The world has grown more complex and interrelated, making the consequences of one's actions on the world stage much more difficult to foresee. This unforeseeability of consequences poses a peculiar problem for justifying war, for one of the conditions that must be met (according to traditional just war theory) for a war to be just is that the war must not produce evils graver than the evil to be eliminated. Calculating the foreseeable evils that could be produced from a war may only lead one to see a spark of an enormous and fast-growing flame.
Juan Cole's commentary that we are close to losing Turkey as an ally illustrates the lesson that war is an exercise in the unforeseeable and the unforeseen.
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