War au Jus

Interesting reading from the NY Review of Books. Garry Wills reviews Michael Walzer's new book on just war. A strange topic, but one dealt with in an interesting way. Being a 24/7 pacifist isn't really tenable morally, not with the "Wouldn't you have gone to war against Hitler" ringer out there, so you are left with having to come up with some measure of what justifies a military action.

Like many moral issues, I think we all have an unarticulated individual sense of what those measures might be, but it is always edifying to see the clear-minded grapple with the issues out loud.

Not to give away the ending or anything, but I found the ending particularly good:

Since democracy is impossible without accountability, and accountability is impossible if secrecy hides the acts to be held accountable, making a just war may become impossible for lack of a competent democratic authority to declare it. A president who can make a war of choice, not of necessity, at his pleasure, on the basis of privileged information, treating his critics as enemies of the state, is no longer a surreal fantasy. Walzer has moved the concerns over just war from the periphery of political theory to the very center of our democratic dilemma.

But maybe I'm just moody today.