Re: Just war (NJC)

[vince]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Following that argument, you would have respected Germany's right to elect Adolf Hitler, with all the consequences thereof, and you would have condemned any other nation that tried to interfere with what the Germans (let's face it, the Germans, not just Hitler) were doing to the Jews, the gays, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the dissenters, the academics?

Oh, how easy to cheap and easily and glibly moralize.

Nationhood cannot be a curtain behind which people may act as they please.

One of the very great advances of the last century was the advancement of human rights as a universal concept. No group of people can now arbitrarily decide to destroy any other group with impunity. If they do, regardless of whether they're an independent nation-state, or a gang of thugs on a street corner, they risk being hunted down and tried internationally, or attacked militarily if a trial is not possible. Their claim to statehood and the right to be self-determining is no longer respected, just as a man attacking his wife behind closed doors is no longer regarded as a private matter.

Bin Laden could, and did, make that same argument as to the why the United States must be destroyed.
However, your argument and Bin Laden's argument fail on precisely the same points.
Who makes the decisions in your framework? You? Bin laden? Who?

I continue to await the presentation of evidence to the international war crimes tribunal.
I continue to wait for my country - under two successive presidents - to become a signatory to the war crimes treaty.

<clip> It refers to a government that does not rule arbitrarily and which is accountable to the people and the law.

And the policy of the so-called "Bush doctrine" of last September places my nation outside of any restraints other than to act in pre-emptory way towards any thing that it chooses.

Whether some of these conditions apply are arguable. But the first and most important - "having just cause" does apply. The people of Iraq are being destroyed.

By what? Who does the defining? Many peoples have been destroyed in the last, say, fifteen years. 750,000 in Rwanda, and who gave a damn? Is what has happened to the Kurds, as reprehensible as that is, not in fact something that happened directly because of the first Bush administration that encouraged revolt and then stood by and did nothing? And can what has happened to the Kurds in Iraq be distinguished from what has happened to the Kurds in Turkey, or groups of people in Saudi Arabia, or other nations that we choose AT THIS MOMENT to have as allies? Why pick and choose the moral atrocities that we care about and respond to? The total failure of any consistent morality in foreign policy is its only constant. And we remember that the last US administration to make morality an issue was Carter's, for which he was roundly attacked and defeated by the same people who make the current US administration.

There is NO doubt about that. You can doubt the weapons of mass destruction. You can doubt the oil interests. But the humanitarian aspect stands in stark undoubted contrast to all the other murkiness.

And bin Laden makes the same argument against the US, that our policy systemically and intentionally destroys peoples and cultures. So who makes the decisions? The one with the most power? Might makes right? Remembering your previous attacks upon Islam and advocating of rejecting people "out of hand" I hardly wish to entrust you with the ability to fairly and objectively be the arbitrator of morality on the international scene.

What is totally lacking from you, and from the Bush administration, is any realization of the fact that if we were on the other side, our arguments would be the same. Take North Korea. We have 10,000 nuclear weapons pointed at their part of the world. The Bush Doctrine of September 2002 rejects forbearance of no first strike and in fact advocates presumptive strikes. And our nation under this administration tore up the ABM treaty in a unilateral action. And now we object to North Korea doing exactly what we did, pull of a treaty unilaterally, and wanting one of what we have 10,000 of.

Saddem Hussein is a neighborhood bully. Unfortunately, my country is prepared to act in the same way. There has been nothing advanced that distinguishes one side from the other that then the presumption that we are the good guys (and both sides will claim that) and the other side is the bad guy (both sides claim that). Lets face reality and that is under the daddy Bush administration, this nation made commitments to Afghanistan and then to the Kurds and then walked away leaving people responsible to their fate for doing what we told them to do, and then we denied that we have any role. The moral distinction there is negligible if it exists at all.

It was exactly the same during WW2.

No it is not.

It was this moral clarity that made that war just.

Moral clarity making that war just? And geo-political and economic considerations had nothing to do with world war 2, in anything that led to that war to its denouement.

A similar moral clarity applies to Iraq too. Don't let the murk blind you to that.

Sarah, you believe what you do, fine. I have a long standing, life time long, problem with people who advocate policies that they are not affected by. You want to go to war, but you will not go to war yourself personally, you will go to war with other people's children. I do have a problem with that.

In the 1930s, many US citizens who wanted to fight fascism in Spain joined the Lincoln brigade and went and fought Franco. And in the same decade, many US citizens went to Canada or England to join the armies of those countries.
I know for myself, for moral clarity, that I do not advocate that others do anything that I myself am excused from. When I opposed apartheid, I went to the South African embassy and got myself arrested in July 1983, protesting apartheid, and put in jail. When I opposed the nuclear arms race, I withheld my taxes and notified the federal government and at least was involved in the issue, and took the consequences thereof.

What are you personally going to do to fight this war you want? Your moral clarity means you must do more than post in the JMDL. Is there a brigade you join and become a part of the battle, an army you will join and be a part of the fighting force, even if not on the front lines but near them as a doctor or nurse or medic? Will you go and engage in civil disobedience which will consequences?
I await your plan of action by which you personally act on your moral clarity to wage war and cause death.

Vince