Whatever method best protects the safety of my men and the goals of the mission is the real consideration here.
Additionally, no war can be effectively conducted when all civillian casualties are prohibited.
When has America ever engaged in proxy defense? No war is ever fought under the rationale of helping someone else. They are fought under the false premise that the nation itself is under threat, direct or indirect.
The military of the government of the United States of America could have won the its war by nuking Vietnam. Why didn’t it?
Well, then you should be questioning the premise of war, because the death of innocents should always, unconditionally be unacceptable. If it’s unacceptable to kill people by accident, it is certainly unacceptable to kill them on purpose.
I agree. I merely wanted to illustrate that his argument is illusory.
I agree. I merely wanted to illustrate that his argument is illusory.
Actually, that is what those war mongers, Reagan and Goldwater thought was conservative and just. They were just as fanatically anti-communist as the folks today who obsess over islamo-fascism. They couldn’t see the forest from the trees, or how compromised their supposed belief in natural rights had become.
These are all good points. I didn’t consider raising the argument about forcing tax payers to fund the military and how you are forcing them to defend someone else. That is a good argument. I’m still not convinced about the civilian casualties, however.
Suppose that a people who subscribe to privately provided defense by a company are attacked by another group. This group mixes in with a population which has not advocated violence against the aggrieved party, but are not willing to cooperate in bringing the attackers to justice. How is justice done? Sometimes you can’t tell a soldier from a non-soldier until it is too late.
Well, maybe your friends and some friends of his should have tried that - killing some top officials of the NV government. However that has nothing to do with total war.
“We” did not promise to help out; instead, officials of the government of the United States did. The government of the United States of America is an illegitimate institution.
Yes, the women and children in the jungle were the aggressors, that is why they were napalmed. rollseyes
huh ? ‘your’ men ?
Because there has never been a war on your soil, and you have never had to hold your dead child in your arms.
Although your argument may in fact be correct, your reason I’m citing is not a good one to support it. That is an emotional argument that says “Its wrong because if you felt it you wouldn’t like it.”
Furthermore, why was their a draft? How is it moral to force someone else to defend the rights of others? The rights of thousands of Americans were violated when the government of the United States forces them to go murder people in Vietnam; or else they would have been thrown in jail, like Mohammed Ali.
Would you happen to have a source to back up this claim? I know that Goldwater was quite militant, and Reagan didn’t mind using military force, but I have a hard time believing they advocated the utilization of nuclear armaments in the Vietnam War.
That is a good point, again one I forgot to bring up for some reason. But what if we assume a volunteer army? I guess the taxpayer issue still comes up at that point.
Goldwater was has been quoted as saying America should “lob a nuclear bomb into the men’s room at the Kremlin” and Reagan advocated reducing Vietnam to a parking lot by bombing.
Did they specifically endorse using a nuke on Vietnam? Not that I have read. Did their policies and ideas amount to less? No. Goldwater was beaten by Johnson because he was painted as a crazed war monger who would bring nuclear war, and he did little to diminish that image. They were both militant war mongers who endorsed the neo-con policy of forward interventionism decades before George Bush Jr.
Johnson was actually the war mongerer.
Almost every American President has been a war monger. The American state is the largest and most aggressive military in the world and has been since WWII. Where the US doesn’t exercise military force, it commits economic blackmail with the IMF.
Volunteering to napalm innocent women and children isn’t moral either. Taxpayer money, for the most part, is stolen money. There are people who do voluntarily give money to government, but most people do not.
And yet, several of his campaign ads from 64 imply he opposed the war. I suspect ‘nuking Vietnam’, as some believe Goldwater meant, was his wish to see the conflict finished quickly and leave. (Which doesnt make it any more moral)