But even if Israel somehow loses this war, through incompetent Israeli tactics or superior Hezbollah strategy, that does not, in itself, prove the war was unjust by reason of lacking a “reasonable chance of success.” The North came very close to losing the Civil War; if Early had taken Washington when he had the chance, or the bluecoats had broken at Gettysburg, the South might have won. Would those events have made Lincoln an unjust warrior? ~Joseph Bottum

This unfortunate question by Mr. Bottum, which comes in response to some interesting notes of limited skepticism about Lebanon and Iraq from Ross Douthat, is supposed to be a sort of rhetorical slam dunk: no one would be so crazy as to suggest that Father Abraham was not a “just warrior”!  There is also a reference to FDR, but that would take us too far afield into the history of that man’s particular tyranny.  But let that wait for a minute. 

So, here’s the first question: a reasonable chance of succeeding in what?  If we look at the provocation, the cause, of the current campaign–the incident where Hizbullah kidnapped two soldiers–it might occur to us that the objective would have been punitive, designed to force the return of those soldiers.  But the response was aimed at something entirely different–a general campaign aimed, if we believe the defenders of it, at isolating, degrading and pushing back Hizbullah. 

Second, if this was Israel’s aim, how many people who knew anything about the situation believed that it could be not only degraded but at least pushed back by Israeli action to a point whence they could not hit Israel with their rockets?  If, after 18 years of occupation, Hizbullah was not beaten, and they had six years to entrench themselves even more deeply in southern Lebanon, who would suppose that air strikes over the course of a few weeks would be able to dislodge them and drive them back?  It took NATO two and a half months to force Serb military withdrawal from Kosovo, so why would it be any easier to force a hardened guerrilla force to pull back?  If we assume that the campaign still has a practicable objective, driving Hizbullah out of range of being able to hit Israel, not eliminating it entirely, would seem to be it.  Perhaps it is easier to judge this objective as not having a reasonable chance of success, knowing what we know now. 

However, equally important in considerations of just war is the principle that the recourse to war must lead to a peace that is preferable to the peace that prevailed before the war started.  Even supposing that the campaign had a reasonable chance of success, how does this compare to the great harm the campaign has inflicted on the noncombatant population: the creation of a refugee crisis and the devastation of large swathes of the rest of Lebanon?  Here this is a case where the means used have probably both reduced the chances of Israel’s success against Hizbullah and employed and have been, to borrow from another post of Mr. Bottum, “not merely in reasonable error but criminally unjust.” 

Someone will have to explain how, say, the NATO-induced refugee crisis of 1999 (which was conveniently pinned on the Serbs) constituted “ethnic cleansing” and war crimes worthy of a bombing campaign, but the IAF-induced refugee crisis and destruction of civilian settlements are just unfortunate side-effects with no impact on the justice of the war.   

Now back to old Abe.  Mr. Bottum’s question is interesting to me, mainly because it assumes that Lincoln was justified in launching the war against the Confederacy.  Since he launched the war with no legitimate authority (since, by definition, the President had no authority to compel sovereign states to remain in the Union) and not to redress any injury, but to compel millions of people to remain in a federation to which they no longer wished to belong, it is rather puzzling how anyone could regard his war as a just one.  As a war to “preserve the Union,” it was by definition flawed and impossible from the outset, for the very act of compelling membership effectively made the voluntary Union of States into a consolidated, unitary state.  Mr. Bottum’s point that losing a war does not necessarily make it unjust is one that is well-taken.  But his example is indubitably bad, and it causes me to wonder whether Mr. Bottum would know a just war if he saw one. 

Matushka Frederica, for her part, keeps fighting the good fight:

But there is this other side of “do not resist one who is evil” (Matt. 5:39), and I frankly don’t know how the two are supposed to fit together. (I’m not a fan of just war, for reasons too time-consuming to get into.) Since my side of the street is virtually deserted, and there’s very little danger that President Bush is going to slap his forehead and say “She’s right!”, I keep trying to hold up these clues and reminders from the scriptural and early Christian witness on these issues. I think it’s not just a matter of shrewdly calculating whether you have the strength to win the fight (as the Jews and martyrs did not), but that war is inherently hellish, bad for the heart and spirit, even when the cause is considered noble.

Mat. Frederica’s remarks about just war do represent an important difference in Orthodox and Catholic thinking on the problem.  Whenever we talk about “the just war tradition,” we are essentially talking about the just war tradition of Latin Christianity, beginning with St. Augustine and continuing through Aquinas and, still later, through Grotius.  Eastern Christianity has never had a formal doctrine of just war of any kind, though in modern times Orthodox hierarchs and theologians have turned to St. Augustine’s principles for some guidelines.  They are not bad guidelines, as far as they go, but there has typically been a much stronger sense in the Eastern churches that war is always simply evil and that Christians should pray for peace and, by extension, strive to establish peace without recourse to violence. 

Wars of self-defense (which were usually the only kinds of wars that the conservative Byzantines were interested in waging after the seventh century) were accepted as necessary, but there was always some distinction between necessity and justice.  The one case where a Patriarch of Constantinople lent strong religious, rhetorical and moral support to a war was that of Sergios I during the crisis of the Persian invasions of the early seventh century.  The only other time anyone sought to sanctify warfare was the attempt by Nikephoros II Phokas (perhaps influenced by his wars with the Muslims?) to have soldiers slain in battle commemorated as martyrs of the Faith–the patriarch, very wisely, said no.  On the Orthodox attitude towards war, people will usually cite St. Basil the Great’s ruling that soldiers who have killed in battle cannot receive communion for three years, because the grievous nature of killing for any reason and the spiritual pollution associated with it.  This is the point Mat. Frederica is trying to make: even when you must resist an aggressor or right an injustice, the act of retribution takes a spiritual toll that is profoundly unnatural, because death and violence are unnatural in the understanding of the Fathers.  It is true that you can find St. Athanasios saying positive things about the honourable profession of being a soldier, but his affirmation of actual physical soldiering is a notable exception to a general refusal to endorse warfare as just.