Just War

Justice and forgiveness, rightly understood, are not opposites. They are mutually reinforcing goods. We divorce them at our own peril–and our enemy’s.

Retribution is the form love sometimes takes when nothing else will requite injustice.

We are leaving Afghanistan before solidifying our gains and stabilizing the goods we have achieved. Even still, we can exit with honor.

For proportionality to remain a helpful category in limiting the horrors of war, it needs to remain a calculation of costs against effects—measuring the goods to be achieved by two measures of harms, including that which will be likely done if force is not used,