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Preventive Wars and Prudence

Some of Peter Lawler’s readers are against Santorum: One objection to Santorum is to his unfashionable support for the Bush freedom agenda, with its solicitude for the rights of people everywhere and the corresponding interventionism. But foreign policy, of course, is largely a matter of prudence, and there are and should be good Catholics on […]

Some of Peter Lawler’s readers are against Santorum:

One objection to Santorum is to his unfashionable support for the Bush freedom agenda, with its solicitude for the rights of people everywhere and the corresponding interventionism. But foreign policy, of course, is largely a matter of prudence, and there are and should be good Catholics on both sides of issues such as what to do about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

I would point out that the “freedom agenda” was the ideological justification for military intervention in Iraq after it had already happened, and its fruits in the Near East have generally been illiberal and/or Islamist to the severe detriment of the Christian communities in Iraq and (to a lesser extent) Lebanon. Support for this agenda is “unfashionable” in large part because it has been very harmful to the nations that supposedly benefited from it. As I mentioned earlier this week, then-Cardinal Ratzinger famously said before the Iraq war that “the concept of preventive war does not appear in The Catechism of the Catholic Church.” Santorum voted in favor of one preventive war, and openly advocates for at least one more. Whether or not a Catholic (or indeed any Christian) can endorse preventive war is not simply a matter of prudence, because there is no scenario in which that war could be justified. One could go so far to say that preventive war requires the abandonment of prudence.

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