So, after a good deal of pushback and a good deal of thoughtful commentary on my war posts, I think I’ll have to take a step back from my plunder/defense/folly theory of war. I do think that many conflicts can be viewed, at least after the fact, in this fashion. Certainly I still see the Crusades – as they played out, if not their initial motivation – as wars of plunder and conquest. Other conflicts are much harder to judge, the web of actions and motives so tangled.
And really, that is where the classification breaks down the most – in the inspiration for war and the many reasons men feel the need to wage it in the first place. As many have pointed out, these motives are manifold, often too complicated to easily or even accurately classify.
The question I have, then, is what makes a war just? What makes a war worth fighting? And what allows us to clearly judge who is in the right and who is in the wrong? Perhaps we are simply left with the fog of recollection, the many rewrites of history, and no good way of understanding whether a war ought to have been fought, whether it was just, whether the motives of the many different actors involved were noble or wicked. In the end, I think most wars are probably a mixture of all three of my classifications, and perhaps some others as well. But perhaps we should still attempt to see what lies beneath the surface of these conflicts, what direction the power is flowing.
“The question I have, then, is what makes a war just? What makes a war worth fighting? And what allows us to clearly judge who is in the right and who is in the wrong?”
I would highly recommend a good book on just war theory. Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars is a fine secular introduction. Or start with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on war.Report
I tend toward the Catholic Church’s current four-criteria formulation for assessing whether or not a war is just, a standard that I think works pretty well whether or not one is Catholic. Well, I say it works, but then I also don’t think contemporary wars can really meet all four criteria, particular the criteria that a war not produce evils graver than the evil to be eliminated. The way the world has become more interconnected on a global scale generally makes it impossible to reasonably foresee a war’s consequences. The effects of war today are not localized or measurable. A strike in Iraq has ramifications, economic and otherwise, all throughout the world. So we really can’t know whether or not a given war will produce evils graver than the evil to be eliminated. This difficulty of measurement existed in the past, of course, but I think in the past it was possible to reach a reasonable speculation, whereas I’m pretty sure such speculation today is a shot in the dark.Report
A war, a real war, is justified only when a nation is defending itself against attack.
That’s my answer.Report