Even as the world’s powers grasped for a last-minute resolution to the crisis in Syria, it remained an open question whether any amount of diplomacy could prevent the conflict from claiming at least one more victim: the classic Christian teaching known as the “just war” tradition.The central problem is not that the just war doctrine is being dismissed or condemned, but that it is loved too much. Indeed, both sides in the debate over punishing the Syrian regime for using chemical weapons are citing just war theory, but are reaching diametrically opposed conclusions.
Nicholas Hahn III, a Catholic writer, declared Tuesday (Sept. 10) in the conservative journal First Things that “a classical reading of the just war tradition renders robust intervention in Syria a morally desirable act of charity.”
At the same time, the Catholic editor of that same magazine, R.R. Reno, has been writing forcefully ...