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Reviewed by:
  • Just War on Terror
  • Kevin Schilbrack
Just War on Terror. By Jean Bethke Elshtain. Basic Books, 2004. 251 pages. $14.00.

In this book, Jean Bethke Elshtain applies revised Augustinian criteria for just war to the US war on terror. This is therefore a book that pursues the difficult task of moving beyond the relatively clean world of theory to more complicated questions concerning decision making and consequences in the actual world. Elshtain's thesis is that the US war on terror, exemplified by the invasion of Afghanistan, is just. The 2004 edition adds an epilogue assessing the invasion of Iraq and argues that the Iraq invasion, like that of Afghanistan, meets the criteria for a just war.

The strongest part of the book is the idea that with power come ethical obligations. Elshtain is certainly right that the Taliban and Saddam Hussein governments were brutal, and critics of the war should recognize squarely that to defend the innocent from terrorism is a state's moral duty. Moreover, as Elshtain says, there is such a thing as a "false peace": a nation that is not at war [End Page 539] may exist nevertheless in a situation of cruelty and injustice. There is thus an inevitable moral burden that follows from the fact that the United States is the world's only superpower.

The central weakness of the book, however, is that Elshtain portrays the only responses to 9/11 as (a) exactly what the Bush administration is doing and (b) a complete pacifism that denies that evil is real, permits genocide, and is racist in its implication that the Arab world does not deserve democracy. Not only does she argue that the war on terror is just, there are no aspects of the war on terror she criticizes, and she considers no alternatives. [For such alternatives, see Jim Wallis, God's Politics (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).] Of course, Elshtain knows that there are critics of the war, like Noam Chomsky who argues that the war on terror does not meet the criteria of a just war and is, rather, a pretext for US imperialism; but Elshtain says, "I have not put Chomsky's outrageous and wholly irresponsible tirade in the body of this text because analyzing it is like shooting fish in a barrel—it just isn't very interesting" (226 n.17). Instead she chooses to shoot down unusual arguments such as the claim that Americans were bothered by the destruction of the twin towers because they were phallic symbols (153). Who made these arguments? Elshtain does not say, and she rarely gives them more than a sentence before she dismisses critics of the war on terror as purveying ridiculous nonsense. The book includes several such straw men. Similarly, throughout the book, conservative thinkers are introduced as "distinguished," thinkers on the left as "bizarre," "fact-shunning," and "partisan." Elshtain's is an unsubtle polemic.

Elshtain describes herself as an Augustinian, and the heart of the book is her case that the war on terror meets the criteria of the Christian just war tradition. The five criteria of jus ad bellum are that a war is justified when the cause is just, when one's intentions are right, when the war is authorized by the legitimate authority, when one has a reasonable chance of success, and when one turns to war only as the last resort. Was the cause of the war on terror just? The primary justification for the war in Iraq was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but this turned out to be false. Another justification was that Saddam Hussein had ties to the 9/11 attacks or to Al Qaeda, but this also turned out to be false. One might fear that if the stated justifications for the war fail, then the justice of the war also collapses. But Elshtain points out that a war can be justified as defending a third party, namely the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. In both countries, repressive regimes were overthrown. Elshtain argues that in US-occupied Afghanistan, "girls are flocking back to school and women are openly teaching again," and hundreds of thousands of children have been vaccinated...

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