Afghanistan, the Just War Doctrine and the Fitzgerald Family

When fiercely anti-Russian John Paul II  became Pope in 1978 his fellow countryman Zbigniew Brzezinski was already pushing for confrontation with the Soviets as the head of President Carter's National Security Council. At the same time the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT II ) was working it way through congress. We had interviewed the supporters of the SALT II Treaty back in 1979 for a documentary. At that time all nuclear agreements had been governed by "Mutual Assured Destruction." This principle dictated that if either side used their nuclear weapons, the other side would retaliate in kind and neither side would win. This realization kept a strict limit on the numbers of weapons each side maintained. Once the Soviet invasion occurred in December, 1979 all negotiation on the the SALT II Treaty ended. It came as no surprise that Reagan was elected in 1980 on an anti-arms control platform that year.

A group known as Team B had been lobbying since the early 50's against this restriction, arguing that the Soviets were cheating and planned to take over the world. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan Team B finally had the proof they'd been looking for and the restrictions came off. In the summer of 1980, six months after the Soviet invasion - two men from the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, published an article in Foreign Policy Magazine called Victory is Possible which cited the Just War Doctrine of the Catholic Church as reason to stop abiding by the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction. They argued that it was immoral not to prepare to fight a nuclear war and that we should be prepared to win at all costs.

We found the idea that the US was using a medieval doctrine to justify Armageddon amazing but it caught on. What we didn't know at the time was that the Just War Doctrine of the Catholic Church had been written by the Papal Nuncio for the Fitzgerald family in Ireland during the 1570's. As a Fitzgerald I knew something of my family's history. A terrible war, brought on the Fitzgeralds by the English destroyed much of the family's power and depopulated the Irish countryside. Now I began to see how long my family had been involved in international and religious politics and that the Just War document was just one event in a very long family quest.

It was startling to discover that a document created to save my family in the 16 Th century could now be used to justify a nuclear Holocaust at the end of the 20 Th century. It required a whole new way of thinking to grasp the meaning. Alexis de Tocqueville stated that ''religion extends its authority over intelligence . . . It is religion that gave birth to American societies; one must never forget this." It  would seem an understatement today.