Israel Matzav

If Iran wiped out Israel, would that be enough for Carter to justify war?

Former President Jimmy Carter has told a conference of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Chicago (I know, that's rich in and of itself) that there is not yet any justification for a war with Iran.

War is only just when it is a "last resort" after "every other possible peaceful resolution" is exhausted, when all efforts are made to protect civilians, when the purpose of the conflict is to make the situation better, not worse, when society in general agrees it is just and when the level of violence is "proportional to the injury received," he said.

"That would obviously exclude our recent policy of preemptive war," Carter said in a keynote address.

The United States has been "almost constantly at war" in the past 60 years – in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Libya, Panama, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and many others.

"And now we are contemplating going to war again perhaps in Iran," said the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Most of those wars fail to meet the criteria for a just war and "some of them were completely unnecessary."

In Carter's world, there is no justification for war now against Iran, because they don't have a nuclear weapon yet. There will be no justification for war against Iran once they develop a nuclear weapon, because they will not have used it yet. And if God forbid they develop a nuclear weapon and use it to wipe out Israel and a few other countries, there will be no justification for a war because a war won't bring those countries back anyway.

What could go wrong?

Labels: Iranian nuclear threat, Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Prize

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:24 PM