Not long ago, in a discussion elsewhere,\u00a0 I mentioned that I have a hard time deciding who I dislike more in re the situation in the Middle East – the antisemitic right, or American liberal Christians with academic to-the-point-of-infantile interpretations of “Just War Doctrine”.<\/p>\n
Not much I can say or do about the former.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But as to the latter?<\/p>\n
Just War Doctrine outlines reasons that war might be morally justified. It requires a legitimate cause (like self-defense), proportionality in response (there’s your bugaboo right there), and due discretion to minimize harm to non-combatants. It also says you need a legitimate authority to declare war, a reasonable chance of success, and war as a last resort after running out of peaceful alternatives. The doctrine is an academic attempt to balance the moral complexities of armed conflict with the pursuit of peace.<\/p>\n
I’ve seen a few of my liberal Christian friends dunk on the Israeli strikes on the Iranian nuke program and military, even though by any *rational* measure, the Israeli strikes satisfy all of these criteria.
Self defense? Iran has been bankrolling terror against the US (not to mention Israel)\u00a0 for over forty years. The Marine Embassy bombing? Funding and arming Hamas, Hizb’allah, the Palestinian Authority, the Houthis and other terror movements throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia? Funding all the Intifadas, paying big money to the families of suicide bombers, funding decades of rockets attacks on Israel (and others), having their fingers directly on the October 7 pogrom, and having “eradicating Israel” as a foundational goal (inclding for their nuke program)?
Too many of my liberal Christian friends seem to have gone past “Just War” doctrine and straight on to “Groundhog Day Doctrine” – forgetting all of history when they wake up every morning and starting the entire Middle East conflict over from a clean slate every morning. Israel “attacked Iran” – 40-odd years of terrorism, direct attacks, and apocalyptic ,eliminationist rhetoric be darned.
Proportionality? Forget for a moment that it’s not only an academic concept when actual self-defense is involved – “proportionality” taking to the ridiculous extreme too many history-challenged liberal Christians do, it actually makes wars worse and less “just”. Think about it: a “proportional” response to Pearl Harbor would have involved sinking Japanese ships and calling it even; in 1939, the Allies should have retaken Poland and left everything else in place; Israel should presumably send goons into rural Iran on an anti-Farsi pogrom, taking hostages and killing 1200-ish people – in all cases, leaving the *root cause* of the wars (Japanese and German expansionism, elimination antisemitism) in place.
But you’d have a hard time showing a more “proportional” response in all of military history than Israel’s attack on Iran – thus far, at least. No carpet-bombing, no “Search and Destroy” missions through villages – no conventional ground troops at all. And hardly any contact with civilians outside the nuke program at all (it’s likely 90% of the Iranian population has had no contact with the war outside whatever media reports they’re getting.
They’re not a lot different than Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, in their own way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not long ago, in a discussion elsewhere,\u00a0 I mentioned that I have a hard time deciding who I dislike more in re the situation in the Middle East – the antisemitic right, or American liberal Christians with academic to-the-point-of-infantile interpretations of “Just War Doctrine”. Not much I can say or do about the former.\u00a0 But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-war-and-peace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89732,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89731\/revisions\/89732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}