The NYT Sunday Book Review features "The Violence of Peace, America's Wars in the Age of Obama," by Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter, and reviewed by James Traub, contributing writer for the NYT Magazine and a weekly columnist for ForeignPolicy.com.
Traub writes about Carter's acceptance of a "just war," in the Augustine and Aquinas tradition. War must be a last resort; the force used must be proportional; and "whenever possible," civilians must be spared.
The concept of a just war is pure fiction and total bull. No war is ever just. The fiction arises because kings and presidents want some moral justification for what they will engage in, and their lackeys come up with pseudo-moralistic and quasi-philosophic justifications for their leader's actions.
War never spares civilians, it always targets them. See the American carpet bombing of German cities during WWII, the dropping of American nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the drone attacks currently conducted by the CIA in the Waziristan areas of Pakistan.
War is never proportional. The larger the bomb or shell, the better. The more destructive and lethal the weapon, the sooner it is incorporated into the action.
And war is never the last resort. Consider George W. Bush's action against Iraq. Saddam wanted a compromise. Bush would not permit it.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
TOTAL BULLSHIT: THERE CAN BE A JUST WAR
Monday, March 1, 2010
KARADZIC CALLS BOSNIAN WAR "HOLY AND JUST"
Radovan Karadzic calls the Serbian wars "just and holy." This is a most ridiculous and senseless assertion.
How could any war be just? All wars necessarily involve killing civilians and terming the result "collateral damage." The scholastics argued that a war was just if the ratio of civilians to combatants killed was "proportional." That argument can come only from scholastics and others who are on the winning side. Even if only one non-combatant is killed, that makes the war unjust. There can be no proportionality when even one civilian is killed.
Al Jazeera reports:
"Karadzic stands charged as the "supreme commander" of an ethnic cleansing campaign of Croats and Muslims in the Bosnian war in which 100,000 people were killed and 2.2 million displaced.
"He is facing 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, but though he denies any wrongdoing, he has refused to enter a formal plea.
"Among the charges against Karadzic are the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 7,000 captured Muslim men and boys, and the 44-month siege of the capital Sarajevo that ended in November 1995, leaving about 10,000 people dead."
