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Stardate 20011125.1202 (On Screen): Well! Someone actually attempted to make a cogent case against war in general. Let me reproduce it in its entirety:

Around 2500 BCE in what was then called Sumer, The King of Kish set the boundary between the villages of Umma and Lagash. Lagash's land boundaries happened to contain the water supply. This ticked off the Ummarians. As it was unfair. This is what started one of the first recorded wars between human beings. Perhaps it was THE first recorded war between human beings. That was over four MILLENIA ago. We've been throwing things at each other ever since. From rocks, to spears, to arrows, to knives, to bullets, to missiles and nuclear warheads.

Has it made a difference? No. For all our technology, we're still cavemen howling at the damned moon.

Today? We're still fighting. Violence begets violence. I kill your brother. You kill me. My brother kills you. Your distant cousin kills him. On and on and on. If it wasn't for the fact that sex feels so damn GOOD, we'd have run out of human beings to kill each other with a long time ago.

I could cite literally thousands of examples of that, from the dawn of history to present day. Every violent act you read in today's newspaper or saw on last night's Evening News TV program proves that. This cannot be argued.

Violence is pointless.

Should we have bombed Afghanistan? We had no choice. Just as the Ummarians had no choice but to fight the Lagashians for water. Water is a necessity for survival. It's the real reason why Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait a decade ago. Iraq is landlocked. No shoreline. Kuwait's in his way. Iraq could better compete with the rest of the world in so many ways if only Saddam could have successfully gotten their land, their water, and their OIL.

It's the relentless, endless, pathetic battle between the Haves and the Have-Nots. Violence has not solved this problem in over four thousand and five hundred years of recorded civilization. It's redundant. It's pathetic. Violence is the last resort to the one who lost the argument. So us bombing Afghanistan is going to make no difference. It's not even a drop in the bucket towards World Peace.

Did we have a choice? No. Should we have done it? No.

I appreciate his effort; I just wish he'd done a better job. There are number of things wrong with this argument. First and foremost: if we have no choice about something then there is no morality associated with it. If there's only one thing to be done, it's neither "right" nor "wrong", it's merely necessary. The purpose of ethics is to guide us through situations where we are faced with choices. So to say Did we have a choice? No. Should we have done it? No. is a contradiction in terms. If we had no choice, then how could we have done anything else?

Second, it doesn't deal with the fact that there may be many different goals to violence. To pick one ("peace") and show that violence doesn't accomplish it doesn't prove that violence couldn't achieve other goals -- and in fact, the history is full of cases where war did accomplish the goal set for it by one side. (Carthago delenda est.)

Nor is it the case that tit-for-tat violent reprisals necessarily go on forever. If one side mounts a major attack and completely destroys the other side, then the struggle is well and truly finished. (Which in fact was the exact result of the Punic Wars.)

Violence begets violence. Often this is true, though not by any means always. But the goal of war is not to eliminate violence, so this is at best irrelevant.

Violence is pointless.

Should we have bombed Afghanistan? We had no choice. Just as the Ummarians had no choice but to fight the Lagashians for water. Water is a necessity for survival.

This is decidedly odd: right after stating that violence is pointless, he proceeds to make a very good case for why one group should have engaged in violent war: that being that without water they'd die, and they had to fight to get it. So for them violence wasn't pointless -- on the contrary, as he himself says they had no other alternatives. Without violence they were sure to die; with it they had a chance of survival. (Actually, they did have just those two alternatives: fight or die. I don't suspect anyone at the time seriously proposed that they should sacrifice their entire tribe in order to prevent war because war is evil, though.)

It's the relentless, endless, pathetic battle between the Haves and the Have-Nots. Violence has not solved this problem in over four thousand and five hundred years of recorded civilization. It's redundant. It's pathetic. Violence is the last resort to the one who lost the argument. So us bombing Afghanistan is going to make no difference. It's not even a drop in the bucket towards World Peace.

It may well be true that it won't accomplish the goal of World Peace, but where was it written that this was what war was about? In the case of this particular war, that's not the goal at all. The goal is to prevent future attacks against the US -- and there's now a damned good chance that it will be at least partially successful at that.

Unfortunately, this entire argument is a strawman. Suppose that I say "My clothing is a failure because it hasn't made me wealthy." But that was never the goal of my clothing; it is rather intended for such prosaic goals as keeping me from dying of hypothermia in the winter -- and it's succeeded in doing that. The fact that it hasn't made me rich doesn't prove that it's a failure. That's the kind of argument Zach is making: he's picking one single goal for war (world peace) without paying any attention to any of its other purposes(which are both less noble and less global); he's proving that it hasn't accomplished that one goal and then he declares it a failure. By so doing he ignores all the things war has succeeded at (like gaining independence for the United States from England, or giving Rome 500 years of dominance of the Mediterranean). Yes, some of the results of war are fleeting, but what of that? Who ever said that the only worthwhile results were eternal?

I guess I can't put down my lantern quite yet. (discussion in progress)

Just in passing: Iraq is not landlocked. It has about 60 km of coastline on the Persian Gulf, between Kuwait and Iran.

Zach responds!