Why I Believe in Just War Theory
Who remembers Edwin Starr singing:
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
Say it again!
At one level, it is true, war is good for nothing … but manufacturing misery.
I know I’ve been guilty of thinking some wars were justified when they were not.
I supported Australia’s involvement in the Gulf War (1990-91) because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he was an evil dictator, and was threatening other Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia. But once Kuwait was liberated and Operation Desert Storm was over, myself and many others were wondering why Bush didn’t go after Saddam, and remove him from power. Bush was criticized on the grounds that if he was US president during WWII, the allies would have stopped at the Rhine and left Hitler in power!
In any case, in 1992, I joined the Army and trained as an infantry soldier and so became part of the military machine of a key American ally. To this day, no regrets!
Fast forward some ten years to the Iraq War, when people were hawkish after 9/11, trying to draw a line between Hussein and Al Qaeda, and claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, I didn’t find it remotely convincing. What was convicing to me was seeing the removal of Saddam as the unfinished work of the Gulf War and liberating Iraq from an evil dictator. Back then the thinking was, if we had stopped Hitler, the Ayotollah, Pol Pot, or Idi Amin at first cause, we could have prevented a lot of bloodshed. The same idea was behind “Get Saddam.” I remember Tony Blair’s speech about trying to make the world freer and safer by getting rid of as many dastardly dictators as we could. It made sense and I bought it.
But I was wrong. Now I know why.
First, nobody likes armed missionaries, so trying to impose liberal democracy on places and people for whom liberal democracy is not an organic development was never going to work.
Second, like it not, dictators often keep a lid on all the crazies in their country, whether Jihadists or Jingoists. Sometimes it really is a case of better the devil you know!
Third, the military industrial complex will pay politicians handsomely to go to war, even though it’s other peoples’ kids who fight in it and the children of another nation who usually die because of it.
Just War Theory (JWT) provides a framework from within the Christian tradition for determining when warfare can be morally justified and how wars should be fought.
I have learned to be more cynical and cautious about any calls for America, Australia, AUKUS, or NATO to get involved in wars far from our home.
That said, I do believe a military build-up right now is justified. In the present time, the West does face an existential threat from an axis of autocracy consisting of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea (with Venezuela, South Africa, and Brazil mostly cheering for them on the sidelines) who form a geopolitical bloc aimed at destroying western civilization. This axis cooperates militarily, economically, and politically. So rather than see Ukraine, Taiwan, and Iran-Israel as three separate crises, we need to understand them as three theatres of the one struggle against an axis of authoritarian regimes.
So in the end, I repent of the hawkishness of my youth, but I’m still not a pacifist.
I still firmly believe in JWT. The theory is built on several key arguments.