It strikes me, Ross, that you’re digging yourself into terminological difficulties here , primarily because you’re trying to make the justice of the war match the chronology of your thinking about the war. A person might have thought Israel’s attack on Hezbollah was just when it began, and that person might no longer think so¯but that can’t give us a war that was just to begin and is now unjust to have begun .
If you want to condemn the war with just-war principles, you need to choose one of these options:
(1) The war was unjust from the beginning, for though it met some of the criteria for just war, it lacked a reasonable chance of success with proportional means, and the Israelis are morally blameworthy for the imprudence of beginning this war in culpable ignorance or culpable denial of the incompetence of their strategy and tactics.
(2) The war was just to begin, ad bellum , but it has been pursued, in bello , with means not merely in reasonable error but criminally unjust.
(3) The war was just to begin, but it is now unjust to continue, for the errors of the Israelis have created a situation in which the original just goals can no longer be met.
I don’t agree with any of these yet, but they are coherent and possible. What I don’t think coherent is the attempt to say the justice of a war itself changes to match the changes in our thinking about the justice of that war.
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