Does US Airstrike in Iraq Violate Just War Doctrine?

[o_mlly]

This is true, provided certain conditions must be met.

Not many conditions need be met. The intention must be to prevent the evil in the killing by the aggressor of a proportionate number of innocents. The circumstance must be the imminence of the aggressive act.

The more dangerous the world is, the more willing people are to trade being free and being ethical because they want to feel safe. Being free and being ethical takes a lot of courage.

As there is no security in being slaves and only people who are free to act may act ethically, it would seem the better conclusion is that courage is required to remain free and ethical.

At any rate, I don’t think the assassination met the requirements we are taught by the Church.

To label the act as assassination begs the question. Even still, assassination, as in the case of tyrannicide, is still a debated topic among Catholic moral theologians.

 

[o_mlly]

I’d still like to be answered as to why killing one general, one president, one whatever is less morally acceptable than sending thousands of soldiers to war.

The killing of an unjust aggressor may be morally justified. Sending soldiers to war to defend a country from unjust aggression is morally justified. Both acts may be equally moral.

 

[o_mlly]

Yet historically assassinations have always been looked down upon.

Not always. See Aquinas’ commentary on Lombard’s Sentences.

 

[Aquinas11]

I would think that they’d say that among all our Presidents, at least Trump is open about his lack of moral restraint and his willingness to do whatever he feels like doing, if he sees a strategic advantage to doing it. In their place, I’d say that the other US Presidents were all hypocrites, and this one is brazen. The difference is that this one is very impulsive and careless in his political calculation. He doesn’t bother to learn about a situation; he assumes he knows it all and that being willing to do anything at the drop of a hat gives him the advantage.

Yeah FDR wasn’t brazen and open about lack of moral restraint when locked hundreds of thousands of minorities in internment camps

LBJ wasn’t brazen when he lied about Gulf of Tonkin to start Vietnam War

 

[Aquinas11]

Deliberately destroying cultural sites (rather than tolerating damage because it cannot be helped) as the President has threatened to do would be utterly indefensible

No because Liberals already championed destroying cultural sites with the Robert E Lee statue removal movement

 

[pnewton]

I think I’ve been reminded by you, but it might have been someone else, on different topics that the US is not a catholic nation and that it would not be right to impose catholic teaching on non Catholics with the government.

No one is arguing if the United States is a Catholic nation. We all know it is not. However, there are Catholics here, and being a democracy, can vote for what we see as the best moral option. Whether a person governs morally is a legitimate concern, and in this instance, it is worth considering if this type of assassination is a moral act.

 

[PetraG]

Yeah FDR wasn’t brazen and open about lack of moral restraint when locked hundreds of thousands of minorities in internment camps

LBJ wasn’t brazen when he lied about Gulf of Tonkin to start Vietnam War

We’re dragging in FDR? Good grief, he put citizens in internment camps! That’s the benchmark? Don’t go lower than locking up citizens and forcing them to lose businesses and lands that they’re not getting back and you’re good? LBJ lied so if Presidents lie that’s OK? If Osama bin Laden was unarmed and could have been taken alive, but Barack Obama ordered him killed no matter what, then Presidents have a license to kill aggressors when they could be captured, instead? You can’t “prove” Kennedy ordered the CIA to take out Castro, so that makes it OK for Presidents to order the assassination of foreign leaders…you know, provided they’re discrete about it? Just tell Congress where to get off and do what you think you need to do when you’re President, because as long as you can pretend you had no choice because of the great threat out there, you know they won’t remove you for it? Is anybody in the way of US foreign policy fair game, then, since everything is about terrorism?

What rabbit hole have I fallen into? I thought this was a Catholic forum, but this is moral relativism.

No because Liberals already championed destroying cultural sites with the Robert E Lee statue removal movement.

The United States already joined in the unanimous vote that made destruction of antiquities or cultural sites a war crime. International law is still legally binding. He’d be committing a war crime.

As for statues owned by municipalities or college campuses or whatever, that depends on state and local law. In some places, cities have the authority to remove them, and in other places, states have the right to forbid that. The main thing is that going in and destroying the cultural artifacts of another nation is a war crime. How any particular nation manages its own statues and cultural sites is a matter of national sovereignty, provided the nation has not made an agreement or treaty to protect the site.

More to the point, though, if we start taking down centuries-old mosques in Iraq or Iran, we can count on our cathedrals being attacked. We can count on attacks on our national parks and so on. Why wouldn’t they be targets? Do we think we’re too big and scary for anybody to retaliate against us?

Where does this end? It is not just immoral. It is lunacy. Even if we could get away with it, though, it would be immoral. We’d have to answer to God for what we did and what crimes we called necessities and rights all while claiming the name of Christian.

 

[Aquinas11]

We’re dragging in FDR? Good grief,

Actually you dragged him in

I would think that they’d say that among all our Presidents, at least Trump is…

Not sure why you made a statement if not prepared to defend it

he put citizens in internment camps!

Ok wow as long as the minorities are citizens it’s ok to lock up hundreds of thousands without cause and it’s not brazen

Not reading anymore, absolutely disgusting

 

[PetraG]

Not sure why you made a statement if not prepared to defend it

My statement that he’s the most open about it?
I think he’d say he’s the most open about it, frankly. I think he’d say that he’s only doing what US President have always done, only he’s not hypocritical enough to pretend he knows nothing about it or to have a long face about it. Credit him that much.

Ok wow as long as the minorities are citizens it’s ok to lock up hundreds of thousands without cause and it’s not brazen

Not reading anymore, absolutely disgusting

You think it is absolutely disgusting that Donald Trump can’t openly do whatever he wants and tell everybody that Article II allows him to do whatever he wants because you can name other Presidents who did horrible things, and therefore any horrible thing that Donald Trump thinks up to do is A-OK? Not only A-OK, but moral under a Catholic understanding of morality? That beggars belief.

Some day, tell me what moral boundaries you do think apply to Donald Trump. I’d be very interested to hear what they are. I have leveled criticisms at most of the Presidents since WWII, but I don’t think I’ve heard you name anything President Trump has done that you can’t find an excuse for.

 

[Aquinas11]

Some day, tell me what moral boundaries you do think apply to Donald Trump. I’d be very interested to hear what they are. I have leveled criticisms at most of the Presidents since WWII, but I don’t think I’ve heard you name anything President Trump has done that you can’t find an excuse for.

Inexcusable he hasn’t built the wall yet.

 

[HarryStotle]

Some day, tell me what moral boundaries you do think apply to Donald Trump. I’d be very interested to hear what they are. I have leveled criticisms at most of the Presidents since WWII, but I don’t think I’ve heard you name anything President Trump has done that you can’t find an excuse for.

CS Lewis made an interesting comment in Mere Christianity about the burning of witches in the Middle Ages.

“Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the 'Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”

It might be worth our while to seriously consider Lewis’ point.
Like AOC, what we have here is a case of disregarding the facts on the pretext that morality ignores or has nothing to do with the facts. Her words were: “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”

Unfortunately, there is no being “morally right” without considering the facts. As Lewis points out, if witches were really about using their supernatural “powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather,” surely the morally “correct” response wouldn’t be to permit witches to carry on killing or driving others insane or initiating climate change. And if they had supernatural powers wherein the only way to stop them would be to drown or burn them, then – feel free to correct me if I am wrong – what was done in Medieval times would have been the morally correct thing to do, no?

NOTE: I am not saying it was the morally correct thing to do, but if the witch persecutors had their facts correct, then their moral response would have also been correct. As Lewis points out, they got their morality wrong because they got their facts wrong.

In order for you to be correct in your above assessment of all of the presidents, especially Trump, you would have to be correct about the facts. Again, what access do you have to military intelligence that allows you to make such an absolutely certain moral assessment absent clarity of the facts, assuming that the facts are critical to being correct about your moral judgement?

 

[AlNg]

The United States already joined in the unanimous vote that made destruction of antiquities or cultural sites a war crime. International law is still legally binding. He’d be committing a war crime.

As for statues owned by municipalities or college campuses or whatever, that depends on state and local law. In some places, cities have the authority to remove them, and in other places, states have the right to forbid that. The main thing is that going in and destroying the cultural artifacts of another nation is a war crime. How any particular nation manages its own statues and cultural sites is a matter of national sovereignty, provided the nation has not made an agreement or treaty to protect the site.

More to the point, though, if we start taking down centuries-old mosques in Iraq or Iran, we can count on our cathedrals being attacked. We can count on attacks on our national parks and so on. Why wouldn’t they be targets? Do we think we’re too big and scary for anybody to retaliate against us?

Where does this end? It is not just immoral. It is lunacy.

Well said. I hope the Americans do not target the cultural monuments of Iran for destruction.

 

[Divine3]

https://cjd.org/2003/08/01/pope-joh...conservative-iraq-just-war-theories-rejected/

“Americans were largely unaware of the depth and importance of the opposition of Church leaders to an attack on Iraq, since for the most part the mainstream media did not carry the stories. In the same way, many Americans were unaware that Pope John Paul II spoke against the first Gulf War 56 times. Media in the United States omitted this from the commentaries on the war. Many have also been unaware of the number of Iraqis killed in that war (not to mention the war which recently “ended”). In February 2003 Business Week published an interview with Beth Osborne Daponte, a professional demographer who worked for the Census Bureau. The first Bush administration tried to fire her because her published estimates of the number of Iraqi deaths conflicted with what Dick Cheney was saying at the time. She was defended by social science professionals and was able to keep her job. Her estimates: 13,000 civilians were killed directly by American and allied forces, and about 70,000 civilians died subsequently from war-related damage to medical facilities and supplies, the electric power grid, and the water system.”
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
And this was years ago. What will happen now that our own president has started an evil, revengeful war? Our youth who have no recall of 9/11 are now going to fight because our president started a path of no return. God have mercy on our military.

 

[Divine3]

"At the Ash Wednesday Mass this year the Pope reemphasized the theme that peace comes with justice: “There will be no peace on earth while the oppression of peoples, injustices and economic imbalances, which still exist, endure.” He insisted that changes in structures, economic and otherwise, must come from conversion of hearts: “But for the desired structural changes to take place, external initiatives and interventions are not enough; what is needed above all is a joint conversion of hearts to love.”
https://cjd.org/2003/08/01/pope-joh...conservative-iraq-just-war-theories-rejected/

 

[OurLadyofSorrows]

I have not read this entire thread, please pray for avoidance of escalation after the Iran rocket attacks on US bases

 

[OurLadyofSorrows]

Well said. I hope the Americans do not target the cultural monuments of Iran for destruction.

Trump has pulled off on that threat. He realises it is against international rules of war ( I do not know the official name)

 

[HarryStotle]

Whether a person governs morally is a legitimate concern, and in this instance, it is worth considering if this type of assassination is a moral act.

I Saw Qasem Soleimani's Brand of Evil Firsthand — It's Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine | CBN News

 

[Kindnessmatters]

No. Such claims are not grounded in faith and rather are purely political.

 

[EndTimes]

Does US Airstrike in Iraq Violate Just War Doctrine?

(4) U.S. presumes it’s the ‘good guy’ in that scenario…

For… Everyone agrees it’s primarily about glomming OIL, yes?

_

 

[PetraG]

Inexcusable he hasn’t built the wall yet.

Please tell me you really didn’t expect that to happen. (The campaign promise that Mexico was going to pay for it ought to have been the first clue that it was a rainbow-and-unicorn claim.)

I am not saying it was the morally correct thing to do, but if the witch persecutors had their facts correct, then their moral response would have also been correct. As Lewis points out, they got their morality wrong because they got their facts wrong.

Yes, I think it is fair to say that this can be an honest difference on what effect this really has on the imminent threat to those the US has a duty to defend. Absolutely. I don’t think the assassination was morally justified because I don’t think it was ending an imminent threat posed by someone who had claimed credit for criminal acts against human life. If the evidence was that the ongoing course of crime would be ended by killing him, that would be a different matter (since he obviously could not be apprehended and tried as criminals normally are). You don’t just kill people with no trial when it isn’t in defense of life. I don’t think killing him removes the overall threat that he posed even though it obviously ends the threat that he posed personally. It is plausible that it even elevated the overall threat.
Pre-emptive assassination of leaders, especially in the absence of declared war, is a very slippery slope to go down. I don’t think we do well to broaden moral law to such a degree, not even with sound philosophical underpinning. Practically speaking, I don’t think the thinking is sound.

As the old saying goes: In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they’re not.

Trump has pulled off on that threat. He realises it is against international rules of war ( I do not know the official name)

It was a UN definition of such a thing as a war crime, which the US (and everyone else voting) supported. This is because, well, the terrorists were stealing and destroying cultural artifacts and attacking cultural sites, both to terrorize and to raise money for terrorism. (No nation who was voting dreamed a civilized country would actually do that.)