Catholic and Enjoying It!
The Church teaches a set of criteria all of which must be satisfied in order for a decision to go to war to be just. I take it that the fact that all of them must be satisfied means that all of them must be satisfied, not that if several of them are turned up to eleven we can discount the remaining ones to irrelevance.
Of course, the odd thing about the Iraq war was that even many supporters tended to insist (one the weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize) was that the threat was *not* lasting, grave and certain and that Bush never said it was. “He never said the threat of Saddam acquiring WMDs was imminent!” was one of the weird cries put up by Bush apologists once the WMDs failed to materialize.
As though that helped their argument.
But still, Zippy’s basically right: you can’t turn it up to eleven and call it a just war argument. My personal favorite moment of Turning It Up to Eleven was when people attempted to claim that, since Just War can only be declared by competent authority, we must therefore all be silent and trust that whatever the competent authority declares to be Just is made so by the fact that the competent authority said it is. By this line of reasoning, the invasion of Poland by the democratically elected Hitler was therefore an act of just war. After all, the Dear Leader said so and that’s all anybody needed to know.
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