To my mind, this week’s question on the morality of the Iraq conflict continuing, was answered conclusively by Reinhold Niebuhr in 1932. Throughout the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, Niebuhr was a highly influential political and social analyst as well as a renowned theologian. In 1932 Niebuhr published Moral Man and Immoral Society. Central to Niebuhr’s thesis in this book were the following points:

--All nations have a well-known, deep-seated selfish nature. They are driven by self-interest. Niebuhr cites George Washington’s dictum that no nation should be trusted beyond its own interest.

--Nations achieve a unity of action only through following the self-interest of the dominant economic groups and by “the popular emotions and hysterics which from time to time run through a nation.”

--Niebuhr observes that nations find it far, far more difficult than individuals [who find it difficult enough] to observe the beam in their own eye while giving critical analysis of the mote in the eye of other nations. Since moral action requires taking note of one’s own hypocrisy, Niebuhr suggests we should not expect nations to engage in ethical actions. “perhaps the best that can be expected of nations is that they should justify their hypocrisies by a slight measure of real international achievement and learn how to do justice to wider interests than their own, while they pursue their own.”

--Accordingly, Niebuhr states, it is almost inevitable that every nation, especially in a time of war, regards criticism as a lack of loyalty.

Niebuhr’s argument is that nations never make a frank avowal of their real motives, that nations will always clothe their self interest in a claim to be fighting for civilization, the good of humanity, order or democracy. Such claims, of course, help secure the allegiance and devotion of the citizenry to the cause in question.

Niebuhr uses the Spanish-American War as a prime example of the hypocrisy and sentimentality he is describing. I wonder if the speechwriters for President Bush relied upon President McKinley for some of their themes. Here is McKinley addressing Congress in the prelude to the Spanish-American War: “If it shall hereafter appear to be a duty imposed by our obligations to ourselves, to civilisation and humanity to intervene with force it shall be done without fault on our part and only because the necessity for such action will be so clear as to command the support and the approval of the civilised world.”

Or perhaps these orders to the Army as they prepared for the occupation of the Phillipines – “It will be the duty of the commander of the forces of the occupation to announce and proclaim in the most public manner possible that we have come not as invaders or as conquerors but as friends.”

Niebuhr was writing to counter the romantic, sentimental, overestimation of human virtue and moral capacity that can so easily take over in a wartime environment.

The Iraq War has not been, and is not now, a moral venture. Let's be done with moral pretension and follow Niebuhr’s lead by asking, whose interests are really being served by continuing this end-game strategy to support an ineffectual Iraqi government not regarded as legitimate by a major share of the citizens?

Who gains from spending our nation’s dollars and the lives of our sons and daughters in a civil war our President refuses to recognize and whose outcome we cannot control?