In a most interesting piece for the right-leaning National Review Online, George Weigel argues that Mr. Obama's interpretation of the just war tradition - on which the latter predicates his support for the Afghan war and his opposition to the Iraq War - is fundamentally flawed.

In the just-war tradition, as rightly interpreted, the justified use of proportionate and discriminate armed force was always understood to be in the pursuit of peace, which was the fruit of justice, security, and freedom.

First of all, I do not in any way contest Mr. Weigel's training or clarity on the just war tradition, and claim no legitimate expertise on my own behalf. But from the studying I have done on just war, the above claim is open to debate.

Specifically, there is not, as far as I have been able to discern, a consensus within the just war tradition that waging limited wars to preserve anything other the imminently threatened human lives is legitimate. For example, it is legitimate to fight a way to stop a genocide from being committed, if apprehended as imminent, or from continuing, once begun. But is it legitimate, for example, to wage a war to prevent nuclear proliferation? Is the preservation of the non-intervention norm in international society a legitimate end of a just war?

In the traditional Roman Catholic view - the Roman Communion having been the incubator of the just war tradition since Augustine - the answer is at best murky, and quite possibly a simple 'no'.

In World War I, Catholic Irish and German immigrants were widely considered traitorous to the cause of the American empire. Why? Because they refused to back a global war in the name of the god "democracy," especially when the subtext of that war was the supposed theological mandate to overthrow of the last surviving monarchies (particularly, the Catholic Habsburgs).

This excerpt from an essay on just war tradition written by a popular Roman Catholic commentator is important because it answers, in the negative, the question of whether norms or ideals - as opposed to the physical safety of human persons - can be the legitimate end of just war.

For what it's worth, I'm with Weigel. I gravitate toward the view that norms - e.g., international society's non-proliferation norm, the appropriateness of confronting brutally repressive states which grossly offend basic liberal values, etc.; - may, in fact, constitute legitimate objects of just wars.

My issue is not with this view. My issue is with Mr. Weigel's view that just war has always been concerned with the preservation of ideational goods as opposed to simply and exclusively the physical security of human persons.

The just-war way of thinking begins... with (the) legitimate public authority's moral obligation to defend the common good by defending the peace composed of justice, security, and freedom. The just-war tradition is not a set of hurdles that moral philosophers, theologians, and clergy set before statesmen. It is a framework for collaborative deliberation about the basic aims of legitimate government as it engages hostile regimes and networks in the world.

Again, this represents a valid perspective on just war, and one which I share: but we mustn't claim that this view is representative of the totality of the just war tradition or of its historical consensus.

It simply is not.