Who made the United States policeman of the world?

The pope has a point, argues Christine Gudorf, when he criticizes the United States' proclivity for unilateral military action.

IF NOTHING ELSE, 1999 has finally disproved nativist Protestant fears that Catholics cannot give primary loyalty to the United States government because their first loyalty is to the pope.

When Pope John Paul II interrupted his trip to Mexico in early 1999 for a day trip to meet President Clinton in St. Louis, Catholics followed the secular press in ignoring the purpose of the papal trip, stressing instead the pope's appeal to the Missouri governor that prevented an execution. The stated purpose of the pope's day trip was to persuade Clinton that the U.S. policy in Iraq was immoral.

Americans didn't want to hear it, just as they had not listened to papal arguments that the boycott of Iraq should be ended because its primary effect had become civilian suffering and death. The pope was not saying that Saddam Hussein is a nice man or that his government is just or that he does not have weapons of mass destruction. What he was saying is that no country has a unilateral right to impose no-fly zones within other nations and then enforce those dictums militarily.

God never made the U.S. the policeman of the world. Taking on that role, even for otherwise good ends, poisons the common good.

The Gulf War was a United Nations war begun in defense of an invaded nation. The embargo is a U.N. embargo. Its cost, it can be argued, is no longer proportional to its benefits; but the embargo did originate in a legitimate authority that represents all the nations of the world. The more recent bombing, however, the pope argued, was a U.S. war that we lacked the authority to wage. We were not authorized to act for the United Nations.

The pope's point was that even if Saddam does have weapons of mass destruction, if the degree of danger is not sufficient to allow the U.S. to persuade the U.N. coalition from the Gulf War to wage this war, then it is not sufficient to justify waging war against Iraq.

JUST-WAR TEACHING, BOTH FROM CATHOLIC AND FROM secular perspectives, requires first of all that a nation have a just grievance against another. The U.S. may not want Iraq to have weapons of mass destruction, but it is difficult to make this the basis for just military action. After all, the U.S. and many other nations have these same weapons, and the U.S. has neither destroyed its own cache nor made similar military threats against Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan--nations that also have not destroyed their caches of such weapons. Hard to make a convincing argument for just war only against Iraq.

But the war in Iraq pales beside the war the U.S. and our NATO allies waged in Kosovo. As the pope pointed out in his attempts to mediate a negotiated settlement on Kosovo, NATO is not analogous to the United Nations. NATO is the military self-defense pact of a self-selected group of Western nations--not an organization of all the nations of the world. It has no authority to impose conditions on nonmember nations. Neither Yugoslavia nor Albania nor Macedonia are members of NATO. The U.S. would certainly not agree that Russia and other central Asian nations had the right to bomb Germany into granting Turks and other guest workers citizenship.

The Serbs were right to protest that NATO attempts to force a settlement before the bombing were illegitimate interference in a sovereign nation. NATO's demand of three years' autonomy for Kosovo--presumably followed by a plebiscite in which the Kosovar Albanians vote for independence--rejected Serb demands to retain historic Serbian boundaries. The indivisibility of their nation is the same argument that our American hero, Abraham Lincoln, used in defending a war against the South to preserve the Union.

Slobodan Milosevic is no Abraham Lincoln. He has planned and implemented a systematic ethnic cleansing that smells in some ways like. the genocide of the Holocaust. There is no question that other nations, including ours, had an obligation to intervene to save those who were suffering and dying. But the assumption that the only way to save the suffering and dying was to bomb the Serbs is naive and self-serving. It is also too easy both for us and for the other NATO nations.

NATO intervened in Kosovo because it feared that Serbian military responses to the Kosovo Liberation Army (which itself has targeted Serb civilians) would trigger a wholesale and unwelcome exodus of Kosovar Albanian refugees into Germany and Italy. Even the U.S. and Western European nations of NATO were moved by self-interest. America's habit of militarily defending Western Europe's--as well as our own--interests led us into Serbia. These, more than humanitarian concerns, prompted NATO ultimatums and attacks against Serbia.

Humanitarianism in the NATO nations evidently takes very limited forms. We were willing to drop bomb after bomb and wage an indefinite air war on Serbia in the name of saving the Kosovar Albanians, while hundreds of thousands of them huddled for many weeks in the freezing rain in open fields at the Macedonian and Albanian borders without food, shelter, or sanitation. We were neither willing to take them in, nor to send in ground troops that could stop the Serbian massacres long enough to allow safe evacuation of the remaining hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians. In short, we were willing to drop bombs and shoot missiles to save innocent lives, but not to open our doors to refugees or to risk military casualties in either evacuating them or establishing a safe zone for them in Kosovo.

What kind of neighborly love is only willing to kill to respect human life?

MANY HAVE COMPARED THE SERBS TO THE NAZIS. CERTAINLY there are similarities. But the analogy also raises questions about our behavior, both past and present. Millions of Jews could have been saved between 1933 and 1939 had the nations of the world been willing to open their doors to Jewish refugees. In the present, why, if we were only concerned about the welfare of the Kosovar Albanians, did we hound their leaders to sign the Rambouillet agreement, which we knew would enrage the Serbs, and then proceed to bomb Serbia without evacuating those Kosovar leaders? It couldn't have been a surprise that some of the first Kosovars rounded up and killed after our bombing started were signers of the agreement. Do we have no responsibility for their deaths?

In a similar vein, did none of the NATO officials describing many thousands of Serb killings of Kosovars during the war anticipate that returning Kosovars would go hunting Serbian Kosovars in revenge? Or is not protecting the Kosovar Serbs part of a broader NATO plan to avoid the tensions of a multi-ethnic society?

The pope asks America to answer at least two questions: Who made America (or NATO) policeman of God's earth? And, if the welfare of the Kosovar civilians is what motivated us, why did our planning and preparedness focus so much on crippling Serbia, and so little on aiding and protecting civilians?

I ask myself: Why the silence in the U.S. around these issues? In particular, where have the churches and U.S. women been--the two principal groups that traditionally have been much more critical of military budgets and military action than the rest of the population?

We have heard all kinds of concern in the media about the threat of increased terrorism against the U.S. in the future, but who is pointing out that it is the U.S. proclivity for unilateral military intervention that helps to create a climate of anti-Americanism in much of the world? All those whose interest in peace and justice surpasses their interest in projecting U.S. power should join the pope in speaking out.

U.S. women and churches, where are you?

By CHRISTINE GUDORF, a theology professor at Florida International University in Miami and author of Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics (Pilgrim Press, 1995).