This report was significantly updated on June 20 with new content from Catholic News Service.
As tensions rose further in the Gulf of Oman after U.S. officials accused Iran of playing a role in two more attacks on merchant shipping transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, the chair of the U.S. bishops’ Committee for International Justice and Peace urged dialogue and restraint. In a letter to the Trump administration released to the public on June 19, Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the U.S. Archdiocese for the Military Services called on the Trump administration to avoid a military confrontation and to seek “sustained dialogue...to de-escalate the current situation that is a danger to both the region and the world.”
Archbishop Broglio told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: “There is little probability that another war in the most volatile region in the world, where the recent and current experiences of conflict in Syria, Iraq and Yemen are vivid, will succeed in bringing peace to the region.
“A different approach is needed,” he added. “The president’s recent statement that the United States does not seek war with Iran is encouraging.”
Archbishop Broglio: “There is little probability that another war in the most volatile region in the world, where the recent and current experiences of conflict in Syria, Iraq and Yemen are vivid, will succeed in bringing peace to the region.”
Mr. Pompeo told reporters on June 18 after a meeting with U.S. military leaders at U.S. Central Command in Florida that Mr. Trump “does not want war.” However, he said, the U.S. presence in the region was meant as a deterrent to Iran’s threats. On June 20 the Iranian Revolutionary Guard said it shot down a U.S. military drone that had violated Iranian air space. The U.S. military confirmed the loss of the drone but insisted that it had been flying over international waters.
Iranian officials have denied any involvement with the recent attacks on ships in the gulf and said Iranian military will defend Iranian national interests.
On June 16 Pope Francis called for diplomacy to head off any confrontation.
“I invite everyone to use the instruments of diplomacy to resolve the complex problems of the conflicts in the Middle East,” he said after celebrating Mass in Camerino, Italy, which was devastated by an earthquake in 2016. “I renew a heartfelt appeal to the international community to make every possible effort to favor dialogue and peace.”
President Trump has said that the U.S. withdrawal from the so-called P5+1 pact has made the world a safer place. France, the United Kingdom, Russia and China, along with Germany, remain parties to the deal, which international monitoring agencies have confirmed that Iran continues to follow. However, Iran announced on June 17 that it could soon start enriching uranium to just beneath weapons-grade level.
In response, the Pentagon ordered 1,000 more troops to the Middle East. The step is seen as an effort to deter Iran and ease concerns among allies about the security of vital shipping lanes.
The escalation of tensions this month was preceded by a series of events in May that suggested the possibility of open conflict breaking out between the United States and Iran.
Many Americans were startled on May 5 when John Bolton, the national security advisor, announced that the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group had been rushed from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf to counter “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” from Iran. His threat assessment went without much further elaboration.
They barely had time to ponder the implications of that potential deployment when on May 13 the public learned that the Trump administration was evaluating a war contingency plan with Iran that would deliver 120,000 U.S. troops into combat against the Islamic republic. Since then, four oil tankers were targeted in apparent acts of sabotage off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, and a drone attack was launched on a Saudi pipeline. Tensions ratcheted up on May 15, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ordered the evacuation of nonessential staff from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, and from the consulate in Erbil, in Iraqi-Kurdistan territory, in response to another undefined Iranian threat.
The escalation caught a lot of Americans off-guard; less surprised was George Lopez, professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies: “I think for most of us who are monitoring what’s been going on over the last two years, this is not sudden.”
Increasingly bellicose rhetoric from the Trump administration under the guidance of Mr. Bolton have meant a sudden surge of alarm in the region. Will it mean another war in the Middle East?
Mr. Lopez explained that tensions with Iran have been on the rise for at least 18 months, beginning with the President Trump’s decision in October 2017 to “disavow” the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. That multilateral agreement intended to end any potential nuclear weapons development by Iran in exchange for the easing of economic sanctions and the normalization of relations with Western states. In May 2018, the president pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal altogether.
There was no diplomatic initiative attached to the U.S. withdrawal, “no visible strategy,” said Mr. Lopez. “Sanctions are not only meant to enrage and punish a target, but to find a way to engage a target. There was no strategy to get [Iran] to the table,” he said. There was only a sense that “we are going to drive you to the ground because of who you are and we’re going to keep our foot on your neck until you cry uncle.”
And this month the increasingly bellicose rhetoric and actions emerging from the Trump administration under the guidance of Mr. Bolton have meant a sudden surge of alarm in the region. Will it mean another war in the Middle East?
“We’re watching October through March of 2003 all over again,” Mr. Lopez said, calling the current approach to Iran a replay of the lead-up to the Bush administration’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein. “But the possible consequences here are so much more dramatic than in Iraq,” he warned.
Tobias Winright is associate professor of Theological Ethics at Saint Louis University in Missouri. “Obviously, given what was experienced in Iraq and the wake of Iraq, I think we’re justified in being skeptical” about the administration’s claims so far, “even more so than usual about such things,” Mr. Winright said.
The president’s tweeted denials that open war with Iran is the administration’s goal have not exactly been reassuring when it remains uncertain who is setting policy.
Filtering the administration’s rhetoric through the Catholic just war tradition, Mr. Winright has difficulty confirming the legitimacy of a conflict at this time with Iran.
“Is there really a threat here?” he asked. The administration needs to share much more information with Congress and the public to make that case, he said. The church has never supported the concept of a preventive war, that is, not a strike to deflect a grave and imminent threat but an offensive move intended to diminish a potential enemy.
“What is the just cause here? Do we have the right intent? Are we trying to promote a just and lasting peace in the region?” These are questions he does not believe the Trump administration has so far adequately addressed.
“I’m not a pacifist,” Mr. Winright said, “and I do believe military force is sometimes justified, but good reasons have to be given.” He has not heard them yet.
Mr. Winright added that because it had essentially cut off a diplomatic route to the mediation of the conflict and resists acting through multilateral institutions like the United Nations, it would be difficult for the administration to meet just war standards of legitimate authority and to prove that a resort to armed conflict truly represents a last recourse.
But even if it could demonstrate legitimate cause, a U.S. strike against Iran still might not be justified, he said, if it would “lead to greater evils than the ones we’re seeking to avoid.”
He is concerned about the fate of many non-combatants who would be put in harm’s way by a U.S.-Iranian conflict, especially ethnic and religious minorities in northern Iraq like the Yazidi and the Chaldean, Armenian and Syriac Christians.
The church has never supported the concept of a preventive war, that is, not a strike to deflect a grave and imminent threat but an offensive move intended to diminish a potential enemy.
“Even if it’s a surgical strike that respects noncombatant immunity, what will the ripple effects of that be? What about blowback?”
And as more military hardware moves into the Persian Gulf, Mr. Lopez said that the danger of an accidental conflict dramatically increases. He added that other unpredictable agents are also at work in the region. “Here we have, foaming at the mouth, the Saudis and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, who can’t wait to see the fight [between the United States and Iran] happen and who have big stakes in it.”
The United States is perceived as an ally of Saudi Arabia, thus a legitimate target to militias in Yemen who may operate outside of Iranian control, Mr, Lopez pointed out. A strike against U.S. forces by one of these militias could trigger a broader conflict.
Mr. Lopez has been troubled by the Trump administration’s apparent disconnect and disarray in its approach to Iran even within its own team of national security and military planners. The president’s tweeted denials that open war is his administration’s goal have not exactly been reassuring when it remains uncertain who is setting policy, Mr. Lopez said.
Mr. Lopez is also concerned with the breakdown of congressional order he has been witnessing as tensions with Iran mounted. He noted that Mr. Bolton’s boasting of more or less personally dispatching a carrier group to the Persian Gulf was demonstrated to be untrue just a few days later by Pentagon reporters, who learned that the deployment had been planned for weeks.
That misrepresentation should have triggered an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he argues. Similarly the loose talk about the deployment of 120,000 troops should have led to hearings by the Senate’s Armed Services Committee. So far there is little indication of a significant response from either of these GOP-led committees.
“We don’t have anyone stepping up” in Congress, he complained. “No committee or journalist has asked what I want to know: What happens the day after [a U.S.] attack” on Iran or its regional surrogates?
He shares Mr. Winright’s concern about the fate of the remnant Christian community in Iraq’s Nineveh Province. They have slowly been returning to communities devastated by occupation by ISIS militants and the effort to dislodge those Islamic extremists in 2016-2017, and they now live among Shiite militia members and their families. How will they be protected in the aftermath of a U.S. strike against Iran or one of its Shiite surrogates in northern Iraq?
Discussions of the growing U.S.-Iran confrontation have so far drawn “no linkage to the Yemeni war,” said Mr. Lopez. But the idea that this conflict could somehow be “compartmentalized” between the United States and Iran is ridiculous, he said, arguing that a war with Iran would have huge repercussions across the Middle East. Noting the fragility of the peace in Iraq and in parts of Syria where fighting has ended and the ongoing bloodshed in Yemen, he added, “If you want to set this whole region on fire, escalate the conflict with Iran.”
Totally agree with Mr. Winright, "I'm not a pacifist...but good reasons have to be given." This is the real world and not the world of theory.
Isn't it interesting, and perhaps frightening, that the only country to have ever deployed nuclear weapons, the United States, deems itself to be the judge of what other nations can have nuclear weapons. And why should the United States of America, a nation remotely removed from the Middle East, have military interest/involvement in that part of the world? Would the United States tolerate Russian, Iranian, or Saudi Arabian warships patrolling its coastal waters? We all know that it wouldn't! The truth is that the U.S. has no business in the Middle East, and its troops and ships are not welcome. All that they have brought to that part of the world is death and destruction, especially in Iraq.
If the United States wants to lead, they should set an example by eliminating their nuclear weapon arsenal, and limit all international involvement to humanitarian efforts.
The Senate of the United States never approved the Iran/U.S. Nuclear Treaty. So there is no treaty and never was. President Trump has been very clear, he considers the Obama/Iran deal a terrible deal that was never ratified. Plane loads of cash were sent by President Obama to Iran. Actions speak louder than words. Isis has been defeated in Syria. I've never been keen on John Bolton, but Trump is the President.
The Senate of the United States never approved the Iran/U.S. Nuclear Treaty. So there is no treaty and never was. President Trump has been very clear, he considers the Obama/Iran deal a terrible deal that was never ratified. Plane loads of cash were sent by President Obama to Iran. Actions speak louder than words. Isis has been defeated in Syria. I've never been keen on John Bolton, but Trump is the President.
Professor Lopez’ comment says it all ........ “the Saudis and .... Netanyahu ..... can’t wait to see the fight (between the United States and Iran) happen and (who) have big stakes in it “. The issue simply follows from the Americans endlessly playing the role of Israel’s lapdog now joined with Trump’s grotesque camaraderie with the Saudi leadership.
In this century the world is a global village and Israel and Saudi Arabia are terrible neighbors with no self-control or internal restraint based on even just the golden rule.
This is a very important article regarding this subject, which has not received the attention it deserves. Also, as we may be stumbling toward more war in the Middle East, I am glad to see the comments from experts that relate the issues to Christian principles.
Thanks
Unfortunately YES, because Trump et al. belong to that generation of grumpy old white men who still believe that WAR IS GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY!
Trump ran on wanting to get us out of wars. But he has advisers, and whatever advice he gets that is the most hateful, THAT'S the one that rings most true for him!
The MSM is starting to remind me of the media's build up to the Iraq war.Already PBS yesterday was up to its old tricks;telling us how Iran is a threat, because of their CONVENTIONAL weapons..Like it was just discovered that Iran has missals.. Does not every country have the right to have conventional weapons?We're going to dictate which countries can defend themselves and which can't? It was never really about them not having nukes but that we control the world and only our interests matter? Now its about that, too.
The biggest threat to world peace may be the US, the way even the anti Trump media too is entertaining ramping up the whole Iran threat propaganda; they have conventional weapons and they fight us in Iraq and Afghanistan.We can be there, but they can't?These are US outposts now?[lol]
Why does this discussion not include any provocative statements and actions that IRAN is engaging in?
Yeah. Just because the Americans, Israelis and Saudis are trying to afflict them with crippling, debilitating misery is no reason for the Iranians to engage in provocative behavior that’s intended to ward off the hegemonic bondage of their three persecutors.