Chapter 10 - Reconciliation Is Justice – and a Strategy for Military Victory

Summary

A classic tenet of the just war tradition is that the purpose of a just war is to secure a just peace. In the past generation, securing a just peace in the wake of military victory has been perhaps the thorniest problem in United States foreign policy, encountered in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Kosovo. This chapter offers a moral framework for judging and pursuing a just peace in the wake of military intervention – an ethic of political reconciliation. It roots the ethic in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, seeks also to express it in secular language, and contrasts it with the globally dominant liberal peace. The chapter then applies the ethic to Iraq and shows how the it may help to build a deeper and more lasting peace and thus secure a critical foreign policy interest of the United States.