When is military intervention within the borders of another sovereign state a duty or a right and when does it violate politics and law?

The dimensions of that question have changed dramatically over the centuries within the context of the ethics of war--most recently as the issue of the global proliferation of weapons of mass destruction took center stage in the international security arena, the Rev. Bryan Hehir said during a campus lecture on Dec. 6.

The U.S-led war in Iraq--which Hehir characterized as "conceived in confusion" and "carried forward by arrogance"--has only muddied the discourse and left fundamental questions over the principle of nonintervention and the policy of nonproliferation unanswered, he said.

Hehir, the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard University and the secretary for social services and president of Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Boston, delivered the annual Drell Lecture, which is sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). In a talk titled "The Politics and Ethics of Nonproliferation," Hehir examined the ethical relationship between nonproliferation in an age of weapons of mass destruction and terror and the principle of nonintervention. A discussion session following the talk was dominated by questions and commentary on the war in Iraq.

Hehir, a Catholic priest, has taught on the faculty of Georgetown University and the Harvard Divinity School. His research and writing focus on ethics and foreign policy and the role of religion in world politics. Hehir helped to draft the influential 1983 pastoral letter on war and peace issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which called for immediate bilateral agreements to halt the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons systems.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, "things changed dramatically for people who study politics, ethics or strategy," Hehir said. The focus of international security shifted from a problem between two superpowers to the question of world proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, he said. "Now it was no longer how you prevented catastrophic damage, it was what you would do about creeping chaos. The world didn't really know what to do."

Hehir grounded his lecture in the history of the evolution of the principle of nonintervention. In the medieval model of politics in ancient Europe, where the community was suffused with strong themes shaped by faith, the ethic of war was a penal one, he said. "Since the community presumably had a single normative view, "when someone broke the rules, the rest of the community was mobilized in the style of a posse to go after the lawbreaker. In that setting, intervention was a duty," he said.

With the rise of sovereign states, one of the ways of keeping the peace between nations was by the principle of nonintervention--a central idea that is still at the heart of the foreign policy debate today, Hehir said. In the context of preserving order among states, "nonintervention became a duty." Moralists, however, never fully accepted the notion of a duty of nonintervention in absolute terms, because "it allows terrible things to happen inside of political communities and no one else is responsible," he said.

In the moral and political complexities of the 1990s, ethicists and strategists struggled with questions of the principle of nonintervention, "almost stumbling from case to case," in places like Rwanda and Bosnia, he said. But by 2000, an international consensus had begun to emerge, one that presumed nonintervention but defined clear exceptions--including genocide, ethnic cleansing and failed states--that would justify military intervention, he said. There was not yet consensus on what would trigger overriding the principle of nonintervention to enforce the policy of nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, he said.

The debate "was overtaken by terrorism," said Hehir. "The attacks on 9/11 blew apart the framework and it became the lens through which you looked at all of world politics--which was at first understandable," he said.

In his view, the terrorist attacks constituted a "conscious, premeditated attack across international boundaries against civilians," and the war against the Afghan government and al-Qaida met the ethical criteria for a just war, he said.

But the arguments in favor of the war against Iraq were not well grounded and the strategy was unilateralist and interventionist, Hehir said. Legitimacy rested with the sovereign judgment of a single state, and Iraq was seen as a precedent for other cases, he said. "Taking the world into war without being able to persuade the world that it ought to go seems to me to smell of arrogance."

As a result of the debate over the war in Iraq, "we have a highly fragmented international community, a very fragmented U.S. community and pervasive distrust" in international relations, he said. "We are, in a sense, set back as we try to set some basic rules in international policy. I think we are at a point where we are going to have to rebuild from square one on some of these important questions."

A result of the "chaos" of the war in Iraq is that "intervention becomes once again a bad word in toto, when I don't think you can treat it that way. Some interventions are necessary; other interventions are not to be undertaken."