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ORIGINAL: IronBear

 Nothing like feeling the dirt kick up in you face or the rounds whistling about you and seeing mates die to give you a whole new outlook on war...  

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ORIGINAL: DelightMachine

No, one more point before I go:

Do you think I didn't see the grieving on Sept. 11, 2001 with my own eyes? Do you think I haven't met the grandparents of the dead, the parents of the dead, the wives of the dead who spoke on the phone with their husbands still in the World Trade Center when both ends of the phone conversation knew that the husband was about to die?

Spare me the glories of "peace" when there is no peace.

We are at war. Recognize it. That war is not over. Recognize it.

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ORIGINAL: DelightMachine

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One of the issues we'll always see in any type of discussion like this is the difference between those who comment from a permanent civilian position (never having had military service or at least no combat experience) and those who have and are vets.. Nothing like feeling the dirt kick up in you face or the rounds whistling about you and seeing mates die to give you a whole new outlook on war...  
 
DM, I'd like to offer for thought four quotes (sorta) from four different areas of thinking for your perusal and I'm sure you and others will be able to enjoy them.... 

You haven't said this but others have come very close to it: That I have no right to advocate war if I haven't been in one.

There is only one response to that, and there can be only one response to that: Bullshit.

If your point were that I haven't been sensitive enough to the horrors of war, then you haven't been paying close enough attention to what I said in the earlier pages of this thread.

And if that is your point, then I have a counterpoint to that: You aren't sensitive enough to the horrors of "peace." And I've made clear what many of those horrors are in this thread and others.

Honestly, half the people who post in these threads haven't read what the other side is saying.

If I'm misreading you, please feel free to tell me how.

Edited to add: No I haven't read your full post, IB, but I'm printing it out and will read it tomorrow. Now, finally, to bed.

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ORIGINAL: JohnWarren

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ORIGINAL: IronBear

 Nothing like feeling the dirt kick up in you face or the rounds whistling about you and seeing mates die to give you a whole new outlook on war...  

Not to mention afterwards when you sit down and write those letters to wives and mothers who aren't going to see their loved ones again.  And, you lie through your teeth.... "and he died instantly."

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ORIGINAL: DelightMachine

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ORIGINAL: SirCumSpank
Iraq was a bunch of people in the dessert with sheets and no real technology and of course their own religion and views of life.

After Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear facility, and after more information came to light about it, Western governments and experts were shocked at how far Iraq had gotten. If another couple of years had gone by, they later estimated, Saddam's government would have had nukes.

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ORIGINAL: DelightMachine

.........My point is, you try to look at the broadest possible picture before deciding to get into a war and you do the same thing when you look back on one. Those who look at a few details and jump to a conclusion are acting foolishly.

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We are dealing with two seperate judgements here, foresight and hindsight. It is best if our leaders have both, but if they only have one then I'd suggest foresight is the more useful.

Good suggestion, but irrelevant. 
is (it) justifiable to enter some wars or say that no war has ever resulted, ultimately, in mankind being better off. Or am I missing something here?

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ORIGINAL: meatcleaver

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ORIGINAL: DelightMachine

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ORIGINAL: SirCumSpank
Iraq was a bunch of people in the dessert with sheets and no real technology and of course their own religion and views of life.

After Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear facility, and after more information came to light about it, Western governments and experts were shocked at how far Iraq had gotten. If another couple of years had gone by, they later estimated, Saddam's government would have had nukes.

Western governments were not shocked by how far Iraq had got with nuclear technology because western governments had built it ie. France.

At the time Saddam was an allie of the west and what Israel did was an act of international terrorism, seen in the Arab world as backed by the USA.

Now if you carry on through the history of the middle east you will see why a majority of Arabs don't see 9/11 as an unprovoked attack.

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yes, you are missing my point by a country mile.
you are doing two separate things and saying they're the same thing. Foresight and hindsight.
The criterion for deciding whether a war was justified have little relation to those used to see if it will be justified.
To take the arguments you have advanced to their logical conclusion you wouldn't be able to tell if a war is a good one until after it has occured. So best to start one, in case you need it later?

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As to your suggestion that the recent military operations are all part of a War on Terror......well, i'm afraid that even a cursory glance at world history and politics suggests that isn't true. If this were a war on terror then we could expect America to at the very least withdraw support from regimes that use terror tactics against civilian populations. They haven't done so, therefore there is no war on terror.....merely a series of wars against regimes that would be strategically useful if they were more onside. Iran or Syria next.......however not Zimbabwe because that has no strategic use to America.

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ORIGINAL: DelightMachine

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yes, you are missing my point by a country mile.
you are doing two separate things and saying they're the same thing. Foresight and hindsight.
The criterion for deciding whether a war was justified have little relation to those used to see if it will be justified.
To take the arguments you have advanced to their logical conclusion you wouldn't be able to tell if a war is a good one until after it has occured. So best to start one, in case you need it later?

I'm afraid that I don't get your point at all. Justification for war is justification for war either before or after the war. Obviously you'll have a better grasp of the facts after a war, and before you get into one you have to make estimates to the best of your ability -- but the moral criteria are essentially the same. That's one reason why they study past wars at military academies.

I don't even see why it should be controversial to say that it's a good idea to look at the impact of getting into a war as broadly as possible before getting into one and to say that it's a good idea to look at the impact of a past war as broadly as possible before deciding if it was a good idea to have gotten into it.

Sorry, I guess I'm just too dense for you, philosophy.

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As to your suggestion that the recent military operations are all part of a War on Terror......well, i'm afraid that even a cursory glance at world history and politics suggests that isn't true. If this were a war on terror then we could expect America to at the very least withdraw support from regimes that use terror tactics against civilian populations. They haven't done so, therefore there is no war on terror.....merely a series of wars against regimes that would be strategically useful if they were more onside. Iran or Syria next.......however not Zimbabwe because that has no strategic use to America.

You've got to be kidding me. You know as well as I do that it's a war on radical Islamic terror. The decision on who to ally with in such a war is based not on abstract principals so much as on strategic necessity. You well know that it would be stupid for us to wage war on every single bad Muslim regime at once. Would you have opposed the alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II? That alliance left half of Europe under tyranny despite the fact that we were warring against tyranny by fighting the Axis powers. Do you seriously suggest we should have dropped our support for Stalin's war effort?

If Zimbabwe was harboring terrorists that targeted America, do you think for one minute we wouldn't do what we could to target Zimbabwe?

I have to say that the arguments I'm getting here are incredibly weak. You can find better arguments against the war in the articles I linked to in that hailstorm of quotes I posted about all the governments and people who believed Saddam had WMDs.

philosophy, I guess you feel that there's no danger to any of us from WMDs in the hands of regimes like Saddam's or like the Ayatollah's. Is that right? What exactly would stop terrorists from getting nukes from regimes like that and smuggling them into Britain or America?   

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ORIGINAL: DelightMachine

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ORIGINAL: meatcleaver

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ORIGINAL: DelightMachine

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ORIGINAL: SirCumSpank
Iraq was a bunch of people in the dessert with sheets and no real technology and of course their own religion and views of life.

After Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear facility, and after more information came to light about it, Western governments and experts were shocked at how far Iraq had gotten. If another couple of years had gone by, they later estimated, Saddam's government would have had nukes.

Western governments were not shocked by how far Iraq had got with nuclear technology because western governments had built it ie. France.

At the time Saddam was an allie of the west and what Israel did was an act of international terrorism, seen in the Arab world as backed by the USA.

Now if you carry on through the history of the middle east you will see why a majority of Arabs don't see 9/11 as an unprovoked attack.

Yeeeeeeeaaaaaah. It was an act of terrorism. Uh huh. Terrorism happens to be an act targeting civilians who are not part of a military establishment, as the Iraqi nuclear facility was, and has no purpose other than to terrorize. The Isrealis had what just might be thought of as a military purpose.

Since any nukes Iraq might have gotten would have been available for Saddam to use on other Arabs, and since Saddam had no moral compunctions about killing other Arabs, the idea that Israel's attack on a nuclear facility controlled by a monster would have truly offended most Arabs is really rather laughable.

As for France's involvement, I'd like to see something that showed me France ran that program for Iraq in order to believe that the Iraqis could do nothing for themselves, which is the point SirCum was making and that I was disproving.

I notice you've got nothing to say about the possibility that Bush lied in saying there were WMDs when he didn't believe there were WMDs.

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ORIGINAL: DelightMachine

A lot of people on these message boards think that because you can hit the mark with a criticism against a govenment fighting a war, that means either we never should have fought the war or we're losing, or we're winning a Pyrrhic victory.

Well, you could do the same with any war. Here's how one writer imagines World War II could have been criticized in just the same way:

"May 21, 1945—After the debacles of February and March at Iwo Jima, and now the ongoing quagmire on Okinawa, we are asked to accept recent losses that are reaching 20,000 dead brave American soldiers and yet another 50,000 wounded in these near criminally incompetent campaigns euphemistically dubbed 'island hopping.'
 
"Meanwhile, we are no closer to victory over Japan. Instead, we are hearing of secret plans of invasion of the Japanese mainland slated for 1946 or even 1947 that may well make Okinawa seem like a cake walk and cost us a million casualties and perhaps involve a half-century of occupation. The extent of the current Kamikaze threat, once written off as the work of a 'bunch of dead-enders,' was totally unforeseen, even though such suicidal zealots are in the process of inflicting the worst casualties on the U.S. Navy in its entire history."

The whole thing is worth reading:
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MzRjMGE2MGViZGE3NDcyMmZhYzY3MWJjOTc1OTc3YmQ= 

My point: You have to put EVERYTHING in the mix when looking back and judging whether it was worth fighting a war. All the results, all the things that you no longer have to worry about because you fought the war, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful.

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ORIGINAL: LadyJezOfTheLake

Politics, War and Religion 3 things better not discussed in public, It will cause a war of words.

Just Breathe and enjoy Your life, for life is too short to go around flustered with Your feathers up.

Lady Jezabel Of The Lake

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Now if you carry on through the history of the middle east you will see why a majority of Arabs don't see 9/11 as an unprovoked attack.