Just war

[Don Laird]

The just war is the war justified by the winner.

What about a war of defense, as when attacked.  Yes, the Iraqis seem to be
engaging in a just war when American bombers fly over their airspace and the
Iraqis use air defense weapons to try to shoot them down.  The Iraqi air
defense system is in fact a defensive system.   For the U.S. to respond to
the Pearl Harbor attack seems to be a defensive response.   Two hundred
years of U.S. interventionism carry the emblem of a non-defensive war or
strategy.  The idea of the war in Kosovo being an example of a just war
seems laughable, only it's really not.

We humans can justify absolutely anything, and so we claim that our wars are
"just."  It's simply an extension of the common delusion that individually
we are above average morally.   The belief that the U.S. engages in moral
actions is another extension of the common delusion that the U.S. is an
extension of ourselves, so to criticize it on moral grounds is equivalent to
criticizing the individual.

A so-called "just war" is not a problem of semantics, it's a problem of
psychology.  The man-made idea of morality or "just war" is so laden with
emotions that it's nearly impossible to think straight about it.  Its
definition seems vague and based in part on wishful thinking.

At least that's the way it seems to me.

Don