Is the Attack on Iran Just?

Is America’s and Israel’s attack on Iran a just war?

According to Catholic teaching, to be justifiable a war must 

1. Be in a just cause 

2. Be a last resort 

3. Have a good probability of success 

4. Target an evil worse than war itself 

5. Be waged by legitimate government authority.

Let’s check them off one by one.

Be in a just cause.

Nominally, the war is waged to take out Iran’s nuclear and missile capacity before they develop a nuclear weapon, making them invulnerable. This seems to me just because defensive. Iran has declared its intent to destroy Israel. They have sponsored ongoing attacks by proxy forces—in effect, they are already conducting aggressive war.

Unofficially, the war is also waged to give the Iranian people an opportunity for freedom from an oppressive government.

Be a last resort.

Trump made a show of trying to negotiate an end to the missile and nuclear programs in recent weeks. The Americans claim the Iranians would not concede much.

This might have been window dressing, or a misdirection, but it does not matter. The Americans have negotiated for years, trying to get Iran to stop developing nuclear weapons. The Iranians just kept breaking the deals.

According to the Israelis, the Iranians were within weeks of having a bomb. According to the Americans, the Iranians actually boasted they already had enough enriched uranium to make eleven bombs.

So there was no longer any time left for diplomacy. It was indeed, if these reports are true, a last resort.

Have a good probability of success.

The proof of the pudding is this: the Americans and Israelis have so far indeed been spectacularly successful, in taking out the Iranian leadership, taking out the Iranian air force, taking out the Iranian navy, in just five days of sorties. Success seems in sight.

Target an evil worse than war itself.

The casualty list from this action so far is reportedly about one thousand Iranians. This must be tallied up against Iran’s record of killing about fifty thousand of their own civilians over the last month or so, the tolls from their sponsorship of terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East over the years, and the possible casualties from an eventual nuclear exchange with Israel.

Be waged by legitimate government authority. 

Obviously, Trump and Netanyahu are legitimate government authorities. Doubly legitimate in that they were democratically elected, an so have a popular mandate.

There Is a War

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The Need for an American Empire

 

The refusal by Britain to allow the US to use their air bases in the UK for the current attack on Iran, the similar refusal by the Gulf States, and the controversy over turning Diego Garcia over to Mauritius, makes a strong case for Trump that the US needs to own Greenland. As this shows us, in a crunch, simply having bases there is not enough.

Iran in Flames

 

Because I am among those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, I endorse the current Israeli and American attack on Iran. I question the morality of those who do not.

Whatever happens now, the ability of Israel to kill the Supreme Leader and 40 high officials in a first strike in broad daylight is decisive. Together with the arrest of Maduro in Venezuela, this must give any world leader pause who wants to pick a fight with the USA. It won’t be his faceless soldiers who die for him, as in older days—he will directly face the consequences. 

This has to be good news. War may now be close to unthinkable.

Given this apparent capability, from now on, the US calls the shots—perhaps without casualties on the American side. 

At least so long as nobody else has this capability. Russia proved it did not in its invasion of the Ukraine—instead of a surgical strike, it turned into brutal trench warfare. Could China do better?

Even if they could, this ability to target the top does not naturally lead to aggressive war. It would not be very useful for taking territory. It would not enable China, for example, to take Taiwan. It is obviously most effective against dictators. It won’t work agains a democracy.

As to what happens next, the Iranian drone and missile attacks on civilian targets in the Gulf states, on Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman, are signs of collapse. They make no strategic sense; Iran at the moment does not need more enemies. It looks like desperation, the desperation of the suicide bomber. It is a regime in its death throes, thrashing about. They need to use those missiles somewhere quickly, or lose the chance. It is better to go out with a bang than a whimper. 

I do not assume this will provoke the participation of the Saudi or UAE air forces in the current conflict. But if it does, I believe they are formidable. I have lived in the Gulf. Every young man there dreams of becoming a pilot. And they may want to become involved, now that they have been attacked, for the sake of national honour. These are proud nations.

I do not expect the current Iranian regime of mullahs to survive this.

Brave New World

 

Where I came in...

I was early into the computer revolution—1979. I was developing software soon after. I felt then that people did not recognize the significance of the desktop computer. It seemed to me this was a technological advance comparable to the invention of movable type—an improvement in the dissemination of knowledge that led to the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Exploration, European dominance of the globe, the invention of empirical science, the general recognition of human rights, the collapse of feudalism, and democracy.

Then came the Internet and the World Wide Web. This was even bigger. Now I thought we were seeing an innovation comparable to the invention of writing. An improvement in the dissemination of knowledge that brought mankind out of the Stone Age into civilization.

But we were not done. Now we have, apparently, AI, something I did not think was possible. This seems comparable in its impact to the development of language itself. Which more or less marks the rise of the human as a being above the animals.

And these three new advances are happening within one lifetime. The first three took hundreds of thousands of years.

It is no surprise that the world seems to be in tumult. How could it not be? This is the most significant period in the history of the human race.

Here’s the good news: the average human life became hugely better with the discovery of language. Human life became incomparably better with the development of writing. Human life became incomparably better with the development of printing. We can assume that these innovations in turn will make life inconceivably better.

So it seems reasonable for Elon Musk to predict a time in the near future when we will all be wealthy, by current standards, perhaps without needing to work at all. The computer revolution and the internet revolution have already made many things that used to be expensive free or almost free; consider how many costly things your smartphone has replaced. 

If so, the spectre of pension funds running out of money is not real. We will have the ability to give everyone a pension, at any age. The government deficits we worry about may be buried in rapid GDP growth.

This means, in turn, that the recent drive by governments throughout the developed world towards mass immigration is gravely short-sighted. We will soon not need more people to do the work at lower skill levels, and will not need their taxes to fund government or pensions. The only factor limiting growth will be labour, but resources. While it may not be difficult to support a larger population, the disruption to the local culture and civil order would not be worth it.

Is the Left Collapsing in Real Time?

 The left seems to be experiencing cognitive dissonance. A poet friend, politics well to the left, responded to the release of the Epstein files with these lines:

Individuality, 
Sinful seed that 
It is, discounted 
From the congress, 
Shell game intent 
Leads us towards 
Discord & murder.

He blames the Epstein pedophile cult on “individuality.” 

Individuality was obviously not a feature of these crimes. That would be, for example, Jeffrey Dahmer. This was a group—a cabal, a conspiracy. But this presumably does not fit in with the leftist world view: that the collective is good by its nature and even gets to determine good and evil; while the individual and individualism is bad.

The Epstein Hellfire Club is actually the perfect application of the left-wing postmodern idea that reality, and morality, are "social constructs." By these lights, the Little Saint James crowd had every right to decide among themselves that, for them, there was nothing wrong or immoral about pedophilia, or cannibalism, or rape, or murder. QED

In the same discussion, he then condemns globalization as “colonialism nouveau.”

This seems to be to be pulling away from the leftist line. Isn’t the left in favour of globalization? After all, Trump is famously opposed to it. And logically, they should be: it is the ultimate in collectivization. The ultimate move away from the individual.

It seems incoherent. Perhaps he is mulling things through in his own mind. He may be turning into an individual.

Lead Us Not into Translation....

 

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