As usual, the US is desiring to do the right thing in the wrong way. 

With the recent political embarrassments in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are now faced with the unpleasant consequences of having undertaken nation building before having fully defeated our enemies.

America’s instinct to rebuild defeated nations with whom we have fought is a correct and noble one.  Indeed, it is the moral obligation of the United States, as with every civilized nation, that once we have achieved victory over an enemy, we also assist him in his return to the community of nations governed by the rule of law.  Victory in a military sense is not the final purpose of war.  While our enemies rage against moral order and behave in ways that outrage conscience, the violence of war is only the first order of business in bringing into submission rebellion to moral truth.  Once that state of war is past, it is a duty born out of the responsibility which accrues to just understanding, to assist the rehabilitation of former enemies who struggle to rediscover the suppressed moral conscience that once made them thralls of depravity and the enemies of peace.

There are, however, necessary preconditions to the moral responsibilities of nation building.  First, we must defeat our enemy.  Second, and only then, the enemy must confess and truly repent of his evil—and in so doing, allow us and the world to become friends again.

Rebuilding a nation that remains in rebellion to moral truth is not just folly; it constructs an unwitting foundation for future wars and hazards to peace.

The purpose of war is precisely to return nations to the benevolence of community.  It is not to destroy but rather to bring about the contrition and rehabilitation that are necessary for the moral reordering of reprobate society.

The potential tragedy of pre-mature nation building is the same rebuilding a fire-ravaged home while windblown flames continue to consume the neighborhood.  First, we must put out the fire.  Second, we should be wise to design a house according to stringent fire codes and then, and only then— should we begin to rebuild. 

This nation has undertake all of these elements in good faith, but undertaken them in the wrong order.  Indeed, we have allowed the arsonists themselves to draw up the fire codes (if I must explain the metaphor), in the form of constitutions and laws that govern those societies!

Nevertheless every nation that acknowledges the natural law, understands that war is more than killing, destroying and breaking things.  War is the first element in the rehabilitation of a nation that is at war with moral truth.  Like re-breaking a bone that has not set right or cutting out a cancer, violence is only the first part of a complete remedy.  Rehabilitation occurs only after the surgery is successful.  Once an enemy has yielded to the violence of war, it is the obligation of good men and good nations to help restore the former enemy into the ordained community of nations according to a moral understanding given by common grace to the entire human family.  We are all the children of Adam and being made in the Image of God means that all of us have access to moral truth and may achieve just government by moral reasoning.  All men have access to these attributes of the Imago Dei.

To bring into the family of nations or honor a recalcitrant foe with the imprimatur of community without he first submitting his will and mind to the authority of moral truth is an error of wisdom that has often resulted in profound tragedy.  Such was the incomplete rehabilitation of the German people after the First World War, as was the unreconstructed racism of the Confederate South.  This, in fact, is the great problems with the United Nations as an institution for resolving human conflict.  When we attempt to reconcile with peoples who are deludes with monstrous ideas, we presume to find a commonality with criminality.  For even after killing and breaking things in wars, if we fail to come to a common understanding of what the moral law requires of all parties, we have shed blood and destroyed treasure in the vanity of believing that violence in itself is sufficient to rehabilitate human evil.  As Jesus taught in the New Testament, moral instruction and example are necessary.  And as God teaches in the Old Testament, unrepentant wickedness is the object of wrath and judgment.

The challenge to our age, which is greater than the challenge of war, is no different than it ever was.  We have seen in the massive power of overwhelming American strength that wars may be won in the course of days or years.  Sometimes they can be won in hours.  But reconstruction, as with the Confederate South, or post Nazi Germany, or the imperial ambitions of Japan, may take decades, if not centuries.  Without accepting the moral corollaries of war this age of multiculturalism and post-modern doubt about the universality of moral order, is sending young men and women to their deaths for the purpose only of temporarily forestalling an ultimate day of reckoning. 

While pragmatic economic constraint may in some ways council us to undertake half-measures, prudence always instructs that if we go to war, we should do so with the full understanding of the totality of what war requires of our society when we undertake violence to reestablish justice and moral order.

We in America, through the folly and delusion of out leaders (particularly George Bush, but now Barack Obama) are demonstrating that our blindness to the requirements of war crosses party lines, and is the consequence not of ideology so much as a general character weakness of American culture itself.  Attempting to wrestle by violent half-measures a sulky and insincere concession to moral authority without first bringing into submission the stiff-necked and moral cruelty of our adversaries, is to abuse the use of force in war, without properly understanding its purpose.  It does violence to violence.  It means we remove from the awful carnage of battle, the very moral antecedent that justifies it.

I have concluded after witnessing the folly of our leaders in both political parties, that war is too important an undertaking to be considered merely a policy judgment of a President, or a police action approved by a Congress.  I am now of the opinion that military force by our government should never be employed without an actual Declaration of War, as is required by our Constitution, directed against an actual specific non-abstract enemy—no matter how small the nation or distant the threat.  If the remedy is war, the threat must not be speculative or abstract.  It must be so clear that no reasonable party could object to the use of violence to remedy the evil.

War must not be merely an extension of politics as Clausewitz said, if we presume to cover ourselves in the mantle of a moral people.  War, properly understood, is a profoundly important decision that must be undertaken with the soundest moral reasoning and only prosecuted by a democratic people who overwhelming agree that the moral threat and the remedy is a “settled” political question.  To undertake violence without the righteous instinct that the teeth of the wicked must be shattered and that without his full abject submission to moral order, he must be utterly destroyed or enslaved, is to turn war either into a political game of foreign policy wonks, or to provoke irrational violence from people who see only the carnage of war without the necessary moral context of it.  As surely as it is medical malpractice to excise a cancer without sewing up the patient, it is morally indefensible to undertake a war without a willingness to prosecute it properly to its full conclusion.  War, like surgery, is more than the letting of blood; it is a long hard road to recovery that will cost much treasure.  Such are the necessities of making men and nations whole again.  

If we do not soundly defeat our enemies before we rehabilitate them-we are shedding blood not just in vain, but also in ways that will aggrieve and agitate the opinions of every witness to the conflict, friend and foe alike.  If we are unwilling to bring the enemy into full submission to moral judgment, then war is the wrong remedy or it is an immoral application of violence.  A just rehabilitation of the defeated is the only proper end of war—anything else leaves a greater future conflict to be fought. 

Hence, this country and the noble young soldiers who defend it are not only hostages to the savageness of Middle Eastern Barbarians but also to the political disease of a morally confused electorate who declines in pleasant middle class distraction to comprehend the grievous and heavy responsibilities of ravaging nations and spilling human blood.  Perhaps we think we are just playing another computer game.   

War is not politics.  Politics is not war-not by other means, not by any means.  It is not political entertainment for the ruling class.  It is awe-full and rife with great responsibility.

Let us right the conscience of our country, and treat war as the dread instrument of uncompromising moral righteousness, and politics as the felicitous and domestic sphere of compromise and debate.  We must not confuse the two.  Wars are fought to destroy evil and conserve the lives, liberty and property of men.  It is an instrument of justice.  Politics can only order men once evil is suppressed.  Public discourse is only possible once the authority of just and righteous law is enforced by physical might.  In failing to understand this, we threaten in our foreign relations to make war on things and people that should not be made war on.  And more destructive to country, and ourselves we threaten to confuse the nature of politics, thinking like Clausewitz, Hobbes and Marx, that war is just politics, and politics is just war by other means.

If we fail to recant of this folly, our lack of wisdom becomes wickedness.  We will sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.