After seeing these:
I can’t help but think:
Is the moral war in Iraq already lost?
That moral war right was lost right around the time the US invaded Iraq for no defensible good reason.
What AHunter3 said. Especially given the revelations that the President was determined to invade nearly a year before we did, but lied to everyone that he was seeking to avert a war.
What exactly is a ‘moral war’? Who decides whats ‘moral’ about a war and what isn’t? Isn’t it a matter of perspective? What would have made the war in Iraq ‘moral’? WMD? Purer motives by Bush et al? More ‘evil’ deeds by Saddam et al? No oil in Iraq? What makes it immoral? How do you judge any conflict…and who decides whats moral about it and what isn’t?
To answer the OP I don’t think that a ‘moral’ war was ever to be won in Iraq…reguardless of the circumstances for invasion. But then…I think the victors decide whats ‘moral’ and what isn’t, and in the long term, assuming that a stable ‘democratic’ Iraq emerges the war will be considered a ‘moral’ victory…by the victorious. If that doesn’t happen then the ‘moral’ war will have been ‘lost’.
-XT
xtisme:
Good debate-worthy questions, all. IMHO, a moral war is one fought in defense against direct attack. To a lesser and diluted extent, perhaps also one fought in defense of a 3rd party against direct attack on them, but that’s a situation that gets very muddy very easily. (Think Serbia, WW I, and the card-tower of alliances and treaties).
In theory but not in practice, I would add a war fought in defense of a nation’s people against their oppressive government. If, hypothetically speaking, a war were to be truly fought for such a reason, we could in the abstract call it a moral and justifiable war. In real life, it’s an unworkable proposition on the international stage, though, due to the unconvincing nature of any distinction between doing that and being a belligerent invader.
We claimed (among other justification-claims we made) to be doing the act described in the latter paragraph, an international act of profound stupidity if we thought that was going to fly. (I call bullshit. We don’t have a history of jumping in to save citizens from oppressive governments and have passed up many opportunities to do so).
We also claimed to be defending ourselves from a nation that hadn’t stuck us first. AKA “I thought he was gonna hit me first so I hit him back first”. That makes us belligerents. We invaded another fucking country that we thought was eventually going to attack us. Attacking another country because of what you think it might do (something, perhaps, more horrible than it attacking us because of what its leaders think we might do?) is no different than attacking another country just for the pure hell of it.
Which, as it turns out, is what we actually did, since they lacked the capacity to attack us in any meaningful way, weren’t about the business of planning to try it, and furthermore the leaders who pushed us into this didn’t think they posed any danger to us.
We just attacked another sovereign nation and conquered them for absolutely no trace of any even remotely defensible reason.
That ain’t moral.
It wasn’t a sovereign nation. It was Saddam’s private territory, more or less.
In any event, Al Quaedda bombing Iraqi’s indiscrimiately is much more likely to push them into our camp than anything else going the other way.
There are two aspects:
(1) The morality of the reasons for the war. Self-defense or defense of an ally would be good ethical reasons for a war; territorial ambitions would be bad ethical reasons for a war. “Nation building” is probably somewhere in the middle here.
(2) The morality of the conduct of the war: such things as use of chemical or biological weapons, treatment of prisoners of war, and how much civilian targets are attacked would be factors here.
What would have made the Iraq war more moral would have been better reasons for the initial invasions, better treatment of prisoners, and more restraint in causing harm to civilians.
Smiling Bandit:
That’s just a rewording / of “entering a war to save a nation’s peoples from their government”. As I said:
If we can do it, by the same excuse/logic the communist governments could invade the US because the US is not a legitimate “government of the people” (by their way of thinking), just an oligarchical fiefdom of capitalists enslaving the Working Class, blah blah blah. And, once again, it just won’t play on an international stage for a nation to take it upon itself to decide which of the other nations are sovereign nations and which ones are just (e.g.) “Mister Fox’s private territory” and therefore legitimate for us to invade.