Avant-propos - Studia Moralia

THE WAR ON TERRORISM: A JUSTWAR? 41
Assisi invoked the doctrine to justify war. 8 Has the JWD been
effective in restraining war? In some circumstances, it does
seem to have acted as a restraint, at least during the era of
Christendom. 9 However, there is not sufficient published evidence
available to form a reasonable judgment on the historical
effectiveness, or lack of it, of the doctrine over a longer period.
In relation to the war against terrorism, up to the present, conducted
in Afghanistan, the JWD criteria may well have had a
restraining influence on military planning and conduct. But the
issue is complicated by tight restrictions on information; journalists
were kept away from the theatre of war so that people
have been deprived of the factual knowledge needed to form a
responsible judgment. To some extent at least this lack is now
being remedied. 10
Some of the criticism of the JWD can be answered by a clarifications
of its presuppositions. It does not maintain that war as
such is just, or that all wars are just; it holds that war is not, in
itself, always immoral, or, in other words, that it is not intrinsically
evil. Any particular war, to be justified, must satisfy all of
the criteria it proposes. It would thus be logically possible that,
after considering the purposes and conduct of historical wars,
the upholders of the doctrine would have to condemn all wars.
At present, both International Law and official Catholic teaching
accept defence only as just cause. The only form of war now
legally permissible for a state, is a war of individual or collective
self-defense. 11 Pius XII also taught that defense was the only just
8 CRISTOPH T. MAIER, Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the
Cross in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994) 15; JAMES TURNER JOHNSON, The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic
Traditions, (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) 57.
9 JOHNSON, Ideology, 13.
10 CARL CONETTA, “Strange Victory: A critical appraisal of Operation
Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan war.” Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth
Institute Project on Defense Alternatives Research Monograph, #6, 30 January
2002; URL http://www.comw.org/pda/O201strangevic.html; Idem., “Why a
Higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties?” 18 January 2002, URL
http://www.comw.org/pda/0201oef.html.
11 Article 51 of Chapter 7 of the United Nations charter recognizes war
of defense as a right to be exercised pending action by the Security Council.