The “twelve day” preventive war waged by Israel and the United States against Iran will therefore have, for the moment, led to any general blast. This early use of the force, however, is debated. The categorical imperative “You will not kill” seems, in fact, to ruin any moral justification for the use of war, all the more reason when it is said to be preventive. If its purely military logic is grasable, the choice of an offensive to prevent a country deemed to be threatening to take action.
From Plato to Saint Thomas Aquinas, classical thought justified war “Due to some fault” of the enemy. It could only be defensive, its preventive form is, on the other hand, a bet on the real intentions of a possible adversary and a risk of conflict which is precisely trying to protect ourselves. But modern thinking and the invention of nuclear power, capable of total annihilation, modify the meaning of war and make necessary the use of early attack to protect itself from it. Illegal with regard to international law since 1945, the preventive war, already experienced in the past, appears just in the eyes of a nation which feels threatened in its existence.
The reflection on the warrior fact is old. In his Ethics in NicomaqueAristotle justifies war if it is waged in order to establish an order “Founded on peace”. A pre-en-umnation action can even be fair if it prevents a people “Become a slave of others”. Cicero Romanis this preventive right AD Bellum because “The force that defends the fatherland against the barbarians is in accordance with justice”. Gaul will pay the price.
“Modernity, defeating the traditional rules of war, updates the preventive war”
Augustin adjusts the imperative of war to Christian moral demands. If war remains an evil, it is sublimated when it is at the service of justice. Thomas Aquinas later joins this legitimization of the war at the“Right intention” and a “Just cause” excluding de facto any form of preventive war. That a country is strengthening does not mean that it will attack, but perhaps only that it seeks to dissuade its neighbor from attacking him. Until Grotius, in the 17th century, the idea dominated “That the possibility of being attacked (not) gives (not) the right to be attackers”.
The preventive war according to Montesquieu and Kant
But modernity, by defeating itself from traditional war rules, updates preventive war. For Hobbes, man of nature, in permanent insecurity, has no other choice “What to anticipate, that is to say to make himself master, by force or cunning” for its own ” conservation “. This state logic leads to states to “Go up to extremes”according to the clausewitzian grid, in an escalation which can no longer lead to the extermination of the other. The preventive war then describes less a form of combat than a way of apprehending the one that we fight. She signs the opponent’s passage to the enemy. If the opponent is content to fight, the enemy wants to destroy you. The modern preventive war was born from this fear.
If Montesquieu justifies “The law of natural defense (Who) sometimes leads to the need to attack ”, Kant tolerates preventive war provided they “Discreetly”. More generally, the lights denounce as immoral the “War of kings”yet limited in its means, its goals and its magnitude and always available to arrangements. There “War of the masses” revolutionaries will thus be brighter. The sacrificial investment of peoples on behalf of the fatherland makes any compromise impossible. In a climate of paranoia skillfully maintained by the Jacobins, the preventive war is consubstantial with their ideology which sees in any competitor an enemy in power which must be hit before it strikes you.
“After 1945, the Charter of the United Nations prohibited the preventive war”
The anomie of contemporary war replaces the preventive war at the center of the debates. René Girard redoubts it as a factor triggering a conflict that could not have taken place. If you want peace, you don’t have to wage war. But now any preventive war is defensive. Germany in 1914 and 1939 as Japan in 1941 claim to be attacked. The USSR also prevents countries from joining the “Free world”.
Israel proves its determination
After 1945, the Charter of the United Nations prohibited the preventive war. But the atom gives it a new orientation. In essence immoral, nuclear ballistic is a weapon of combat or defense but a tool of destruction. His use ruins any Riposte strategy and obliges the threatened power to anticipate the shooting.
During the Cold War, many in Washington then wanted to strike Moscow before she acquired the atomic weapon. This preventive nuclear war is also curiously supported “by humanity” by pacifists who, like Nigel Lawson, imagined that she would end the conventional wars. The trauma of September 11 confirms the idea of preventive war, even preemptive according to Bush, against the terrorist “thugs” states including Iraq and Libya, with the success that we know.
Netanyahu justified the strikes on the faith of warnings which would make his country run an existential risk. Iran has never missed verbal emphasis to announce correcting the historical anomaly that Israel would have made up “Rayant of the card”. So as not to reproduce the error of having underestimated the threats made in Mein Kampfthe Israeli Prime Minister has chosen to take the Shiite diet seriously taking the mission to protect his people from a new holocaust. Her preventive war will not have dropped the mullahs, but she will have proven them the determination of Israel to strike them. In wartime, it is already a victory.
