So what?
This fact makes your snarky remark about Iraq looks silly
Wars are fought for all kinds of reasons:
-
Political. You have a political philosophy I don’t agree with. You try to impose it on me. I go to war to stop you. Various communist/anti-communist insurrections and wars were because of this.
-
Economic. You’re sitting on a pile of resources. You won’t share. I’m starving. Guess we’re gong to war over it.
-
Population Pressure. I need some liebensraum. You’ve got it. I’m taking it.
-
Human Rights. You’re a murderous bastard killing and torturing people. War is the only way to stop you.
-
Tribalism. I hate your kind. You hate mine. We live too close together. You’ve got what I want. I’ve got what you want. We can’t cooperate, because we hate each other. I guess we’ll go to war.
-
Political/national re-alignment. My group of people is tired of living in your society, so we’re going to take the piece of land we live on and split off. You don’t like it, so we have to go to war to settle it.
-
Religion. You’re an infidel, and your existence displeases my God, causes my children’s faith to waver as they wear blue jeans and watch The Simpsons, and in any event God commands me to smite you down.
Some of these are irrational, unnecessary, and we all wish would never happen again. But some are the inevitable result of moral and economic problems that have failed to be solved in any other way. War is the result of the failure of diplomacy.
Imagine if divorce were illegal or impossible. Think about how many more spouses would be killed if it were the only way out of a marriage. War is the result when it becomes impossible to negotiate your way out of an impossible situation.
I don’t think it was irrational for America to go to war to divorce itself of Britain. I don’t think it was irrational for Britain to go to war to protect the citizens of the Falkland Islands. I don’t think it was irrational for the U.S. to go to war with Grenada to push back the tide of Communism and protect democracy. I don’t think it was irrational to go to war with Saddam either time. I don’t think it would have been irrational to go to war in Rwanda to stop a genocide.
Sometimes, the alternative to war is continual low-scale conflict, oppression, economic stagnation, and genocide. War is hell, but so are a lot of other things that wars stop.
Finally, there sometimes seems to be a fundamental difference in how some people perceive war and diplomacy. On one side you’ve got the “why can’t we all just get along?” crowd, who think war can be avoided through appeasement, ‘understanding’, forming the right international organizations, and lots of love-ins. This view is fundamentally agnostic as to who is good and evil - it’s all just a lot of misunderstanding and irrationality.
On the other side are the people who believe that there is real evil in the world - bad people who will do lots of bad things to lots of people unless someone is willing to stand up to them. During the cold war, the first group waged protests and demanded that we just lay down our arms. (“You can’t hug a child with nuclear arms!”). The other side said that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, and Communism an evil philosophy, and stood ready to oppose it wherever necessary.
The first group was, in my opinion, far more likely to cause war than the latter, because the prime driver of conflict was the evil on the other side, and having good people lay down their arms and do nothing was not a solution. The Jews used to be in the first camp, but the events of the 20th century convinced them that the only peace that attitude would get them was the peace of the grave. So they became willing to go to war to defend themselves, and as a result have been relatively safe since.
My remark wasn’t snarky, and your response was idiotic. You have failed to make a case for anything you’ve presented in this thread and many of the posters here are calling you on it. If you want an honest debate, you need to start debating honestly. If you just want to throw around random ideas, then I’m not interested.
If WWII was a good war simply because we got rid of a tyrant with expansionist tendencies, then why isn’t also good to get rid of SH-- a tyrant with expansionist tendencies? If you can’t answer that, then you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Hitler would be 118 if that matters.
No it doesn’t. His brain would have been transplanted into the body of a Great White Shark years ago.
Actually that kind of proves chowder’s point. By th end of the war enough of the English citizenry were so upset with continuing to fight it that were near revolution themselves.
Not only that but a series of boneheaded moves the king of the time is what pushed them to it. Had he given the colonists representatives in parliament like they wanted we’d probably be English today.
You’re confusing the end result of the war with the reason for it’s inception. The war started because Hitler wanted to control Poland, and didn’t think any other European power was strong enough to stop him from taking it. WWII was not “justifiable,” it was a naked power grab by genocidal madman, which led to one of the darkest eras in human history. There are damned few wars I can think of that are less justifiable than WWII.
I think it depends on how you look at it. If you look at the Axis reasons for fighting then you’re spot on. If you look at the allies reason for fighting it then they were justifiable.
Like how a mugger kicking you is assault, but kicking your mugger is valiantly standing up for yourself.
The ‘rightness’ of WWII is only visible in hindsight, and after a satisfactory conclusion from the Allies’ standpoint. It certainly wasn’t ‘obviously right’ to Americans in 1940, since there was a strong isolationist, anti-war contingency in the U.S. electorate. Charles Lindberg and other luminaries were part of it. Politicians ran for office on pledges that they would not allow the U.S. to become involved in a European war. And don’t forget that Hitler was Blitzkrieging his way around Europe for three years before the U.S. got involved, and it took an attack on Pearl Harbor and a declaration of war by Germany to get the U.S. in.
There were plenty of people back then who thought that going to war over Czechoslovakia or Poland was a stupid idea. There were plenty of people who felt that sacrificing a country or two was preferable to a global war.
And imagine if it hadn’t turned out the way it did. Say, if D-Day had failed and the allies wound up fighting Hitler to a stalemate, with an armistice signed in maybe 1948 or so with Hitler still holding Poland, and 40 million people dead. Would WWII have still looked like an obviously correct conflict to get involved in?
‘Bad’ wars like WWI that don’t accomplish anything don’t necessarily look much different than the ‘good’ ones which change the world for the better - until after they are fought.
That’s very true. Although it’s with a very American perspective. Isolationist politics were very prevalent in the US and we didn’t enter the war for any other reason then we were dragged into it at Pearl Harbor kicking and screaming mad.
Now how about the English reasons for entering the war, could they be justified from the start? The French resistance?
Sure, defending yourself is justifiable. But if all that’s required to make a war “justifiable” is to have one side defending itself against an agressor, WWII is hardly exceptionable in being a justified war.
Agreed.
Few wars are as cut and dried “good” and “bad” as WW2 though, but there are others.
Lots of data to back up claims: Correlates of War Project
But there’s the rub isn’t it? They had to justify the 2nd Iraq war, the invasion, in ways that had no real bearing on the reasons for the USA starting that war.
The ‘justification’ failed. So it would seem the invasion is simply not justified. Why then the support?
Like the American revolution and the Star Wars trilogy?
Well, a sizable chunk of the the English supported American independance, and a sizeable chunk of American support the British king.
Make of that what you will.
Star Wars however is quiet morally ambiguous
I go by Augustine’s principle. A war is justified if it causes more good than bad. World War II had a high cost in human lives and general destruction but it’s generally considered to have been worth the cost to defeat Hitler. World War I, on the other hand, is generally not considered to have had enough good results to have justified the millions of lives lost.
That said, a civil war is no different then any other war. One group thinks it can gain more from war then it can from peace. It doesn’t matter if that group is seeking a gain from another group inside or outside of its borders.
I think you’ve been whooshed. Bryan was quoting Bart Simpson.