Part of the contemporary problem with defining what a war is, who it benefits and what its final functions are reside in the linguistic criterion of word meanings and ontological lexicons. Lexicons of ideas may exist as well as for vocabularies.The neo-cons for example had a given world view and ontology with a dedicated lexicon as a sub-unit of larger social lexical structures. Obviously those of the opposition forces have a differnet ontology and structure from that of the broadcast media, global corporations, the Obama administration or whoever else wants to spend trillions of Afghanistan conflict. I think the idea of a 'just' war occurs within a given linguistic ontology with a particular world view.
There is the additional problem of defining morality. One may have a linguistic catagory approach or an anthropological paradigm from which to examine wars in general or a given war in particular. Is it moral to abstract human relationships so far as to make them impersonal and general? Can one consider universal human categories of evil as general questions that may be solved in theory? If humanity all have original sin is it then morally just for the Supreme Being to delete them all we might ask?
Morality has been said to be a list of what people actually do rather than an abstract inquiry into the nature of right conduct. Sociologists could write up what American morality is in practice after observing it for instance, and then say that such conduct is what is moral in relation to the positive or negative reinforcement such conduct elicited. If it is the usual thing to say that it is moral to pay taxes or be monogamous, but few do or are (in a hypothetical state), then it is also a moral practice to lie in addition to cheating on taxes and committing adultery.
Morality may be either what people actually do or the effort to work for a perfect moral order being perfectly moral on the way. Jesus Christ best exemplified that method. Siddartha made an effort at that too. In Afghanistan the United States has few claims about moral correctness that seem relevant.
Political leaders initially intervened to punish Al Qa'eda and remove the Taliban, yet after a decade the effort seems an inconclusive and unreasonable way to go about the paramount task of preventing further attacks on the United States. If the defense of Europe is a goal, Europeans should be the overwhelming majority of the forces deployed--maybe the Russians too would like to return so it doesn't become a haven for Chechyan terrorists. In many ways the Afghanistan mission presently seems a consequence of political inertia and a lack of leadership intelligence for certainly there are better policy implementations possible that would profit the United States instead of seasonal Taliban sympathizers.
In some of the above criteria the war that is not a war but a foreign occupation and management of a puppet government for a couple more years is immoral because it loses money for U.S. taxpayers. As repugnant as war for profit would be to some of us more perfect moralizers, it has traditionally been a reason for invading and looting foreign places. The United States did defend the people of Iraq enough so that Exxon got some oil contracts in the desert, yet the war would have ended sooner if the people of Iraq themselves as individual citizens were given ownership shares personally of the nation's oil with the government keeping maybe 25%. That would still be a better way to withdraw U.S. troops and to bring domestic tranquility with a lesser prospect for a regional war with Iran or whoever wants the oil and gas fields.
Our friends the Vikings of course on plundering missions might give lung water-wings to their prey who could haplessly flounder about in the water a few minutes afloat. America may have been first settled by Irish-Alban Europeans escaping farther west across the Atlantic removing to new fishing and hunting grounds perennially pursued by the Vikings. If we aspire to a higher morality today because we have more technology, it is comforting to realize the reasons for the failure are not an indication of the pervasive incapability of increase of moral education and faith. A minority invented the technology and a minority are moral leaders in a positive direction. People flock to good material things brought by technology while avoiding the moral lessons that require material value cost. Political and social leaders accentuate the positive and profitable except where its funding is borrowed.
Value theory plays a large role in decisions for the prosecution of war. Fighting over scarce commodities is often considered just. If we put a list of just symbolic reasons for war on the right side of an equation and find them, then our equation of 'Is there a just war' on the left finds a concurrence in truth. The value theories for political action could be changed, yet of course the profit gained from learning moral conduct of value to society en mass punishes financially from the ground up for early students of morality while the apposite value of goods and power pays hierarchially for the few from the top down.
The rest of us take quite a while to learn that the good of the majority may be as meaningful as our own well-being occasionally. Peace abroad in Afghanistan at low cost with prosperity in America of a qualitative, rather than quantitative sort, is a better direction to fight for than to spend trillions and let the terrorists go for placing of goal-line bombs aboard scheduled airlines.
The analytic philosophy of W.V.O. Quine and and others tended to find a circularity in the origin of word meanings whereby one reinforces a definition of a term with a reference to other words that are accepted without further examination. Obviously the word-meaning of 'just' will have a large indeterminate condition in the context of defining a 'just war'.
Additional questions arise such as of a poetically just war. If the United States spends much of its wealth and borrows more to pursue unnecessary ventures will it be poetic justice that the opportunity costs leave the United States badly situated for domestic, national transition to a new ecologically based economy and so forth? A pyrrhic victory is an expensive lesson often for more than one nation. The right ontology to maximally bring into being Universal happiness may be of more value than to pursue an ideology badly applied.
That social conflicts occur is historical fact. Of equal importance to the proximal question of 'is a war just?', is the pursuit of answers to other questions such as does public opinion have a meaningful effect on the start or continuance of a war? Must a citizen simply accept whatever elites of politics decree? Can a nation's policies of war be sometimes reasonable and sometimes stupid?
What if America's present foreign policy is neither just nor unjust regarding the prosecution of war abroad--but less than the best course of action possible? Is in unjust to wage war badly when it could have been done for less cost and with less harm? What if an American policy of ecological renewable economic projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan got support instead of war? Would that get more local approval than military missions? Would Pakistanis have more condemnation of there peers that plan terrorist missions against a nation helping them with ecological economic policy than with one waging war on some of it's citizens?
Since America's investment in Afghanistan is economically immoral it is worth pointing out the capitalism applied within a Darwinian paradigm without a Democratic government oversight setting boundaries within which it must exist tends to run amok, buy the broadcast media, and politicians too.
The United States lost a million private sector jobs droping from 109 million to 108 million between 2000 and 2010. Darwinian capitalism is preparing the ground for global socialism when the majority of a poor electorate in the U.S.A. in 25 years vote to delete the rich through heavy taxation. Something must be done to reduce the gap between the rich and poor within ecologically positive criteria as soon as possible with a gull employment goal rather a retiringt nation without creative industrially green tech progress.
I will write about the particular war in Afghanistan,and why it is presently not the best of all possible courses of action for the United States to take--it may lead to nuclear war between India and Pakistan after Pakistan is destabilized enough...
The United States of America since the Vietnam war has practiced a globalist foreign policy initially developed as a result of the involvement in the two general wars earlier followed by the global cold war to contain communism and the Korean conflict. That foreign policy habit continued following the end of the cold war with the Bush I administrative launch into the first Gulf War to contain the expansionism of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or at least it set the stage for a return to the global policies of prior eras that had been curtailed after the end of the protracted, unsatisfying Vietnam conflict.
With the rise of the stock market following a decade of post cold-war profit taking and expansion the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in greater Washington D.C. let the politically challenged Bush II administration have a political T-ball to swing at that would set the stage for a return to globalism.
This time the global, non-general campaign would be against second and third world Muslim insurgents and second world nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush league campaign costs were in financial terms far higher than the general conflicts in absolute terms. Between the first year of the campaign in 2001 until 2009 more than two trillion dollars were spent, and more was promised by the next administration of president Barrack Obama. President Obama guaranteed was until at least 2011 with tens of thousands more troops at very high almost mercenary pay scales being deployed to Afghanistan while those already in Iraq would only slowly be reduced in number.
The U.S. foreign policy leading to protracted foreign military engagements against suicide bombers and a Diaspora of terrorists driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S. led occupation and into Pakistan to destabilize the Pakistani government calls in to question the fundamentally flawed reasoning of the two U.S. administrations that have selected heavy foreign troop deployments of occupation as a way to prevent occasional terrorist missions arriving on scheduled international flights from reaching the United States. The U.S. post 2003 war occupation was a necessity created by the complete lack of post-war planning of the Bush II administration, while the Afghanistan war prosecuted by President Obama is a perhaps greater strategic blunder for the United States in that it may stimulate Muslim radicalism rater than contain it.
It is a paradox that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is financed by money borrowed from Communist China who is free to develop copper mines in Afghanistan and naval bases in Sri Lanka along with vast African investment increases while the United States pursues an unintelligent military based foreign policy that displaces fundamentalist Mohammedans from their home in Afghanistan to move them over the border in to Pakistan and surrounding areas.
If the United States simply requires that a non-Taliban government exist in Afghanistan it could use stand off air power and on ground defense fortresses to interdict Taliban concentrations for a decade or so. The policy intent of creating a friendly Muslim Government in the high central Asian nation is fundamentally flawed. It is a force pressure wave generator of Mohammedan radicalism instead training a new generation of fusionists who have a cohort cadre in the anti-ecological corporatist globalism movement of the United States
Corporatism as a political movement has overtaken the United States political leadership. Forgetting the lessons of Vietnam regarding protracted engagements militarily in heavily populated Asia has returned the rose colored glasses vision to political planners. Clauswitz's first test for a successful war prosecution was 'do the premises add up to the conclusion, or-do the means equal the end? There is not supposed to be a lot of guess work and maybe in a year and a half kind of speculation.
The Bush I war evidently so swollen up the Bush II and Obama governments on American ability to successfully use military power to solve certain political challenges that they began to believe the technological military weapons supremacy could overcome the manpower of Asia in opposing foreign occupation forces.
It is unlikely that heroin poppy production will halt in Afghanistan or Asia, that President Karzai can ‘punish’ and correct corruption, or that any pro-American secular government in that area will be regarded as anything more than a Shah of Iran puppet style tool of western corporatism. Corporatists unfortunately have developed a post cold war era error in belief that the right interpretation of Adam Smith is that the invisible hand of capitalism is a Darwinian selector of the best way of governing--better than democracy. They believe democracy is a hindrance if it does not serve capitalists well. That Spenserian and amoral political philosophy of course corrupts Adam Smith’s David Humean paradigm entirely-they were egalitarian guys in support of democracy that sought empowerment for the masses rather than for the monarchy.
In the absence of firm government parameters based on nationalism or an equivalent accountable-to-the-people-political bargaining unit, capitalism may evolve into a simple oppressor with concentrated wealth and political power. At any rate corporations develop an equivalent power as communist collectives or Soviets of lesser scale, and actively oppressive individual rights foundation requisite for democracy. Freedom of political expression is denied for individuals in corporatism through a de facto control of networks and copyright pragmatics in the Internet age. The U.S. military has not planned a junta in Washington D.C. yet to continue foreign wars, yet former generals do talk of our ‘enemies in Russia, and China, and Africa and…’ in the context of the bad wisdom of setting an withdrawal date for troop deployment in Afghanistan. Why they could imagine that Muslims in central Asia will be any less Muslim in a year or two is difficult to imagine.
A better policy would be to invest funds in U.S. ecological economic and national security development while letting Asians be Asians. If the actually attack the United States then we may reply--and they would be aware of that, yet occupying their nations for a decade or two is an expensive and financially illogical response to foreign aggression in the modern world. Traditional military forces have little prospect for containing spy-cell style terrorist insurgencies abroad, and there is little reason to try to rule the world’s second world trouble spots as a rational way to stop terrorists from entering U.S. borders.
If the United States decides to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities it would not need to occupy Iran. The Obama administration may hope that present revolutionaries in Iran will overthrow the government and end the nuclear arms development program--that policy is perhaps stimulated by an Aminidinijab ploy to help the Hillary Clinton State Department to council the President to wait, and wait… On large items of foreign policy the U.S. Government fails, and avoidable troop deployments it fails, on planning post-war reconstruction it fails--all that failure is expensive.
America’s continued failure to implement an ecologically founded economic policy and to secure its borders against illegal immigration means that the U.S.A. may need to defend Iraq’s oil fields with military security for decades in order that Exxon-Mobil’s contracts may be defended. That is a very oily and expensive policy for the United States. That reliance on oil for automotive power, and natural gas for energy plants in the United States instead of a super-conductor and thermal, wind and solar input infrastructure means that bad U.S. foreign policy strategic objectives will continue for decades to take the U.S. down environmentally and politically disadvantageous roads that should not have built to start with.
There is the additional problem of defining morality. One may have a linguistic catagory approach or an anthropological paradigm from which to examine wars in general or a given war in particular. Is it moral to abstract human relationships so far as to make them impersonal and general? Can one consider universal human categories of evil as general questions that may be solved in theory? If humanity all have original sin is it then morally just for the Supreme Being to delete them all we might ask?
Morality has been said to be a list of what people actually do rather than an abstract inquiry into the nature of right conduct. Sociologists could write up what American morality is in practice after observing it for instance, and then say that such conduct is what is moral in relation to the positive or negative reinforcement such conduct elicited. If it is the usual thing to say that it is moral to pay taxes or be monogamous, but few do or are (in a hypothetical state), then it is also a moral practice to lie in addition to cheating on taxes and committing adultery.
Morality may be either what people actually do or the effort to work for a perfect moral order being perfectly moral on the way. Jesus Christ best exemplified that method. Siddartha made an effort at that too. In Afghanistan the United States has few claims about moral correctness that seem relevant.
Political leaders initially intervened to punish Al Qa'eda and remove the Taliban, yet after a decade the effort seems an inconclusive and unreasonable way to go about the paramount task of preventing further attacks on the United States. If the defense of Europe is a goal, Europeans should be the overwhelming majority of the forces deployed--maybe the Russians too would like to return so it doesn't become a haven for Chechyan terrorists. In many ways the Afghanistan mission presently seems a consequence of political inertia and a lack of leadership intelligence for certainly there are better policy implementations possible that would profit the United States instead of seasonal Taliban sympathizers.
In some of the above criteria the war that is not a war but a foreign occupation and management of a puppet government for a couple more years is immoral because it loses money for U.S. taxpayers. As repugnant as war for profit would be to some of us more perfect moralizers, it has traditionally been a reason for invading and looting foreign places. The United States did defend the people of Iraq enough so that Exxon got some oil contracts in the desert, yet the war would have ended sooner if the people of Iraq themselves as individual citizens were given ownership shares personally of the nation's oil with the government keeping maybe 25%. That would still be a better way to withdraw U.S. troops and to bring domestic tranquility with a lesser prospect for a regional war with Iran or whoever wants the oil and gas fields.
Our friends the Vikings of course on plundering missions might give lung water-wings to their prey who could haplessly flounder about in the water a few minutes afloat. America may have been first settled by Irish-Alban Europeans escaping farther west across the Atlantic removing to new fishing and hunting grounds perennially pursued by the Vikings. If we aspire to a higher morality today because we have more technology, it is comforting to realize the reasons for the failure are not an indication of the pervasive incapability of increase of moral education and faith. A minority invented the technology and a minority are moral leaders in a positive direction. People flock to good material things brought by technology while avoiding the moral lessons that require material value cost. Political and social leaders accentuate the positive and profitable except where its funding is borrowed.
Value theory plays a large role in decisions for the prosecution of war. Fighting over scarce commodities is often considered just. If we put a list of just symbolic reasons for war on the right side of an equation and find them, then our equation of 'Is there a just war' on the left finds a concurrence in truth. The value theories for political action could be changed, yet of course the profit gained from learning moral conduct of value to society en mass punishes financially from the ground up for early students of morality while the apposite value of goods and power pays hierarchially for the few from the top down.
The rest of us take quite a while to learn that the good of the majority may be as meaningful as our own well-being occasionally. Peace abroad in Afghanistan at low cost with prosperity in America of a qualitative, rather than quantitative sort, is a better direction to fight for than to spend trillions and let the terrorists go for placing of goal-line bombs aboard scheduled airlines.
The analytic philosophy of W.V.O. Quine and and others tended to find a circularity in the origin of word meanings whereby one reinforces a definition of a term with a reference to other words that are accepted without further examination. Obviously the word-meaning of 'just' will have a large indeterminate condition in the context of defining a 'just war'.
Additional questions arise such as of a poetically just war. If the United States spends much of its wealth and borrows more to pursue unnecessary ventures will it be poetic justice that the opportunity costs leave the United States badly situated for domestic, national transition to a new ecologically based economy and so forth? A pyrrhic victory is an expensive lesson often for more than one nation. The right ontology to maximally bring into being Universal happiness may be of more value than to pursue an ideology badly applied.
That social conflicts occur is historical fact. Of equal importance to the proximal question of 'is a war just?', is the pursuit of answers to other questions such as does public opinion have a meaningful effect on the start or continuance of a war? Must a citizen simply accept whatever elites of politics decree? Can a nation's policies of war be sometimes reasonable and sometimes stupid?
What if America's present foreign policy is neither just nor unjust regarding the prosecution of war abroad--but less than the best course of action possible? Is in unjust to wage war badly when it could have been done for less cost and with less harm? What if an American policy of ecological renewable economic projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan got support instead of war? Would that get more local approval than military missions? Would Pakistanis have more condemnation of there peers that plan terrorist missions against a nation helping them with ecological economic policy than with one waging war on some of it's citizens?
Since America's investment in Afghanistan is economically immoral it is worth pointing out the capitalism applied within a Darwinian paradigm without a Democratic government oversight setting boundaries within which it must exist tends to run amok, buy the broadcast media, and politicians too.
The United States lost a million private sector jobs droping from 109 million to 108 million between 2000 and 2010. Darwinian capitalism is preparing the ground for global socialism when the majority of a poor electorate in the U.S.A. in 25 years vote to delete the rich through heavy taxation. Something must be done to reduce the gap between the rich and poor within ecologically positive criteria as soon as possible with a gull employment goal rather a retiringt nation without creative industrially green tech progress.
I will write about the particular war in Afghanistan,and why it is presently not the best of all possible courses of action for the United States to take--it may lead to nuclear war between India and Pakistan after Pakistan is destabilized enough...
The United States of America since the Vietnam war has practiced a globalist foreign policy initially developed as a result of the involvement in the two general wars earlier followed by the global cold war to contain communism and the Korean conflict. That foreign policy habit continued following the end of the cold war with the Bush I administrative launch into the first Gulf War to contain the expansionism of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, or at least it set the stage for a return to the global policies of prior eras that had been curtailed after the end of the protracted, unsatisfying Vietnam conflict.
With the rise of the stock market following a decade of post cold-war profit taking and expansion the 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in greater Washington D.C. let the politically challenged Bush II administration have a political T-ball to swing at that would set the stage for a return to globalism.
This time the global, non-general campaign would be against second and third world Muslim insurgents and second world nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush league campaign costs were in financial terms far higher than the general conflicts in absolute terms. Between the first year of the campaign in 2001 until 2009 more than two trillion dollars were spent, and more was promised by the next administration of president Barrack Obama. President Obama guaranteed was until at least 2011 with tens of thousands more troops at very high almost mercenary pay scales being deployed to Afghanistan while those already in Iraq would only slowly be reduced in number.
The U.S. foreign policy leading to protracted foreign military engagements against suicide bombers and a Diaspora of terrorists driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S. led occupation and into Pakistan to destabilize the Pakistani government calls in to question the fundamentally flawed reasoning of the two U.S. administrations that have selected heavy foreign troop deployments of occupation as a way to prevent occasional terrorist missions arriving on scheduled international flights from reaching the United States. The U.S. post 2003 war occupation was a necessity created by the complete lack of post-war planning of the Bush II administration, while the Afghanistan war prosecuted by President Obama is a perhaps greater strategic blunder for the United States in that it may stimulate Muslim radicalism rater than contain it.
It is a paradox that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is financed by money borrowed from Communist China who is free to develop copper mines in Afghanistan and naval bases in Sri Lanka along with vast African investment increases while the United States pursues an unintelligent military based foreign policy that displaces fundamentalist Mohammedans from their home in Afghanistan to move them over the border in to Pakistan and surrounding areas.
If the United States simply requires that a non-Taliban government exist in Afghanistan it could use stand off air power and on ground defense fortresses to interdict Taliban concentrations for a decade or so. The policy intent of creating a friendly Muslim Government in the high central Asian nation is fundamentally flawed. It is a force pressure wave generator of Mohammedan radicalism instead training a new generation of fusionists who have a cohort cadre in the anti-ecological corporatist globalism movement of the United States
Corporatism as a political movement has overtaken the United States political leadership. Forgetting the lessons of Vietnam regarding protracted engagements militarily in heavily populated Asia has returned the rose colored glasses vision to political planners. Clauswitz's first test for a successful war prosecution was 'do the premises add up to the conclusion, or-do the means equal the end? There is not supposed to be a lot of guess work and maybe in a year and a half kind of speculation.
The Bush I war evidently so swollen up the Bush II and Obama governments on American ability to successfully use military power to solve certain political challenges that they began to believe the technological military weapons supremacy could overcome the manpower of Asia in opposing foreign occupation forces.
It is unlikely that heroin poppy production will halt in Afghanistan or Asia, that President Karzai can ‘punish’ and correct corruption, or that any pro-American secular government in that area will be regarded as anything more than a Shah of Iran puppet style tool of western corporatism. Corporatists unfortunately have developed a post cold war era error in belief that the right interpretation of Adam Smith is that the invisible hand of capitalism is a Darwinian selector of the best way of governing--better than democracy. They believe democracy is a hindrance if it does not serve capitalists well. That Spenserian and amoral political philosophy of course corrupts Adam Smith’s David Humean paradigm entirely-they were egalitarian guys in support of democracy that sought empowerment for the masses rather than for the monarchy.
In the absence of firm government parameters based on nationalism or an equivalent accountable-to-the-people-political bargaining unit, capitalism may evolve into a simple oppressor with concentrated wealth and political power. At any rate corporations develop an equivalent power as communist collectives or Soviets of lesser scale, and actively oppressive individual rights foundation requisite for democracy. Freedom of political expression is denied for individuals in corporatism through a de facto control of networks and copyright pragmatics in the Internet age. The U.S. military has not planned a junta in Washington D.C. yet to continue foreign wars, yet former generals do talk of our ‘enemies in Russia, and China, and Africa and…’ in the context of the bad wisdom of setting an withdrawal date for troop deployment in Afghanistan. Why they could imagine that Muslims in central Asia will be any less Muslim in a year or two is difficult to imagine.
A better policy would be to invest funds in U.S. ecological economic and national security development while letting Asians be Asians. If the actually attack the United States then we may reply--and they would be aware of that, yet occupying their nations for a decade or two is an expensive and financially illogical response to foreign aggression in the modern world. Traditional military forces have little prospect for containing spy-cell style terrorist insurgencies abroad, and there is little reason to try to rule the world’s second world trouble spots as a rational way to stop terrorists from entering U.S. borders.
If the United States decides to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities it would not need to occupy Iran. The Obama administration may hope that present revolutionaries in Iran will overthrow the government and end the nuclear arms development program--that policy is perhaps stimulated by an Aminidinijab ploy to help the Hillary Clinton State Department to council the President to wait, and wait… On large items of foreign policy the U.S. Government fails, and avoidable troop deployments it fails, on planning post-war reconstruction it fails--all that failure is expensive.
America’s continued failure to implement an ecologically founded economic policy and to secure its borders against illegal immigration means that the U.S.A. may need to defend Iraq’s oil fields with military security for decades in order that Exxon-Mobil’s contracts may be defended. That is a very oily and expensive policy for the United States. That reliance on oil for automotive power, and natural gas for energy plants in the United States instead of a super-conductor and thermal, wind and solar input infrastructure means that bad U.S. foreign policy strategic objectives will continue for decades to take the U.S. down environmentally and politically disadvantageous roads that should not have built to start with.
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