[Peace-discuss] Obama Invokes "Just War, " But Is the War in Afghanistan "Just"?

[C. G. Estabrook]

This is an excellent article.  But I'd suggest that it's not quite correct to 
call "the concept of just war ... an official doctrine of the Catholic Church."

It's surely taught in the Catholic tradition, as Bob's quotations for the recent 
Catechism shows, but it's both broader and narrower than that.

Narrower -- in that there are many Catholics who reject the notion that just war 
theory is adequately Christian, either because they're pacifists or because they 
think it incapable of being applied.

Broader -- in that ethical reasoning about the just war theory is hardly limited 
to the Catholic Church. As a philosophical argument, it's more than two 
millennia old, and many of those who have elaborated it, past and present, are 
not Catholic.

As a theory, it's a summary of much thought about how and when war is justified 
-- which is why Obama used it, however speciously.  --CGE


Robert Naiman wrote:
> Obama Invokes "Just War," But Is the War in Afghanistan "Just"?
> 
> "Accepting Peace Prize, Obama Evokes 'Just War,'" notes the headline
> in the New York Times, referring to President Obama's speech accepting
> the Nobel Peace Prize. President Obama did indeed invoke the concept
> of a "just war." But tellingly, he did not try to argue that the U.S.
> war in Afghanistan meets the criteria to be judged as a "just war."
> 
> A plausible explanation for the President's failure to argue that the
> war in Afghanistan is a "just war" is that he recognizes that such an
> argument would not be convincing.
> 
> As President Obama noted in his speech, there are criteria involved in
> the "just war" concept. It isn't just a matter of proclaiming that a
> war is justified. There are tests.
> 
> This matters, because a substantial part of the U.S. and world
> population subscribes to the theory of "just war." In particular, more
> than a fifth of the U.S. population are estimated to identify as
> Catholics. The concept of "just war" - that wars can be considered
> "just" only if they meet certain criteria - is an official doctrine of
> the Catholic Church.
> 
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/obama-invokes-just-war-bu_b_387231.html
> 
> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/10/121056/05
> 
> http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/426
> 
> 
> --
> Robert Naiman
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org
> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
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