Is prudence the forgotten virtue? Ross Douthat says it well:
Yet it’s also true that there are moral obligations involved in war making besides the obligation to only make war in a righteous cause—and one of the most pressing, with apologies to Lionel Trilling, is the moral obligation to be intelligent. And this is where I sense—based on reports like this one and this one, from sources with no anti-Zionist axes to grind—that Israel has gone dramatically astray in this campaign. It’s not that they don’t have the right to pursue Hezbollah into Lebanon, to attack the terrorist group’s infrastructure and impose a cost on those who harbor terrorists, even if the pursuit of these objectives puts innocents at risk. But they also have the duty, when the stakes are so high and so many lives hang in the balance, to avoid taking large-scale military action unless they have a high degree of confidence in the operation’s ultimate success. And thus far I’ve seen very little to justify such confidence.Douthat goes on to say that while the Iraq war probably met Just War criteria, it too was an exercise in a lack of prudence. I just knew if I shopped long enough I could find someone with much intellectual firepower who agreed with me.
Update: Bottum rebuts.
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