Aggressive war is not a legitimate tool of foreign policy – it is a war crime.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
War of aggression -Wikipedia
Those who remember Vietnam, and were wise enough to learn its lessons in the first place, do not support war as foreign policy in any shape, form or fashion. The problem is far too few remember and far too few were wise enough to learn.
One of the main lessons, if not the main lesson, of the Vietnam war is that unnecessary wars are immoral – immoral to the point of being evil. War then was not so sanitized as it is now. We watched the bodies being tossed casually into mass graves on the evening news. We witnessed American youths lying wounded and bleeding in the mud. We saw the burning villages, the grieving grandmothers, the napalmed children with their skin falling off in sheets. We saw the futility and horror of it all...and yet look what we've become: the biggest war-making nation on the planet by far. How easily we have forgotten our own history.
A recent dkos diary asked if our progressive/liberal values are based on a fundamental principle. My answer is yes and that fundamental principle is that people matter – more than profit, more than riches or luxury, more than prestige, pride or ego, more than anything.
”It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
Voltaire
I Was So Much Older Then - a video made especially for this diary.
IMHO, we should all be deeply ashamed of our country for bringing such untold misery, mayhem and violent death to less fortunate nations whose struggles are already hard enough. And even if bombing poor villagers were otherwise a fine thing to do, we can no longer afford such madness – and it's high time we stop putting up with it. It is my fervent desire that every American would Demand peace NOW!