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Regardless of what one thought of the legal and moral justification of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or of the prudence of that action, now that the U.S. is there it has moral and legal obligations to Iraq, to the region and to its citizens.

Many of these obligations are clearly delineated in international law. Relevant documents are the annexed regulations to the Hague Convention IV of 1907, the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention and Protocol I to the Geneva Convention of 1977. (Although neither the U.S. nor Iraq was a party to this latter agreement, its fundamental principles express the spirit of international law.)

Major obligations of the occupying power are the maintenance of law and order, administration of a judicial system, and provision of adequate food, water and medical treatment "to the fullest extent of the means available to [the occupying power]." Religious and cultural practices of the local population are to be respected. Education is to continue, though those over 18 may be compelled to perform work necessary for the needs of the occupation force, to operate public utilities or to provide for people’s basic needs. Perhaps most important, Iraqi sovereignty should remain intact, although elements of normal sovereign activity are suspended or curtailed during the occupation.

Meeting these obligations is not necessarily easy especially when active resistance to the occupation continues, including sabotage of precisely the kinds of public services that international law and prudence require the occupation force to provide. In many ways, occupation law envisions a case of clear-cut surrender of the enemy government, followed by a largely peaceful occupation. Such surrender did not occur in this conflict. It is not surprising that some elements of the old regime might continue to fight on or that al-Qaeda and other non-Iraqi fighters might find opportunity in the current disorganization. The complaint that the U.S. has been slow in meeting its obligations is valid -- although the military had in fact planned for meeting these obligations. (Two detailed studies of occupation tasks were completed for the army well in advance of the conflict. See material at www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/bios/prev/ccrane.)

We did not invade Iraq for the purpose of occupying it or providing services to its citizens, however. Our ethical obligations (as well as our strategic interests) extend not only to Iraqis, but also to neighbors in the region whom our invasion has disrupted. Our leaders owe the citizens of the U.S. results that justify the sacrifice of enormous quantities of national treasure and the loss of friends, spouses, sons and daughters.

If one believed that Iraq possessed significant quantities of weapons of mass destruction and was on the brink of unleashing them on its neighbors or the citizens of the U.S., removing that threat would alone justify our actions. But for those who doubted that claim, or who note the absence of evidence for such weapons and intentions in the aftermath of the war, other outcomes are required.

We must leave a "better peace" than what was there before. While a fully secular, Western-style democracy may be too much to hope for, minimally we need to leave behind a state that is more inclusive and respectful of the rights of its citizens, less inclined to aggressive adventures in its neighborhood and less likely to require future military intervention. Like the de-Nazification program of the post-World War II occupation, the occupation must ensure that the Iraqi government that will reclaim sovereignty is neither a Baathist regime nor an Islamic republic. We will need to retrain and help reequip a new Iraqi military capable of self-defense but respectful of the rights of Iraqi citizens and of the laws of armed conflict. In short, having effected a "regime change" and a decapitation of the Iraqi government, we have an obligation to do far more than leave the country to itself.

As the U.S. continues to wield its enormous power in the world, it is important to temper the unilateralist tone and manner that took us to Iraq. U.S. unilateralism potentially creates an extremely destabilizing practice in international relations.

On the other hand, Kofi Annan’s September 23 comments to the United Nations General Assembly also ring true: "It is not enough to denounce unilateralism, unless we also face up squarely to the concerns that make some States feel uniquely vulnerable, since it is those concerns that drive them to take unilateral action. We must show that those concerns can, and will, be addressed effectively through collective action."

Since World War II, human rights law has been evolving toward agreed-upon limits to the conduct protected by national sovereignty in principle (although rarely in practice), that humanitarian law created a legal permission and perhaps even obligation to intervene in the Internal affairs of states that fall below human rights standards in their treatment of their own people. The U.S’s long-term ethical and legal goal must be to build a similar international consensus about patterns of terrorism and support to terrorism, so that these will not be protected under the cloak of national sovereignty

Nations should move toward acting in concert in the name of collective security. This is precisely the founding vision of the UN: that the Security Council would exercise its Chapter VII authority under the UN Charter promptly and consistently to eliminate threats to international peace and security. Such collective action would allow the great powers to "eliminate the scourge of war." U.S. and international interests converge in pointing toward the establishment of an international order in which that vision can be realized with greater consistency.

The war against terrorism is truly a global war in which all members of the international community have a stake, just as the struggle to realize the human rights agenda globally is an international struggle. We should not let the unilateralist tone of the Iraq intervention blind us to the fundamental truth of these internationalist goals.

Book Review: Morality and Contemporary Warfare

By James Turner Johnson. Yale University Press, 256 pp.

It is a truism that generals always prepare to fight the previous war. The memory of the past so shapes military thinking that the new challenges of future conflicts are frequently obscured. In a similar way, moral thinking about war is to a large degree focused not on the shape of future conflicts, but on the moral questions of previous eras.

James Turner Johnson wants to bring ethical reflection to bear on the conflicts most typical of the present and the foreseeable future. Ours is a post-cold-war world of small-scale ethnic and religious conflict amid the ruins of collapsed empires. The analyses applied to the Vietnam war or the problems of nuclear deterrence are ill suited to illuminate the contemporary scene.

A professor of religion at Rutgers University, Johnson is a leading authority on just-war thinking, especially on its historical development. Among his earlier works are The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions and Can Modern War Be Just? Johnson’s thesis is that much of American literature and thought about war in the 20th century is of limited relevance to the typical forms of contemporary armed conflict and the changing shape of the international order.

Johnson discerns three stages in the post-World War II development of thought about war. The issue of nuclear weapons dominated the 1950s and a good part of the ‘60s. During the Vietnam war Americans were preoccupied with the morality of intervention and the assessment of the means of fighting that war -- all, of course, still under the nuclear umbrella of the cold war. In the ‘80s, the focus returned to nuclear weapons issues, but opposition to all war also became an important factor in the debate.

Although all those issues remain alive, none is directly relevant to current problems:

This is the kind of armed conflict that has erupted in the former Yugoslavia, in many places in Africa and in the former Soviet republics.

Johnson graphically illustrates the moral schizophrenia of much contemporary moral and religious-ethical thought, including that of the U.S. Catholic bishops and other official religious bodies. On the one hand, there is a strong resistance to the use of military power, rising in some Roman Catholic documents and papal statements to a "presumption against war" and the suggestion that recourse to military power is always bad. Counterbalancing this trend is the frequent advocacy (often by the same groups and individuals) of using military power in humanitarian causes.

To those wrestling with this dilemma, Johnson offers an historical review of the fundamental principles of the justified use of force and their application to this new environment. Neither the political tradition of realism, with its sharp focus on narrowly conceived national interest, nor a utopian universalism uninformed by the hard practicalities of military capability offers significant conceptual help. The former would counsel undue isolationism on the grounds that very few humanitarian causes genuinely engage vital national interests. The latter would advocate impossibly grandiose involvements in humanitarian interventions, involvements far beyond the nation’s military and diplomatic capabilities and resources.

Johnson draws on the whole history of just-war thinking to find the appropriate moral framework to guide us. With caution and even-handedness he shows the limitations of so-called "just-war pacifism" (the thesis that modern weapons are so inherently destructive and indiscriminate that no war fought using them could be just). He also cautions against an overenthusiastic embrace of the United Nations as the sole guarantor of international peace and security.

The end of the cold war makes it politically more likely that the UN will want to exercise the powers granted it in its charter. For example, in principle the UN has "the right to intervene, by force if necessary, in conflicts where no peace has been established, in order to set right conditions deemed to pose a threat to international peace and security." But Johnson notes that the presently constituted UN "lacks in itself the attributes necessary to make it capable of effectively acting out this role stipulated in the Charter."

The conclusion often drawn from such observations is that the UN should increase its power and authority, developing sufficient military power to perform far-flung humanitarian operations.

Here, too, Johnson provides some valuable cautions against a too quick criticism of the nation-state and an overenthusiastic embrace of a single global authority. Legitimate authority for humanitarian interventions, Johnson notes, is not dependent on the Security Council actually agreeing on action. As a practical matter, "what is required is that the majority of Security Council members agree to support a particular use of force, while no one permanent member opposes it enough to veto it."

But the military forces necessary to execute such operations must be drawn from the best national forces available or from those of longstanding and highly trained alliances such as NATO. Consequently, although the legal authority may reside with the UN, "the de facto authority for the use of force has been delegated to. . . regional organization[s] ." Further, only if those forces are large, well equipped and well trained will the aims of the "international community" be effectively advanced.

Johnson focuses on four aspects of contemporary armed conflict that, while not unprecedented, have become special concerns: the legitimacy of intervention, the place of noncombatants, the significance of cultural differences, and procedures for dealing with war crimes and achieving reconciliation after conflict.

Johnson’s discussion of intervention is organized around his assessment of the thought of Paul Ramsey, Michael Walzer and the U.S. Catholic bishops. This lends the discussion an air of conversation among scholars, but Johnson’s review of the debate helps bring readers into that conversation.

Perhaps Johnson’s most powerful contribution is his demonstration that American Catholic thought has lacked clarity on the issue of intervention. In The Challenge of Peace, their 1983 pastoral letter, the bishops "identified as critical the need for arms control and disarmament, efforts to minimize the risk of ‘any war."’ But in their tenth anniversary "reflection" on the ‘83 pastoral, The Harvest of Justice Is Sown in Peace, a new topic appears: "the forceful, direct intervention by one or more states for essentially humanitarian purposes," such as alleviating "internal chaos, repression and widespread loss of life." The bishops note that Pope John Paul II called such interventions "obligatory" and "a duty for nations and the international community," and they listed the particular conflicts where intervention seemed justified: Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Burundi.

The bishops’ confusion mirrors the situation in many religious communities. The source of the confusion is the tension between the older standard of state sovereignty, which focuses moral obligation within political communities, and the emerging standards of universal human rights, which call for intervention into states in the name of the rights of citizens and the pursuit of justice.

Tension becomes pernicious when it prevents people from considering practical issues of intervention. Advocates of aggressive humanitarian intervention need to reflect more deeply on the military capabilities required for and the limitations of possible intervention. What rules of engagement and weaponry will allow forces to be effective and yet avoid drawing them into the conflict as additional combatant parties?

Although Johnson does not make the point, I would add that religious communities have an obligation to understand the consequences to the armed forces deployed. Each deployment has major impacts on defense funding, retention of personnel and the ability to perform tasks essential to national military strategy. To be specific, a military large enough to execute the current U.S. strategy and also to conduct numerous long-term humanitarian interventions would have to be considerably larger and better funded than the one we have now (our present army, for example, is only two-thirds the size it was during the Desert Storm offensive). Are religious communities prepared to advocate a military large enough to implement interventionist ideals?

Johnson examines in some detail two features that have made contemporary wars particularly horrific: wholesale warfare against noncombatants, and warfare fueled by religious and ethnic difference. The idea of making discriminations in combat, so central to Western just-war thought, was jettisoned completely in the style of air war fought in World War II. Johnson reviews noncombatancy and discrimination as they have been articulated and reaffirmed by official religious statements, scholars and international law since then. The massively destructive character of modern warfare is often cited as the central difficulty in protecting noncombatants. In the recent conflicts in Rwanda-Zaire and in Bosnia, however, the massive and indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants were "not collateral, but a deliberately chosen means of prosecuting the war."

Johnson reviews and rejects various bases on which one might claim that the distinction between noncombatants and combatants is irrelevant in such conflict. While granting that each form of conflict generates ambiguous cases, he argues for the importance of maintaining the fundamental immunity of noncombatants and for intervening to protect victims of indiscriminate warfare. "Intervening to help the victims of such conduct in war . . , is not simply a humanitarian action oriented to the good of the victims; it also serves the cause of international peace and stability."

The role of religion and ethnicity in generating and sustaining conflict is a striking and depressing aspect of many modern wars. Johnson notes that realist political theory (with its focus on rationally conceived interests) and the rational and cosmopolitan ethic of the Enlightenment do not take such matters into account. "In terms of an interest-based conception of politics, wars in which the influence of cultural factors looms large are dangerously irrational, unpredictable in their beginnings, and often extreme in their conduct." But since such wars have become pervasive, an adequate theory of statecraft must take diverse theories of causation into account.

Johnson concludes by discussing "conflict resolution." What means can bring secure and stable endings to conflict? Would a universal regime of war crimes trials bring standards of justice to bear on past conflicts? Would the existence of a permanent international criminal court deter violations of the laws of war, or would it prolong conflict? Or is some version of "no-fault" reconciliation a better approach?

Johnson identifies "two useful strategies": active efforts to increase communication across lines of cultural difference, and a focus on reconstructing societies devastated by conflict rather than on settling scores. But Johnson is wise enough to know that "both have limits; neither is a panacea."

To those caught between uncritical pacifism and equally uncritical interventionism, Johnson provides an invaluable perspective and sense of balance. He reminds us that the deepest presumption in Christian thought is not against violence, but in favor of protection of the weak and the innocent from unjust attack and oppression. It is that presumption that leads serious Christians soberly, even mournfully, to take up the sword. Johnson helps us to think clearly about that task.

When Martin Luther asked "Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved," he was struggling to find a theologically defensible balance between two competing demands. As he penned the 1526 essay, he was feeling the force of the New Testament’s condemnation of violence and Christ’s exhortation to nonresistance of evil. But Luther also faced the demands of political reality. The survival of the Reformation, he realized, was dependent on the fighting power of the German princes. Finally, Luther was unwilling to sacrifice political prudence and practicality on the altar of biblical literalism, or to identify Christianity with sectarian withdrawal from the political sphere.

I propose a similar approach to military service in our time. Christian ethics has generated much scholarly work on "just war" theory, and recent literature is rich in discussions of violence -- both the literal kind, and the kind embedded in institutional structures. But there is a notable lack of attention to the moral concern most typical of early Christians: the legitimacy of military service.

This is all the more surprising at a time when tens of thousands of Christians are serving in the U.S. armed forces. For more than 20 years now, the U.S. has relied entirely on volunteers to fill the ranks of the armed forces. Anyone familiar with the culture of the American military knows that many officers and enlisted soldiers identify themselves as pious Christians. In their minds, there is no tension between their commitments to faith and to the military. Indeed, many military personnel believe that their commitment to a cause larger than self, and to possible self-sacrifice in defense of that cause, is one of the highest and most noble of Christian callings.

Given the generally antimilitary ethos of many mainline Protestant traditions and clergy and most Roman Catholics, one might expect them to suggest that it is moral failure that causes these individuals to volunteer for military service. Such views are rarely articulated. As a result, there is little serious dialogue about whether Christians ought to serve in the military.

Christian ethicists and leaders are remiss in not initiating such a discussion. Most denominations feature a culture gap between their civilian members and military members. At best, it is a gulf of mutual noncomprehension. At worst, the gulf fuels distrust and suspicion.

Given the nature and function of U.S. forces at this historical juncture, how should Christians think about voluntary military service? What advice can Christian leaders give regarding the meaning of choosing voluntary military service?

The contemporary American military is used for many purposes. It fights wars. It provides disaster relief in cases of flood, hurricane and earthquake. It deploys peacekeeping and peacemaking missions all over the world, from East Timor to Bosnia to Kosovo. Each of those missions presents a different moral frame for the meaning of military service. Clearly, the moral meaning of any profession is tied to what someone who joins it imagines he or she will be doing as a result of making that choice.

Let’s start with the core function of the military -- its essential reason for being. All activities in the military ultimately serve to sustain the "pointy end of the spear." In its most formal and sterile formulation, their purpose is "national defense." A more direct expression is "fighting and winning America’s wars." When military people talk among themselves, they state the unvarnished truth: it is "killing people and breaking things."

The prima facie case against Christians’ performing this function is unquestionable. The message of the New Testament, the early church and the example of Jesus himself all point to nonresistance to evil as the model of Christian life. Yet those texts and examples fail to address a perennial problem: How do we protect innocent people and maintain order in a world where wrongdoing is a permanent feature of life?

For Augustine and Luther, the Christian soldier is justified in his military service because he is performing an essential service for the good of the society. Properly used, the military protects a sphere of civil life within which a relatively peaceful existence is possible.

I think this view of morally legitimate military service is correct. But it is too easy to conclude that this argument alone justifies service in the contemporary American military. There is no foreseeable scenario in which our military will need to be used in defense of the nation in the strict sense. By "strict sense" I mean the defense of our borders from an armed incursion that threatens national survival or political institutions.

When we use the war-making capabilities of our military around the world, we are using them for purposes that can rarely be labeled honestly as national defense. At some risk of oversimplification, I would identify two uses of military force in modern American deployments. On some occasions, the U.S. uses military force in pursuit of vital national interests; on others, it applies force in support of international moral and political ideals. In the post-cold-war world the latter type of interventions are likely to increase.

Most exercises of American military power in recent decades fall into the first category -- the service of national interests. The invasions of Panama and Grenada, the attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan, and the deployment in the gulf war fit into this framework.

I’m not endorsing the judgment that American interests were at stake in each of these cases. But the individual member of the armed forces who was involved in any of these situations is the agent of the National Command Authority, and pursues objectives which in that authority’s judgment are weighty enough to be sought through use of the military instrument.

Is a morally conscientious Christian justified in joining a profession in which he or she voluntarily accepts the obligation to serve as such an agent? Before tackling this question directly, let me set aside one matter immediately. I take it to be obvious that no one should be willing to serve in a campaign or conflict known to a moral certainty to be unjust, or conducted in clear violation of just-war reasoning. Nor should they volunteer to serve a state whose leadership, in their judgment or that of their Christian community, routinely uses soldiers in ways that are not justified.

But military personnel are entitled to give their leaders a large benefit of the doubt. They may in conscience assume that decision-makers have weighed the moral and personal costs of using them in conflict against the weight of the national interests involved and deemed it an acceptable equation.

It follows that citizens should not in conscience volunteer for military service unless they believe in the general moral seriousness and competence of the command authority that will be in control of them. It is not necessary to believe that leaders are omniscient or infallible or even morally pure. On this point, Shakespeare’s soldiers have it exactly right in their reply to King Henry V. Henry asserts that soldiers may die contented in the king’s company, "his cause being just, and his quarrel honorable." The soldiers reply with appropriate skepticism concerning the decision to use them in this war in the first place: "That’s more than we know. Ay, and more than we should seek after; for we know enough, if we know we are the king’s subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us."

I do not mean to give soldiers a moral blank check. The permission is, rather, hypothetical: if one believes that military forces must exist to protect the common life of the state and the lives of the innocent, and if one sincerely believes that he or she serves a relatively good state, led by reasonably competent and responsible leaders, then one is morally justified in that service.

But what justifies the soldier’s willingness to fight, kill and possibly die in the service of national interests as determined by national command authority? At root, this question is about the moral status of the sovereign state itself. For Christians, the sovereign state is necessarily a morally ambiguous thing.

In principle, Christianity is cosmopolitan. From its inception Christianity was committed to Isaac Watts’s claim that "In Christ there is no east or west, in him no south or north." After Constantine, the attempt to convert religious and moral universalism into institutional and political form led to the corruption of both church and state.

The Reformation shattered the church’s grasp on the whole of Europe, but without rethinking (except in the case of the Radical Reformation) the principle that a single all-encompassing church should be yoked with a single state. The result was relentless religious warfare until the Peace of Westphalia (1648) set the stage for an international order of sovereign independent states. The system Westphalia established was, morally and religiously viewed, always a compromise arrangement. It was a pragmatic accommodation between the ideal principle of religious universalism and the practical reality of political and confessional fragmentation.

In the Westphalian international system, military service takes place in a less-than-universal nation-state. The soldier serves his or her state and strives to protect and advance the interests of that state in the inherent competition between similar states. The American state serves to protect the lives and interests of Americans.

In the current international context, the U.S. serves as what former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the "indispensable nation." In peacekeeping and diplomacy, U.S. participation is expected and sought by almost all other states.

Only the politically naïve could fail to realize that being the "indispensable nation" depends on the appearance and reality of American power. For the U.S. to continue to play that role in the world, it must defend and advance its interests effectively and maintain its credible military leadership. Service in the U.S. military supports those requirements. It is not necessary to claim American moral purity to justify that service -- any more than Augustine felt the need to join Roman pagans in the glorification of Rome’s rise to power and empire, or Luther to exaggerate the purity of the motives of the German princes.

The ability to threaten and to use coercive force is a morally necessary instrument of worldly power. We who benefit from the voluntary service of our fellow Christians (and others) who take on the moral, physical and spiritual burden of that service honor them poorly when we simply wish those sad necessities away.

Ancient Athenian leader Pericles put the matter most honestly, I believe, in his address to the Athenian assembly. His words come after Athens’ first encounter with military defeat and plague in the Peloponnesian War. They are words of striking relevance to the place of the United States in the modern world:

It is right and proper for you to support the imperial dignity of Athens. This is something in which you all take pride, and you cannot continue to enjoy the privileges unless you also shoulder the burdens of empire. . . . Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirit of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do. In fact you now hold your empire down by force: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go. And the kind of people who talk of doing so and persuade others to adopt their point of view would very soon bring a state to ruin. . . . For those who are politically apathetic can only survive if they are supported by people who are capable of taking action. They are quite valueless in a city which controls an empire, though they would be safe slaves in a city that was controlled by others.

In the contemporary geopolitical circumstance, service in the American military is, on balance, a force for relative good. That good is grounded in a balance of power and coercion, a balance that Reinhold Niebuhr argued is the closest approximation to justice and peace achievable in this world. To the fundamental question then -- is military service to defend and advance American national interest and security a valid Christian vocational choice -- my answer is yes.

I would also point to Pericles’ wise counsel. All of us in the U.S. benefit from the service of those "willing to act" on our behalf. Because they have been so successful for such a long time, we have a luxury that is very rare in human societies. For us citizens, the connection between the peace and prosperity of the society we live in and the reality of our military power is largely invisible to us.

Unless we are really willing to give up the "empire" -- the place America has secured for itself in the economic and political sphere of the world -- we must also accept the burdens, practical and moral, of maintaining that place. It is simply bad faith to derive the benefit and then condemn a major source of that benefit.

Furthermore, unless we really believe the world as a whole would be better off without the U.S. to play the "indispensable nation" role, we must think clearly about the fact that our power serves not merely national but global welfare and stability.

Naturally, there’s lot of room in this framework for determining what are American national interests, and for criticizing ways in which that has historically been construed to justify questionable policies. There’s room to ask, for example, what degree of redistribution of the world’s wealth and debt forgiveness would be acceptable to the U.S. and other economic major powers without destabilizing the world order. There’s room to ask whether we understand the tensions of other societies clearly enough before we use their conflicts as a reason to intervene. But any such assessment must be made in the clear light of political reality, and not in terms of universalizing an idealism that cannot be practically implemented.

The other typical use of contemporary American military force -- service of internationally defined moral and political concerns -- is not tied strongly to American national interest. The "ideal type" of this use of American force is as part of a coalition deployed in the name of humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping or peacemaking.

Although resembling in some ways domestic police work, such use of military power is inherently less discriminate than policing. Only very rarely will military force be able directly to act against "the perpetrator," especially if we mean the command authority behind military atrocities. In the ideal police model, to take Kosovo as an example, one would wish to apprehend or attack Serbian leaders themselves, and individual soldiers and commanders responsible for ethnic cleansing and atrocity. But in practice, all the standard just-war concerns about noncombatant immunity and discrimination are present, perhaps even more strongly so, because of the inherently imprecise nature of the military instrument.

The Clinton administration has established use of American forces in operations such as peacekeeping, peacemaking and nation-building as a fundamental part of our present national security policy. It is the stated policy of the secretary general of the United Nations that the world should move toward a uniform policy of preparedness to reach through the borders of sovereign states whenever and wherever the defense of fundamental human rights requires it.

What should be our moral assessment of military service in this form? How should the Christian view military service in a blue-helmeted or internationally authorized coalition force? This kind of military service comes closest to the Christian understanding of military service. If an effective international consensus were to build up in support of consistent and principled use of coercive power in support of universal principle, it would represent true "self-less service" by military personnel.

But there are numerous obstacles to making U.S. military forces resemble this kind of international law-enforcement force. On the side of international political structure, the presently constituted United Nations is too weak to exercise such force effectively and consistently. Consequently, agreement in the Security Council to authorize such actions is inconsistent, and heavily influenced by the interests of the major powers.

Also, because international law enforcement depends on the voluntary participation of the militaries of sovereign states, those states inevitably are averse to running significant risks to their own forces in defense of the lives and rights of individuals who are not their own citizens. The felt sense of international solidarity is not yet to the point where sacrifice of American military lives in defense of, say, Kosovar civilians, feels as justified as would the defense of the same numbers of American lives.

But even the glimpses of effective action by "the international community" hold out a promise that corresponds well to the kind of vision of global human community that Christian ethics should advocate. A Christian realist vision would encourage and support Christians (and others) in their military service -- especially if the military they serve increasingly approximates the ideal of Christian universalism.

The war criminal, the aggressor, the practitioner of genocide and the terrorist are not fading from the scene. In such a world, only the presence of effective military forces makes possible the maintenance of relative peace and security in international politics. Voluntary service in support of that relative peace is a self-sacrificial Christian calling.