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Not even the Catholic Church agrees with you and they're famously aggressively anti-war. From Pope Francis, “war is in itself a crime against humanity.” John Pa
by Spivak 2y ago
Not even the Catholic Church agrees with you and they're famously aggressively anti-war. From Pope Francis, “war is in itself a crime against humanity.” John Paul II, "No, never again war, which destroys the lives of innocent people, teaches how to kill, throws into upheaval even the lives of those who do the killing and leaves behind a trail of resentment and hatred." And yet church doctrine outlines the criteria for a just war.
1. The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain.
2. All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.
3. There must be serious prospects of success.
4. The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.
The US gets tripped up on 4. a lot.
- psunavy03 2y ago#3 and #4 are worth valuing, but also sometimes wickedly hard to measure. I mean, look at the interventions in places like Yugoslavia and Libya, where the goal was to stop disorder and/or genocide. Or the disaster that was the UN intervention in Rwanda. Clausewitz teaches that wars have a character all their own, unique to their time and circumstance, and that understanding the nature of the war you are engaged in is simultaneously vital and very, very difficult to do.