It is vital for those of us who oppose war to listen to those who are the most educated about war. That includes the leaders among our veterans who, like Kos, have done the hard work of thinking, talking, and writing about war.
To Amplify Markos' point about warfare, I think it's important that we listen to Bob McNamara, who discusses how he behaved as a war criminal during our conflict with Japan.
He's speaking here about the incendiary bombs.[Link]
...[T]he issue is: In order to win a war should you kill 100,000 people in one night by firebombing or any other method? [General Curtis] LeMay's answer would have been, clearly, yes.
Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities.
58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed.
Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed.
99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya.
This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.
I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The U.S.-Japanese War was one of the most brutal in all of human history- kamikaze pilots, suicide, unbelievable! What one can criticize is that the human race prior to that time- and today- has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it, "the rules of war." Was there a rule then that said you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night?
LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
The question, as Kos pointed out, isn't about the method by which civilians are killed.
But there's another aspect to the Syrian question that I don't think has been well examined. We do have just cause for war, that is clear.
Just cause is not, and never has been, sufficient reason for war.
The other questions are these:
Do we have a reasonable chance of success?
Are we able to accomplish our goals justly?
Will there be a just end to the conflict?
The most important point in just war theory is that there must be some expectation that our actions will bring about success.
The most important lesson I've learned is that we must know what success looks like before we go into any conflict.
I have heard no statement, none, from anyone supporting conflict in Syria about what our ultimate goals will be, and about what we want to achieve by engaging in armed conflict with Assad.
There has been no reasonable answer to this question.
What would this conflict achieve? What does success look like?
The removal of Assad? Yes, that's definitely possible. I'm sure we could kill Assad, and hand him over to an angry mob. I'm sure he could have the same end as Saddam Hussein or Nicolae Ceaușescu.
But that would not be our reason for going in to Syria. Not primarily.
Let me play out for you the scenario I see:
We go in.
We get Assad.
We use parts of the opposition, the secular parts, to prop up a government like the one in Afghanistan or Iraq. We spend 10 years working with the Turks, fighting a guerrilla war against the Syrian version of the Mujaheddin, while trying to round up all of Assad's old chemical weapons to keep them out of the hands of people who have stated that they desire to wage war against the US and Israel.
And you see, that's what this is all about. Toppling Assad could give some of the worst people in the world weapons of mass destruction that we know exist in Syria because we have all seen videos of them being used.
Do you really think we're just going to roll the dice on whether people who want to attack us and our friends get their hands on Chemical Weapons?
I don't rightly know. I'm not privy to the president's daily briefings. But I cannot imagine that a situation like the one in Syria would not involve a significant deployment of ground troops.
Am I out in the woods on this one, or do others see what I see here?