Quote Originally Posted by Valin View Post
If I may...
(Yes I know it's Wikipedia...but it's a place to start
wikipedia: Just War

The idea that resorting to war can only be just under certain conditions goes back at least to Cicero.[3] However its importance is connected to Christian medieval theory beginning from Augustine of Hippo[4] and Thomas Aquinas.[5] The first work dedicated specifically to it was De bellis justis of Stanisław of Skarbimierz, who justified war of the Kingdom of Poland with Teutonic Knights. Francisco de Vitoria justified conquest of America by the Kingdom of Spain. With Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius just war theory was replaced by international law theory, codified as a set of rules, which today still encompass the points commonly debated, with some modifications.[citation needed] The importance of the theory of just war faded with revival of classical republicanism beginning with works of Thomas Hobbes.

The Just War Theory is an authoritative Catholic Church teaching confirmed by the United States Catholic Bishops in their pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, issued in 1983. More recently, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 2309, lists four strict conditions for "legitimate defense by military force"
(snip)

Point is The Just War Theory goes back a lot farther than Reinhold Niebuhr.

Yes and no. The ideas that you presented there are all different ideas of "Just War" from what people mean today when they say just war. THe case of Cicero, the Catholic Church, and so on all argued that certain wars were just because they were forwarding a Just Cause. As such the war, and whatever were involved in it was just. Now that might seem the same as humanitarian issues but it is not, because sometimes to win the war and forward the just cause, you allowed thousands to starve and enemy troops to bleed to death on the battlefield. In other words, it was the ends that offered the justification for the war. You see this a lot in pre-WWII literature, where "this is a just war because the Nazi's are evil," and so on.

After WWII, and really, in Europe after WWI people began to realize that both sides make the same argument. This wasn't really a challenge to those who thought that war was evil in and of itself, and indeed, many people decided that fighting was simply not worth it. This became a problem when people in the military (specifically the French military) started to think that way. In essence, western europe laid down and died before Fascism.

Many important thinkers, but Reinhold Neibuhr was one of the earliest and one of the most lucid, attempted to demonstrate that there was actually a Method for fighting wars that made it just. They did this to show that Liberal Democracies could fight wars, and that they were not the same as totalitarian regimes that they were opposing. Basically, they tried to set up an objective litmus test whereby both participants and observers of electoral democracies could know that their wars were not the same as the blood thirsty wars totalitarians waged.

In essence, the just war is a war waged by a state, not for its own interests. The way that you know that a state is not waging a war for its own interests is that it turns the declaration of wars over to outside bodies, like the UN. This is the moral argument that people use to beat up George Bush and the Iraq invasion, and what most people are appealing to when they say that a war is illegal. Under this definition, war is not justified by its ends (e.g. spreading a religion, freeing a people, creating stability in the system) but by the way in which it is waged (i.e. you go to the UN and they tell you that it is ok to go to war)

It is clear, based on the negotiations surrounding the establishment of the UN and the League of Nations that they were aware of this reason for existing, and they clearly thought that humanitarian type missions would fall as just. However, the immediate problem became that, just like before, all wars have sides, and helping in any way helps one side. Moreover, in these organizations states vote their interest. Therefore, the UN is much more likely to authorize force for humanitarian reasons if more states stand to gain from such actions than stand to lose. Of course, you also have veto powers to consider, as well.

Naturally, states who have humanitarian problems are usually just trying to implement a policy, no matter how egregious that policy may seem to us, and they don't care for the undercutting of that attempted implementation by an outside body. Indeed, no matter how well intentioned, humanitarian aid remains a subtle way of forwarding one side over the other, and of forwarding ones own policies. Indeed, the entire UN process has become more of a way of amalgamating interests rather than extricating them from the process.

Of course, the easy way around all this is to recognize that there is a right and a wrong, exactly like all those old thinkers did, and that sometimes you are going to have to fight a war. A war is just if you are on the right side, and not because you called for a vote on it. This is not to say that there should not be humanitarian considerations, but generally the best way to end a humanitarian crisis is to win. Make sure the right side wins. I know that it is easier said than done, but I would rather try to get the answer right, than muddle around with a bunch of answers we already know are wrong.