Seeking accord for war is new twist in world affairs

National Catholic Reporter, March 6, 1998 by Patricia Zapor

WASHINGTON -- The way the U.N. dispute with Iraq over weapons inspections has played out illustrates a dramatic change in international conflict resolution, according to speakers at a social ministry conference.

The fact that the United States sought international authorization before launching a military strike against Iraq "is in itself a significant advance," said Fr. J. Bryan Hehir of the Harvard Center for International Affairs. He and Esther Brimmer, senior associate at the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, spoke Feb. 24 at the annual national gathering of diocesan social ministry workers.

The idea of addressing global tensions through international collaboration has been on the books "in principle" since the end of World War II, Hehir said. But only recently has such a system begun to function in conflicts like the Bosnian civil war and the Gulf War. As a result, when Iraq was at risk of attack by the United States over its weapons buildup, a phase of diplomacy kicked in that drew in nit only the Persian Gulf nations, but Russia, France, England and other distant countries.

Because Iraq had clearly not adhered to the treaty ending the 1991 Gulf War, "without a doubt there is legal authorization, for a military strike, Hehir said. "But the question is whether legal authorization is sufficient." Should the United States attack Iraq without first obtaining the support of other key countries, the country would find itself standing alone in the globe, he said.

Hehir noted that Pope John Paul II, the U.S. Catholic bishops and Catholic leaders in Iraq all firmly opposed military intervention as inappropriate under the church's just-war criteria. In that situation, "the tension between the legal and political `rights' leaves room to raise the moral questions," he said.

Brimmer said the 1994 civil war in Rwanda represented a recent example of when international military action probably would have had a lifesaving effect. An analysis conducted for the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict concluded last year that if 5,000 international peacekeeping troops had been sent into Rwanda at the first sign of trouble in 1994, as many as 500,000 lives could have been saved, she said.

The massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Rwanda is indicative of another way warfare has dramatically changed in this century. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, 4 million people have been killed in wars, and nearly all were civilians, Brimmer said.

Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, said that in wars up through World War I, 90 percent of the people killed were in the military. In today's conflicts, 90 percent of the victims are civilians.