America's third war is underway. Don't be fooled by the legerdemain of President Obama "passing the football" to a NATO coalition, so that it appears not to be an American war. The US effectively controls NATO because it leads NATO. So we have Iraq, then Afghanistan, now Libya.
Back in the "good old days" there had to be a clear and present danger to the United States in order to justify war. In this regard, Afghanistan was the most legitimate, since it harboured and provided a base of operations for Al Qaeda, which had just murdered three thousand people in New York.
Somewhere along there came a new war-doctrine in the West, espoused most forcefully by Tony Blair. David Rieff, writing in the New Republic, puts it neatly:
Remember those halcyon days of the late 1990s when Tony Blair was promising the world that in the future the West would fight wars in the name of its values, not just of its interests, in effect promising that the wars of the twenty-first century would be noble wars of altruism?
Then came Iraq. War was justified because Saddam Hussein constituted a clear and present danger to someone (neighbouring countries, most likely), what with weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the brutality of the regime was evident. People really were dying in the torture chambers--in large numbers. In the jingoism of the moment, few noticed the subtle, but significant shift from the justification for Afghanistan to Iraq.
Then came the "surge" which was said to be the key to US victory in Iraq. Whilst the "surge" would have helped, let none be in any doubt: the only reason the US were able to claim victory was that Sunni and Shi'ite factions stopped fighting the US and turned their guns on Al Qaeda operatives instead. That happened because Al Qaeda made itself odious in the eyes of both factions, since it regarded both as traitors to Islam and equally worthy of extermination.
Meanwhile, the mission in Afghanistan shifted from rendering Al Qaeda impotent (which should have been done within a few months, followed by a speedy withdrawal) to "nation building". Same mission as Iraq, now. The objective is to make both Iraq and Iran into secular Western-style democracies, with the same philosophical intellectual urbanity of, say, the secular West.
Then comes Libya--the third war. At first it was justified on humanitarian grounds: stopping Gaddafi from slaughtering the inhabitants of Bengazi. Each time, the justification for war has both expanded and diminished. First it was protecting American lives, then countries in the Middle East, now civilians and insurgents in a country not remotely connected with the US. But also the threshold for was has gone down: now it was to protect civilians and citizens of another country from their own government. (At this point, the US has "justification" for armed aggression against just about every government on the planet.) But, now that the inhabitants of Bengazi have been protected, the "mission" has morphed into more familiar territory: the overthrow of Gaddafi--regime change--in order to install yet again another western-style democracy this time in Libya.
Humanitarianism is a bloody, bloody doctrine. It is also a wicked idolatry that will be broken into pieces by the Living God. Humanitarianism is an attempt by Western elites and its commentariate to establish the beneficent empire of man over the world. It is in the name of Man that the US and Europe has gone to war repeatedly. It is the Tower of Babel redivivus: "come, let us make a name for ourselves".
Now at this point, an objector usually says, "Well, with Gaddafi closing in on Bengazi with blood on his mind, what would you do?" The very question betrays the problem. Why presume that one needs to do anything? What basis, what ideology, what religion must one appeal to in order to justify interference or action in behalf of those not citizens, not those one's government has been charged by God to protect and defend? Whatever the justification, know for sure that it will not be remotely Christian. For Christianity cannot, cannot be spread by the sword.
Not that Christians and Christian countries would never bear a sword. Christianity does not teach pacifism with respect to the state. But bearing the sword must never be living by the sword. For a truly Christian nation, bearing the sword must only ever be a police and judicial action to defend one's own citizens from murderous aggression, and to execute the aggressors. It is a limited and strict application of the divine mandate given to the civil magistrate in Romans 13--only in this case the evil doer would be the aggressive foreign power, whose servants must be put to death as long as they attempt to do evil, murder, maim and destroy the lives and property of our citizens.
Going to war in order to do good, especially good in the name of Man, is doomed to an unceasing exaction of blood. As C. S. Lewis put it:
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
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