So, this country has an unusually strong investment in war, though it is far from the only warmaker. But what would it take to have a justifiable war? According to just war theory, a war must meet several criteria, which I find fall into these three categories: the non-empirical, the amoral, and the impossible. By non-empirical, I mean things like "right intention," "a just cause," and "proportionality." When your government says bombing a building where ISIS stashes money justifies killing up to 50 people, there's no agreed upon, empirical means to reply No, only 49, or only 6, or up to 4,097 people can be justly killed.
Attaching some just cause to a war, such as ending slavery, never explains all the actual causes of a war, and does nothing to justify the war. During a time when much of the globe ended slavery and serfdom without war, for example, claiming that cause as the justification for a war holds no weight.
By amoral criteria, I mean things like being publicly declared and being waged by legitimate and competent authorities. These are not moral concerns. Even in a world where we actually had legitimate and competent authorities, they wouldn't make a war any more or less just. Does anyone really picture a family in Yemen hiding from a constantly buzzing drone and expressing gratitude that the drone has been sent to them by a competent authority?
My hope is that the more that people learn the tools of nonviolence and their power, the more they will believe in and choose to make use of that power, which will increase the power of nonviolence in a virtuous cycle. At some point I can imagine people laughing at the idea that some foreign dictatorship is going to invade and occupy a nation ten times its size, full of people dedicated to nonviolent noncooperation with occupiers. Already, I get a laugh on a frequent basis when people email me with the threat that if I do not support war I had better be prepared to start speaking North Korean or what they call "the ISIS language." Apart from the nonexistence of these languages, the idea that anybody is going to get 300 million Americans to learn any foreign language, much less do so at gun point, almost makes me cry. I can't help imagining how much weaker war propaganda might be if all Americans did know multiple languages.
Continuing with the impossible criteria, what about respecting a person while trying to kill her or him? There are lots of ways to respect a person, but none of them can exist simultaneously with trying to kill that person. In fact, I would rank right at the bottom of people who respect me those who were trying to kill me. Remember that just war theory began with people who believed killing someone was doing them a favor. And noncombatants are the majority of casualties in modern wars, so they cannot be kept safe. And there's no reasonable prospect of success available -- the U.S. military is on a record losing streak.
But the biggest reason that no war can ever be justified is not that no war can ever meet all the criteria of just war theory, but rather that war is not an incident, it is an institution.
Many people in the U.S. will concede that many U.S. wars have been unjust, but claim justness for World War II and in some cases one or two since. Others claim no just wars yet, but join the masses in supposing that there might be a justifiable war any day now. It is that supposition that kills far more people than all of the wars. The U.S. government spends over $1 trillion on war and war preparations each year, while 3% of that could end starvation, and 1% could end the lack of clean drinking water globally. The military budget is the only place with the resources needed to try to save the earth's climate. Far more lives are lost and damaged through the failure to spend money well than through the violence of war. And more are lost or put at risk through side-effects of that violence than directly. War and war preparations are the biggest destroyer of the natural environment. Most countries on earth burn less fossil fuel than does the U.S. military. Most superfund disaster sites even within the U.S. are at military bases. The institution of war is the biggest eroder of our liberties even when the wars are marketed under the word "freedom." This institution impoverishes us, threatens the rule of law, and degrades our culture by fueling violence, bigotry, the militarization of police, and mass surveillance. This institution puts us all at risk of nuclear disaster. And it endangers, rather than protects, those societies that engage in it.
According to the Washington Post, President Trump asked Secretary of so-called Defense James Mattis why he should send troops to Afghanistan, and Mattis replied that it was to prevent a bombing in Times Square. Yet the man who tried to blow up Times Square in 2010 said he was trying to get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
For North Korea to try to occupy the U.S. would require a force many times larger than the North Korean military. For North Korea to attack the U.S., were it actually capable, would be suicide. Could it happen? Well, look at what the CIA said before the U.S. attacked Iraq: Iraq would be most likely to use its weapons only if attacked. Apart from the weapons not existing, that was accurate.
Terrorism has predictably increased during the war on terrorism (as measured by the Global Terrorism Index). 99.5% of terrorist attacks occur in countries engaged in wars and/or engaged in abuses such as imprisonment without trial, torture, or lawless killing. The highest rates of terrorism are in so-called "liberated" and "democratized" Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorist groups responsible for the most terrorism (that is, non-state, politically motivated violence) around the world have grown out of U.S. wars against terrorism. Those wars themselves have caused numerous just-retired top U.S. government officials and a few U.S. government reports to describe military violence as counterproductive, as creating more enemies than are killed. 95% of all suicide terrorist attacks are conducted to encourage foreign occupiers to leave the terrorist's home country. And an FBI study in 2012 said that anger over U.S. military operations abroad was the most commonly cited motivation for individuals involved in cases of so-called homegrown terrorism in the United States.
The facts lead me to these three conclusions:
1) Foreign terrorism in the United States can be virtually eliminated by keeping the U.S. military out of any country that is not the United States.
2) If Canada wanted anti-Canadian terrorist networks on a U.S. scale or just wanted to be threatened by North Korea, it would need to radically increase its bombing, occupying, and base construction around the world.
3) On the model of the war on terrorism, the war on drugs that produces more drugs, and the war on poverty that seems to increase poverty, we would be wise to consider launching a war on sustainable prosperity and happiness.
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