Comments

1
Umm, bullshit. Suppose we followed your proposal that anything that there are no rules to war and any consideration that impedes the ability to "win" a war should be ignored. By that measure, there should be NO prisoners of war - every single person, even those who throw down their arms and surrender - should be hauled off to the gas chambers or worked to death in slave labor camps. Why? Keeping prisoners alive requires guards, food, materials to build prison camps, etc. Therefore, it would be a better to work them to death as slave labor or kill them in the most efficient way possible.

Do you really want to plant your flag on that hill?
2
Being moral is hard and if we can't be 100% moral all the time forever, let's not even try.
3
Any list of black GOP crazies that doesn't include Allen West is a list that's not worth reading.
4
@1, that doesn't really follow - there are many reasons you might choose to keep POWs alive and well. You could view them as bargaining chips, for one. And the anticipation of humane treatment would increase the incentive of other enemy soldiers to surrender peacefully rather than fight to the death.
5
I prefer this attitude to that of Democrats, which is to give lip service to the Geneva Convention while defending the atomic bomb, openly torturing captives and blowing up weddings with unmanned robots.

At least this is honest.
6
Banning war is a worthy goal but in the meantime let's try constraining the crazies with a few sensible rules, please. I can't even believe that Charles wrote this drivel.
7
Good Morning Charles,
I believe it was Clauswitz who remarked that "War is negotiation by another means." Cynicism aside, both you and Carson have points. Sure war is to be avoided but if one wages it, it isn't surprising at all that one would wage it totally as Napoleon, Lincoln and Churchill did. Still, total war can exercise restraint. Recall Churchill once said that the Allies could continue incendiary bombing of German cities in the Spring of 1945 but that if they did "there would be no Germany".

I get that "limited war" is also a conundrum. But, I think at the very least before any war is waged, ALL sides must be heard. All it takes is one to start a war but at least two to end it.

BTW, I refer to military war only. War as allegory ("War on Poverty", "War on Drugs" etc.) is entirely different.
8
The problem with your formulation is that most wars aren't actually fought in order to "win". They're fought to blow off mass hatreds. There are tons of examples of battles being diliberately fought with tactics that made victory less likely just for the sheer fun of killing people you hate.

An example: in the Battle of Olustee in Florida, the Conferates routed the US Army, but instead of pursuing the Union soldiers and capturing them, the good old boys stayed behind and set to murdering the hundreds of wounded black soldiers lying in the fields. When asked why he and his men were letting the Union soldiers escape, one officer replied "killing niggers, sir". This shocking atrocity is celebrated today as a proud triumph in Florida, but General Beauregard, who actually knew how to fight wars properly, said "the fruits of the victory were insignificant".

Or, you know, Rwanda.
9
What constitutes a war crime is determined afterward by those with the power to declare and enforce it.

Any act may be speciously justified by a nihilistic conception of the ethics of war, which both negates and obviates justification. But not every act is justifiable in the name of victory, where winning is the ultimate value by which all wartime acts are judged, because not every act can or will lead or contribute to victory, not every participant in any given conflict will win, and certain acts may be incompatible or inconsistent with a belligerent's aims (even assuming victory).

Your stated position is incredibly simplistic, Charles. One wonders if you believe it.
10
always apropos in these discussions:
Kurtz: I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror... Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces... seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it... I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us.
11
I rate this Mudede post: 15% good, 30% shit, 60% troll.
12
Philosophically, Mr. Mudede, Mr. Carson has an abstract point. Effectively speaking, he's asking license for our troops to rape and murder at will. You know, shoot an Arab because having such an appearance and skin tone is a criterion for being scary. Torture a Muslim because such an appearance and faith means he must necessarily be evil. Stripping the application away from the abstraction is, in this case, a crime against humanity of its own.
13
While Carson and Mudede have a legalistic point, I'm with @2: black and white thinking is juvenile or naive at best.

@8 - There is a real purpose beyond just hatred - terror has it's uses, at least in the short term, and genocide, like most war, is really about tribal & economic hegemony. Keeping slaves terrified helps suppress slave revolts...the kind of thing that seeing African American soldiers might put in the minds of slaves. @10's Kurtz quote really gets at this beautifully.

Please wait...

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