a "just war"?

[Doug Millison]

...some Boston Globe "propaganda" for your consideration:

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/331/oped/This_war_is_not_just+.shtml

[...] The broad American consensus that Bush's war is ''just'' represents a
shallow assessment of that war, a shallowness that results from three
things.

First, ignorance. The United States government has revealed very little of
what has happened in the war zone. Journalists impeded by restricted access
and blind patriotism have uncovered even less. How many of those outside
the military establishment who have blithely deemed this war ''just'' know
what it actually involves? It is clear that a massive bombardment has been
occurring throughout Afghanistan, but to what effect? And against whom? Is
the focus on the readily targeted Taliban, in fact, allowing a far more
elusive Al Qaeda to slip away?

The crucial judgment about a war's ''proportionality,'' central to any
conclusion about its being ''just,'' simply cannot be made on the basis of
information available at present. And how is this war ''just'' if the so
far unprovoked war it is bleeding into - against Iraq - is unjust?

Second, narrow context. The celebrated results that have so far followed
from the American war - collapse of the Taliban, liberation of women - are
welcome indeed, but they are relatively peripheral outcomes, unrelated to
the stated American war aim of defeating terrorism.

And these outcomes pale in significance when the conflict is seen in the
context of a larger question: Does this intervention break, or at least
impede, the cycle of violence in which terrorism is only the latest turn?
Or, by affirming the inevitability of violence, does this war prepare the
ground for the next one? By unleashing such massive firepower, do we make
potential enemies even more likely to try to match it with the very weapons
of mass destruction we so dread? Alas, the answer is clear.

This ''overwhelming'' exercise of American power has been a crude
reinforcement of the worst impulse of human history - but this is the
nuclear age, and that impulse simply must be checked. This old style
American war is unwise in the extreme, and if other nations - Pakistan,
India, Israel, Russia? - begin to play according to the rules of ''dead or
alive,'' will this American model still seem ''just''?

Third, wrongly defined use of force. This war is not ''just'' because it
was not necessary. It may be the only kind of force the behemoth Pentagon
knows to exercise, but that doesn't make it ''just'' either. The terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11 could have been defined not as acts of war, but as
crimes. That was the first mistake, one critics like me flagged as it was
happening.

As perhaps the most savage crimes in history, the terrorists' acts should
have been met with a swift, forceful response far more targeted than the
present war has been. Police action, not war. The criminals, not an
impoverished nation, should be on the receiving end of the punishment.

Instead, a massive war against a substitute enemy leaves the sprawling
criminal network intact - perhaps in Afghanistan, certainly in major cities
elsewhere. Meanwhile, because of the war, the rule of law at home is being
undermined. Because of the war-driven pressure to be ''united,'' the
shocking incompetence of US domestic security agencies goes unchallenged.

Early in the war, the highest US officials, including the president and
vice president, encouraged the idea that the anthrax attacks were
originating with the bin Laden network. The understandable paranoia that
consequently gripped the public imagination - an enemy that could shut down
Congress! - was a crucial aspect of what led both press and politicians to
accept the idea that a massive war against an evil enemy would be both
necessary and moral.

Now, the operating assumption is that the anthrax cases, unrelated to bin
Laden, are domestic crimes, not acts of war. But for a crucial moment, they
effectively played the role in this war that the Gulf of Tonkin ''assault''
played in the Vietnam War, as sources of a war hysteria that ''united'' the
nation around a mistake. In such a context, the more doubt is labeled
disloyal, the more it grows. The more this war is deemed ''just,'' the more
it seems wrong.