A Just War

When terrorists on September 11 crossed even those lines of decency that nobody had ever before dared to, and the United States had to recognize that an act of war had been committed against it, everyone knew that a military response would be inevitable. As an American, I can only take pride in the fact that the response has been tempered with wisdom and mercy, saying to one and all that the attack on the perpetrators of this outrage is neither an attack on Islam nor the people of Afghanistan and that humanitarian aid is being dropped to those who have been forced to flee their homes. War is always a horrible thing, and no verbiage about glory, so common to earlier generations, can mask the fact that people will die, parents will mourn their offspring, and children will become orphans. As always in war, there will be innocent victims, and nobody can prevent it. Let the guilt be on those who could have prevented all this by refraining from doing the unspeakable.

The ancient Romans first came up with the idea that war was permissible only for a righteous cause, and Hugo Grotius revived the idea in the seventeenth century that states should try conciliation first and send men into battle only later. There was not much to negotiate with those who decided to turn civilian airliners into kamikazes, killing themselves and everyone else onboard plus another five thousand or so in the buildings they crashed into. The Americans and their allies waited until they had evidence enough to convince those with whom they could share such information that they had irrefutable evidence against the culprit (some things simply cannot be made public because they might jeopardize still other lives), demanded that Afghanistan’s Taliban regime turn him over, and in the absence of any positive response went to war. War is sometimes a lesser evil than appeasement, and this is something that cannot be appeased, something that can never be forgiven. Now the murderers of New York and Washington (incidentally, the World Trade Center had a day care center, the children of which were murdered in cold blood) have proclaimed a holy war on the United States, its British allies, Israel, and the civilized world in general. No speculation about the unsolved problems of the Palestinians, by no means all of whom are Muslims (a number of the founders of the Palestinian national movement were Christians, and the world’s search for workable formula for the Palestinians’ coexistence with Jews in the Holy Land will remain on the world’s front burner), can justify an atrocity that can in no way help anybody. God has long been the subject of immoral speculation by those who invoke His name to serve the most godless of ends. When the Nazi SS men were gassing Jews over half a century ago, they also had Gott mit uns (God is with us) emblazoned on their belt buckles. Undoubtedly, it is the same God as Bin Laden invokes in his holy war against all that civilized humanity holds dear.