Just Wars?

The basic idea of a just war is very simple and ancient.  If a community is attacked, fighting to defend the community is just.  It is, however, more difficult to justify initiating a war.  Yet, the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have each offered reasons for doing so. 

In the Torah God tells the ancient Israelites to fight the peoples of Canaan, because God is giving the land to the people he has chosen.  Deuteronomy presents a long sermon, attributed to Moses, which includes this passage: “When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are abaout to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you — the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you — and when the LORD your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them.” (Dt. 7:1-2)

This “holy war” is just, the Torah claims, because God is just, and God commands that the war be fought.  At the end of the New Testament the Revelation to John ends with a vision of a battle between the forces of evil and the forces of good, which is assumed to be a just war because it is the will of God. 

Nonetheless, Christians were pacifists until in the fourth century Emperor Constantine converted and made defending the Roman Empire not only a just cause, but also a Christian duty.

Islam teaches that Muslims have a duty to embrace jihad, which means defending the truth.  In a time of peace, and within the Muslim community, this involves a quest for spiritual and moral purification.  In a world of war, it means fighting for Islam against its enemies.  As with Jewish and Christian notions of holy war, jihad is assumed to be just because it is God’s revealed will.

To check the dangers of holy war, theologians in the West developed a more philosophical understanding of what constitutes a just war.  The principles of the just war tradition rely on ethical presumptions, rather than assertions of divine authority.  In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas formulated these principles, and European political writers applied these principles to judge the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

The following moral presumptions sum up the duty of a government, as it contemplates war.  To be justifiable, a war must:

•  Have a just cause.
•  Be declared by a proper authority.
•  Be based on a right intention.
•  Use just means.
•  Have a reasonable chance of success.
•  Result in more good than harm.
•  Be a last resort.

At the end of the eighteenth century revolutionary wars were fought in what would become the United States and in France.  The British government certainly did not consider the American revolt to be justified, but instead asserted that British authority over the colonies was lawful.  Likewise, the king of France did not believe the French rebels had any legitimacy. 

Yet, the American and French uprisings in pursuit of new forms of representative government were successful, not only on the battlefield, but also in securing public support for the rights that each uprising affirmed.  Both of these revolutions justified war in order to assert civil and political rights and democratic government. 

Today, rather than relying on the just war tradition, Western nations evoke the revolutionary understanding of a just war to defend their military intervention in Libya.

With hope . . . Bob Traer