The Just War - Sullivan

The Just War - Sullivan states the case:

...war against Hitler killed millions - but it was also just. And no sane person, after all, is opposed to peace as such. The question is: Peace at what risk? Peace on whose terms? Peace for how long? Looked at this way, war is not only sometimes a moral option - as theologians have long argued. Sometimes, it's the only moral option we have.

The American Bishops - famous for supporting Daniel Ortega against Ronald Reagan - posted their criteria for a "just war":

• Just Cause: force may be used only to correct a grave, public evil, i.e., aggression or massive violation of the basic rights of whole populations;
  
• Comparative Justice: while there may be rights and wrongs on all sides of a conflict, to override the presumption against the use of force the injustice suffered by one party must significantly outweigh that suffered by the other;
  
• Legitimate Authority: only duly constituted public authorities may use deadly force or wage war;
  
• Right Intention: force may be used only in a truly just cause and solely for that purpose;
  
• Probability of Success: arms may not be used in a futile cause or in a case where disproportionate measures are required to achieve success;
  
• Proportionality: the overall destruction expected from the use of force must be outweighed by the good to be achieved;
  
• Last Resort: force may be used only after all peaceful alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted.

It's the last one that most of the US "Peace" movement harps on - if you think about it, there is always one more resort to which one may turn before war; England could have sought terms after Dunkirk; the US, UK and Netherlands could have given Japan the control they sought, over the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific; the West could have written off Europe, and its Jews in the bargain. You can keep backing up a long, long way, if you don't consider anything worth fighting for.

But by any reasonable measure, we've exhausted all rational steps short of war:

Have we exhausted every single alternative to war? Well, we've spent the last twelve years trying to find peaceful ways to get Saddam to live up to his promises. Waves of inspections; countless resolutions; occasional use of targeted force under the Clinton administration; crippling economic sanctions; and finally a last attempt under U.N. Resolution 1441 to give Saddam a last, last chance to disarm. He was told three months ago by unanimous U.N. agreement that he had to disarm immediately and completely. He still hasn't. I can't think of any recent war that tried so hard for so long to give peace a chance. This isn't so much a "rush to war" as some have bizarrely called it. It's been an endless, painstaking, nail-biting crawl.

Indeed. There comes a time when seeking one more "last resort" is, itself, immoral:

War is an awful thing. But it isn't the most awful thing. No one disputes the evil of Saddam's brutal police state. No one doubts he would get and use weapons of mass destruction if he could. No one can guarantee he would not help Islamist terrorists get exactly those weapons to use against the West or his own regional enemies. No one disputes that the Iraqi people would be better off under almost any other regime than the current one - or that vast numbers of them, including almost every Iraqi exile, endorses a war to remove the tyrant. If we can do so with a minimun of civilian casualties, if we do all we can to encourage democracy in the aftermath, then this war is not only vital for our national security. It is a moral imperative. And those who oppose it without offering any credible moral alternative are not merely wrong and misguided. They are helping to perpetuate a deep and intolerable injustice.

I'm far from a warmonger. I have friends in Southwest Asia as we speak, getting ready for whatever comes. I - to say nothing of their families and friends - don't want them to go through this for frivolous or gratuitous reasons.

We as a nation need to search our souls over these sorts of things. But huge crises are great catalysts for the searching of one's soul. September 11 was that event. I think we're in the right. I'm not going to speak in terms of ass-kickings and walkovers when war finally comes - war is far too solemn an event for that. The lives of those that will die - ours and theirs - are too important to trivialize with jingoistic sloganeering.

But the opposite - the sloganeering of pacifism at any price - has come to the point of trivializing even more. It's not about oil, or patronymic loyalty, and to claim so over the bodies of 3,000 of our fellow citizens merely showcases one's intellectual bankruptcy.

Read the article. Get back to me.

Posted by Mitch at March 2, 2003 10:12 AM