Disturbing doubts over the bombing of Syria
by Jules Gomes, Rebel Priest:
‘But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make,’ says soldier Williams in Shakespeare’s Henry V, reflecting on the morality of war before the Battle of Agincourt. ‘Moral factors cannot be ignored in war . . . Moral elements are among the most important in war,’ wrote the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz.
Is the Anglo-Franco-American strike on Syria moral? Why is there little or no debate on the morality of going to war with Assad and an ear-splitting silence on the part of governments in the West?
No religious or political leader has so far explored persuasively the morality of even one of the six criteria of the Just War model either to justify or question the morality of the strike on Syria: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, last resort, proportionality and prospect of success.
Is it because Western leaders are morally confused with the very first criterion of just cause? ‘But if the cause is not just, the king himself will have a lot to answer for’ is how a modern translation renders the text from Henry V. ‘Without just cause nothing that follows can be justified, even if it can be more and less virtuous,’ writes ethicist Nigel Biggar in his book In Defence of War.
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