortable
with the claim that a strategy that would kill tens of millions of U.S.
citizens would be politically and morally acceptable. However it is worth
recalling the six guidelines for the use of force provided by the “just war” doctrine of the Catholic Church…”

Carefully sidestepping the
fundamental principle that war can only be “just” when used as a last resort
and that targeting innocents is strictly forbidden, Gray and Payne would go on
to claim that based on the most ancient rules of the game, not only did U.S.
policy of nuclear deterrence toward the Soviet Union (MAD) fail to qualify for
“just war,” but that in failing to plan to actually fight a nuclear war, “U.S. nuclear strategy is immoral.”

In other words, since Gray and Payne
could not use a rational scientific process to achieve victory through nuclear
weapons or to find hard evidence to support their claims that the Soviets
assumed they could achieve victory through theirs, they turned to a premodern
religious system (developed centuries before the first atomic bomb) that
dismissed empirical evidence and replaced it with whatever they could imagine
as truth, based on precepts evolved by medieval monks.

From the dawn of Christianity, the
justification for killing fellow Christians presented scholars with a moral
dilemma. St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) originated Just War theory
which was later refined and expanded by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). But
murdering in the name of Christ was tricky business and often subject to
conflicting interpretations.

Far from the romantic notions of
chivalry presented by today’s popular
mythology, the knightly class was viewed by the medieval Catholic Church as
lawless thugs whose behavior was clearly “unjust.” The idea that a monk would
engage in the plunder and murder of innocents, much less warfare was anathema
to church teaching.

The influential Cistercian abbot,
Bernard of Clairvaux weighed in with a different opinion in his famous
twelfth-century treatise De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the new Knighthood) by redefining the
very nature of murder itself in support of his friend Hugues de Payens, Grand
Master of the warrior monks known as the Knights Templar.

“The soldier of Christ kills safely
and dies the more safely… He is the instrument of God for the punishment of
malefactors and for the defense of the just. Indeed, when he kills a malefactor
this is not homicide but malicide, and he is accounted Christ’s legal
executioner against evildoers.”

Like Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne’s
“Victory is Possible,” Clairvaux’s treatise bent the rules for the uses of
acceptable violence on behalf of an elite group of European nobles who wanted
to go to war in the holy land. It opened the floodgates of recruits for the
Crusades, established the spiritual and legal authority of powerful, wealthy
Catholic military orders and put the power of the feudal machine under Church
control, at least temporarily.

After working for three years as the
host of a public affairs program (under the terms of the Fairness Doctrine) for an affiliate of Pat Robertson’s Christian
Broadcasting Network in Boston, we were aware that an aggressive
rightwing/Christian political movement was merging into the American
mainstream.

But following the publication of
Gray and Payne’s 1980 treatise, we realized that the underlying philosophy of
America’s defense policy was also being challenged on the basis of faith, not
facts.

Just war
was a contentious subject with a long history, including
a surprising connection to president JFK’s Fitzgerald family. The Just War
Doctrine of the Catholic Church had been invoked by the Papal Nuncio on behalf
of the Fitzgerald family in Ireland during the 1570s in their war against the
Elizabethans.

The Catholic Fitzgeralds had lost;
and some notable Elizabethan victors had gone on to establish a corporate
empire that would redefine and dominate the world’s economy from North America
to Asia for the next four centuries.

Join us as we explain how medieval
feuds between rival families evolved into today’s “deep state” and continue to
drive today’s increasingly desperate actions in Europe and the Middle East to
control of the world’s trade routes and resources, in our final chapter of America,
an Empire in Twilight. 

Copyright – 2022 Fitzgerald &
Gould All rights reserved

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, published by City Lights (2009), Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, published by City Lights (2011).
Their novel The Voice , was published in 2001. Their memoir, The Valediction Three Nights of Desmond was
published by TrineDay (2021) and The Valediction Resurrection was published by TrineDay (2022). For more information
visit invisiblehistory , grailwerk and valediction.net