We had our great debate on bombing Libya. I won’t repeat here what I said, but this and similar operations raise an interesting debate on notions of Just War.

Thomas Aquinas was keen on this subject. The Catechism of the Catholic Church lays out the conditions in which an act of war is acceptable against an aggressor:

• The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power as well as the precision of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

To my mind, most of the World’s miseries over the centuries have been caused by people invading other people’s countries to enforce what they consider a superior moral right.

Clearly Gaddafi has no morality on his side, but do we have the right to prescribe what we see to be a just solution upon another country? I think not.

We only have a right to impose a ‘humanitarian solution,’ protecting civilians from a massacre in Benghazi.

We do not have a moral right to go further – to overthrow a dictator by force.