Former US president Jimmy Carter warned against a possible war with Iran Monday as he decried his nation’s involvement in unjust conflicts at a summit of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Chicago.
Carter, a naval veteran who served as Democratic president from 1977 to 1981, said that while he is ‘not against conflict when necessary,’ the criteria for a just war are often not met.
War is only just when it is a ‘last resort’ after ‘every other possible peaceful resolution’ is exhausted, when all efforts are made to protect civilians, when the purpose of the conflict is to make the situation better, not worse, when society in general agrees it is just and when the level of violence is ‘proportional to the injury received,’ he said.
‘That would obviously exclude our recent policy of preemptive war,’ Carter said in a keynote address.
The United States has been ‘almost constantly at war’ in the past 60 years — in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Libya, Panama, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and many others.