Vietnam and the Gulf War

The Vietnam War (1954-1975) violated at least six of these standards. It wasn't a last resort. The rights of the US hadn't been violated, and the US hadn't been attacked. The war was undeclared. Far from there being a chance of victory, no one in the government even knew what "victory" meant. The means--like dropping millions of tons of bombs on North Vietnam--were out of proportion to whatever end the war sought (except the total destruction of Vietnam). US soldiers, under orders, killed thousands of civilians in "search-and-destroy" missions and similar operations. Nobody will ever know, of course, whether the US wanted to humiliate the Vietnamese.

The Persian Gulf War (1991) was widely thought to be a just war because the Allies were fighting to repel Iraq's illegal invasion of Kuwait. You'll have to decide for yourself whether it met the just war standards, but there's a good argument that it didn't meet some of the eight standards above. It wasn't a last resort, for example. Right up to the start of the air war, the Allies could have decided to rely on economic sanctions against Iraq rather than make war. And it's not clear that the destruction caused by the war was "proportional" to the end sought. Over 100,000 Iraqis, most civilians, were killed in the air war, and according to a United Nations evaluation, the bombing reduced Iraq to nearly "stone age" conditions in some places. The World Council of Churches, in fact, has formally declared that the Gulf War did not meet "just war" standards. (See Conventional and Unconventional Wars for more discussion of the Gulf War and its effects.)

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