Tell Congress to stop the Biden administration from funding wars in Ukraine and Israel

(LifeSiteNews) — John Sharpe, editor and publisher of IHS Press, gave LifeSiteNews an interview about his 2005 two volume series called Neo-Conned! Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq and Neo-Conned! Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq (with an Introduction by Scott Ritter). These two volumes were released in opposition to the 2003 Iraq War and its aftermath. At the time, John and my late husband, Robert Hickson, worked closely on these books, with my husband contributing an essay to each of the volumes, discussing the project, and helping to find other contributors for the books. With both Robert and John being Catholics and having a military background, they had a lot of common ground. John himself is a retired navy commander.

At the time, this topic was not a welcomed one. In 2003, I remember how Robert left his teaching position at the Special Operations University in Tampa, Florida, because he could not have that war on his conscience. He tried, in high-level meetings and conferences, to convince the U.S. military that this incursion into Iraq would constitute an unjust war, that there were no justified causes for such a war, nor were there even clear aims for the war. But, as many of our readers surely remember, such a time was not one welcome to differing opinions.

I believe it gave my husband some satisfaction to be able to contribute to this project, providing him an opportunity to aid his country in a different way.

Now, nearly twenty years later, the atmosphere has greatly changed. People have started to wake up to the fact that the neoconservative thinkers in our country have effectively steered U.S. foreign policy for years, particularly through waging wars against countries in the Middle East such as Iraq and Syria, who had no intention of attacking America.

In the conversation with John Sharpe, he gave examples of this happening, pointing to the fact that in the U.S.’s preparation for the Iraq invasion, numerous stories were spread about Iraq leader Saddam Hussein, stories which were now know were simply not true. John explained to LifeSite that volume one of his Neoconned! books has a lengthy interview by Jude Wanniski, a conservative journalist, who details all the falsehoods spread about Iraq and Saddam Hussein. As Wikipedia has it, this lengthy interview was Wanniski’s last publication before he died in 2005.

At this current moment, most of our readers will know that Iraq did not possess those infamous “weapons of mass destruction” that were the casus belli (case for war) for the U.S. to bomb the country.

More fundamentally, the first volume of the Neoconned! books presents essays on the long tradition of Catholic just war doctrine (including the writings of Fr. Franziskus Stratmann, O.P.), which lays out the principles of “ad bellum” and “in bellum,” as Sharpe told LifeSite. That is to say: what are the principles when it is morally licit to enter a war, and what are the principles that allow a country to be kept in a war.

John Sharpe summed the just war doctrine with the words: “unless you have been attacked, or you know that you are in danger of an imminent attack, you may not go to war.” Applying it to the Iraq war, Sharpe added: “as Wanniski makes it very clear, Saddam [Hussein] did not attack us, and there was no danger happening.”

But not only did the U.S. attack Iraq, they also occupied the country. Effectively, according to Sharpe, “there was an actual insurgency,” there were “actually Iraqis in their own country who didn’t welcome an occupying power.” He went on to describe in detail how the U.S. then started treating these insurgent civilians as combatants, thereby undermining principles of the Geneva Convention with respect to the treatment of civilians in war. Another part of the problem of these Middle Eastern wars is the concept of “nation building,” this idea that a foreign power like America can root out centuries of history and erect a new nation in its place.

John and I also touched on the role of neoconservatives such as Robert Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz who were pushing for these wars in the Middle East. Colonel Douglas Macgregor, in a LifeSite interview earlier this year, had detailed their machinations at the highest levels of the U.S. government. In that interview, Macgregor had recounted what Paul Wolfowitz said in the 1990s, characterizing Wolfowitz’s motto as one of “perpetual revolution” with the notion that the U.S. will “go everywhere” and “reshape everything.”

Speaking about the 2003 Iraq War, Macgregor also referred back to Wolfowitz, who worked “strategically around Israel.” At the time, Macgregor did not see the military leaders of the U.S. being interested in occupying Iraq. “No one was prepared to occupy anything,” he expounded, referring here to General Tommy Franks. But then “we destroyed it,” he went on to say, and Iraq “was in ruins.” All of this happened to “help Israel’s position strategically.”

With regard to the role of the neoconservatives, and especially Richard Perle’s Clean Break Plan from 1996, Sharpe explained in our interview that this document was about a “strategy for the survival of Israel,” derived in neoconservative think tanks. That document “is basically to say we have to destabilize the powerful countries that are the neighbors of Israel. And it’s no secret whatsoever. That Israel and the United States, in terms of foreign policy vision, are in lockstep. It’s just not a secret. It’s not something that’s good, bad, indifferent. It’s a fact. It is a reality.”

We hope that our readers, after watching this short interview, take an interest in studying the history of the Iraq war in more detail, perhaps with the help of these two historic Neo-conned! volumes that formed a Catholic witness at a time where voices of peace had very little audience. May we learn from our recent past in order to avoid more wars in the future.

Tell Congress to stop the Biden administration from funding wars in Ukraine and Israel