The Just War
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Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
– Ernest Hemingway
I disagree with statement “War is often justified and worth the cost”. Through out history, war has been defined as a state of open, armed, often-prolonged conflict, but what is a Just war? It’s a question that has been around as long as the concept as war itself. Some think that a just war is a war that only occurs after every other peaceful alternative to conflict has been tried and failed. But how many attempts must be made before it is conceded just? Who decides how long we must wait before war becomes our “last” option and what is the cause of it? When war does become our last option, we have to know who suffers because of it and decide if it is worth the cost.
The only wars that are ever conceded “justified” by the western world are the ones that ether we or our allies start. The reasons for these wars are many; sometimes a country has committed great crimes against humanity or is believed to have in its possession “weapons of mass destruction”, but is the same not true of us or our allies? A nation that has committed crimes against humanity cannot justifiably claim the same as a cause for war. An example of this is the current war between America and Iraq; America claims the war against Iraq is justified because Iraq has connections to terrorist organizations; however America recruited, financed, and trained Al Qaeda during the Russian engagement in Afghanistan. America has more weaponry then any country in the world, defiantly enough to be conceded “weapons of mass destruction”, and yet America believed the same was enough to justify invading and bombing Iraq, killing soldiers and civilians alike. If America’s war on Iraq was justified then every nation on earth has a cause for war against America. However a war against America is too much of a cost for the western world.
The cost to the individual people and the nations who suffer because of war is a high price to pay. Potential for death and destruction in towns and small villages is great and frightening, and even more frightening is the major wars, the ones that take out entire cities, thousands of people, all in one night,
”I was on the island of Guam in his [General Curtis LeMays] command in March 1945. In that single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children.” (Robert McNamara, The Fog of War)
Those Japanese civilians did not deserve to die; Robert McNamara himself admitted “He and Id say I… were behaving as war criminals.” LeMay recognized