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Reconcile or count the cost
'WAR never solves anything" is a much-loved slogan of the peace movement. And excepting the fact that Nazism and fascism perished at the sharp end of a bayonet, perhaps the peaceniks have a point. After all, nothing demonstrates the moral superiority of military passivity like the genocides of Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur, ne c'est pas?But even at its best, war is a dirty business. During one of the most morally sublime campaigns in one of history's most ethically defensible conflicts, the good guys inadvertently killed thousands of innocent bystanders. Yet should the Allies have refrained from invading Normandy because 20,000 friendly civilians would die during the campaign to liberate Europe? Would humanity have been better served by perpetuating French suffering under the boot heel of Nazi oppression? Collateral casualties are a tragic consequence of even the most well-executed military campaigns. But we consign ourselves to pacifism if we set our moral threshold so high to preclude any action that might inadvertently cause non-combatant deaths. And in the cruel world we inhabit, the vulnerable irrelevance of pacifism is an engraved invitation for tyranny to run wild. Posted by: Fred 2006-07-17 |
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