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>4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uproo

>4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uprooting of the normal system where we resolve conflicts in a peaceful and organized fashion.

runawaybottle 6y ago
I think the suggestion was that the actual war was illegal, mostly proven by now, there was no basis for it. As for what happens in war, we can take a look at what Geneva convention tried, but that’s not the debate.
- deathgrips 6y ago
  This implies that there are political motives that justify killing thousands to millions of soldiers and civilians. Can you or anyone here provide a non-exhaustive list of these justifiable motives?
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Money? Grab some books on the Iraq war. There’s plenty of money involved in making and buying rockets to throw at a country (defense industry), then rebuilding said country (defense contracting), then securing that country’s resources (oil industry), all while winning re-election (Politics). In Medieval (Antiquity too? Goes pretty far back) terms, this is often called Plundering. There’s a real market for it.
    - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
      There is no doubt whatsoever that the war on terror has been a calamitous waste of money. One reason for the precipitous decline in war over the last seventy year is precisely that it no longer pays: (i) it does not pay to wage war because it has become highly resource-intensive and technologically sophisticated, and often involves protracted low-intensity campaigns against asymmetric guerrillas. (ii) it does not pay to win wars because we now realise that land is not the principal variable of national economic growth, but the place of an economy in the global value-added supply chain. I think the first motive was moral and political (along the lines of neoconservatism), and the second reason was a geopolitical vision of a reconstructed Middle East pliable to American demands, open to democratic reforms, and aligned with the interests of Israel.
      - jessaustin 6y ago
        Those are really old-fashioned justifications. In the first place, "land" hasn't been the motivating resource for over a century. USA has plenty of land. Now that we also have plenty of petroleum, it's easier to see what the real motivation for war has been for at least 70 years: transferring resources to armaments manufacturers, and thence to their puppets in politics and news media. All of our public discourse about security etc. is a manufactured farce, subordinate to the basic goal of churning blood into money.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    Stopping genocide. More generally the Responsibility to Protect[1]. For a while this seemed likely to have legs but after Libya went from a functioning state that was more or less peaceful to a never ending civil war with open slave markets due to Obama, Clinton and Power Russia and China are likely to veto any similar US actions. Note the US isn’t solely to blame. In Libya and Syria there was a lot of support in Europe for the US to spend its money, power and political capital doing things the French and others wanted someone else to do but were incapable of doing themselves, by which I mean, unwilling to pay for. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect
    - fit2rule 6y ago
      Cool. I look forward to America using its responsibilities to stop the genocide in Yemen that it has been so far supporting for the last few years in its alliance with KSA. "But the other kids do it too" is never going to work in the ICC. Which explains why the refrain is so common, and why the USA is terrified of the ICC.
  - colonelanguz 6y ago
    I posted a long boring reply about this that you can read above, but it strikes me that your comment lives or dies on the meaning it assigns to the word "justify." If you're referencing _moral_ justification, then yeah of course you are right. War is horrible. But if you mean _legal_ justification, then here's a non-exhaustive list: - Self-defense
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    There can be non "political" motives, like self-defense from outside aggressors, but I can't think of much besides that (and even that doesn't really cover civilian deaths)
colonelanguz 6y ago
I am sympathetic to the point that you are making and hate to go all legal-positivist, but an illegal war is a war that isn't legal under international law. Defending your country from an invasion is like the gold standard of legality. It sits in contradistinction to, e.g., wars of aggression, which are what they sound like. To be a legal war where you're not defending against an invasion, it's necessary to have either a UNSC resolution supporting the war or a compelling self-defense/preemptive justification. For the 2003 invasion of Iraq, people argue that it was illegal because there was no UNSC resolution. The U.S. and U.K. argued that it was authorized under the UNSC resolution that blessed the first U.s. invasion of Iraq. I think that sounds like nonsense, and particularly when you factor in that the actual pretenses for the 2003 invasion were false and probably fabricated by the aggressing parties—it seems like not a stretch to call it an illegal war. Obviously the 2003 Iraq Invasion doesn't itself get you to OP's 4 million body count, but I hope this is a helpful start.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Without getting too much into international law, which is mostly laughed at, evidently, sometimes I think it’s just better to see some video: https://youtu.be/1Z3f_p_7OeE https://youtu.be/1Z3f_p_7OeE It was very illegal to put it quite frankly.
  - colonelanguz 6y ago
    100%. Not that this means anything but I'm a JD and my JD girlfriend specializes in international law and we agree it's basically a joke. But hell yeah it was illegal.
oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
Outside of international law and ethics, technically it's not legal for the US to go to war without approval from Congress. So legally speaking, either the war was not a war, or an illegal one. You can look into all the undeclared wars (or police actions) by the US on Wikipedia.

runawaybottle 6y ago

I think the suggestion was that the actual war was illegal, mostly proven by now, there was no basis for it. As for what happens in war, we can take a look at what Geneva convention tried, but that’s not the debate.

deathgrips 6y ago
This implies that there are political motives that justify killing thousands to millions of soldiers and civilians. Can you or anyone here provide a non-exhaustive list of these justifiable motives?
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Money? Grab some books on the Iraq war. There’s plenty of money involved in making and buying rockets to throw at a country (defense industry), then rebuilding said country (defense contracting), then securing that country’s resources (oil industry), all while winning re-election (Politics). In Medieval (Antiquity too? Goes pretty far back) terms, this is often called Plundering. There’s a real market for it.
  - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
    There is no doubt whatsoever that the war on terror has been a calamitous waste of money. One reason for the precipitous decline in war over the last seventy year is precisely that it no longer pays: (i) it does not pay to wage war because it has become highly resource-intensive and technologically sophisticated, and often involves protracted low-intensity campaigns against asymmetric guerrillas. (ii) it does not pay to win wars because we now realise that land is not the principal variable of national economic growth, but the place of an economy in the global value-added supply chain. I think the first motive was moral and political (along the lines of neoconservatism), and the second reason was a geopolitical vision of a reconstructed Middle East pliable to American demands, open to democratic reforms, and aligned with the interests of Israel.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      Those are really old-fashioned justifications. In the first place, "land" hasn't been the motivating resource for over a century. USA has plenty of land. Now that we also have plenty of petroleum, it's easier to see what the real motivation for war has been for at least 70 years: transferring resources to armaments manufacturers, and thence to their puppets in politics and news media. All of our public discourse about security etc. is a manufactured farce, subordinate to the basic goal of churning blood into money.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Stopping genocide. More generally the Responsibility to Protect[1]. For a while this seemed likely to have legs but after Libya went from a functioning state that was more or less peaceful to a never ending civil war with open slave markets due to Obama, Clinton and Power Russia and China are likely to veto any similar US actions. Note the US isn’t solely to blame. In Libya and Syria there was a lot of support in Europe for the US to spend its money, power and political capital doing things the French and others wanted someone else to do but were incapable of doing themselves, by which I mean, unwilling to pay for. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    Cool. I look forward to America using its responsibilities to stop the genocide in Yemen that it has been so far supporting for the last few years in its alliance with KSA. "But the other kids do it too" is never going to work in the ICC. Which explains why the refrain is so common, and why the USA is terrified of the ICC.
- colonelanguz 6y ago
  I posted a long boring reply about this that you can read above, but it strikes me that your comment lives or dies on the meaning it assigns to the word "justify." If you're referencing _moral_ justification, then yeah of course you are right. War is horrible. But if you mean _legal_ justification, then here's a non-exhaustive list: - Self-defense
- ineedasername 6y ago
  There can be non "political" motives, like self-defense from outside aggressors, but I can't think of much besides that (and even that doesn't really cover civilian deaths)

colonelanguz 6y ago

I am sympathetic to the point that you are making and hate to go all legal-positivist, but an illegal war is a war that isn't legal under international law. Defending your country from an invasion is like the gold standard of legality. It sits in contradistinction to, e.g., wars of aggression, which are what they sound like. To be a legal war where you're not defending against an invasion, it's necessary to have either a UNSC resolution supporting the war or a compelling self-defense/preemptive justification. For the 2003 invasion of Iraq, people argue that it was illegal because there was no UNSC resolution. The U.S. and U.K. argued that it was authorized under the UNSC resolution that blessed the first U.s. invasion of Iraq. I think that sounds like nonsense, and particularly when you factor in that the actual pretenses for the 2003 invasion were false and probably fabricated by the aggressing parties—it seems like not a stretch to call it an illegal war. Obviously the 2003 Iraq Invasion doesn't itself get you to OP's 4 million body count, but I hope this is a helpful start.

runawaybottle 6y ago
Without getting too much into international law, which is mostly laughed at, evidently, sometimes I think it’s just better to see some video: https://youtu.be/1Z3f_p_7OeE https://youtu.be/1Z3f_p_7OeE It was very illegal to put it quite frankly.
- colonelanguz 6y ago
  100%. Not that this means anything but I'm a JD and my JD girlfriend specializes in international law and we agree it's basically a joke. But hell yeah it was illegal.

oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago

Outside of international law and ethics, technically it's not legal for the US to go to war without approval from Congress. So legally speaking, either the war was not a war, or an illegal one. You can look into all the undeclared wars (or police actions) by the US on Wikipedia.