The week’s question raises a host of issues that religious as well as philosophical minds have wrestled with almost as far back as we have written records of human activities. As a human being, as a person raised in and molded by Christian traditions, and as a citizen of what until recently we have prided ourselves on as a model democracy that eschews offensive, including preemptive war, I am opposed to any war that is not an action of last resort in opposition to aggression or oppression.
I do not see that position as one associated especially, and certainly not exclusively, with any one religious tradition; I would like to think it is one that most great religious communities would for the most part see as rational as well as moral.
Virtually all major religious traditions – Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, for example -- have opposed or forthrightly condemned offensive warfare, and one or more strands of all of the major traditions have likewise even gone so far as to condemn all warfare and espouse pacificism. (It is important to remember that every great religious tradition has a huge range of moral and theological positions on almost every issue of importance, from warfare to licit and illicit foods to individual morality.) For me personally, there can be just wars, although they are few and far between in history, and then only for those who have been forced to fight evils greater than the evils of fighting and killing themselves.
Is the Iraq war a “just war”? At no time could this, in my view have been argued plausibly. Those of us who felt it was wrong at the outset have only been strengthened in that view in the years since. It is not that Saddam Hussein was ever anything but a tyrant and murderous psychopath, but we have endured quite a number such leaders around the world without one nation deciding that it was its peculiar mission to proceed effectively unilaterally to purge such evil rulers; indeed, to our shame, this country has supported quite a few of them at times, including Saddam Hussein himself, whom we armed and aided during the Iran-Iraq war.
Nor did we go into the occupation with any plan and little if any thought on the part of our leadership about how to stave off the chaos that has ensued. We have put our own military personnel as well as the Iraqi general public at deadly risk because of the way our government has gone about the whole misadventure. We have increased the risk of global conflict and, yes, global terrorism by our actions. If there is something "just" in all this, it is hard to discern.
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