Just War and Our Wars, Part III: Authority
Continuing this series on Just War and Iraq and Afghanistan, we come to the third criteria. This states that those engaged in the war must be a legitimate authority – not a group of bandits, not a private vendetta, but a legitimate government.
This criteria is strange, and a bit difficult to apply. Obviously the U.S. is a legitimate government, since it has a constitution, a rule via representative democracy, etc. A majority of the population gave authority to George Bush at the start, and while perhaps the polls were ambiguous about full “support”, that really matters little. Bush had the authority handed to him by the people’s representatives in congress, and he went with it.
But is this really legitimate? According to Just War theory, yes. No matter what international law says (as many in fact thought the wars “illegal”), Just War does not really account very well for competing authorities. When is an authority legitimate? When are “bandits” more than bandits but legitimate movements, such as the contras supported by the U.S. in Nicaragua, or by Iran in Lebanon?
Whatever the complications, though, it’s clear that both Iraq and Afghanistan fit this second criteria. Some may not have liked how it went down, whether there were “lies” or not, still, from a Just War perspective, there is no problem.
This post brings to mind something that I teach about in my US History class, and that has to do with United States Native American policy. Many actions were justified using what I have termed “narrow definitions of governance.” If one eliminates an enemy’s opportunity to justify their resistance by removing their legitimacy as a nation state under the third criteria, one can place military action against this enemy under the umbrella of police action. Because the United States did not acknowledge the validity of complex yet starkly different systems of governance, it was able to justify its actions as maintaining order within the state instead of waging an unjust war and land grab against a sovereign enemy.
[...] far we’ve looked two criteria of Just War: good intention and legitimate authority. Now comes the real controversial part – just [...]
[...] far we have dealt with three criteria for just war: right intention, right authority, and just cause. These three are duty-based requirements, meaning they respond to a violation of [...]