Why Libya Clears the Just War Hurdle

Mary Kenny asks in this week’s Catholic Herald whether St Thomas Aquinas would have backed the Nato operation to install a no-fly zone over Libya and to take “all necessary measures” to defend civilians from their own government’s bloodthirsty behaviour. It is true that we don’t actually know what the final outcome of all this will be. But that can’t surely affect the question of the morality of this military operation, even if, as some claim, it actually, in effect, tacitly includes the ambition of “regime change” – the ousting of the Gaddafi family from power – since it is difficult to imagine how else the Libyan population is ultimately to be defended. As for unpredictable outcomes – the question “what happens then”, which Mary says makes the Nato operation, from the point of view of “the Aquinas conditions”, borderline – they surely can’t come under the just war criteria.