text: Walzer's historical approach to examining just war theory is, I think, the most useful way to understand morality in war. That is so because empirical facts back up all the philosophical evaluations. Walzer describes experience and draws conslusions here; he is laying a philosophical foundation and implying, if not prescribing, moral norms from which the rules have been extracted. Be forewarned, he does not cut the reader any slack. This book requires some serious attention to the author's train of thought.  
  
  Just war theory has two categories: the justice of going to war, and the justice of fighting once in a war. Walzer's discussion usefully and clearly separates the two and examines via historical events what we regard as right and wrong within each sphere. In doing this he has done the modern world a tremendous service. His logical breakdown speaks to thousands of years of tradition about what thinkers have considered right and wrong in war. One of the best outcomes of this landmark work is the complete debunking of the notion that "all is fair in love and war." That is the path of least moral resistance (or as Clausewitz would say, "friction"), yet we all know that soldiers are honored for fighting well and loathed for behaving like armed thugs and murderers. What is amazing from the discusion is the realization that Walzer knows he has to attack that age-old notion, something our collective sense of justice has historically always rejected.  Yet it remains a prevailing idea for many.  Originally coined by the Romans it seems (Walzer quotes them, "In war the laws are silent"), they themselves were self-consciously contrite over the fates they inflicted on the Greeks and Carthginians.  The book rates five stars for rigorously addressing this issue alone.
  
  Some make the mistake of thinking Walzer is a pacifist--far from it.  On the otherside some critics find his argument about "supreme emergency" a moral failure and a cop-out.  The case of Nazi Germany is his paradigmatic case of supreme emergency, one where normal rules may be relaxed, if ever so little, because of the especially pernicious nature of state-sponsored genocide.  The same relaxation of restraints would likely apply to Islamic terror. In contrast Walzer does not see Imperial Japan, for instance, as having represented a supreme emergency, and so the atomic bombings and the fire bombings of cities could not be morally justified. Readers may want to compare his view to Paul Fussell's perspective in the essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb."
  
  Significantly for current events, readers interested in the distinction between pre-emptive and preventive war will find a well articulated argument here. The US attack on Iraq was and still is often justified as pre-emptive.  That impulse on the part of the neo-conservatives who devised or whipped up the casus belli reflects, I think, a need to cloak a morally questionable war in the robes of legitimacy. There is no way that attack can be justified under the historically accepted norms of "pre-emption." Michael Walzer's well-thought distinction between pre-emption and prevention makes sense even in the milieu of asymmetric warfare against terror and Islamic radicalism, and it clearly shows why the Iraq war was a moral mistake from the start, regardless of its practical success down the road, if we are fortunate enough to see that. The moral precedent of engaging in preventive war will continue to haunt America long into the future. The fact that Iraq was not even on the spectrum where the fine line between pre-emption and prevention exists is a telling aspect of the overall ongoing strategic fiasco.  Where one fails to recognize the moral high ground, one is doomed to moral failure. Walzer was vocal about the run-up to war in 2003, and those who read his book would do well to find his comments about the Iraq invasion; they are edifying in terms of understanding the overall argument and where we are going in this role as the world's police force
  