Can the standards of just war theory be applied so stringently that they become irrelevant to modern warfare? This is what concerns Ross about Peter Hitchens’ position on Gaza. As Hitchens’ position is more or less my position as well, I have a few thoughts about this. First, here is Ross:

Who gets to define what sort of harm is “lasting, grave, and certain” enough to justify going to war? Who decides when all means of preventing conflict “have been shown to be impractical or ineffective”? Doesn’t almost everybody enter a war convinced they have “serious prospects of success”? Isn’t every party to a war convinced that their actions won’t “produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated”? I’m being a bit glib, obviously, since serious thinkers have drilled down on all of these questions – but the fact remains that on a case by case basis, a shared commitment to just war theory doesn’t guarantee anything like a consensus on the justice of a given war or operation.

Well, that’s putting it mildly. George Weigel could claim, presumably with a straight face, that preventive war against Iraq is perfectly in line with the standards of a just war, and then-Cardinal Ratzinger could say that the “concept of a ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” Obviously, I think the current Pope has a better understanding of the matter than the administration’s court theologian, which ought to bolster the claims of those who interpret just war requirements more narrowly, but this rather dramatically illustrates Ross’ last point.

There are, broadly speaking, two camps who appeal to the just war tradition: those looking for loopholes that permit the use of force as often as possible, and those looking for barriers to prevent the use of force as often as practicable. The loophole crowd seems to start from the assumption that every use of force, particularly when employed by governments with whom they sympathize, is licit and just and that just war tradition exists to provide the language and borrowed authority for the arguments to support this view. The barrier crowd starts from the assumption that there has to be an extraordinarily high standard met before force can be used. Naturally, as someone in the latter crowd, I think that the purpose of the standards set forth in just war theory is to make it as difficult as possible to meet them, because war, while sometimes necessary, is a great evil. It should not be easy to go to war even in self-defense, much less should it be easy to escalate or start wars. For the loophole crowd, the reason for invoking just war theory seems to be mainly to gain the political benefits of being able to claim to being on the right side, and preferably without having to meet most of the obligations that just war theory requires (or to lower the standards for meeting those obligations such that virtually every operation will meet them no matter what happens).

Of course, it is possible that applying high standards will simply cause those who wish to wage war for whatever reason to ignore the restraints of the tradition entirely, but then I thought that one of the purposes of establishing moral standards was not to accommodate the unjust in their desires. After the last six years, I would have thought that the tendency to water down these standards and thus make escalating and starting wars more morally and politically acceptable was the far greater problem that we face. We are not in danger, it seems to me, of “giving ammunition to the side of the debate that wants to do away with moral restraint in the struggle against terrorism entirely,” as these are the people who are perfectly happy to warp and distort the just war tradition (and the Constitution, international law and the basic meaning of words, among other things) to accommodate the virtual abandonment of that restraint. One could make a similar argument that opponents of the torture regime, by taking an absolute stance against torture as wrong in all cases, are giving ammunition to those who have defended and justified it as necessary, but I think Ross and I would agree that there is an obligation to oppose injustices that are carried out by the state, whether in isolated incidents or as a matter of systematic policy, that needs to be fulfilled whether or not apologists for those injustices can demagogue that opposition to their temporary advantage.