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Afghanistan: * Just War? * Five Times GDP

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DANIEL C. MAGUIRE
Maguire is professor of moral theological ethics at Marquette University and is the author of The Horrors We Bless: Rethinking the Just-War Legacy.

He recently wrote that in Obama’s Nobel Prize address the president “hoisted his petard on the classical ‘just war theory,’ a theory that, properly understood, condemns his decision to send yet more kill-power into Afghanistan. This theory, which is much misused and little understood, is designed to build a wall of assumptions against state-sponsored violence, i.e. war. It puts the burden of proof on the warrior where it belongs. It gives six conditions necessary to justify a war. Fail one, and the war is immoral.” See Maguire’s analysis of the six conditions.

JO COMERFORD
Executive director of the National Priorities Project, Comerford just wrote the piece “$57,077.60: Surging by the Minute,” which states: “We could have dedicated that $30 billion [of escalation costs] to job creation. According to a recent report issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs or 541,080 positions in healthcare, or fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers. …

“In Afghan terms, our upcoming single year of war costs represents nearly five times that country’s gross domestic product or $3,623.70 for every Afghan woman, man, and child.” http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175179

The UN estimates Afghanistan’s 2008 per capita GDP at $466, the CIA at $800.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167