Volume 51, Number 18 · November 18, 2004
What Is a Just War?
By Garry Wills
Arguing About War
by Michael Walzer
Yale University Press, 208 pp., $25.00
The traditional theory of the just war covers three main topics—the cause of war, the conduct of war, and the consequences of war. Or, in the Scholastic tags: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum. But most attention is given now to the middle term, the conduct of war. That is where clear offenses are most easily identified, though only occasionally reported and even more rarely punished. The two main rules of jus in bello have to do with discrimination between combatants and noncombatants, the latter to be spared as far as possible, and proportionality, so that violence is calibrated to its need for attaining the war's end. The claims of morality here are recognized with difficulty in actual combat, and disputed when recognized. Why should that be?
Review, 4752 words
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