Sunday, March 15, 2015

Vatican to UN: Authorize military force to stop ISIS genocide

◼ Last summer, Pope Francis issued a stunning call for global action against ISIS, but stopped short of a demand for war.
Last summer, Pope Francis issued a stunning call for global action against ISIS, but stopped short of a demand for war. The pontiff carefully explained that the world needed to “stop the unjust aggressor,” that force might be required to do so, and that the proper venue for such action would be the United Nations. “One single nation cannot judge how he is to be stopped, how an unjust aggressor is to be stopped,” Francis told a plane full of reporters as he left South Korea, but insisted that “it is legitimate to stop the unjust aggressor.”

Yesterday, on the second anniversary of Pope Francis’ election, the Vatican made it much more explicit. The world must come together in force to stop the genocides of ISIS, in what Crux’s John Allen called “an unusually blunt endorsement of military action”:
“We have to stop this kind of genocide,” said Italian Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s representative in Geneva. “Otherwise we’ll be crying out in the future about why we didn’t so something, why we allowed such a terrible tragedy to happen.”

Tomasi said that any anti-ISIS coalition has to include the Muslim states of the Middle East, and can’t simply be a “Western approach.” He also said it should unfold under the aegis of the United Nations.

The call for force is striking, given that the Vatican traditionally has opposed military interventions in the Middle East, including the two US-led Gulf Wars. It builds, however, on comments from Pope Francis that the use of force is “legitimate … to stop an unjust aggressor.” …

“It will be up the United Nations and its member states, especially the Security Council, to determine the exact form of intervention necessary,” he said, “but some responsibility [to act] is clear.”
In other words, we seem to have moved from what Allen described as a “yellow light” last summer to a very bright, flashing green light. Needless to say, this is not just “unusually blunt,” it’s unusually hawkish for the Vatican...





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