FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Back in the 1990s, Cambodia, impoverished and rebuilding after its genocidal Khmer Rouge years, took steps to give its new garment industry a competitive leg up. It agreed to a system of fair labor standards with a minimum wage rule, a limit to working hours, unions to represent workers, and freedom of expression. All would be open to international inspection. Today, there are perhaps 400,000 garment workers in more than 300 factories in and near the capital, Phnom Penh. They are subcontractors to brand names and retailers in Europe and America.

Beginning from scratch less than two decades ago, Cambodia’s garment industry has grown into the largest export earner for this country. Three out of four dollars that come into Cambodia come from the garment factories.

The key question is how much all this has benefited workers, almost all of whom are female. Many factories have been plagued by labor unrest. Occasionally, it’s been violent. There have been frequent reports of faintings on factory floors. The unions cite unhealthy conditions and workers weak from malnourishment.

CHEA MONY (Trade Union Leader): Workers have very low salaries, only $61US per month. You cannot afford to live on that day to day. It’s legalized slavery.

DE SAM LAZARO: Chea introduced us to these workers. Like most of their colleagues, they are young, rural migrants living in tight, shared quarters, supporting extended families back home.

SOY NAKRY (Garment Worker): We have to pay for the room, electricity, water.

VONG SOPHAL (Garment Worker): In the evening, we just buy some fish and make some soup. Sometimes we have to keep part of it for breakfast.

DE SAM LAZARO: Chem Savet supports a farm family in a rural province 60 miles away, including her husband, her parents, and two-year-old daughter.

CHEM SAVET (Garment Worker): I can only see her once a month. When I go home she really misses me, so she hugs me, especially when I must leave one day later. One time she put some of her clothes in when I was packing. She wanted to come with me.

DE SAM LAZARO: The standard six-day, 48-hour week plus overtime leaves little time for travel to see family. Factory managers aren’t sympathetic during family emergencies, they complained, and many employees are on temporary instead of permanent employment contracts.

FEMALE GARMENT WORKER: Previously, we saw a lot of strikes, but those haven’t happened recently in our factory because there are a lot of newcomers.

DAVID SCHILLING (Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility): The minimum wage clearly is not sufficient for workers to meet their basic needs. We’re talking food. We’re talking clothing.

DE SAM LAZARO: David Schilling is with the New York-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. It’s a shareholder activist group that wants to add a moral voice in global economic matters.

SCHILLING: Whether you’re talking about all the Abrahamic traditions, the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, at the core is that concept of the human dignity of the person. So you’re taking that and then you’re moving into the realities.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ken Loo represents Cambodia’s garment factory owners. He sees a very different reality for workers.

KEN LOO (Cambodia Garment Manufacturing Association): They’re not whipped, you know. They’re not chained. They come to work willingly.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says most garment workers make more than the $61 minimum wage; closer to $90 dollars a month, he says, higher with overtime. That’s more than policemen, teachers, or most civil servants, he adds.

LOO: We have to put things in context. The per capita GDP of Cambodia for last year as announced by the World Bank was $908. The average common factory worker earns 40 percent more than national per capita GDP. If you use that as a gauge, I think any worker in America would be glad to get 40 percent more than national per capita GDP.

DE SAM LAZARO: Cambodia’s minister of commerce says factory owners have little wiggle room because they are no more than contract tailors.

CHAM PRASIDH (Cambodian Minister of Commerce): They do not own the fabric. They do not own the brand. They just import the fabric, cut, sew, pack, and then sell.

DE SAM LAZARO: Prasidh could impose higher wages in the factories, most of which are owned by investors from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Malaysia. But he says that would be suicidal.

PRASIDH: There is a lot of demonstration to ask for living condition, ask to increase the minimum wage, and what happen? The investor just packed their sewing machine, and they go home!

DE SAM LAZARO: Or they go to another country?

PRASIDH: They go to another country so we have to compare that, our price with Bangladesh. We have to compare our price with Pakistan or India, yeah, or even with China.

DE SAM LAZARO: San Francisco-based Gap is the largest buyer of garments made in Cambodia. It also buys from dozens of other developing nations. Spokeswoman Bobbi Silten says Gap, which owns the Old Navy and Banana Republic chains as well, has no plans to leave Cambodia.

BOBBI SILTEN (Gap Foundation): We have very longstanding relationships with many of the vendors in Cambodia. It’s been one of our top ten sourcing countries for the last ten years. So we are very committed to being there, and we think that the labor standards that they have put in place is one of the reasons why we continue to stay.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ken Loo says buyers may talk up the labor standards. But in 2008, when the global recession began, many, including Gap, cut back in Cambodia. At the same time, he says, Bangladesh—with lower pay and labor standards—saw no drop in business.

LOO: It just confirms our knowledge that, indeed, compliance of labor standards is the icing on the cake. Price is the cake.

PRASIDH: It is a race to the bottom, and Cambodia—to survive we have to create something special.

DE SAM LAZARO: Jill Tucker says Cambodia does have a special competitive advantage since buyers want to be associated with ethical labor standards. Tucker heads an agency supported by the UN and the US government that conducts factory inspections for compliance with the labor standards.

JILL TUCKER (Better Factories Initiative): In the olden days, by that I mean maybe ten years ago, it was more of a cat-and-mouse game than it is now, and the really smart producers, I think, realize that, you know, you need to treat your workers well to retain your workers, and that it’s just not worth it to not treat your workers well.

DE SAM LAZARO: She cites this factory, run by a Taiwan-based company, QMI, as a good example. There’s plenty of air and light and, managers say, good labor relations. All ten thousand of QMI’s workers are on permanent contracts, and wages here range from $90 to as much as $150 a month. That’s still below what unions say is adequate. But Tucker says demands for higher wages, however justified, are a tough sell given realities in the US, the biggest market.

TUCKER: I really wonder if American consumers are willing to pay significantly more for their apparel.

DE SAM LAZARO: Really?

TUCKER: Yeah. The cost of apparel has only dropped over the past decade. None of us are paying more for our garments than we were 10 years ago.

SILTEN: We do need to think about what consumers are willing to pay, where we can source these goods to achieve, you know, get the math to work for everyone. From a macro standpoint I think it’s a very complex issue.

DE SAM LAZARO: Gap’s Silten isn’t sure if consumers would pay more for ethically produced garments. The Interfaith Center’s Schilling says retailers like Gap, pressured by competitors and Wall Street investors, aren’t likely to ask them to do so. More likely, he says, campaigns by activist groups should bring a greater awareness of worker rights issues as they are now on environmental ones.

SCHILLING: There’s more and more advertising around, you know, sort of ecologically sound products. I think more and more that’s going to happen within the social space as well.

DE SAM LAZARO: That would bring greater awareness of the plight of workers in Cambodia and more urgently other nations that don’t subscribe to fair labor standards, and Schilling says it could not happen fast enough.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

The United States has decided not to act unilaterally to protect rebellious Syrian communities from the atrocities of the Syrian military. By the time the international community organizes to take remedial action against Syria’s armed forces, the regime’s tyrannical oppression will be largely accomplished.

According to the teachings of the Christian just war tradition, whose norms have been selectively incorporated into international law and secular political morality, the United States has good reasons for rejecting unilateral intervention in this case. By heeding these reasons, however, the president and citizens of the United States accept a terrible cost. The number of Syrians already killed by the Syrian government (well over 7,000, by U.N. estimates) will continue to grow. The degradation of the insurgents will be prolonged.

This situation places American citizens of conscience in a difficult position. Can the United States ever be obligated in justice to refrain from a military action that could save thousands from murder, degradation, and rapine? Is it possible in justice to accept the deaths of so many? The answer, at least for those citizens whose consciences have been formed by the norms and expectations of the Christian just war tradition, is clearly yes. But how are we to think about the consequences of this judgment? For weeks the major national newspapers have included articles about the mounting deaths and suffering of ordinary Syrians. These articles implicitly pronounce a familiar imperative: something must be done. But in the face of this imperative, we are compelled by another: force is justified only where there is reasonable hope of doing more good than harm. How are we to respond honorably to such conflicting imperatives, especially when the human costs are so high?

An exchange last week between Senator John McCain and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta captures the moral complexity of the situation. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary Panetta suggested that a unilateral attack on Syria would cost too much in American lives, in collateral deaths among Syrian civilians, and in future disorder. Senator McCain responded by asking pointedly: “Tell us how long… the killing would have to continue, how many additional civilian lives would have to be lost, in order to convince you the military measures…necessary to end the killing…[are justified]? How many more? 10,000 more? 20,000 more?”

The implication of Senator McCain’s question was clear. When the United States has the military power—particularly, the air power—necessary to stop the tyrant, how callous must we be to refuse to use it on behalf of vulnerable communities devastated by their own government? Secretary Panetta, whom no one would accuse lightly of callousness, responded wearily that such an attack may only be undertaken with a clear view of its probable consequences.

On the terms of the Christian just war tradition, Secretary Panetta’s position clearly has the right of it. Centuries of accumulated Christian moral reflection have taught that a just war requires three things: proper authority, just cause, and right intention. Using force to protect civilians from mass atrocity would undoubtedly constitute just cause. An attack on Syria, however, fails at present to satisfy the other two criteria. There is little consensus at home or abroad that the United States should intervene. The criterion of proper authority is not satisfied simply by widespread approval of an action. Nevertheless, within the contemporary context of international institutions, the criterion requires solicitude toward the judgments of other states. This solicitude is necessary not only to ensure that other states will cooperate by not interfering, but also to ensure that a use of force is perceived as—and is in fact—a contribution to international peace and stability.

While United Nations Security Council resolutions are neither the first nor the last word in political morality, they do function to address this basic concern. Many Americans welcome the concern for international institutions implied by this interpretation of proper authority. The rub is that it will sometimes require binding a benevolent government’s hands by the competing judgments of recalcitrant and self-interested authorities in other states, such as Russia and China.

At a minimum, the requirement of right intention demands that a government actually act upon the just cause that provides the initial justification for war. More broadly, however, the demand for “right intention” places an act of war within the purview of the virtue of prudence. Some Christian thinkers have made the demands of prudence explicit by requiring that a use of force be proportionate, a last resort, and have a reasonable hope of doing more good than harm.

As Secretary Panetta rightly suggests, unilateral intervention in Syria fails the test of prudence. From his testimony, he clearly believes all reasonable political efforts have not yet been exhausted and the prospects of doing more harm than good are very great. In particular, he suggested that intervening in Syria would likely do more harm than good for Syrian civilians, at least for the present moment.

The consequence of this, of course, is that the United States accepts the deaths of the Syrian civilians and rebel fighters currently being slaughtered by their government. It is not an indifferent acceptance, nor even a passive acceptance, but an acceptance all the same. We should not be confused when our president or one of our representatives declares the situation in Syria “unacceptable.” The situation is, of course, unacceptable, yet… And it is here, in this disorienting place where we find ourselves compelled to accept the unacceptable, that we leave the comfortable realm of well-worn moral principles and confront the deeper dimensions of our situation.

The great Christian theologian St. Augustine of Hippo confronted this situation in one way when he laid the foundations of Christian moral reflection on war in the fourth century. Writing in his “Reply to Faustus the Manichean,” Augustine asked, “What is the evil in war? Is it the death of some who will soon die in any case, that others may live in peaceful subjection? This is mere cowardly dislike, not any religious feeling.” Augustine’s view is startling. He suggests plainly, and in a troubling tone, that war is not justified principally to save people from being killed. Such killing is evil, to be sure, and to be prevented when possible. But war is not, on Augustine’s view, a matter of humanitarian intervention. For Augustine, war is justified–if at all–as a means of punishing and containing the lust to dominate that threatens public safety everywhere. This view may sometimes justify what is now called “humanitarian intervention,” but only if such an act justifiably serves public order.

For Augustine and the Christian tradition that descends from him, the slaughter of innocent civilians is just as evil as it seems. These individuals are more valuable in the eyes of God than every hall of government and military monument on the whole earth. But human politics is not a practice born in heaven. It is a practice that takes place within the horizon of a time when the full truth of humankind is, as Augustine might say, clouded by pride and distorted by lust. The most that can be hoped for here is to contain and minimize human degradation by creating a broad public context in which ordinary persons may endure life’s suffering, savor its joys, and confront their deaths in relative peace. The treacheries of human injustice, on this view, cannot be policed all the way down into every poverty-stricken corner of this sad world. And for this reason, Augustine thought, resignation, endurance, and prayer—including lamentation—are practices as important to human social life as any right-minded effort to battle evil with justice.

Augustine and his ilk could embrace this view in part because they believed in a transcendent God who would restore a broken humanity and resurrect the dead. Many Americans cannot accept this view. But surely rejecting this transcendent hope does not leave us only with the view that human effort knows no intrinsic bounds. Many human rights activists argue that any refusal to intervene with force on behalf of the vulnerable is a moral failure. Accusations of callousness abound. Such boundless moralism, however, seems as committed to a transcendental mythos about human moral possibilities as traditional theism.

There is no honorable way to stand before the ghosts of the unjustly dead without shame. Nevertheless, there is admirable honesty in a clear-eyed acknowledgment of limits.

Howard Rhodes has taught at the University of Iowa and is currently is a J.D. candidate at Duke University School of Law. His research interests include the ethics of war, international humanitarian law, and religion and international relations.

BOB ABERNETHY, host:  In Egypt this week, one year after the beginning of protests that toppled President Mubarak, tens of thousands again took to the streets. Meanwhile, the lower house of the new parliament was sworn in. The majority of members are not young demonstrators, but members of two Islamist parties, which now hold almost three-quarters of the seats.

We talk today with Kate Seelye, recently back from Egypt. She has reported from the Middle East for many years, and is now a vice president at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Kate, welcome here, and it’s great you’re back, and how did it feel when you were in Cairo this time? What did it feel like?

KATE SEELYE (Vice President, Middle East Institute): Well, you know, I sensed, Bob, a kind of empowerment and excitement that I haven’t seen in Egypt for a very long time, and I’ve been reporting there for years. Egyptians overthrew a dictator. They’re now politically empowered. They found their voice. They’re engaged. But at the same time there are new fears and anxieties. The country has been very unstable the last year. The tourism industry has collapsed. Investment is down, and people are hurting economically. In fact, there are people today who are much worse off than they were a year ago. So there are fears.

ABERNETHY: In those demonstrations that we saw pictures of, there were divisions, weren’t there? Some for one thing, some for…

SEELYE: Yes, it’s interesting. We’re seeing sort of a different take on the revolution. There’s one group that came out the other day, and they were celebrating, celebrating these newfound freedoms, and those were many of the people who did very well in the recent parliamentary elections. But there was another group, the young protesters who triggered the demonstrations last year who feel that the revolution is not over, the goals of the revolution have not been met, the ruling military council is still in office, and they are determined to keep protesting, so two different views of the same revolution.

ABERNETHY: What does it imply about the future for people there that in this new parliament there are three-quarters of the members who are Islamists? What does that say?

SEELYE: That’s right. Well, first let me explain who they are. There are two groups that did very well, the Muslim Brotherhood, a mainstream Islamist group that has been around for 80 years doing charitable work and is very popular among the Egyptian electorate and got 47 percent of the seats, and then a hardline, very conservative Islamist group, the Nour Party. Together, as you said, they make up nearly 75 percent. There is a concern that they will impose an Islamist agenda on Egypt. But the hope is that once in office, once held accountable they will both move more to the center, and that won’t be the case.

ABERNETHY: What about the minority of Christians in Egypt? What’s the future for them?

SEELYE: Well, they are worried. They have been facing more sectarian divisions. They’ve been the victims of more attacks on their churches, and they’re worried with an Islamist-dominated parliament in office. Their hope is that when Egypt starts to draft a new constitution, which it will do over the course of the next six months, that their rights and their freedoms will be guaranteed in this constitution, they will be safeguarded, and that is their best hope for the future.

ABERNETHY: And the women are a little nervous, too, aren’t they?

SEELYE: They’re a little nervous as well, and once again they are looking at this constitution and saying this is the chance to safeguard our rights.

ABERNETHY: Kate Seelye of the Middle East Institute. many thanks. Welcome home.

SEELYE: Thank you so much.

Read an excerpt from THE EICHMANN TRIAL by Deborah Lipstadt

DEBORAH LIPSTADT (Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and Author of The Eichmann Trial): The trials that took place immediately after the war were based primarily on documents. In the Eichmann trial, Gideon Hausner, the attorney general, made a decision to call the victims of genocide. He called these witnesses to tell their personal stories, and they told their stories one by one by one. So people began to associate what happened during the Holocaust, the Final Solution, with specific people, and in that way it put a human face on genocide.

The victims had spoken before, but they had never had an audience the way they had it at the Eichmann trial. The world was listening. I think it was the impact of the intensity, the idea of being in a courtroom setting, that the perpetrator was sitting there in that glass booth—I think all those things together gave what the victims were saying, what the stories they were telling, an added authenticity and authority.

People understood that these people weren’t inherently flawed, that they weren’t inherently weak, but that they were in a sea of opposition, a sea of hostility, and there was no one, no one there to help them.

When you begin to hear the story from people, when it becomes personalized, when you hear it in the first person singular, “This is my story and this is what happened to me,” genocide takes on a new meaning. You begin to realize that it didn’t happen to just a group of nameless people, but it happened to individuals, and what happened is their memory, and then the memory gets transmitted to the next generation.

It’s a lesson to the world of what happens when you stand silently by. In fact, it’s more important that the rest of the world, those people who aren’t associated with the victims, know about it. That’s what it means to be persecuted, that’s what it means to be a victim, that’s what it means to call for help and have nobody answer. That’s the importance of memory—that you take this memory, integrate them into ourselves, internalize them, and act on that in our lives.

I was here as a scholar in residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and then on June 10, [2009] as I was on my way downstairs to give a lecture to a group of people who had come to visit the museum, I passed the guard station. I saw Officer Johns and the other officers greeting people. No sooner had I gotten to the room, a few minutes thereafter shots rang out, and it was an 88-year-old Holocaust denier, racist, anti-Semite who came to the museum, approached the door. Officer Johns reached out to open the door to let the man in, and the man took out a rifle and shot him. It happened because this killer was motivated by hatred, was motivated by anti-Semitism, was motivated by exactly those sentiments which this museum is dedicated to fighting, and it was such a terrible irony.

On this Yom HaShoah I think it’s very important for the world to remember that evil begins with a single individual talking to another individual talking to another individual. Maybe they are motivated, as was the case in the Holocaust, by an age-old hatred, but it takes one person with another person with another person to make it happen, and that each of us as individuals have the power to say, “Stop.” We may not be able to stop the hatred, but we can say, “Stop, I won’t be involved in it.” We also have to remember not to think of the victims only as “the six million,” but they were one by one by one, and in that courtroom in Jerusalem 50 years ago people heard the voices of those victims in a way that they hadn’t heard them before.

When President Obama spoke last night about the military intervention in Libya, he confronted a public both stunned and skeptical.

The military action was the product of a complex set of political considerations undertaken at great speed. The rapidity of the political run-up to the initial attack rendered ordinary processes of democratic consultation confused and confusing. Despite the fact that the attack on Libya was legally authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, thus sanctioning the action with the highest form of justification purportedly representing international consensus, many people in America and abroad continue to find the moral and political justifications for the act unclear or unconvincing. Many citizens are skeptical, in particular, about the extent to which protecting civilians represents the actual motive for the undertaking. While the president’s speech forcefully defended the humanitarian grounds for the Libya intervention, it also suggested other, arguably more powerful motivations for using force against the Gaddafi regime. Attacking Libya, the president suggests, is not simply an act of liberal humanitarianism, but of fidelity to America’s revolutionary origins.

President Obama’s principal justification for attacking the Gaddafi regime was to prevent a massacre in the city of Benghazi. Against the background of a history of foot-dragging and inaction by previous American regimes in the face of humanitarian crises, President Obama and his advisors determined that it would be better to use force early rather than “wait for images of mass graves” to flood television screens around the world.

This decision carries enormous risks. It justifies the use of force by reference to a plausible, but still hypothetical scenario in which the Gaddafi regime slaughters civilians by the thousands. It takes literally the hyperbolic threats of a dictator for whom hyperbole is a basic modus operandi and uses those words as proof positive of atrocious intent.

The president’s judgment may in fact have been correct. Perhaps Gaddafi’s treatment of the rebellious population would have involved massacre, mass graves, systematic rape, and other horrors of mass atrocity. But we will never know, and while it is better never to know such things, this not-knowing leaves the president—and the American people—with a situation in which the principal justification for using force is underdetermined.

A great deal of the president’s speech hinges on the extent to which his audience accepts his claim that civil war in Libya would involve “violence on a horrific scale.” The president does not clearly succeed in distinguishing the violence in Libya from the violence in other countries such as Yemen and Syria. This makes him vulnerable to claims that his administration is being inconsistent by attacking Libya but ignoring other situations. President Obama essentially sidesteps the issue by simply acknowledging that America cannot use force everywhere while asserting that this cannot be a reason for inaction in the present case. It is true that intervention in one case does not commit one to a perverse ethic of consistency demanding intervention in every case. But if Libya is not clearly distinguished by extraordinary violence, then the president’s claim that protecting civilians is the primary purpose of intervening in Libya is very weak indeed.

Perhaps, however, the protection of civilians is only one reason for using force in Libya, one that is most acceptable legally and internationally but which is essentially on a par with other reasons for action in this case. The president mentioned the desire both to send a signal to other authoritarian regimes in the region that their violence will not go unanswered and to assist the self-determination of the Libyan people. This is where President Obama’s remarks about American political identity and revolutionary origins are relevant. According to the president, passivity in the face of the Libyan rebellion would have been a “betrayal of who we are” as a nation. America is a nation born of a revolution. Our revolutionary origins have left an indelible mark on our national mythos, our sense of ourselves in our grander moments. It inclines the American people toward sympathy with others who take up arms to fight for freedom and, in some cases, commits us to coming to their aid, through force of arms if necessary. For us, defending human dignity sometimes involves using force to support a rebellion. Or so suggests the president. If one accepts this as a plausible account of how Americans justify the use of force—an account focused more on notions of national identity and revolutionary values than on human rights or humanitarian protection—then one is presented with an account more in keeping with America’s ongoing efforts to shape the global environment according to its revolutionary values.

If America’s identity as a revolutionary regime is crucial to how the president justified the use of force in Libya, then the intervention could amount to a dangerous and destabilizing act of “exporting the revolution.” But America, according to the president, is not only an “advocate of human freedom.” It has also acquired a hard-earned identity as an “anchor of global security.” American revolutionary values, on this account, cannot be understood independently of the concern to preserve global order by supporting international institutions, securing cooperation and consensus, and observing the realistic limits of military force. From this point of view, what distinguishes Libya from other situations is not the severity of its violence, but the fact that the opposition to Gaddafi seems actually to have organized itself into a genuine rebellion. At the beginning of the debate over Libya at least, the Libyan rebels seem to have organized themselves sufficiently to promise both an effective armed resistance and a potential provisional government in the wake of Gaddafi’s demise. This perception of rebel organization seemed to answer the concern that any intervention not result in broader political destabilization. We know now that the Libyan rebels are poorly organized, untutored in the art of government, and largely unknown. Time will tell, then, whether the American administration’s support of Libya’s rebellion will cause harms disproportionate to the goods achieved.

Whatever the future brings, one cannot understand adequately the intervention in Libya without coming to terms with the dance between nationalism, liberal internationalism, and political realism in the president’s speech. When the claims about international consensus and humanitarian concern break down under critical scrutiny, only the claims about national values remain. These national values, and the national identity they presuppose, need not and should not be understood independently of humanitarian concern. Without vital notions of national identity and accompanying notions of honor and fidelity, however, humanitarian aspirations lack ways of actually motivating action.

None of this, of course, answers the question of whether the intervention in Libya was just. But any moral judgment depends upon first acquiring an adequate description of the act under question.

Howard Rhodes teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: As the so-called Arab Spring spread out from Egypt and Tunisia, the New York film makers Oren Rudovsky and Menachem Daum were in Israel listening to the hopes and concerns of Palestinian Arabs and Israelis. Here is a sample — unscientific but still revealing.

SHMUEL GROAG (Israeli Architect): The revolution in Egypt, the first reaction of the Israeli public was kind of being in panic as if, you know, you see democracy on one side and people are panicking.

SHWECKY (Israeli Environmentalist): Listen, the situation is not good for us or for them, because there won’t be a strong leadership, and we are the ones who have to be strong or else they’ll wipe us out.

DAFNA: (Israeli Sociologist): I understand the fear of Muslim Brothers, but it doesn’t seem that’s what people in Egypt or in Tunisia want. They really want freedom, and I think we should trust them on what they want. They want to live properly. They want to have jobs. They want to live like everybody else.

ROBBY: (Israeli Founder of Organ Donor Society): I think we need to focus on democracy, human rights, freedom of expression, and hope in the marketplace of ideas that tolerance of other people in the region will play out to Israel’s benefit.

SHEIK NAMIR: (Palestinian Historian): The Palestinian people have had a lot of problems. Every time an event like that happens in an Arab country it’s good for Palestine. Every flag raised calls for the liberation of the Palestinian people, and we’re witnesses to that.

TAHU: (Palestinian Poet and Elder): We are now in front of a bright, new beginning, hopefully. Look at the Europeans. They are supporting the Libyan people, not their rulers. Before they used to side with the rulers. Now everybody knows the truth and feels sorry for the Palestinian people and all other people who are oppressed by their governments, as if they were imprisoned.

JALAL AKEL (Palestinian Businessman): All this will have an impact on the Palestinian youth, who will be affected by the events in the Arab world. Now they can claim back their freedom the same way they see it happening in Egypt and Tunisia and hopefully soon in Libya.

DAFNA: You know, something is changing, and I don’t know but I think it will come here. It’s very difficult to believe that the whole Arab world will be in riots and Jerusalem and the West Bank are going to be quiet.

ABERNETHY: The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics has released figures showing that in the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, there are 5.5 million Palestinians, and 5.8 million Jews. Because of their higher birth rate, the number of Palestinians is expected to equal the number of Jews in about three-and-a-half years.

In the UN resolution and in much of the debate leading up to the launch of the operation, the word “responsibility” has been in the air. The popularity of this term goes back to 2001, when a Canadian commission proposed the idea of a “responsibility to protect” as the framework through which debates about humanitarian intervention and human rights should be understood. In 2005, the UN General Assembly proposed the concept as part of its reform of the UN system in order to avoid politicking over matters that demanded immediate action. Since then, it has been invoked not only by academics, but also by policy makers and even military officials in support of various interventions in support of human rights.

“Responsibility” is not just a legal term, but a moral one as well. Indeed, some analogue of the term is central to philosophical and religious traditions around the world, including the just war tradition. The idea is linked to concepts such as duty and obligation, although there are some crucial differences, according to some philosophers.

What does it mean to say we have a responsibility to others? In one morally extreme version, responsibility means having to care for the ills of all people. Especially when one is powerful and can provide aid to many around the world, this notion of responsibility becomes more resonant. The just war theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain has referred to it as the “Spiderman Ethic”: for those with great power comes great responsibility.

One response to this might be to say that no matter how powerful, no one state or coalition of states can be responsible for all the problems in the world. The 2001 report on the “responsibility to protect” recognized this when it proposed an overlapping set of responsibilities, starting with the responsibility of the state to protect its own citizens, which then expands out to the larger international community when the state cannot or will not aid its own citizens.

But there is perhaps another way to think about responsibility, one that helps us better understand what is happening in Libya and that might be more relevant for the future. The Lithuanian Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas famously proposed an “ethic of responsibility.” Educated as a Talmudic scholar, but one who influenced French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Levinas argued that responsibility does not mean having a duty to solve the problems of the world. It is really about recognizing other peoples and communities as unique and worthy of respect in their own right. This recognition means challenging assumptions about oneself and one’s certainty about the rightness of one’s own cause.

Levinas was not proposing simple hand-wringing about one’s own sins or faults, nor was he recommending inaction. Rather, in the moment when one is called to act for the other, one must always recognize the danger of imposing the self on the other or assuming that one’s own ideas are the only ones.

So what does this have to do with Libya? As anyone with a passing interest in or knowledge of international affairs knows, relations between the countries leading the assault on Libya and the wider Arab world have been fraught with conflict and misunderstanding. These relationships have not been ones of recognition, from any perspective. Many in the Arab world believe North Americans and Europeans are simply interested in oil or supporting Israel, while those leading the intervention often demonstrate an embarrassing lack of knowledge about diverse political and religious Arab communities.

Rather than argue that the coalition forces should not act, the point here is that in acting, American, British, French, Canadian, and Italian forces need to be sensitive to their history of colonialism, occupation, and intervention in the region. While they may have a responsibility to protect the civilians in Libya, they also have a responsibility to recognize the reality of others who may not simply accept their aid with open arms.

Responsibility as recognition is not easy, but if there is to be any real ethics in international affairs, perhaps we need to look to new sources for understanding that responsibility.

Anthony F. Lang Jr. is senior lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. He has written most recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Afghanistan.

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On December 10, the Nobel Peace Prize is scheduled to be presented to Chinese dissident and pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.

Liu will not be in Oslo to accept the award. He’s languishing in a Chinese prison under an 11-year sentence. Nor, in all likelihood, will his wife go to Oslo to receive the prize for him. She has been under house arrest since October 8, when the Nobel committee named Liu as the recipient of this year’s award.

Fifteen Nobel peace laureates, including retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former US President Jimmy Carter, and the Dalai Lama, urged the G20 group of nations to press China at their November meeting to free Liu. The appeal fell on deaf ears, as did a similar request from President Obama, last year’s peace laureate.

The Liu episode underscores in dramatic fashion both the ubiquity of human rights in international affairs and the constraints on a movement in which nation-state sovereignty and national foreign policy interests still dominate world events.

In a provocative and contrarian new book, “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History” (Harvard University Press, 2010), Columbia University professor Samuel Moyn outlines the moral and political dilemmas in which the movement currently finds itself, describing his subject as “the place of human rights in the history of moral opinions and modern schemes of progressive reform.”

Moyn takes a revisionist and decidedly minority stance compared with more conventional histories of human rights. Generally, historians mark the beginning of human rights with the revolutions—American and French—of the late 18th century, with traces leading back to the Bible and Greek philosophy and forward to the 1945 formation of the United Nations and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

President Jimmy Carter

But Moyn rejects these usual starting points, instead positing the 1970s, and especially the crucial year of 1977, as the true moment of the birth of the human rights movement. “In the 1970s,” Moyn writes, “the moral world of Westerners shifted, opening a space for the sort of utopianism that coalesced in an international human rights movement that never existed before.” The paradigmatic year—perhaps the movement’s zenith as well—began in January with Jimmy Carter’s inaugural address in which for the first time an American president made human rights a centerpiece of American foreign policy, and ended in December with the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International, the organization that pioneered and embodied a transnational understanding of human rights.

Moyn’s dating of the full-fledged human rights movement to the 1970s rather than 1776, 1789, or the 1940s is dependent on two things: the failure of other universalistic systems or utopias such socialism, anticolonialism, or democracy promotion wedded to laissez-faire capitalism, and the transcendence of the nation-state as the site for and enabler of human rights.

In Moyn’s view, as long as rights were linked to nation-state citizenship, as in the American and French revolutions, and to the nation-building of the anticolonial movement or the narrow foreign policy interests of the Cold War and the neo-conservative pro-democracy movement, then human rights could not be realized in a morally full and transcendent manner as a transnational ideal. The “central event” in the creation of human rights was the recasting of rights “that might contradict the sovereign nation-state from above and outside rather than serve as its foundation.”

During the revolutionary era of the 18th and 19th centuries, rights “were very much embedded in the politics of the state, crystallizing in a scheme worlds away from the political meaning … [they] … would have later. The ‘rights of man’ were about a whole people incorporating itself in a state, not a few foreign people criticizing another state for its wrongdoing. Thereafter, they were about the meaning of citizenship.”

Similarly, Moyn writes that the “true goal” of the prospective United Nations as it was being hammered out in the post-World War II era was less about enshrining the rights of individuals over against the state than it was about establishing a balance of power among the states. In the end, he says, the idea of human rights, despite being bandied about primarily as wartime anti-Nazi propaganda, entered the final plans of the UN “as a negligible line buried in the proposal for an Economic and Social Council without any serious meaning.”

Eleanor Roosevelt with Universal Declaration

Nor did human rights emerge, he notes, as some historians have suggested, as a response to the Holocaust. “In real time, across the weeks of debate around the Universal Declaration in the UN General Assembly, the genocide of the Jews went unmentioned, in spite of the frequent invocation of other dimensions of Nazi barbarity to justify specific items for protection, or to describe the consequences of leaving human dignity without defense.” Moyn acknowledges that “human rights crystallized as a result of Holocaust memory, but only decades later, as [they] were called upon to serve brand new purposes.” He speaks of the “increasing Christianization of human rights after World War II,” but characterizes the 1950s human rights rhetoric of Popes Pius XI and XII as “a throwaway line, not a well-considered idea” and “an empty vessel that could be filled by a wide variety of different conceptions.”

The bulk of Moyn’s extended essay is devoted to three moments in contemporary history and how they not only created the framework for but also, in his view, impeded the development of human rights: the creation of the United Nations, the rise of anticolonialism, and the development of international law. In a chapter called “The Purity of the Struggle,” Moyn traces the emergence of the human rights movement in the 1970s, paying critical attention to Russian and Eastern European dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel, as well as President Carter’s foreign policy efforts (though without mentioning Patricia Derian, who served during the Carter administration as the nation’s first assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs), and crediting “the supreme importance of political Catholicism in Eastern Europe” and Amnesty International as a central player.

Human rights exploded in the 1970s, Moyn writes, “in direct relation to the breathtaking marginalization of the UN as the central forum for and the singular imaginative custodian of the [human rights] norms. For this outflanking of the UN, American internationalism during World War II and its postwar remnants provided no precedent. It was Amnesty International [AI] above all, whose origins Moyn situates in “Christian responses to the Cold War,” that “made this move most decisively.” In the wake of the failure of the Tehran conference of 1968 marking the 20th anniversary of the Universal Declaration, the need for a new kind of mobilization on behalf of human rights became apparent, and AI provided the model. Indeed, Moyn writes, “almost alone, Amnesty International invented grassroots human rights advocacy, and through it drove public awareness of human rights generally.”

Yet it seems too much to argue that the movement had no real antecedents and somehow sprang full-blown from Jimmy Carter and his speech writers, or Vaclav Havel and Charter 77, or the founders of Amnesty International. It is interesting to note that in a bibliographical essay on additional research that appears at the end of the book, Moyn goes only so far as to acknowledge the work of many other scholars as a “quixotic search” for the deep roots of human rights. For those interested in “claims” about the deep Christian sources of human rights, he refers readers to philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s 2008 book “Justice: Rights and Wrongs” (Princeton University Press).

Reinhold Niebuhr

Religion, nevertheless, runs through Moyn’s account like a red thread, sometimes notable in its impact, sometimes negligible, sometimes less than clear, and sometimes negative, as when Reinhold Niebuhr, the great apostle of internationalism and realism in foreign policy, criticized any proposed injection of human rights into the Dumbarton Oaks framework for the UN on the grounds they would be meaningless. “Nor would the Dumbarton Oaks agreements be substantially improved by the insertion of some international bill of rights which has no relevance, and would have no efficacy in a world alliance of states,” Niebuhr argued. “It is nonetheless true,” Moyn writes, “that against Niebuhr’s advice advocacy groups kept human rights on the agenda in the winter of 1944-45.” Moyn also notes the collaboration of the NAACP, under the direction of W.E.B. Du Bois, with Jewish and Christian organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the Federated Council of Churches “to return the idea of human rights to more prominence in the prospective [UN] charter.”

Moyn is telling a large and complex story concisely and often persuasively, even if he does not give enough credit to alternative versions. But there are many times when the reader wants more details and more context, especially about the role of religion, even though Moyn acknowledges that in the US “it was religious groups who were probably the most active in the campaign to raise the profile” of human rights. At least one reading of his argument suggests that US religious groups—especially the “old-stock Protestants” of the Federal Council of Churches and Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Committee, along with philosophers such as Jacques Maritain (“rights talk seems to have been dominated by Catholics,” Moyn observes at one point), Protestant Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, Anglican bishop of Chichester George Bell, religious peace groups, and Christian layman and Republican foreign policy thinker John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, for whom a Christian concept of human rights was “the last best defense against the communist threat”—all played an important role in the post-World War II debates around the formation of the United Nations in keeping the idea of human rights alive, even if its fully formed version did not come to fruition until the 1970s, and by that time, Moyn says, human rights “lost the religious associations” that had counted for so much in the 1940s.

Lebanese-Christian diplomat Charles Malik

Moyn notes “the striking prominence of Christian social thought” among the three main framers of the Universal Declaration. In different ways, he writes, Christianity defined the worldviews of lawyer John Humphrey, who directed the UN’s Human Rights Division for two decades; Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik; and Eleanor Roosevelt. Even Amnesty International, which Moyn considers critical in the development of a full-blown, transcendent and untainted human rights movement, had its roots in Christian peace movements, including Quakers, Pax Christi and the World Council of Churches (although Moyn observes that neither Pax Christi nor the WCC “had made human rights a central idea.”)

“It was in the atmosphere of the crisis of utopias old and new [in the 1970s] that human rights broke through,” Moyn writes. The stalemate of the Cold War, the end of the anticolonial movement for self-determination—in short the failure of politics fired a longing for a movement and a meaning beyond nation-state politics. What distinguished human rights consciousness in the 1970s was that its appeal to morality “could seem pure even where politics had shown itself to be a soiled and impossible domain,” says Moyn. “Morality, global in its potential scale, could become the aspiration of humankind.”

But what might be called the pure human rights moment of moral vision passed from the scene almost as quickly as it had arrived, and human rights advocates were forced, Moyn argues, to confront the need for a political agenda and a programmatic vision. “If human rights were born in antipolitics, they could not remain wholly noncommittal toward programmatic endeavors, especially as time passed.”

In an epilogue on “The Burden of Morality,” Moyn looks at the new constraints and obstacles facing the movement, because despite transnational treaties aimed at protecting human rights, the nation-state did not wither away and human rights rhetoric—though not necessarily human rights realities—became another tool in the arsenal of national diplomacy.

One of the major issues facing human rights groups today is how to combine the political rights that fueled such groups as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch with the social rights—work, housing, food—that were also a part of the formulation of human rights in the 1948 Universal Declaration. Slowly, Moyn notes, there has been an amalgamation of the human rights movement and the humanitarian movement. Today, he says, “human rights and humanitarianism are fused enterprises, with the former incorporating the latter and the latter justified in terms of the former.”

Moyn is writing as a historian, not an advocate, so he does not address the still incomplete record of the human rights movement in responding to the so-called war on terror and the erosion of political rights with such legislation as the Patriot Act, the use of torture by the United States and other governments against alleged terrorists, or the possible violation of the Geneva Conventions or other international laws and norms in the name of national security. He does, however, observe that “human rights are not so much an inheritance to preserve as an invention to remake—or even leave behind—if their program is to be vital and relevant in what is already a very different world than the one into which it came so recently. No one knows yet for sure…what kind of better world human rights can bring about.”

To date, the human rights movement seems to have been singularly ineffective in offering or enacting the transnational utopian moral vision Moyn believes so distinguished it in the 1970s.

David E. Anderson, senior editor for Religion News Service, has written recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on artist Mark Rothko, drone warfare, and the ethics of sanctions.

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On July 1, President Obama signed legislation imposing new unilateral sanctions on Iran that he promised would “strik[e] at the heart of the Iranian government’s ability to fund and develop its nuclear program.”

“We’re showing the Iranian government that its actions have consequences,’’ Obama said. “And if it persists, the pressure will continue to mount, and its isolation will continue to deepen. There should be no doubt—the United States and the international community are determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.’’

At the same time, Obama suggested that the United States and the international community have learned something from the morally disastrous sanctions imposed on Iraq two decades ago, resulting in a humanitarian catastrophe that left the civilian population devastated, the infrastructure in tatters, and hundreds of thousands of children dead.
The new Iranian sanctions, Obama said, would be targeted or “smart’’ sanctions, aimed at the elite and those “who commit serious human rights abuses,’’ while exempting technologies “that allow the Iranian people to access information and communicate freely.’’

Obama also insisted that “the door to diplomacy remains open.’’ But there is no new diplomatic initiative in the offing, according to Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative scholar and foreign policy commentator who attended a White House briefing on the Iran sanctions this summer. Kagan wrote in the Washington Post that the White House believes the new sanctions against Iran “would at least cause the regime significant pain,” but at the same time the president acknowledged “that the regime may be so ‘ideologically’ committed to getting a bomb that no amount of pain would make a difference.”

The sanctions bill passed Congress overwhelmingly, 99-0 in the Senate and 408-8 in the House, with not a lot of debate on Capitol Hill and little discussion outside the halls of Congress. It was welcomed by the roughly 50 members of the conservative group Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran, while a number of policy analysts voiced their misgivings. The unilateral US sanctions, accompanied by a similar set of unilateral measures from the European Union and Asian nations, followed a fourth round of United Nations-imposed punishments—its harshest sanctions yet against Iran—that were approved by the Security Council on June 9. Yet in early September the New York Times was reporting that, despite sanctions, Iran “has dug in its heels, refusing to provide inspectors with the information and access they need to determine whether the real purpose of Tehran’s program is to produce weapons.” So far, at least, sanctions have not forced Iran to change its direction.

The tough new measures on Iran coincide with the publication of “Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions” (Harvard University Press), a comprehensive and devastating look at the sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 and kept in place until the 2003 invasion by the United States and its allies in what was called “the coalition of the willing.’’ The author is Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield University and a prominent voice for many years in debates over the ethics and morality of using economic sanctions in international public policy.

“Invisible War” is a harsh moral and practical judgment on the role the US played in imposing sanctions on Iraq, and it sounds a timely ethical warning about the future use—and misuse—of sanctions. Gordon writes:

The sanctions regime on Iraq, as it was designed, interpreted, and enforced by the United States, evinced a willingness to see appalling things done in the name of security, and this requires us to consider that measures equally damaging and indiscriminate may be pursued in other circumstances, whether in the name of stopping aggression, drug trafficking, or terrorism. We must come to grips with the perversity of this. It is simply not good enough to say that atrocities committed for the right reasons, or by respected international organizations, are not really atrocities after all.

She states the case even more strongly in a recent post on one of the blogs of the Web site of Foreign Policy magazine:

It is hard to look at the current sanctions on Gaza and Iran without recalling the Iraq sanctions regime—both the structural damage and pettiness. It seems that what the US learned from Iraq was to claim that it now employs “smart sanctions,’’ which will never do the kind of broad damage as we saw in Iraq. … As we hear that Israel will now allow potato chips and juice into Gaza, it is hard to fathom how anyone can rationalize that these ever posed a threat to Israel’s security. But above all, what we should know from Iraq is this: causing destitution in distant lands does not make the world a better place, or make the United States, or anyone else, more secure.

In the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, as the Cold War ended and new forms of international conflict arose, sanctions emerged as a major tool of foreign policy and international governance, and one that has been employed especially by the United States, acting either with the United Nations or with allies or unilaterally. As Gordon and others have pointed out, more than two-thirds of the 60-plus sanctions cases since 1945 were initiated by the United States, and three-quarters of those involved unilateral US actions. Writing on ethical economic sanctions 10 years ago in the Jesuit magazine America, David Cortright and George A. Lopez of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame declared, “Sanctions have become the virtual 911 of international decision makers to enforce norms of justice and international peace.”

Sanctions are attractive to policy makers—and the public—for a number of reasons. They seem more substantial than diplomatic finger-wagging, less costly to impose than military action, and morally preferable to war. “They are often discussed as though they were a mild sort of punishment, not an act of aggression of the kind that has actual human costs,’’ Gordon wrote in a 1999 issue of CrossCurrents, the journal of Association for Religion and Intellectual Life.

Over the years, as the humanitarian consequences and punitive social impact of comprehensive economic sanctions imposed on Iraq and other countries such as Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Yugoslavia became apparent, ethicists began debating more urgently how this tool should be understood. Albert C. Pierce, professor of ethics and national security at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, writing in a 1996 issue of Ethics & International Affairs, the journal of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, argued that economic sanctions “are intended to inflict great human suffering, pain, harm, and even death and thus should be subject to the same kind of careful moral and ethical scrutiny given to the use of military force before it is chosen as a means to achieve national political objectives.’’ According to Gordon, “because sanctions are themselves a form of violence, they cannot legitimately be seen merely as a peacekeeping device, or as a tool for enforcing international law.…They require the same level of justification as other acts of warfare.’’

Pierce, Gordon, and others say sanctions should be evaluated in much the same way and with similar principles as force is evaluated, that is, with the just war doctrine. Gordon, for example, argues the sanctions imposed on Iraq violated both the criteria that must be met before going to war, such as just cause and the probability of success, and the criteria for how the war is conducted, employing such norms as proportionality and discrimination,’ which bars directly intended attacks on noncombatants and noncombatant targets.
Comprehensive economic sanctions as employed against nations such as Iraq in 1990, Haiti in 1991, and Cuba since the 1960s, have failed to achieve their goals while at the same imposing devastating hardships on the civilian population. Gordon cites studies that found the economic sanctions leveled against Iraq were responsible for the death of some 237,000 Iraqi children under age five. At best, sanctions have been successful in just a third of the cases where they have been employed. US sanctions in Iraq “systemically overrode many of the basic principles of international humanitarian law,” she writes, adding that “many have maintained that the magnitude of the suffering was such that the sanctions regime could properly be termed genocidal.”

Some experts, however, pointing to the cases of South Africa and Yugoslavia, suggest there have been at least modest successes with the use of the sanctions tool. “Even in Iraq,’’ according to Cortright and Lopez, “where the frustrations and humanitarian agony of sanctions are most acutely evident, sanctions initially had some impact in convincing Baghdad to make concessions to UN demands.’’ They argue that sanctions can be reformed, and smart sanctions can be used to deny decision-making elites access to financial resources while trying to avoid harm to civilian populations, thus meeting moral and ethical standards.

They have also written that “some degree of civilian pain is inevitable with the application of sanctions and does not make every use of the instrument unjust. International law professor Lori Fisler Damrosch argues that, although sanctions impose hardships on vulnerable populations, they may be ethically justifiable if carried out for a higher political and moral purpose such as halting aggression or preventing repression.”

Cortright and Lopez have suggested that “the use of targeted measures, if properly enforced, could be a means of enhancing the effectiveness of sanctions while reducing their adverse humanitarian consequences.’’ They caution that “substantial improvements in international compliance will be necessary, however, for financial sanctions, arms embargoes, and travel sanctions to have the kind of targeted impact reformers seek.”

In particular, they argue that “sanctions work best as instruments of persuasion, not punishment,” and concessions by a targeted regime “should be rewarded with an easing of coercive pressure.” Even the imposition of smart sanctions “should be limited by specific ethical standards of just cause, last resort, right authority, probability of success, proportionality, and civilian immunity.’’

Applying just war criteria allows for making some distinctions. Lopez, for example, has endorsed the most recent round of United Nations sanctions against Iran, arguing they have a reasonable chance of success. He has also noted they “capture the important policy subtlety that sanctions must pressure for compliance, not punish for capitulation,’’ are smart in that they “undermine real assets and capabilities that Iran might use for weapons production,” and make sanctions “the cornerstone rather than the entire edifice of a nuclear rollback policy.”

But Lopez has been critical of the unilateral US sanctions, testifying before Congress in December the proposed unilateral step by the US “will inflict economic pain in Iran, but produce no political gain on issues important to the United States.” They would have, he said, an adverse impact on the human rights situation in Iran, strengthen the ruling regime, and would undermine “the reasonably strong coalition of support condemning Iranian actions that has emerged over the past year, and which is the ultimate leverage against Iranian misbehavior.”

Looking at past examples of where sanctions-stimulated reversals have occurred—Ukraine, South Africa, Brazil, or Libya—Lopez said the lesson for the Iranian case is “we cannot punish them into a nuclear deal.’’

“Only an astute mix of narrow sanctions to focus their attention, continued engagement, and versatile incentives will provide this,” he told the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs.

Meghan L. O’Sullivan, a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, gives the current sanctions regime “good marks in terms of being well-structured in relation to the goals,’’ and she praises the Obama administration for its effort to “standardize the message about the goal of sanctions: to coerce Iran back to meaningful negotiations—not to destabilize the regime.”

Yet as she has argued in an online interview with Bernard Gwertzman of the Council on Foreign Relations, if the sanctions are to have “any hope of bringing Iran to the table in a meaningful way, they need to be perceived by Tehran as a serious threat to regime stability. And that would involve some real stress on the Iranian economy such as major inflation, growing unemployment, unrest over economic circumstances.”
But that pushes the situation toward the ethically questionable outcome of inflicting harm on civilians rather than regime leaders and raises inevitable questions about the relation between sanctions and force. For Gordon, sanctions themselves are “a form of violence—no less than guns and bombs—and it is ethically imperative that we see it as precisely that.” For Patrick Clawson, who directs the Iran Security Initiative at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “If there is no will to use force to back the sanctions, then the sanctions are morally dubious.”

In March, Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and a member of Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran, called Iran “the most dangerous regime in the world” and said “the diplomatic virtues of patience must not be used to conceal the vices of inaction and appeasement.”

The conservative leaders, who include Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Bill Donohue of Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, among others, did not address any ethical issues but focused on the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran.

“We are running out of time to apply diplomatic pressures to this dangerous regime, and every day we delay, every moment we fail to show resolve, that regime comes closer to threatening the region and stability of the world with nuclear weapons,’’ the group said in June.

Nor have more liberal religious organizations broached the Iran sanctions issue with ethical analysis. In its most recent statement, the World Council of Churches warned in 2007 that “threats to begin another war in the Middle East defy the lessons of both history and ethics.” The council said it was referring to “the belligerent stance of the US toward Iran and of Iranian threats against the US and Israel. The region and its people must not suffer another war, let alone one that is unlawful, immoral, and ill-conceived once again.”

The lack of particular religious and ethical response to the latest round of sanctions against Iran may be due in part to the fact that so far the sanctions are targeted rather than comprehensive, aimed Revolutionary Guard-owned businesses, Iran’s shipping industry, and the country’s commercial and financial sector.

But the US sanctions also target Iran’s energy sector. The July unilateral sanctions penalize companies for selling refined gasoline to Iran or supplying equipment in a bid to increase its refining capacity. Despite being a major oil producer, Iran imports at least a third of the refined gasoline products it needs and, if tightly enforced, sanctions could bring about widespread disruption of the Iranian economy. Some policy experts worry, however, that such secondary sanctions—targeting firms that do business with Iran—inadvertently do more harm than good.

“They are sanctions against our allies, and the people that we need to get on board with us, to help us deal with them,’’ Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, said in an online interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.

Robert Einhorn, the State Department official who oversees US sanctions against Iran and North Korea, told National Public Radio on Sept. 1 the sanctions are beginning to work—at least to put pressure on the government if not to bring it to the bargaining table.

“It’s interesting to know that Iran’s imports of gasoline have dropped very substantially in recent months,” he said, “so that is putting pressure on Iran.’’

At the moment, however, nobody is raising moral and humanitarian concerns about either sanctions imposed by the United Nations with a general international consensus or the more stringent measures imposed unilaterally by the United States and the European Union. But sanctions create an ethical conundrum. If smart sanctions do not appear to be working, if they do not have the right combination of pain and incentives to induce a regime to come to the bargaining table, if they are seen, in just war terms, as unlikely to produce success, then the temptation for policymakers is either to abandon them for another alternative, usually armed force, or to ratchet up the penalties closer to the punishing comprehensive embargo imposed to such devastating effect—Gordon calls it “gratuitous harm”—on the Iraqi people.

Either move entails the risk of violating just war principles. But a choice in one direction or the other might at least generate a more robust public conversation about the ethical justifications and moral implications of economic measures designed as an alternative to war, and more vigorous debate about the proper policy toward Iran—a debate that has yet to take place.

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has written most recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on “Drones and the Ethics of War.”