The College of St. Scholastica should be commended for the diversity of thought that it brought to the community with its recently completed "Words of War" series.
The series ended Monday with a presentation by University of Chicago Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain on just war theory.
With American troops fighting and dying in Iraq, and conducting peacekeeping operations in many other areas of the globe, the entire series could not have been better timed.
Just war theory is based in the idea that there is comparative justice. While pacifists on one side say no to war under any circumstances, and the other end of the spectrum conducts war under any circumstances, just war theorists believe that war can be justified under certain conditions.
Among those conditions are that the means are proportionate to the ends, that every attempt will be made to avoid the deaths of non-combatants, that the war will be entered into only as a last resort, that war will be openly and legally declared and that the war has a reasonable chance for success. The war also may be in response to a specific aggression, but may also be fought in defense of people unable to defend themselves or for another justifiable cause of substantial importance.
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Elshtain warned against pacificism that creates a peace under which massive harm is being done -- a false peace.
In these trying days, all of us need to think more about whether this war is just. The answer is not as clear as some would have us believe.
