There are two key components to the concept of a Just War: jus ad bellum (the just conditions for going to war) and jus in bello (the just way to conduct yourself once you’re already in one).

Which is of course ridiculous. You’re talking about trying to define the conditions whereby it would be sensible and appropriate and honorable to try and kill your fellow men, and the sensible, appropriate, and honorable ways you should go about doing it.

It’s an oxymoron, like “humane slaughterhouse.” Still, all right, let’s try and unpack this whole idea. Going to war to stop evil, or to protect the innocent, is probably as close as you’re going to get to a “just” war. And trying to minimize the casualties is probably better than an indiscriminate massacre

World War II is still America’s defining war because it’s the easiest one for us to think about. You’ve got the brave, modest Allies (in our imagination all starched Brits and wiseacres from Brooklyn) reluctantly taking up arms against the Nazis. You’ve got an enemy not merely intent on conquest, but on genocide. Forget all the other ways in which the Second World War began and devolved into the same messy, greedy fight for land and resources which all war are at heart. The shining core of its myth is the liberation of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

And yes, okay, maybe that IS a good enough justification for a war. It’s certainly close.

On the other hand, you have the grotesque, black-humored satire going on right now. A war in which the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz was unimaginable, but the expectation that the allies we’d called cheats and spongers would come to our aide was reasonable. A war in which military genius is being used to accomplish… what, exactly? Regime change? An imaginary uprising by the Iranian people? “Mowing the grass” to weaken an enemy we all know will only come back, bitterer and angrier, to attack us again?

I miss Terry Southern. What version of Dr. Strangelove would hold the contradictions of this time in its capacious plot? A world in which we scramble for AI to save us while we kill little girls in their classroom and let curable diseases run wild. A world in which we watch the earth burn while we cut off our own access to the fossil fuels we so desperately want?

A world in which we lift the sanctions on Iran so they can SELL US OIL WHILE WE BOMB THEM.

Jesus wept.

XXX,

Adrienne Park