The op-ed’s rationalizations and hackneyed appeals to morality in a matter that has always defied morality and been a Bizarro World ethics conundrum for eons are just repurposed and pointless navel-gazing that echo in the brain like a relentless earworm. Ethics Alarms has discussed…and derided…pacifism and pacifists periodically, and all of those arguments apply to the op-ed and the Pope’s abstract brief against a product of unchangeable human nature that cannot be eliminated or avoided. It’s all here—Straw men: “Machines should not be making decisions about war, Leo said.” Who is advocating machines making decisions about war? I guess they never screened “War Games” at the Vatican. Sophistry: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” Somehow I don’t think that argument cuts any metaphorical ice with Muslims. False standing: “Central to the church’s critique of the Trump administration’s approach to the war in Iran is that it has offered contradictory, murky and mercurial justifications for the conflict.” Our President has no obligation to explain or justify anything to the Pope. The truth is that Trump is contradictory, murky and mercurial about everything, while the Pope is doctrinaire and certain about matters that are none of his business. Irrelevancy: “War is fundamentally antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Yes, we can figure this out, and did, long, long ago after the Crusades set new records for hypocrisy. Those Sixties “Summer of Love” protestors above—whose main concern was the draft–were on the same wavelength as the Pope today.

Here is the big finish:

Overhauling just war teaching will be among the top issues to be discussed on Friday and Saturday at a consistory, or meeting of the Pope’s cardinals, at the Vatican, according to Vatican News, the Holy See’s official outlet. The cardinals should not pull their punches. The moment urgently calls for new guidance, not just discussion. In reformulating the church’s view of war, the stakes for Catholicism, the United States and the world are high, and the Vatican needs to get this right. The universal church, with millenniums of moral reasoning and clergy on the ground in virtually every conflict zone, is uniquely situated to articulate a new intellectual framework on just war theory — especially as A.I. increasingly automates decisions on the battlefield.

AI again! The op-ed is so transparent in its resort to current hot buttons and sources of popular hysteria to bootstrap its advocacy—which, again, is really just a weapon in the Times’s partisan assault on the President. It should make absolutely no difference what the Catholic church’s “new intellectual framework on just war theory” will be. It will be nothing but static and a source of confusion to those who are ignorant of the history of war and the disastrous results of the reluctance to resort to it when urgent and necessary.