Abstract
The profusion of unorthodox justifications offered for the invasion of Iraq, reviewed in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, suggests that significant developments are afoot in the just war tradition. It indicates that the jus ad bellum is in the process of being reconstituted along more broad-based lines: as classical moral tropes relating to good and evil, the rescue of the innocent, and the imperatives of fear are reappearing in just war discourse, the strictures of the legalist paradigm are being disregarded. Accordingly, the Iraq debate provides a context against which we can explore the renegotiation of the just war tradition. The general purpose of this chapter, and the next, is to examine the modalities of this renegotiation. What this requires is not an examination of whether the justifications canvassed in earlier chapters were appropriately applied to Iraq, but some form of second-order analysis focused on how the idiom of the just war was taken up and engaged by scholars and practitioners in this particular instance. The aim is to acquire some understanding of how the just war tradition is referred to, and deployed, in the course of moral debate, while also indicating how the tradition might be reconstituted through this very activity.
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Chapter 5
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© 2008 Cian O’Driscoll
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O’Driscoll, C. (2008). Whose Just War, What Tradition?. In: The Renegotiation of the Just War Tradition and the Right to War in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612037_6
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