Just War and the Gulf War

James Turner Johnson and George Weigel, in Just War and the Gulf War, present a reasonable argument that the Gulf War, from the point of view of those prosecuting the war against Iraq, was indeed a just war, according to the moral criteria of that tradition. At the same time, the authors are not naive about the victory and its results. They point out that "the only peace that can be achieved in this region is one limited to that defined by international law, not a 'new order' that will be extraordinarily difficult to bring into being" (40). This is important to note because it emphasizes that the just war doctrine should be applied to each war individually. The authors are not saying, in other words, that any threat to peace in the Middle East, for example, should be answered by the kind of international effort posed in the war against Iraq.

However, with respect to the Gulf War, the authors leave no doubt that the war was in part a justified because of the many significant results it produced:

Restoring the territorial integrity and governmental autonomy of Kuwait, reestablishing respect for the anti-aggression rule of international law, restoring credibility to the moral and legal guidelines for resort to force and for fighting justly, restoring to the United Nations the ability to act in the world as its designers intended---these are goals deeply worthy in themselves and fundamental to the preservation of international peace (40).

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at would have occurred had another strategy been pursued. The authors argue that the most extreme of the Christian just war theorists go too far in limiting the justice of conflicts because they believe too much in the possibility of an ideal world: Mainline/oldline Protestantism and . . . Catholic leadership . . . abandoned Christian Realism . . . [and] substituted . . . psychologized and quasi-utopian understandings of international public life, which suggest the possibility of a world without conflict. What has been lost in this doctrinal shuffle is the classic Christian tradition's understanding of "peace" as . . . rightly ordered and dynamic political community . . . in which legal and political institutions provide effective means for resolving . . . inevitable conflicts (85). The authors are simply arguing that such extreme arguments make the consideration of just war doctrine meaningless. If we look at the world as if it were an ideal world in which love were the rule, then there will be no room for just war, for war would not be considered "just" under any circumstances in such a world. The authors ask simply that the just war doctrine be considered in light of a real world in which conflict between nations ine

Category: Government - J