Se7en said:
two things here hiphop:
1. god and the israelites didn't believe in the ten commandments either. there are stories all over the old testament about god ordering his nation to literally destroy, i.e. kill, every living thing so that they may inherit the "promised land."
2. was the u.s. militarily involved in nicaragua, as in, did we have troops on the ground? honest question. i *think* that is where sting is trying to make some sort of distintion with u.s. action. asking about the spanish american war would be interesting though... the uss maine mysteriously blows up in a cuban harbor, no evidence is ever found proving the cause, the u.s. declares war on spain anyway and submits cuba to decades of u.s. interference and puppet dicatators. not to mention the bloody rebellion of the filipinos that resulted.
1. fine, the broad point I tried to make is that lots of us are going to church on Sunday and still feel that, generally, some wars are justified. There is no justification for all the pain that is caused by war.
You can go on and on and on about "realpolitik" like A_Wanderer or what would have happened if the U.S. wouldnt have bombed former Yugoslavia. You can make countless statistics on that. This is why I said, war may be inevitable - but war is never justified. Who are you (anyone) to justify 10,000 homeless people, crippled children, women who lose their husband, soldiers hanging themselves because they can´t take the pain no more? You can´t justify a war and ignore this. You can only justify a war if you also think the weapon sales are a just thing, because one doesn´t work without the other.
And back to the point, if you are Christian, you still think that Jesus would nod his head and say, yeah yeah, some of the wars are justified? No way. The only exception the Bible makes, is the uprising of civil society against and, if necessary, the killing of tyrants.
2. Same for the Kosovo example then, did the US declare war? Not to my knowledge, and they also didn´t have troops on the ground.
The distinction whether it is "officially" a war or not, well.. you know, the Somoza troops in Nicaragua couldn´t have survived a month without the constant support of the Contras, so the civil war there would have been over sooner. Is supporting one side of a civil war (that is known for its cruelities) justifiable? Even if we do make the distinction you mentioned, STING2 thinks that the long, long war in Vietnam was justified.