Is the Iraq War a just war?

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servus_Mariae said:
according to Catholic theology?
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I don’t think it meets the second requirement:
*the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
*all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
*there must be serious prospects of success;
*the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

Plus, JP II was firmly against it. I think if the Pope says no, it doesn’t meet the criteria.
 
Did JP II find the Afghanistan war to be just?

My issue with discussing about the Iraq War is that I should not be giving opinions when I am sitting at home instead of listening to defense reports and so on.

In all that I have seen and heard, this war seems to be unjust. If the Pope finds a war unjust,
it probably is.
 
fermat said:
I don’t think it meets the second requirement:
*the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
*all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
*there must be serious prospects of success;
*the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

Plus, JP II was firmly against it. I think if the Pope says no, it doesn’t meet the criteria.
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I’m not convinced the Iraq War met any of the four requirements listed above. I believe the U.S. was morally wrong to go to war against Iraq, in spite of the provocations initiated by Hussein and his government, and I think the Bush Administration thought so too, but prefered to ignore the question of morality for the sake of expedience.
 
fish90 said:
Did JP II find the Afghanistan war to be just?

My issue with discussing about the Iraq War is that I should not be giving opinions when I am sitting at home instead of listening to defense reports and so on.

In all that I have seen and heard, this war seems to be unjust. If the Pope finds a war unjust,
it probably is.
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If you live in a democracy, such as the U.S. claims to be, then not only should you be thinking about the war and presenting opinions to your duly elected representative in Congress, but you have a responsibility to do so. If you are an American citizen, or a citizen of any of the other countries participating in the war, then you should realize that the war in Iraq is not the military’s war, it is your war
 
It’s borderline. There are arguments both ways; the Vatican was not convinced when we invaded, but now we are there they want us to finish the job and leave the country better than we found it.
 
Tsuwano said:
If you live in a democracy, such as the U.S. claims to be, then not only should you be thinking about the war and presenting opinions to your duly elected representative in Congress, but you have a responsibility to do so. If you are an American citizen, or a citizen of any of the other countries participating in the war, then you should realize that the war in Iraq is not the military’s war, it is your war
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I never get a personal response when I contact my representative.:mad:

I do realize that it is my war, but I am still under the opinion that there are some things that the government knows that its people should not know since it may jeopardize the national defense. If a country’s citizens knows something, then its enemies know that and more.

With the utmost and sincere respect, I did say “In all that I have seen and heard, this war seems to be unjust. If the Pope finds a war unjust,it probably is.”
 
Catholic1954 said:
It’s borderline. There are arguments both ways; the Vatican was not convinced when we invaded, but now we are there they want us to finish the job and leave the country better than we found it.
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You’re right. I believe the war was morally wrong from the beginning, but now that the war has been fought and there is an attempt to establish a lasting peace in the region, it would be morally wrong for the U.S. and the NATO countries to abandon Iraq to the chaos they helped initiate. As Colin Powell warned the Sec. of Defense, Donald Rumsfield, at the time, “If you break it, you own it.”
 
fish90 said:
I never get a personal response when I contact my representative.:mad:

I do realize that it is my war, but I am still under the opinion that there are some things that the government knows that its people should not know since it may jeopardize the national defense. If a country’s citizens knows something, then its enemies know that and more.

With the utmost and sincere respect, I did say “In all that I have seen and heard, this war seems to be unjust. If the Pope finds a war unjust,it probably is.”
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Thank you for the clarification. I can agree with your statement here. There are some aspects of waging war that should not be public knowledge because it may endanger soldiers or influence the war negatively, such as precise plans for an attack or the locations of various units and so on, but there are many things a government would prefer its citizens not to know precisely because the government knows it is wrong and does not wish to suffer embarrassment or the contempt of its citizenry if the imformation becomes public; the Bush Administration’s ignorant headlong rush to war without contemplating the end result of the war being one secret of this present war. There is a balance that has to be maintained, but it is hard to know what that balance is in a democracy.
 
Of course the Pope would be against it. However, Catholic teaching leaves open “prudential judgement”.

A question that should be asked is how many lives have been saved by our intervention?
 
buffalo said:
Of course the Pope would be against it. However, Catholic teaching leaves open “prudential judgement”.

A question that should be asked is how many lives have been saved by our intervention?
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Right. Does not that doctrine involve those factors for a just war to be determined by lawful authorities? The same is true for capital punishment which is hardly ever necessary nowadays.
 
buffalo said:
Of course the Pope would be against it. However, Catholic teaching leaves open “prudential judgement”.

A question that should be asked is how many lives have been saved by our intervention?
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Hard to know how many lives have been saved. It has been estimated that Saddam was responsible for approximately a million deaths. He did start two aggressive wars, one a world war, and one in which he used WMD. So he was a pretty evil guy, and there was really nothing that would have prevented him from doing what he wanted later on, in the same way the world community, which opposes Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, seems powerless to stop that. Same with North Korea. There really isn’t any “community of nations” having the power or the will to stop a monster who is in full control of a country.

It has to be remembered that there was really only one “Gulf War”. The war never actually ended after Saddam was evicted from Kuwait. There was a truce. No treaty of peace. The shooting never stopped. Whether or not Saddam complied with the WMD ban, he certainly violated the truce in other ways. So, in opposing what people think of as “Gulf War II”, they necessarily have to oppose “Gulf War I”. Same war.
 
It’s a war invoked solely by greed, and last time I checked, that’s not good.
 
I don’t know if the present conflict in Afghanistan is just or not, especially the war’s expansion into Pakistan, though I think it is possible to make a good argument that it is. I think the original conflict in Afghanistan, the invasion and ousting of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, fell within the limited confines of the Just War Theory.
 
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