The Impact of 9/11 on Religion and Philosophy pp 261-270 | Cite as
The Just War Tradition Faces the Remnants of War
Abstract
The most obvious change wrought by 9/11 has been the initiation by the United States of two international wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The two wars share noticeable similarities (the inculcating of an international force prior to invasion, the overthrow of an oppressive government, the casus belli involving rogue countries giving support to terrorists); but there are also important differences between the two wars, including the size of the force involved, the comparative political instability of Afghanistan prior to invasion, and the degree to which the earlier invasion was widely supported by proponents of the just war tradition (henceforth “just warriors”) whereas those same proponents were deeply divided over decision to invade Iraq.
Keywords
Legitimate Authority American Interest Oppressive Government Conventional Warfare Provide Material SupportPreview
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Notes
- 1.John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989).Google Scholar
- 2.John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
- 3.See Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar
- 8.See Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004)Google Scholar
- 9.See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2003)Google Scholar
- 12.I do not mean to minimize the degree to which the shock of 9/11 unbalanced such arguments. Indeed, that shock undoubtedly played an important role in the shaping of the various moral arguments about war. Instead, I would argue that that shock did not so much displace thought as cause it to be redirected. For an exploration of the way emotion and reason interact (rather than stand in opposition to each other), see Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994).Google Scholar
- 13.Condoleezza Rice, “Rethinking the National Interest: American Realism for a New World,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 4 (Tuly/August 2008): 12.Google Scholar
- 14.For an exception, see Oliver O’ Donovan, The Just War Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 15.Nearing a conclusion (or whatever passes for one), I can hardly do justice to the range or depth of thought on the idea of “modernity” as an age. I leave, instead, a short bibliography: For the philosophies of modernity, see Türgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993)Google Scholar
- Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Jdentity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar
- Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar
- Hans Toas, War and Modernity, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).Google Scholar