Condi's Unjust War

AmericaBlog [1] rightly picked up on Condoleezza Rice’s bold-faced lie rationale [2] for engaging in war atrocities in GWOT.

But she defended the Bush administration's actions in Iraq and challenged her critics' assertions that the Iraq war clashes with Catholic morals.

"Christians are of course on both sides of the argument about the use of force -- when it is indeed just to use force and when it is not," she said at a news conference today. "We have overthrown a dictator who brutalized his population. Sometimes you have to get rid of really, really bad regimes."

What Condi is referring to are Christian Just War principles [3] , which are a generally agreed upon set of guidelines under which Christians may permissibly violate the tenet of Thou Shalt Not Kill. For a fuller understanding of these principles, I could refer you to the academic Theologian, Michael Walzer [4] .

Christian Academics have used these tenets (jus ad bellum, jus in bello, jus post bello) for years to justify, for example, the killing commited during WWII, a just war if there ever was one (which is itself debatable). Unfortunately, Condi’s war doesn’t even come close.

At the risk of being wordy, I will briefly run through these 7 principles:

1) A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.

2) A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.

3) A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see point #4). Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissible objective of a just war is to redress the injury.

4) A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.

5) The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.

6) The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.

7) The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.

In order for a war to be considered “just” it must adhere to each of these principles. Obviously, I defy anyone to explain to me how the US-led GWOT conforms to even one. Rice of course would like to repeat the meme that Hussein somehow equals Hitler, but not only is this patently false, but also flies in the face of the first hundred or so rationales Team Chimpy used to justify the invasion before landing on the “liberation” argument.

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