Can War Really Be Justified?

Originally defined by St. Augustine, the argument for “just war” asserts a pure and good purpose behind military aggression which would redeem it from being sinful by the standards of Christian scripture. In the Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas Aquinas builds upon Augustine’s foundation for the argument and asserts that war can indeed be justified if it is in agreement with three specific criteria. (Secunda Secundae Partis, Q. 40) First, a war must be initiated by the sovereign, not private individuals, for the good of society.

Second, war must be launched for a just cause, upholding justice as its chief motivation. Third and finally, a war should be declared by those with the right intentions, to advance well. On these three principles, Aquinas writes that war can be justified, emphasizing war as a method of establishing justice rather than sin. (II-II, Q. 40 Article I) However, this broadly defined theory has aged into a state of inadequacy when it comes to the problems faced in a twenty-first-century context.

Though Aquinas was solid in his intentions, his interpretation of this argument concerning modern international relations is quite insufficient and potentially harmful. For an example, the Iraq War, headed by the United States and Britain, began in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a US-led coalition that would impose a “shock and awe” bombing campaign, a tactic defined by overwhelmingly brutal displays of power, force, and dominance to paralyze an enemy state into quick submission. (Encyclopedia.org) Although this is arguably disturbing in its own right, at the time of the proposal stage of the war, it did meet the criteria of a “just” one.

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After all, under the sovereign leadership of President Geroge W. Bush, 47-60 percent of Americans polled supported the effort. (USA Today) It began as a war proclaimed to be inspired by the larger quest for justice and the advancement of good over evil; a war that President Bush declared would “defend the world from grave danger” from his position in the Oval Office. In the same address on March 19, 2003, President Bush announced that “The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.” Rather than end quickly, however, the continued warfare and subsequent occupation lasted until the end of the year 2011, resulting in trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of lives lost (including the approx. 800,000 civilian deaths which resulted from post-war life in Iraq). [Watson Institute of Brown University] Soon after the commencement of the conflict, many criticized its given justifications for being not sufficient enough to explain unleashing a war against Iraq. The legitimacy of the very existence of just war requires our greater reflection on what constitutes justifying war today if anything should at all.

Although the just-war theory is used to analyze and then is carried out in nearly every international conflict that emerges (such as the United States’ wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and some smaller-scale civil conflicts including Libya and Syria), it needs intense reexamination. Though it followed the criteria of the just-war theory, the military actions of America during the Iraq War have stood under fire by moral scrutiny and criticism for years since its launch, and popular opinion was shifted. In 2006, 76 percent of participants polled believed that the mission was going negatively for the U.S. and 61 percent believed the war should have never been started in the first place. (NY Times) In another example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (mid-20th century to present), though referred to as an effort against terrorism, has been heavily criticized for issues involving the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinian Arabs (i.e. allegations of ethnic cleansing), the handling of disputes over and settlements in Palestinian territories, and the overall conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces.

One of the simplest criticisms that can be made against the just-war theory is that morality is a subject that is nearly impossible to have everyone uniformly agree upon. Moreover, contemporary foreign matters involve elements such as non-state actors, advanced weaponry, and varying ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ powers at play that did not arise until after the time Aquinas submitted his additions to the theory. The established three criteria do not require the leaders of a sovereign state to take into consideration the good of the opposing state, only their own. Thus, the theory also disregards the probability of one society’s “greater good” differing from the good of the other, as well as tosses out the idea of the existence of a government with corrupt intentions being able to declare war without even imposing some proper checks and balances.

In Article I of Question 40 of the Summa, Aquinas highlights the following quote from St. Augustine: “The natural order conducive to peace among mortals demands that the power to declare and counsel war should be in the hands of those who hold the supreme authority.” And in Aquinas’ reply to Objection 3, he quotes Augustine again: ‘We do not seek peace to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace…so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them to the prosperity of peace.” However, war cannot always simply be the obligation of a hegemonic state to an alleged greater good. Also, if one state’s peace depends upon war against another state, then the enemy state must relinquish its peace for the sake of its adversary. To regain that peace, they must go back to war to derive peace from another state, and thus we reach a paradox of never-ending, counterintuitive aggressions for a goal of peace. Yet there are, in fact, nonviolent counters to injustice and evil that can bring about peace in a way that reserves the greater good for more than just the sole surviving nation of an all-out, destructive war. This is because the technology, methodology, and reasoning behind wars have significantly changed and developed over the hundreds of years since Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, and force alone would be too weak of a tactic to bring about peace in today’s political sphere on its own. Among many nonviolent alternatives are international sanctions against aggressors, arms embargoes, condemning and distancing from oppressive, occupying regimes, supplying asylum for refugees, coordinating negotiations, and igniting civil disobedience. A standard of nonviolence should always be placed before initiating any sort of violent conflict and war should not be justified by a set of principles; those which have the potential for largely acting as cushioning for the sanctimonious rather than as the standards for practical peacemaking.