Again looking at history, I believe without war we wouldn't have technology. Most of the technology that we take as granted in the medieval period came from the Mongols, who because of war managed to gather together inventors from multiple countries and cultures and put them together. They took Chinese fireworks and Bronze Workers from Eastern Europe (I can't remember the country) and put 1 + 1 together, they built a cannon. They also committed many atrocities, however it was always the victims own fault, many times they killed the messenger, which the Mongol's invented their own postal service so they got pissed off at that and just besieged cities. Other times they were given fare warning, nearly always 'surrender and we'll let you live your lives as you always have', yet people refused. IIRC one time the citizens refused and killed the messenger, this one led to the Mongols diverting a river into the city and then slaughtering everyone.
The book I read (http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World/dp/06...) is a real eye opener. The man merely wanted to protect his own family, but betrayal after betrayal he ended up conquering most of the old world. The only reason he didn't take over all of western europe was because 'middle' europe was so poor they thought it was like what we imagine the third world. Aside from Europe they didn't invade most of Africa and India, this was purely because they couldn't ride their horses and didn't feel like invading.
What seems odd to me is the role that history plays in your arguments. You are using it not just as something we can observe and use to inform our judgement about the likelyhood of things. You promote history to a normative force, something fateful that tells us how things must always be, something we must obey, something with a causal logic. Kind of similar to Karl Marx' ideas how capitalism would logically have to fail.
History is seen almost like a living conscious being with it's own objectives that makes you commit atrocities because for all time everybody will commit them and you must hit hardest to prevail.
I think this view disregards that complex systems can change in unpredictable ways and that mankind has reached a level of global interconnection of economies, information and, to some degree, values, that may change the whole game. At the same time, the power of individuals to create things of global impact is infinitely greater than ever before. This works in technology, in influencing opinions as well as in terrorism unfortunately.
It may just be that the rules of the past are obsolete, that no two great powers will ever wage war against each other again. Not just because of some ethic argument, but because it is no longer in anyone's interest. War, in the past, has always been seen as a means to gain economic strength. I think this kind of imperialist logic is starting to break down. All the geostrategic thinking is becoming ineffective.
And for myself I can say this. I refuse to follow the logic of you either fight the evil people or you have already made a decsion to help them. That's not logical in all cases (sometimes it is though). If I go and torture someone, I know what the immediate consequences are. If I don't do it, I cannot be sure what the consequences are, so this is not the kind of binary decision between two knowns that it's made out to be.
Sometimes I feel that it would help to solve many conflicts in this world if people just individually decided to step back for a while and do something useful instead of fighting. The northern ireland conflict ended partly because the Republic of Ireland had become economically incredibly successful. Some people had been doing something useful for a while, like writing software and building stuff, and that changed the game.
Thanks for the debate
No. I defined war as something which continues until one side quits. I furthermore identified that you believe that in certain cases it is more desirable to quit than to prosecute a war in certain formats (such as the use of nuclear weapons) I observed that every war has had atrocities on both sides. Finally I observed that we all live in a world where we enjoy various freedoms, cultures, and science because of a lot of previous wars -- wars in which your norms (or any other norms for that matter) were disregarded to some degree.
It follows that there are always moral reasons for not fighting and that we would be living in caves had we all felt the way you describe. Therefore, if you believe that civilization is more important than your own petty opinions you're compelled to make muddy, ugly moral choices when it comes to the use of force. I made no statement that atrocities are necessary to win a war. I will say that war is about making the other side quit. Most often you end up doing something they really, really don't like in order to reach this point. Fire bombing Dresden, dropping the A-bomb on Japan, etc. -- all drew WWII to an end quicker and promoted the greater good. You may participate in a war and commit no atrocities at all. But by participating, you can be sure you are supporting actions and behaviors that on a clear, sane afternoon you would never do. That's why war sucks so much -- it drags us all down to the lowest denominator: survival.
I'm not getting into current events. They are emotionally laden and simply confuse the issues. I will point out that non-state actors acting in non-standard formats have been with us for a long time. They're usually shot on the battlefield or very close to it by means of summary courts martial. I'll also point out that the word "war" is overused to the point to be meaningless. We have a war on terror, a war on poverty (which I believe might involve shooting poor people?), a war on drugs, a war on pollution, etc. Let's take war as something where one side can clearly quit, which ties back to our previous definition. Under that definition, the current war on terror is not really a war at all, since "terror" cannot surrender to anybody.