An Evening at Master Wiley’s Solarium
I would like to introduce a new category of posts to Todd’s blog. An Evening at Master Wiley’s Solarium will be a feature where I will solicit your thoughts, beliefs and comments on a particular subject. Each week I will submit a question or thought to the group and ask those that wish to expound their beliefs to do so in a statement through the comments section. At the end of the week, I will submit a summary post of the thread and ask a new question.
Comments and posts made by Todd, Mike, Danny, Dave, Chris, Steve and the occasional crushing comment from the Silent Lurker have shown we have a very diverse and active group at the current iteration of this blog. I wish to take advantage of these diverse views to cement my own thoughts and beliefs, which seem to change daily. I also would like all of us to take advantage of the positives that can result from reasoned debate on subjects of current importance.
Participation in this feature is voluntary, and I am not expecting those that contribute to do so regularly. There are however, some ground rules. By the name of this feature you should be able to understand the atmosphere I hope to cultivate for these weekly conversations. Gentlemanly behavior will be expected; sarcasm, flaming, demeaning or disrespecting will not be tolerated. Comments deemed by me to be offensive will be deleted in their entirety without exception. Let’s have reasoned, intelligent debate without imitating the latest roundtable of screaming, partisan talking heads on the cable news channels. I want everyone to feel as though they can participate and be treated fairly and with dignity.
So, if you would like to help me with this endeavor I am grateful in advance. On to this week’s topic:
Cindy Sheehan has stated she wants President Bush to tell her what “noble cause” her son died for in Iraq, a war she and others have called “unjust”. I think this raises an interesting question, when, in your belief, is a war “just”. What “noble causes” would you be willing to have your nation go to war for? Many people believe the current war is a just and noble cause, I think more people believe it is not. We all know where most of us stand on that issue, I would like to hear everyone’s opinion on not just the Iraqi war, but of war in general. When is it Just, when is it Noble?
Filed under: Politics
What is a “just” war? That is a challenging question even for the philosopher’s and religious. I think a more critical question here is when can a war be declared and be considered justified. This also calls into consideration the concept of pre-emptive strike/war.
Obviously self-defense from an invading country can be considered a just war. The Napoleonic Wars, Korean War and WWII can be considered clear and just wars because of the initial invasions by the French in the Napoleonic Wars, Axis in WWII and the N. Koreans in the Korean conflict.
It has generally been accepted (although not always acted on) that the prevention of genocide is also a just reason for war – and declaration of war outside of invasion. Again, WWII and probably the Serbian conflicts are justified here. What is not so clear is the moral issue when countries stand by and don’t react as is happening in several places around the world today.
An interesting question might be to address Japan’s ‘surprize’ attack at Pearl Harbor. This, as some would claim with some merit, was forced upon Japan as a self-defense and survival mechanism due to the economic blockade that the USA had put on Japan. Are economic/profit reasons a “just” war? Japan felt they were…but history showed that this argument was not accepted.
Just some quick thoughts.
OK, found a link for the philosophy of just war.
http://www.monksofadoration.org/justwar.html
Todd, would like to e-mail you. Have information to send you. You might peruse website, but we have much more. Also, book of understanding “The Golden Reed” on http://www.delamerduverus.com.
We always sign off, “Go with God!” Please don’t mistake that for “Go with Religions”.
Jenny
Personally I find every war our country has fought to be just and right. And as a citizen I have a responsibility to support the war effort when and if we go to war. Morality on this boils down for me:
My country is always right, good, and proper. To think otherwise is to have some degree of self-hatred.
This isn’t jingoistic, or as simplistic as some might think it is. I firmly believe in the ideals of my country, and if war is needed to defend them and even to expand those ideals by force, so be it.
On the issue of why we are so selective in what wars we fight, it again boils down to something simple:
We cannot fight everywhere at once. Some fights are not worth fighting now. North Korea and China come to mind. There is no doubt they are our enemies, but to fight them would be disasterous in many ways. Though I think a war to liberate either country would be just, so would a war to colonize Africa and finally bring them out of the darkeness they live in every day. The inability to fix all problems doesn’t make an effort to fix one problem invalid. Iraq is certainly a just war.
We are making the world safer for our own way of life to expand. We ended the disgusting brutality and terror of the Baathist regime under Saddam Hussein. We are making Iraq a better place. We are reducing the danger to our citizens both at home and abroad by drawing out those who would seek to harm us and killing them. Is this unjust?
I suppose I just don’t acknowledge that America has fought any unjust wars. Our failure to win some wars, like Korea and Vietnam, make those outcomes unjust. The actual reasons for fighting were just and right. the solution in Korea is less clear than what should have been done in Vietnam: Overrun the area and impose our way of life on the inhabitants. We certainly had the means, as Vitnam was a crushing US victory until we pulled out. The lack was the will to occupy the region. Sadly, this is part and parcel of US isolationism and the very nature of our society. Since we value freedom above security, wars to expand our shpere of influence are less popular than wars over humanitarian or defensive goals.
My stand on war means I accept that we will come into deadly conflict with Islam. to say that we can live along side fundamentalist Islam would be to bury our heads in the sand. I also think that conflict is just, and on both sides. They must try o destroy us just as we must try to destroy them. Our advantage is that time is on our side. We just have to outlast them until they become enough like us to no longer seek to fight us. The same strategy is working with China. But make no mistake, our culture is at war with many other cultures. It is just to seek to win those wars.
I think the idea of when is just is not the issue but rather how the war should be fought. To say going to a foreign land and killing others is just does not make sense, however once you commit to the act how you do it is important. I personally believe many of our heroic soldiers fallen in battle since the Korean war have fallen in vain. You cannot fight a war worrying about civilian casualties war is hell plain and simple and people die. We in our current politically correct era do not allow our soldiers to fight and win they are so strongly restricted it is no wonder so many die.
We are fighting a people who have no love for life or the lives of others, who believe to die for their cause is just and right. How do you fight people who attack trains and buses for no reason. You cannot do it in a civil manner you must make them more afraid of you. The types of wars we have fought since WWII are against uncivilized individuals who think nothing of killing their own or setting up an artillary unit on top of a school because afer all we will let 10 of our men die trying to surgically remove it instead of just bombing the heck out of it. I am sorry to say but if the death of 10,000 of their innocents will save 1 of ours then it is worth it. We have seen from history what the atomic bombs on Japan did to stop conflict, while it is a tragic loss of life that is war. It is time we stopped walking on eggshells and let our fine fighting forces do their job.
Which Chris is this? I started talking to Chris Gidman about this post and he looked at me like I was from Mars. Is this Garrett?
If we say that the death of 10,000 of their innocents is worth 1 of ours, then aren’t we no better then them?
Correct Steve but that is the only way to handle their kind. Besides it is about winning. Their is no real winner or honor in war it sucks all the way around but if you feel you must then do it to win. If someone is going to hurt your family are you going to worry about how you stop them or are you going to do what ever is necessary to protect your own? Today we are dealing with fanatics who thrive on the power of fear, the only way to conquer this is to hit it head on. Make them either so afraid of you they dare not do anything or limit their number so much they cannot do anything. In the immortal words of Sean Connery “That is like a daco to bring
gun to a knife fight” and “If they send 1 of ours to the hospital we send 3 of theirs to the morque”.
If you decide to engage in battle then do it to win not for show. We cannot even try to compare who is better but who in the end wins. If it were not for this philosophy then don’t you think we may be speaking Japanese now.
Yes Todd, it was Garrett. Sorry for the confusion.
CG
I think – or at least hope – that everyone agrees that war should always be a last resort. When all other options have been exhausted, and there is still a clear threat to the safety of anyone, a war has the potential to be considered justified.
This is what makes a war justifiable: personal safety. The War in Iraq was not a justifiable war. There was no clear and imminent threat that justified the invasion of a sovereign nation.
—Begin Tangent—
Understand that my having this view does not make me a Saddam loyalist. Right-winged news networks including, but not limited to, the Fox News Channel, have constructed this flawed analogy that, if you don’t (or didn’t) support America’s invasion of Iraq, then you support the tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein. This argument is flawed based on the logical inference rule of transitivity:
1. If p then q,
AND
2. If q then r.
THEREFORE
3. If p then r.
p = you don’t support America’s invasion of Iraq
r = you support Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule of Iraq
I have yet to see anyone provide a q variable that makes sense. Without a true q variable, neither of the premises (steps one and two) is complete. Only the third step, the conclusion, is complete. As such, the conclusion that people like me support Saddam is based on no actual evidence.
—End Tangent—
As Chris noted using Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, history has shown that economic reasons do not justify war. As the evidence compounds that the War in Iraq was motivated by our government’s desire for control of foreign oil (namely, all the photos and reports of our troops guarding the oil pipelines at the war’s start, before looting even began), it becomes ever more apparent that this war, too, was based on economics. As such, it is an unjust war.
I believe that the only conditions that make a war just are when groups of people – be it a nation, a religious faction, a race, etc. – have their inalienable rights put in jeopardy.
Life: Justifiable as self-defense.
Liberty: Like in the Revolutionary War. Those first Americans were escaping the tyranny of a different King George than the one who starves other nations of their freedom today.
Pursuit of happiness: None come to mind right away, and I really have to be somewhere right now.
I do somewhat have to agree with Danny in his opinion of the War in Irag. Where we differ is that I believe the initial reason for going was justified. The removal of Saddam was critical to the overall protection of the world. In retrospect consider what may have been the result if someone of power such as ourselves had rid the world of Hitler before WWII then the deaths of so many may have been halted. Where I believe we agree is in the fact that once our primary mission was completed then we should have pulled out completely and let them clean up their own country.
It is not our job to police the world or force our version of democracy or religion on it. It is upto the individuals of that country to do that on their own just as we did from England in the 1700s. While yes we had some outside help it was not of the nature we are forcing on the world today.For some reason our government both sides I add have taken it upon themselves to be the great bringers of democracy to the world. History has shown what happens when great empires stretch too far and try to force their ways on the world. Example: Rome and England.
Dave stated: “The removal of Saddam was critical to the overall protection of the world. In retrospect consider what may have been the result if someone of power such as ourselves had rid the world of Hitler before WWII then the deaths of so many may have been halted.”
I guess I don’t see the connection. Hitler had a very clear plan about the the Aryan race and its purpose to rule the world. He – demonstratably in Poland, France, and Austria – could not be stopped from spreading this hatred by border wars. It took a united world to stop him. For as horrible as Sadam was/is, he had no global plan of conquest and he was very stoppable in both Iran and Kuwait. There have been several other dictators that are documentally worse than him (N. Korea for instance). Also, there has yet to be convincing and documentable evidence that Sadam had any serious connections to Al Quida much less the ability to deliver WMD to terrorist groups. I just don’t see Sadam on the same level as Hitler.
Larger post coming shortly, but I felt the need to jump in here.
North Korea essentially has nukes, and as a result, we are having difficulty in dealing with him. This is why it is bad when our enemies get nukes.
If Saddam did not have nukes, should we have waited until he did? Is there any doubt he wanted to get one or more?
It is bad enough that North Korea has them (and I favor an immediate and harsh response to that situation), so let’s not wait around for other avowed enemies to nuke up and decide to come for us.
The whole ‘Saddam has WMD’ pony show never meant anything to me anyway. I didn’t care if he had them or not. The point was he wanted them, he refused to comply with UN mandates (God help me for defending the UN), and he funnelled money and support to Hamas and other terror organizations who would take a shine to the idea of killing Americans in large numbers (and for the sake of avoiding the firestorm, I’ll refrain from posting the various links between Iraq and AQ).
But the specifics of the Iraqi War are essentially like arguing God or Evolution. Neither side is going to budge on what they believe.
My ‘Just War’ response will be posted shortly.
“North Korea essentially has nukes, and as a result, we are having difficulty in dealing with him.”
But hold on here. We were told that Iraq had an active Nuclear Weapons program (and possibly had nukes)and that they did have biological/chemical weapons (which as far as I’m concerned are just as serious) yet we had no qualms about invading Iraq.
And I’m all for an immediate decapitation attack against North Korea. The world will be a lot better off if the little gargoyle in charge over there, along with his minions, are dead and gone. But I don’t see anyone with the political will to do what must be done.
North Korea = we attempted to negotiate him out of his nukes. Look what happened.
Saddam Hussein = we abandon any attempts to negotiate him out of pursuing WMD programs. Any chance he will get them now?
We should have hit North Korea when they restarted that reactor. Now, it becomes more difficult. People get all weak-kneed over assassination, when in fact a half dozen well placed bullets would solve a lot of problems.
My ‘just war’ reply. I’m posting it despite feeling it is unfinished. It’s just taking me too much time to get this done with everything else going on.
Just War
I took the time to read the link Chris Garrett provided (The Just War Theory by Brother John Raymond), and I feel the need to comment on it before getting to my perspective on war.
Naturally, one would expect modern Christianity to stand opposed to most armed conflict (as opposed to medieval Christianity, which had a decidedly militant way of getting along). The early thoughts of St. Augustine reflected a fundamental pacifism in reformed Christian thought, as evident by his contention “that one’s own life or property was never a justification for killing one’s neighbor”. While some would label this a noble thought, realism demands a more useful answer. What sort of useful philosophy abdicates the world to those of rough character?
St. Thomas modified these ideas and permitted the sovereign to participate in armed conflict on behalf of the greater good of the subjects. This definition has largely remained active today, as most wars are generally cast as conflicts between the interests of the peoples of active nations. St. Thomas stipulated limited reasons for going to war, such as righting a wrong or avoiding an evil, and again those ideas are widely held as proper today.
One element of the Just War theory, as advocated by theologians, is in proportionality. Building upon Aquinas, the theory holds that there is both a proper manner to conduct war, and war must only be entered into as a last resort. Again, those appear to be noble concepts, but reality illustrates that while these conditions limit war, they do nothing to address the circumstances that precipitate armed conflict.
The Western tendency to view war as the most horrible of all outcomes works against us when a situation rises to the level of armed conflict. By holding war as something to be avoided at nearly any cost, thugs are happy to come along and extract whatever we are willing pay in order to avoid a fight. Recent examples of North Korea come to mind, as does Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991. Nation States are willing to press the issue when the aversion to war is asymmetrical.
The concept of proportional response is also built upon the concept of symmetrical concerns. While the West generally values the lives of each individual, other cultures do not carry the same respect. In the early days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union would have been quite willing to trade a million combat deaths with us to contest the control of Western Europe. A proportional threat would have done nothing to deter them from an attempt to take over, so it became necessary to find a disproportional response they would both respect and heed – nuclear annihilation. Would anyone consider nuclear holocaust as a just reaction to an invasion of West Germany by Soviet tanks? Yet that threat provided one of the longest sustained periods of peace in Europe.
Our response to Pearl Harbor was decidedly un-proportional, and we pursued that conflict to the bitterest ends imaginable. Japan faced utter extermination until they capitulated, and while many people today still argue against the use of the atomic weapons, the results speak for themselves. As evidence, I refer you to the many great Pacific Wars fought by Japan between 1945 and present day.
And as an aside, the American Oil Embargo of Japan was a response to the butchery going on in Manchuria at the hands of Japanese soldiers. While Japan will claim economic pressures, the wholesale butchery did little to advance the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
All that being said, I consider two primary aspects of Just War (defensive in nature and proportionality) to be flawed in the modern era.
In previous wars, we waited for the other side to strike that first blow. Again, Pearl Harbor comes to mind, and it created an environment where we all felt comfortable waging war against the Japanese, and later the Axis powers. The lives of 3,000 seamen provided us a moral ‘out’ and freed our conscience when it came time for larger scale slaughter.
That idea of taking the first punch vanished on July 16th, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Modern technology does not afford us the nicety of accepting that first blow simply to clarify the moral perspective of each combatant. What do we do when we reach the day when anyone can kill everyone? At least in the Cold War, we found common ground with the Soviets by raising the stakes to utter destruction. No one wanted to see that. How do you deal with a group that is perfectly willing to wipe out a city?
Problems of proportionality and restraint protect the man that wishes to wipe us out, or commit some other evil on a fellow man. They count on it.
Preventing war is an easy thing. You simply raise the bar until no potential conflict triggers a war. We’re doing that today all over the world, but has this removed the suffering and hostility that leads to war?
The ugly truth is that unrestrained war settles issues. American slavery is unthinkable. Germanic National Socialism is about as dead as any ideology can possibly be. Japanese imperial aspirations are beyond consideration.
Now examine issues ‘settled’ by restrained, proportional warfare. North Korea is a communist power intent on nuclear weapons. Israel is fighting for life sixty years after being founded (and will likely be the first victim of the next nuclear weapon). Vietnam spilled over into Cambodia and Laos, and millions died in the Killing Fields.. World War I turned into World War II.
The only effective way to prevent the CONDITIONS that lead to war is to embrace the willingness to wage war at a lower triggering threshold. At the risk of being too simplistic, consider the neighborhood bully. Will he pick on the high minded intellectual who avoids a fight, or will he mess around with the guy carrying a stick and has demonstrated little qualm about taking a swing when provoked?
War is an instrument of national policy. It is a component of expressing the national interest. Modernity has created a situation where just about everything that happens in the world can impact national security. Nuclear weapons will proliferate. The necessary resources for a catastrophic attack are in the reach of organizations without the resources of nations. Time is on their side. The clarity of 1939 and 1941 is long gone.
We now live in an era where we must consider pre-emptive conflict against people that have already expressed willingness and intent to destroy us. We must advertise our own willingness to take appropriate steps against such people. While I don’t endorse the widespread slaughter that others have implied, I do endorse the transformative efforts we are attempting in certain regions in the world.
The success of our attempts to free people (or meddle, depending on your view) can be reasonably debated. Success isn’t certain. We won’t know how this comes out for another twenty years or more. But consider the alternatives.
Assume for a moment that we make no direct efforts to reform fundamentalist Islam. Assume that we ‘mind our own business’ over there and stay home. Islamic resentment will continue to grow, even if we sold out Israel. America is the blame for everything the Islamic world has failed to become. Nuclear weapons are obtained, and some radical disembarks from a container ship in New York Harbor one bright Tuesday morning.
What is our proportional response?
Our present attempts to plant freedom in the middle of a firestorm of oppression and hate is debatable. I like to consider it a hopeful attempt to prevent the coming slaughter that will follow when nuclear weapons are used against us by Islamic representatives. Does this make our efforts morally just? Is the current struggle to reform the region qualified as a justifiable attempt to prevent the wholesale wars that will come if we do nothing? I think so.
Because if the situation continues as is, you are going to see slaughter like the world has never experienced.
War settles issues. You can either have wars to try to change people’s ideology and remove the coming threat. Or you can wait and have wars of extermination.
Free nations and capitalist countries do not wage war upon one another. (If you want to bring up examples of Mercantilism from the 1700s, don’t bother. That wasn’t capitalisms in the slightest). Open borders and open markets do not lead to war. Therefore, attempts to create free societies anywhere in the world are positive steps toward pacification.
I support wars against oppressive regimes. I would support even more wars to affect that sort of change. And I would consider them all morally just. Modern technology won’t let us sit at home and ignore the world, as many would seem to embrace. In a few short decades, just about anyone with a notion and some cash will be able to vaporize a city.
We can either be proactive and pre-emptive on cultures and ideologies that wish us harm, or we can wait until the certainty of the mushroom cloud gives us the necessary body count to wage war without feeling bad about it.
Uh…yeah! Is this the right-wing’s justification for the Iraq War? That Saddam might have been looking into getting WMD in years ahead?
If this makes the war in Iraq right, it in turn makes America’s entire judicial system wrong.
Innocent until proven guilty. A fair and impartial jury. Are you saying that these are outdated qualities to have?
Scene: A courtroom.
Lawyer: Your honor, the search of my client’s home revealed no trace of drug paraphernalia, and yet he is currently sitting behind bars.
Judge: Well yeah, but, I mean… come on, it was just a matter of time before the little pecker bought some more drugs. Do you really expect us to wait until a crime has actually been commited before we punish it? We don’t have time for that!
This is one of my core beliefs that I don’t foresee ever changing: pre-emptive military action is not okay!
A pre-emptive war in ‘defense’ of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend. – J. William Fulbright
Let’s try to keep this about individuals, not leaders or groups. Overgeneralization leads to misunderstanding, which is the exact OPPOSITE of what I, for one, seek from this dialog.
“Is this the right-wing’s justification for the Iraq War? ”
– No, that’s Todd’s justification. This post is about individual opinions and ideology, not political leanings.
“The tyranny of a different King George than the one who starves other nations of their freedom today.”
– In light of the intent of this particular conversation, this seems to be an irresponsible partisan dig. I want to hear about what posters BELIEVE, not about who they despise.
Well said, Steve. Let’s please stay away from the sarcasm. Portions of Danny’s last post and Todd’s first post contained tones that are not in line with the intent of this discussion.
This is working out very well, everyone has posted some interesting comments that have forced me to reevaluate my positions. I will be posting a new thread tonight or tomorrow but I hope everyone continues to revisit this one.
I apologize if my first post had any negative implications. Certainly didn’t intend it to come across that way.