The Dogs of War

Or the dog-eared articles, in any case. First, an interesting and surprisingly marshal discussion of just war by the Jesuit, Father James Schall. He argues, among other interesting observations:

[O]main problems are not too much force, but too little. A peaceful world is not a world with no ready forces but one with adequate, responsible, and superior force that is used when necessary. The failure to have or use such forces causes terror and war to grow exponentially. Unused force, when needed at a particular time and place, ceases to be force. But force is meaningless if one does not know that he has an enemy or how this enemy works and thinks. That latter is a spiritual and philosophical problem, not a technical one. Many an adequately armed country has been destroyed because it did not recognize its real enemy. Nor is this an argument for force “for force’s sake.” It is an argument for force for justice’s sake. I am not for “eternal peace,” which is a this-worldly myth, but for real peace of actual men in an actual and fallen world. Peace is not a goal, but a consequence of doing what is right and preventing what is wrong and, yes, knowing the difference between the two.

Justice and force require one another in the actual world. Too often they are placed in opposition in a way that renders both unbalanced and ineffective. It is not a virtue to praise justice as if it need not be actually enforced or defended. The greatest crimes usually are grounded in a utopianism that is blind to living men, that does not see how to limit and control disruptive forces that continually arise in human life. . . . Contrary to much rhetoric, we do not live in a world in which diplomacy, dialogue, diversity, and law, however valuable, have replaced force. We can hopefully reach an adequate public order, but the failure to understand that law and dialogue need the presence of reasoned force ends up creating not more peace but less.

A more practical discussion of whether actually to use force against Iran by the brilliant Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld. He notes:

Between 1960 and 1993, first China, then Israel (albeit to a limited extent) and finally India and Pakistan were presented as the black sheep, lectured, put under pressure and occasionally subjected to sanctions. Since then, the main victim of America’s peculiar belief that it alone is sufficiently good and sufficiently responsible to possess nuclear weapons has been North Korea. As the record shows, in none of these cases did the pessimists’ visions come true. Neither Stalin, Mao nor any of the rest set out to conquer the world. It is true that, as one country after another joined the nuclear club, Washington’s ability to threaten them or coerce them declined.

However, nuclear proliferation did not make the world into a noticeably worse place than it had always been — and if anything, to the contrary. As Europe, the Middle East and South Asia demonstrate quite well, in one region after another the introduction of nuclear weapons led, if not to brotherhood and peace, then at any rate to the demise of large-scale warfare between states.

His sanguine message is encouraging, as Bush appears to be punting Iran and accepting their nuclear designs. He’s put all his eggs in the Iraq project, a supposed catalyst of democratic change throughout the Middle East. If by democratic change, one means the dressing up of theocrats with the patina of democratic legitimacy. Yipee!!!

Finally, less brilliantly, I discuss at length whether the marriage of Israel and the West is a marriage of convenience from a common enemy, or the product of a real foundation in the same values in a lengthy comment on this thread at Blackfive. I write, “Jews and Christians lived apart and hostile to one another until very recently in European history. Unless you think the bloodbaths of the secular French and Bolshevik Revolutions are the essential defining aspect of Europe and the West, and not its longer-lasting and more enduring Christianity, then this fact of apartness and lack of common values is undeniable. , , , We do share a structural fact in common with the Israels; we’re both opposed by and now opposing the trend of militant Islam. But America also shares this in common with India, Thailand, East Timor, China, Russia, the Ivory Coast, and numerous other peoples with whom we have almost nothing in common, other than the desire not to live under oppressive Sharia law.”

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