"In the present age, war will never be eradicated; thus, the just-war tradition avoids the utopian error of thinking--or hoping--that war might be abolished. It reckons with the stubborn reality of human nature and human fallenness, which is not only the normative teaching of historic Christian theology, but the empirical evidence on display in all of human civilization. In this way, basic human discernment and just-war moral reasoning acknowledge that, where the lamb and the lion are presumed to lie together in the present age, the lamb will need constant replacement."
"The just-war tradition maintains the moral distinction between guilt and innocence, between combatant and non-combatant, between involuntary manslaughter and murder--distinctions that are rooted in Scriptural teaching and the natural law. Much contemporary pacifism is grounded in a basic horror and revulsion at the notion of violence and bloodshed. While these are unquestionably horrible, policemen and emergency medical technicians, to their credit, voluntarily engage horror and bloodshed as a public service every day as part of their normal work. Violence and bloodshed, hence, are not the worst of evils. The
worse evil is
not to engage social-moral evil when it manifests itself and innocent people are its victims. Properly speaking just-war theory sanctions neither an illicit peace nor unqualified violence; rather, it places
both on trial,as it were, requiring that force be motivated by charity and utilized in the service of justice. One does not cease to be a moral being when one takes up arms. Any policeman, regardless of his political preferences, will verify this truth."
--J. Daryl Charles and Timothy Demy
“During the Cold War…many among the intelligentsia began repeating the old notion that war “solves nothing,” an echo from the 1930s, where the futility of war was proclaimed, among others, by Neville Chamberlain, who said that war “wins nothing, cures nothing, ends nothing”—and who was in turn simply echoing what many among the intelligentsia were saying in his day. But like so much that has been said by the intelligentsia upon so many subjects, the notion that “war solves nothing” had less to do with any empirical evidence than with its consonance with the vision of the anointed, which in turn had much to do with the exaltation of the anointed. Had the battle of Lepanto in 1571 or the battle of Waterloo in 1815 gone the other way, this could be a very different world today. Had the desperate fighting at Stalingrad and on the beaches of Normandy gone the other way during the Second World War, life might not be worth living for millions of human beings today. There have of course been futile wars in which all the nations on both sides ended up far worse off than before—the First World War being a classic example. But no one would make the blanket statement that medical science “solves nothing” because many people die despite treatment and some die because of wrong treatment or even from the remote risks of vaccinations. In short, mundane specifics are more salient in evaluating any particular war than are the sweeping, abstract, and dramatic pronouncements so often indulged in by the intelligentsia.”
