So would you say that constitutes a primary criteria for going to war? Not being attacked?
Robert – okay, but what about people who take military contracts, like DARPA grants? What about people who get employed as Los Alamos – which is nuclear testing, yes, but has a very large contingent dedicated to energy grid optimization? Are people who do non-violent research for things that happen to be funded by or directly employed by the DOD bad?
You know, I could just post a simple list of every major U.S. military action for oh, say past 200 years or so and let you rate them as justified or not in your opinion and go from there…
Don’t forget the military technology transfer part.
most defiantly
Revolution - not justified
1812 - justified
mexican american war - not justified
phillipines - not justified
WWI - not justified
WWII - justified
korea - not justified
vietnam - not justified
gulf 1 - not justified
afghanistan - justified
gulf 2 - not justified
You forgot Grenada.
Yeah, when you’re too liberal for this board, you’ve walked past the fringe and over the edge.
Surprised by this one. Most people would have called these two the other way. What criteria did you use?
Here’s my picks:
Revolution - justified
War of 1812 - not justified
Mexican-American War - not justified
Civil War - justified
Spanish-American War - not justified
Philippines - not justified
WWI - justified
WWII - justified
Korea - justified
Vietnam - not justified
Grenada - not justified
Panama - justified
Gulf 1 - justified
Afghanistan - justified
Gulf 2 - not justified
because the colonists had more freedom and paid less taxes than people living in england
Robert163, the simple point is that most people disagree with you about the morality of US military actions. For someone who does agree with you, you have more or less the right response: if all the military does is pointlessly invade countries and kill innocent babies, then yeah - you should look down on people who sign up, same as you’d look down on someone who joined a criminal gang.
NO ONE currently serving was drafted, and everyone in right now either joined while the war was going on, or had a chance to get out since the war began. There IS a moral aspect to signing up. There are also not that many big surprises in America’s foreign policy: someone considering joining today should ask themselves how they’d feel taking part in an invasion of Iran, or in one of the hot spots in Africa I keep hearing about. Those are the kind of actions they might be required to support. How do they feel about that?
I get the impression most soldiers (at least most enlisted ones) don’t spend a lot of time asking themselves those questions. They should. Or maybe by the time I see them they’ve already sorted that stuff out in their minds and are comfortable with what they’re doing. And maybe they have very good reasons for it that you don’t see or understand. Or maybe not.
In any event, you yourself wrote that the current war in Afghanistan is justified. So why are you shaking with rage at the thought of someone joining to support it?
The war in Afghanistan was necessary but that does not make the US military a legitimate organization. If for example, Brazil invaded Cuba and was going to use this as a launching ground to invade America, we’d have to fight them. But that doesn’t make all the other things the military is involved with OK.
If someone signed up to fight in Afghanistan but was sent to Iraq instead I’d view it as the same as someone who was drafted in Vietnam, they were taken against their will and pressed into service. If they wanted to go to Iraq I’d feel different of course.
Huh? So if the war in Afghanistan was necessary but the military is illegitimate, how do you propose the war should have been fought?
I think you’re not thinking this through.
Well, that’s one of those moral questions you have to ask yourself when you sign up. You don’t get to pick and choose which parts of which conflicts you get to go fight. You have to be willing to go where you’re ordered. If you’re not okay with that, you probably shouldn’t join. Nothing whatsoever like being drafted.
Yes but what if the nation is under attack? I think that at that point joining is obviously correct. Like, if the house is on fire and there is a drought going on, you put out the fire and worry about the drought later. Bad example maybe but I think you can see my point.
I think there always needs to be a small standing army for such emergencies. Joining then would be acceptable but not at the size of the army now.
Fine. Well, per the context of this thread, one kind of personality that is attracted to the modern military is the kind that is okay with killing or supporting the killing of other people according to the known tendencies of American foreign policy. Most people are okay with that, or even think it is very good; you think it is evil. That’s fine, and lots of GD threads have hashed that stuff out. But it’s kind of beside the point here.
Wow. I knew you guys had The Biggest Baddest Army in the World, but I didn’t know it was the only one.
Bloody multilingual one, too!
It wasn’t about taxes. It was about representation. The Americans felt they were entitled to the same rights as Britons theoretically had in Britain - the right to be represented in Parliament. Without that right, Americans were living in a dictatorship, regardless of how benign it might be in practice.
And what do you feel the justification was for the War of 1812?