The Controversy of War

Choosing to write my paper on the ethics of war came as an easy decision for me. War is tied to human society since its very beginnings,and has the potential to affect all aspects of life as we know it.From the beginning of the primortial age,war has evolved to become ever larger and more brutal in terms of loss of life and destruction. Cultures across the globe and throughout the centuries have practiced it for numerous motives,ranging from the need for resources to freeing a repressed nation. In the Modern world however,wars are simply a mean for the elite to achieve their personal and political goals,and are therefore immoral. All human life is important,and the planned killing of others is also considered immoral.

Politicians go to war with a set goal in their mind. But as a consequence,war can actually make such goals unattainable. Take the Vietnam War for example. President Kennedy and Johnson both realized that in order to make the war come to a close,the local people had to be of a pro-american opinion. This was difficult to accomplish due to the high level of airstrikes throughout the countryside aimed at destroying the Viet Kong and NVA,as well as ground forces destroying entire villages and killing its inhabitants,such as the My Lai Massacre. This treatment of the locals was obviously unpopular,and had the negative effect of the villagers actually enlisting into the NVA,making the goverments goals that much harder to achieve.Even if the war is considered a victory,the aftermath can generate more problems than the war solved. While the invasion did indeed remove the pro-communist government from power,the region is now unstable and plays an important role in the cocaine trade from central america,adding more problems for the DEA to take care of.

Take a look at the wars America has been involved in after Korea. There was Vietnam, where the US lost 58,000 dead and tens of thousands more wounded, where it spent billions and as a result suffered from an inflationary spiral, and where it lost. It did not lose, as the Right fondly imagines, because of a stab in the back by weak-kneed civilian politicians,but rather because the US fought on the wrong side of history, because it took up a French colonial project of suppressing Vietnamese Left Nationalism. The US killed perhaps as many as 2 million Vietnamese peasants, which surely counts as a genocide, all to no avail, because the war was poorly chosen. Ironically, Dwight Eisenhower had told the French to give up on a similar fruitless war in Algeria, because he could see that it could not be won and risked pushing the Algerians into the arms of the communists. Three or four years later Kennedy became involved in precisely the same sort of war, succeeding the French. Perhaps it was because the North Vietnamese had already embraced communism; if they had been bourgeois nationalists like the Algerians, even Washington would have had more sense than to get involved. But what that generation of Cold Warriors could not see was that "communism" could often just be a banner for nationalism.

Then there were Reagan's covert wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Afghanistan. Reagan won temporarily in Nicaragua, at the price of running nun-killing death squads. But if you check, you'll see that Daniel Ortega is president of Nicaragua, and left-leaning regimes of the sort Reagan attempted to destabilize are in power in Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil. Reagan's covert wars in Latin America stirred up trouble, hurt the populace, and had no long term success. In part that is because politics wells up from social and economic conditions, and is not just the creation of some individual an imperial power installs in power.

As for Reagan's Jihad in Afghanistan, it was an unforseen blunder. Had the communists stayed in power in Afghanistan, their regime would probably have just evolved after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 into a Kazakhstan-style state. Not a democracy mind you, but stable enough and with schooling for all and an investment in development.Instead, Reagan and his Saudi and Pakistani allies funneled the lion's share of their covert war aid to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the most radical of the Mujahidin leaders. They forced the Soviet Union out, and destroyed the Afghanistan communists, but the ultimate result was the formation and rise of both al queda and the Taliban.

So one must question whether any of these wars -- Vietnam, Nicaragua, or Afghanistan- should have been fought. Either we lost, or the victory was temporary, or contributed to the bombings of September 11th.

Arguably the worst part of war is that is it planned ahead of time. Billions of dollars are used to prepare for war,through training soldiers to manufaturing machines that can kill more efficiently than their predeccesors. Even more money is invested into the aftermath of wars for 'Nation Building' and repairing the damage done. War is perhaps one of Mankinds worst inventions,and yet it has accompanied us since our early beginnings. In the wake of the Cold War though,there is a growing opinion that war is becoming obsolete. Non-Violence approaches have seen a multitude of success