No just wars?

[Roger Baker]

On Monday, October 29, 2001, at 07:22 AM, Michael Eisenstadt wrote:

> Roger Baker wrote:
>
>> Hey! I'm good for another couple of rounds if you change your mind.
>
> not until we agree on just wars. that is a concept which more than
> a few actual wars in history are BY AND LARGE considered to have
> been examples of. IE despite the innocent dead winning the war was
> a GREATER GOOD. some examples are WW II and the recent Kosovo
> intervention. the latter was done with surgical exactness with the
> numbers of innocent dead vanishingly small both in Kosovo and in
> Serbia and was a VERY just war.
>
> building the Brooklyn Bridge cost the lives of dozens of workers not to
> mention those of the designer and his son. but one would have to be
> quite
> the purist to therefore reject the project.
>
> if you reject the very possiblity of just wars what would be the point
> of arguing with you?
>


"Just" wars, like beauty, may only exist only in the eye of the 
beholder, unless
we agree on what determines their justness.

I have an uneasy feeling that this determination boils down to the wars 
that
Mike personally approves of. If there are just wars and unjust wars (with
shades of gray?) then who gets to make this gravely important 
determination,
and on exactly what basis?

Does it involve public opinion with in the contending
countries? Are wars of civilian terror through aerial bombing just? Are 
freedom
fighters and martyrs ever also terrorists? I gather that wars that kill 
lots of unwilling
military men that a dictator has drafted by coercion are more likely to 
be "just" wars
than wars that kill the rest of the families of these same men. Why is 
this so?

Winnability? Minimum casualties? Support of world opinion? Soundness on 
the
basis of international law? Ratio of civilian casualties to armed 
fighting men?

Campaigns conducted with extremely few casualties might be fought by 
terrorizing
heads of state by sending them anthrax letters, as one obvious example, 
making
such efforts very just, assuming the underlying motives were pure and 
noble
enough to outweigh the comparatively few casualties on the scales of 
justice.

Peace, Roger