Originally Posted by Friendly_flyer
This discussion has remained surprisingly civil, I hope it will remain so.
When you are in a fight, or a famine or in any other situation where your life is in danger, "right" or "wrong" comes down to very simple questions of what will help you, your family or your tribe survive. When you sit peacefully in your secure home, warm and full, you have the luxury probing the concept of moral a bit deeper. There is where "relativism" comes into play. When you have 500 rabid and heavily armed Viet Kong storming your camp, your moral compass is to survive the night, and killing the enemy is very much right. When you are at home, you can dabble in thoughts on whether your nation should be over there in the first place, and whether the farmers who have given up their ploughs to become VC soldiers actually deserve to die.
Morale and resolve are not the same thing. The American (actually most of the Western) public in the early 1970ies was starting to wonder whether a war in Vietnam had any real bearing on their life. The general consensus seems to be that it did not, hence most people came to the conclusion the war itself was immoral. While moral thoughts was applied perhaps more than before, resolve withered away. Seeing the situation with the benefit of hindsight, a communist takeover in Vietnam did not threaten Western security. Considering the insane horrors sparked by the Vietnam war in Cambodia and to some extent in Laos, the war was indeed not worth fighting, and thus immoral.
So, will leaving the Arab world to their own devices in our day and age threaten our existence in the Western world? Do our current involvement in e.g. Afghanistan help improve our security situation, or will it only make us more enemies? To my mind, "resolve" to bomb our way is not a good idea.
I do beg the differ. There are wars that are less dirty than others. When nations invade other nations the fronts are usually a bit more clear cut, and the moral less dubious. How was the US resolve to fight during the First Gulf War? How about the war in Kosovo? While not on the same level as WWII (non of the aggressors posed any real any threat to the US), bout were relatively clear-cut. The enemy wore uniforms and were under orders. They even had tanks and planes and the soldiers surrendered when facing overwhelming forces. I do not remember any great problems with resolve back then.
The really, really dirty wars occur when the wars are highly asymmetrical, like in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Vietnam. This is not just because the civil war/tribal war aspect, but also because the underdog (i.e. the insurgents) have everything to win by making the war as dirty as possible, and nothing to gain by fighting cleanly. A German soldier fighting in France in 1944 had nothing to gain from hiding in civilian clothing and attacking Allied soldiers in liberated France. Hence, the fighting was relatively "clean". To the Iraqi insurgents or the VC the same strategy was not only effective, it was often the only option available. Thus these wars became extraordinary dirty, "bad wars" as opposed to nation-against-nation "good wars".
It may possibly be that we are headed into a situation were the Western world is attacked openly in real war against our territories in the near future, but I really do not think so. Any war will probably be economical rather than military. "Moral fibre" to bomb some small patch of land to Kingdom Come to ward off perceived threats is in my mind not going to stop a war against the Western World, rather the opposite.
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