by David Swanson
Global Research
March 14, 2011
It's a simple point, but an important one, and one that gets overlooked. Whether or not you think a particular war is moral and good, the fact remains that war is illegal. Actual defense by a country when attacked is legal, but that only occurs once another country has actually attacked, and it must not be used as a loophole to excuse wider war that is not employed in actual defense.
Needless to say, a strong moral argument can be made for preferring the rule of law to the law of rulers. If those in power can do anything they like, most of us will not like what they do. Some laws are so unjust that when they are imposed on ordinary people, they should be violated. But allowing those in charge of a government to engage in massive violence and killing in defiance of the law is to sanction all lesser abuses as well, since no greater abuse is imaginable. It's understandable that proponents of war would rather ignore or "re-interpret" the law than properly change the law through the legislative process, but it is not morally defensible.
For much of U.S. history, it was reasonable for citizens to believe, and often they did believe, that the U.S. Constitution banned aggressive war. Congress declared the 1846-1848 War on Mexico to have been "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the president of the United States." Congress had issued a declaration of war, but the House believed the president had lied to them. (President Woodrow Wilson would later send troops to war with Mexico without a declaration.) It does not seem to be the lying that Congress viewed as unconstitutional in the 1840s, but rather the launching of an unnecessary or aggressive war.
As Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith warned British Prime Minister Tony Blair in March 2003, "Aggression is a crime under customary international law which automatically forms part of domestic law," and therefore, "international aggression is a crime recognized by the common law which can be prosecuted in the U.K. courts." U.S. law evolved from English common law, and the U.S. Supreme Court recognizes precedents and traditions based on it. U.S. law in the 1840s was closer to its roots in English common law than is U.S. law today, and statutory law was less developed in general, so it was natural for Congress to take the position that launching an unnecessary war was unconstitutional without needing to be more specific.
In fact, just prior to giving Congress the exclusive power to declare war, the Constitution gives Congress the power to "define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations." At least by implication, this would seem to suggest that the United States was itself expected to abide by the "Law of Nations." In the 1840s, no member of Congress would have dared to suggest that the United States was not itself bound by the "Law of Nations." At that point in history, this meant customary international law, under which the launching of an aggressive war had long been considered the most serious offense.
Fortunately, now that we have binding multilateral treaties that explicitly prohibit aggressive war, we no longer have to guess at what the U.S. Constitution says about war. Article VI of the Constitution explicitly says this:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
So, if the United States were to make a treaty that banned war, war would be illegal under the supreme law of the land.
The United States has in fact done this, at least twice, in treaties that remain today part of our highest law: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the United Nations Charter.
WE BANNED ALL WAR IN 1928
In 1928, the United States Senate, that same institution that on a good day can now get three percent of its members to vote against funding war escalations or continuations, voted 85 to 1 to bind the United States to a treaty by which it is still bound and in which we "condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in [our] relations with" other nations. This is the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It condemns and renounces all war. The U.S. Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, rejected a French proposal to limit the ban to wars of aggression. He wrote to the French ambassador that if the pact, ". . . were accompanied by definitions of the word 'aggressor' and by expressions and qualifications stipulating when nations would be justified in going to war, its effect would be very greatly weakened and its positive value as a guaranty of peace virtually destroyed." The treaty was signed with its ban on all war included, and was agreed to by dozens of nations. Kellogg was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929, an award already rendered questionable by its previous bestowal upon both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
However, when the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty it added two reservations. First, the United States would not be obliged to enforce the treaty by taking action against those who violated it. Excellent. So far so good. If war is banned, it hardly seems a nation could be required to go to war to enforce the ban. But old ways of thinking die hard, and redundancy is much less painful than bloodshed.
The second reservation, however, was that the treaty must not infringe upon America's right of self-defense. So, there, war maintained a foot in the door. The traditional right to defend yourself when attacked was preserved, and a loophole was created that could be and would be unreasonably expanded.
When any nation is attacked, it will defend itself, violently or otherwise. The harm in placing that prerogative in law is, as Kellogg foresaw, a weakening of the idea that war is illegal. An argument could be made for U.S. participation in World War II under this reservation, for example, based on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, no matter how provoked and desired that attack was. War with Germany could be justified by the Japanese attack as well, through predictable stretching of the loophole. Even so, wars of aggression have been illegal (albeit unpunished) in the United States since 1928.
In addition, in 1945, the United States became a party to the United Nations Charter, which also remains in force today as part of the "supreme law of the land." The United States had been the driving force behind the U.N. Charter's creation. It includes these lines:
"All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered."
"All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."
This would appear to be a new Kellogg-Briand Pact with at least an initial attempt at the creation of an enforcement body. And so it is. But the U.N. Charter contains two exceptions to its ban on warfare. The first is self- defense. Here is part of Article 51:
"Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence (sic) if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security."
So, the U.N. Charter contains the same traditional right and small loophole that the U.S. Senate attached to the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It also adds another. The Charter makes clear that the U.N. Security Council can choose to authorize the use of force. This further weakens the understanding that war is illegal, by making some wars legal. Other wars are then, predictably, justified by claims of legality. The architects of the 2003 attack on Iraq claimed it was authorized by the United Nations, even though the United Nations disagreed.
The U.N. Security Council did authorize the War on Korea, but only because the U.S.S.R. was boycotting the Security Council at the time and China was still represented by the Kuomintang government in Taiwan. The Western powers were preventing the ambassador of the new revolutionary government of China from taking China's seat as a permanent member of the Security Council, and the Russians were boycotting the Council in protest. If the Soviet and Chinese delegates had been present, there is no way that the United Nations would have taken sides in the war that eventually destroyed most of Korea. MORE...
Showing posts with label Just War Doctrine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Just War Doctrine. Show all posts
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Why The Wars Can't Be Won
By Prof. John Kozy
August 21, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Edmund Burke's statement, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it" is frequently cited, but in truth, even history's obvious lessons are unrecognized by many who know history very well.
There was a time when every school child could recite the Gettysburg Address from memory, especially its famous peroration: “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." But that resolution has largely gone unfulfilled. So exactly what did the Civil War accomplish?
Most certainly, it preserved the union territorially and abolished slavery—two noteworthy things. But the slaves who were freed, rather than being benefited by their freedom, were left in the lurch, and the prejudicial attitudes of Confederate whites were most likely hardened; they certainly were not softened. So although the war united the nation territorially, it failed to unite its peoples, and that division is still evident today.
After the 2004 Presidential election, The Dallas Morning News ran a feature about this division titled Beyond the Red and Blue. Using the red states that went to President Bush and the blue states that went to Senator Kerry, it pointed out how red and blue states ranked in various categories.
People in red states are less healthy than those in blue states.
People in red states earn less than those in blue states.
People in red states are less educated than those in blue states.
More people in red states live in mobile homes than those in blue states.
The red states have higher birth rates among teens than the blue states.
More people are killed by guns in the red states than in the blue states.
And the Dallas Morning News missed a number of other inferior attributes of the red states.
The red states have higher rates of poverty, both generally and among the elderly, higher rates of crime, both general and violent, have higher rates of infant mortality and divorce, and have fewer physicians per unit of population than do the blue states.
These statistics do not paint a pretty picture. And since the red states are commonly referred to as the conservative heartland, one would think that the people who live in these states would vote against conservative candidates merely on the basis of their own rational, self interests. But they don’t.
There’s an obvious clash here, for the red states are the home of that group that calls itself “moral America.” But how can a moral viewpoint countenance poverty, crime, and infant mortality? What kind of morality is it that doesn’t care for the welfare of people? Just what moral maxim guides the lives of these people? Certainly not the Golden Rule, the Decalogue, or the Second Commandment of Christ. From what I have been able to gather, moral America needs a new moral code. The one it has is, to use a word the members of this group dislike, relative.
So what motivates the conservative nature of the people in the red states? Let’s look at some history.
For a century after the Civil War, the south voted Democratic, but not because the people shared any values in common with the rest of the nation’s Democrats. (Southerners even distinguished themselves from other Democrats by calling themselves “Dixiecrats.”) These people were Democrats merely because the political party of the war and reconstruction was Republican. And when, in the mid-twentieth century, the Democratic Party championed an end to racial discrimination, these life-long Democrats quickly became Republicans, because the Republican party had in the intervening years become reactionary.
What motivates these people even today, though most likely they don’t recognize it, is an unwillingness to accept the results of the Civil War and change the attitudes held before it. When a society inculcates beliefs over a long period of time, those beliefs cannot be changed by a forceful imposition of others. The beliefs once practiced overtly continue to be held covertly. Force is never an effective instrument of conversion. Martyrdom is preferable to surrender, and even promises of a better future are ineffective.
So what did the Civil War really accomplish? It united a nation without uniting its people. The United States of America became one nation indivisible made up of two disunited peoples; it became a nation divided, and the division has spread.
Therein lies a lesson all nations should have learned. By the force of arms, you can compel outward conformity to political institutions and their laws, but you cannot change the antagonistic attitudes of people, that can remain unchanged for decades and longer waiting for opportunities to reassert themselves.
Any astute reader can apply this lesson to the present day’s activities in the Middle East. Neither force nor promises of a future better than the past can win the hearts and minds of people. And soldiers who die in an attempt to change another people’s values always die in vain.
All wars, even when carried on by the strongest of nations against weak opponents, are chancy, and their costs, in every respect, are always much more than anticipated, even putting aside the physical destruction and the lives lost.
Nations that have started wars with the psychological certainty of winning rarely have, and when they have, the results were rarely lasting or those sought. As Gandhi once observed, “Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.”
The Crusaders, fighting under the banner of Christ, could not make Palestine a part of Christendom. France, under Napoleon, conquered most of Europe but lost it all and Napoleon ended up a broken man. Prussian militarism prevailed in the Franco-Prussian War, but in less than a century Germany had lost all. The Austrians in 1914 could not only not subdue the Serbs, the empire and its monarchial form of government were lost. The Germans and Japanese after 1939 and astounding initial successes were reduced to ruin.
But even the winners are losers.
Americans won the Mexican War and acquired the southwestern United States, but that conquest brought with it unfathomable and persistent problems—racial prejudice, discrimination, and an irresolvable problem of immigration and border insecurity. Americans likewise won the falsely justified Spanish American war and acquired a number of colonial states but were unable to hold most of them. The allies won the Second World War, but France and England lost the colonies they were fighting to preserve, and these two powers, which were great before the war, were reduced to minor status (although both still refuse to admit it). Israel has won five wars against various Arab states since 1948, but its welfare and security have not been enhanced, and Arab hatred and intransigence has grown more common.
People need to realize that after a war, things are never the same as they were before, and that even the winners rarely get what they fight for. War is a fool's errand in pursuit of ephemera.
At the end of World War II, American leaders wrongly assumed that America's superpower status gave it the means to impose its view of what the world should be like on others everywhere. Then came Korea and the assumption proved false. Despite all of the destruction and death inflicted on the North Koreans, their attitudes went unchanged. The lesson went unlearned. It went unlearned again in Viet Nam, after which Henry Kissinger is reported to have naively said, "I could not believe that a primitive people had no breaking point." The Vietnamese never broke. Now again Americans are foolishly assuming that the peoples of the Middle East will change their attitudes if enough force is imposed for a long enough time and enough promises of a better future are made. History belies this assumption.
Unfortunately, history teaches its lessons to only those willing to learn, and the American oligarchy shows no signs of having such willingness.
So let's start singing bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Warring is nothing but a bad way to die!
John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy...His on-line pieces can be found HERE... and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.
This item was first published HERE....
© Copyright John Kozy, Global Research, 2010
August 21, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Edmund Burke's statement, "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it" is frequently cited, but in truth, even history's obvious lessons are unrecognized by many who know history very well.
There was a time when every school child could recite the Gettysburg Address from memory, especially its famous peroration: “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." But that resolution has largely gone unfulfilled. So exactly what did the Civil War accomplish?
Most certainly, it preserved the union territorially and abolished slavery—two noteworthy things. But the slaves who were freed, rather than being benefited by their freedom, were left in the lurch, and the prejudicial attitudes of Confederate whites were most likely hardened; they certainly were not softened. So although the war united the nation territorially, it failed to unite its peoples, and that division is still evident today.
After the 2004 Presidential election, The Dallas Morning News ran a feature about this division titled Beyond the Red and Blue. Using the red states that went to President Bush and the blue states that went to Senator Kerry, it pointed out how red and blue states ranked in various categories.
People in red states are less healthy than those in blue states.
People in red states earn less than those in blue states.
People in red states are less educated than those in blue states.
More people in red states live in mobile homes than those in blue states.
The red states have higher birth rates among teens than the blue states.
More people are killed by guns in the red states than in the blue states.
And the Dallas Morning News missed a number of other inferior attributes of the red states.
The red states have higher rates of poverty, both generally and among the elderly, higher rates of crime, both general and violent, have higher rates of infant mortality and divorce, and have fewer physicians per unit of population than do the blue states.
These statistics do not paint a pretty picture. And since the red states are commonly referred to as the conservative heartland, one would think that the people who live in these states would vote against conservative candidates merely on the basis of their own rational, self interests. But they don’t.
There’s an obvious clash here, for the red states are the home of that group that calls itself “moral America.” But how can a moral viewpoint countenance poverty, crime, and infant mortality? What kind of morality is it that doesn’t care for the welfare of people? Just what moral maxim guides the lives of these people? Certainly not the Golden Rule, the Decalogue, or the Second Commandment of Christ. From what I have been able to gather, moral America needs a new moral code. The one it has is, to use a word the members of this group dislike, relative.
So what motivates the conservative nature of the people in the red states? Let’s look at some history.
For a century after the Civil War, the south voted Democratic, but not because the people shared any values in common with the rest of the nation’s Democrats. (Southerners even distinguished themselves from other Democrats by calling themselves “Dixiecrats.”) These people were Democrats merely because the political party of the war and reconstruction was Republican. And when, in the mid-twentieth century, the Democratic Party championed an end to racial discrimination, these life-long Democrats quickly became Republicans, because the Republican party had in the intervening years become reactionary.
What motivates these people even today, though most likely they don’t recognize it, is an unwillingness to accept the results of the Civil War and change the attitudes held before it. When a society inculcates beliefs over a long period of time, those beliefs cannot be changed by a forceful imposition of others. The beliefs once practiced overtly continue to be held covertly. Force is never an effective instrument of conversion. Martyrdom is preferable to surrender, and even promises of a better future are ineffective.
So what did the Civil War really accomplish? It united a nation without uniting its people. The United States of America became one nation indivisible made up of two disunited peoples; it became a nation divided, and the division has spread.
Therein lies a lesson all nations should have learned. By the force of arms, you can compel outward conformity to political institutions and their laws, but you cannot change the antagonistic attitudes of people, that can remain unchanged for decades and longer waiting for opportunities to reassert themselves.
Any astute reader can apply this lesson to the present day’s activities in the Middle East. Neither force nor promises of a future better than the past can win the hearts and minds of people. And soldiers who die in an attempt to change another people’s values always die in vain.
All wars, even when carried on by the strongest of nations against weak opponents, are chancy, and their costs, in every respect, are always much more than anticipated, even putting aside the physical destruction and the lives lost.
Nations that have started wars with the psychological certainty of winning rarely have, and when they have, the results were rarely lasting or those sought. As Gandhi once observed, “Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.”
The Crusaders, fighting under the banner of Christ, could not make Palestine a part of Christendom. France, under Napoleon, conquered most of Europe but lost it all and Napoleon ended up a broken man. Prussian militarism prevailed in the Franco-Prussian War, but in less than a century Germany had lost all. The Austrians in 1914 could not only not subdue the Serbs, the empire and its monarchial form of government were lost. The Germans and Japanese after 1939 and astounding initial successes were reduced to ruin.
But even the winners are losers.
Americans won the Mexican War and acquired the southwestern United States, but that conquest brought with it unfathomable and persistent problems—racial prejudice, discrimination, and an irresolvable problem of immigration and border insecurity. Americans likewise won the falsely justified Spanish American war and acquired a number of colonial states but were unable to hold most of them. The allies won the Second World War, but France and England lost the colonies they were fighting to preserve, and these two powers, which were great before the war, were reduced to minor status (although both still refuse to admit it). Israel has won five wars against various Arab states since 1948, but its welfare and security have not been enhanced, and Arab hatred and intransigence has grown more common.
People need to realize that after a war, things are never the same as they were before, and that even the winners rarely get what they fight for. War is a fool's errand in pursuit of ephemera.
At the end of World War II, American leaders wrongly assumed that America's superpower status gave it the means to impose its view of what the world should be like on others everywhere. Then came Korea and the assumption proved false. Despite all of the destruction and death inflicted on the North Koreans, their attitudes went unchanged. The lesson went unlearned. It went unlearned again in Viet Nam, after which Henry Kissinger is reported to have naively said, "I could not believe that a primitive people had no breaking point." The Vietnamese never broke. Now again Americans are foolishly assuming that the peoples of the Middle East will change their attitudes if enough force is imposed for a long enough time and enough promises of a better future are made. History belies this assumption.
Unfortunately, history teaches its lessons to only those willing to learn, and the American oligarchy shows no signs of having such willingness.
So let's start singing bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Warring is nothing but a bad way to die!
John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy...His on-line pieces can be found HERE... and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.
This item was first published HERE....
© Copyright John Kozy, Global Research, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Stumbling About In the Graveyard of Empires
By David Michael Green
March 20, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- If there was ever a decent justification visible for the American war in Afghanistan, there isn't now.
That doesn't mean that one is impossible to imagine. I'm no fan of the Taliban or al-Qaeda, though that alone doesn't justify invading the country. Nor does a military occupation necessarily make things better, even if you assume that a particular regime is noxious enough that a regime decapitation is warranted. Time after time, great powers have learned to their chagrin that the natives don't always necessarily appreciate being invaded, occupied and told who the new boss replacing the old boss will be. People can be odd that way.
But leave all that aside for the moment. Maybe al Qaeda did 9/11, as we were told. Maybe the Taliban were harboring them. Maybe both had a violent, regressive and otherwise just generally ugly agenda. Maybe there was even justification enough for invading in 2001.
I nevertheless meant my initial critique quite literally, however. Whatever may or may not have been the case in 2001, it's now 2010, and any such clarity or justification is now invisible. Indeed, what I find most astonishing about America's latest military adventure is just how much this gravest of national decisions is not being seriously discussed in our national discourse.
Perhaps even more amazing is the degree to which that is true from the bottom of the national security policy process all the way up to the top. The proper way to conceive and consider these issues, I would argue, is in the form of a nested contextual hierarchy, in which each level of policy analysis has to justify decisions to the one, and ones, above it. We, as a body politic, are talking about and thinking about Afghanistan at none of these levels. In fact, of course, we're basically not talking about and thinking about Afghanistan at all.
The lowest level of policy decision-making is the tactical. America has to decide exactly how it is going to prosecute the war. We don't hear very much about that, which is itself more than troubling. Reports are now beginning to show up in the alternative press - but, significantly, not in the mainstream - of tactical operations all too reminiscent of those brutal affairs which have appeared previously in Iraq and Pakistan. Allegations are now surfacing about innocent civilians either being subjected to intentional human rights and war crimes violations, right up to and including murder, or at least wonton disregard for the "collateral damage" caused by battlefield tactics. There is certainly a moral question at stake here, and one that we are just not discussing.
But there is also simply the pragmatic question of whether such tactics properly service our strategy in Afghanistan, the next level up in the hierarchy. But what is American strategy? The latest version seems to be an ‘improvement' over the notion of simply defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda in battlefield engagements. Now the Pentagon brass and theater commanders are talking about following military clearing operations with ‘government-in-a-box' nation-building initiatives, ostensibly for purposes of winning the ubiquitous hearts and minds typically sought by contemporary counterinsurgency occupation forces. Theoretically, providing Afghans with security and with efficient, corruption-free governance will help to win their allegiance to a ‘better' (read American sponsored) way. While the ideas have some merit on paper, they also ignore the historical realities of similar attempts in Vietnam and Iraq, and they require for credibility that we suspend everything we know about America's long-time ongoing national version of the same strategy in Afghanistan, which has witnessed the Karzai puppet regime spending the better part of the last decade demonstrating just how corrupt a government can possibly be, and just how ineffective as well - at least when it comes to everything other than stealing elections or just plain stealing.
But strategy, of course, is not its own end. Strategy is used to achieve certain objectives which form the very purpose for fighting a war. Barack Obama is not quite as lame as George W. Bush in this respect (not exactly a stunning achievement, that), who argued that America should be at war with the weapon terrorism - as opposed to an actual adversary using that weapon. While we can say that Obama is not as deceitful (at least on this score) or idiotic as Bush, that's pretty much true of the entire world, isn't it? More importantly, what are America's aims in massively escalating our presence in Afghanistan? Are we trying to defeat the Taliban? Remove al Qaeda from the country (even though the Pentagon says there's only about a hundred of them left there)? Create a Jeffersonian democracy? Install an ally? Lift the country out of poverty? Again, it astonishes me that one could take a country to war without this most obvious question being part of the national discourse. But it isn't.
And neither is the question of how ‘winning' in Afghanistan, whatever that would actually mean, would effect American national security, just in the short term. If only for the sake of argument, suppose the United States could achieve whatever objectives are entailed by the notion of winning the war there. How long would it take? What would it cost in dollars? How many lives would be lost? What actual, live, current threat would be extinguished, such that America would be safer? What would be traded off, in terms of other uses of the money - from education to infrastructure to paying down the national debt - in order to win this war? What other possible security concerns would go unaddressed because the US took all its armies on the Risk board and moved them from Irkutsk and Yakutsk and Mongolia to Kamchatka? None of these questions have been addressed in the United States, let alone answered. And those just represent short-term security concerns.
As for each level of security policy analysis discussed above, short-term definitions of success should be constructed to give service to the next level up, medium-term ones. If it's true that there is a broader struggle going on against some sort of wider American enemy, of which Afghanistan is simply a single theater of operations, then the medium-term security question one has to ask is whether putting so many resources into that single theater makes sense in the context of the bigger objective. If al Qaeda is located in 60 countries, for example, is it smart to stick 100,000 American troops in just one of them, and spend a trillion bucks hunting down a hundred people, especially when they can just slide over the border into Pakistan almost at will?
Finally, is the medium-term aspiration for the country serving well the long-term foreign policy goals of the United States in which it should be nested? Are these policies likely to leave us better off, somehow, twenty and fifty years from now? Does an American presence in Afghanistan better America's position in the world, both with respect to friendly countries, and with respect to rivals, real and potential? It certainly doesn't seem to be having a positive effect with the former group, as NATO allies appear less and less interested in supporting American efforts in the country, either by being there at all, or by being anywhere near harm's way. As to potential rivals, could anything possibly be more amusing than this war to the grand strategists in Moscow and Beijing, hoping to supercede American as the hegemon of the new century? If there is any such possibility, it could only be the US blunder in Iraq. Either way, America could hardly have given its rivals a greater gift if we had simply wrapped a ribbon around the capitol and stuck a bow on the dome. Yes, as a matter of fact, history's lesson is correct - empires do die from within, not from external assault. Idiocy is more lethal than are Huns.
Like everything in America, both the Afghan war and US foreign policy in general have been relentlessly politicized in the last decades, ever since doing so was discovered as a survival technique for the otherwise completely bankrupt politics of the right. Regressives get more mileage out of knee-jerk reactionary national security fears than anything else they can invent as a reason for their existence. At the same time, pacifists on the left make the mistake of believing that there is no situation for which war is the appropriate response. I wish that that were true, but, unfortunately, it isn't. If I have to choose between World War II and a Thousand-Year Reich of darkness descending over the planet (which would, of course, entail at least as much mass violence, anyhow, to go along with all the repression and civilizational regression), I reluctantly choose war.
The problem for the United States, however, is that it long ago forgot about the reluctant part. We just keep going to war, decade after decade, from Korea to Vietnam to Grenada to Iraq to Panama to Bosnia and back to Iraq and so on. You could make an argument, as regressives often do, that the reason that we are completely unmatched by any other country in the world for the frequency with which we have gone to war over the last century is because we are doing the heavy lifting of international security that others either cannot or will not do. I'd say there's even some truth to that in some cases. By my estimation, about half of America's wars had at least a moderately legitimate casus belli. But that, of course, leaves the other half. When you're talking about the single gravest decision a society can make, it wouldn't hurt to get it right more often than you would by random chance, say by flipping a coin.
Afghanistan is one of the muddier cases, from the perspective of its moral justification. That's true, first, because it is really two cases - then and now. If it was actually true that al Qaeda did 9/11 and that the Taliban refused to give up the perpetrators, then I think invading Afghanistan in order to go after those individuals was an appropriate response, however reluctant I am ever to support violence, especially at the scale of war, and however clear it is that America's policies in the world all too often harm others. (Similarly, I think it equally appropriate that George W. Bush and gang ought to be sitting in an ICC courtroom right now, on trial for their crimes.) But now that first version of the war is long over, yet another botched product of the Bush administration, and al Qaeda has largely been neither captured nor killed, but instead driven into Pakistan. Whatever legitimate justification there was for the first phase of a US war in Afghanistan seems to me completely absent now that we are in the second.
And yet the president (another botch king, of a somewhat different and some similar sort) is dramatically escalating the American military presence there. I do not see any moral justification for that.
But part of why I don't see that is because we basically have not been presented with any justification whatsoever. And the reason that hasn't happened is because we, as a society, are not addressing seriously any of the nested policy questions necessary to an intelligent and just formulation of American foreign policy.
Are we using tactics in Afghanistan that are as humane as possible and that can work?
Do those tactics serve our strategy there, assuming we know what that is?
Does our strategy serve our goals for fighting a war in Afghanistan?
Do those political goals for the war serve a broader short-term American foreign policy outside of Afghanistan?
Do those short-term goals advance medium-term US foreign policy goals?
And do those medium-term goals serve the country's long-term goals?
Most of these questions are almost impossible to answer decisively, for the reason that we don't actually know what the country's tactics or strategy or goals are.
But if one had to try to answer these questions, based on the best information available, you'd probably have to say: No, no, no, no, no, no and no.
Not very impressive. It's one thing for a government to act recklessly with the lives of its citizens and those of other people, elsewhere. In less politically mature countries, like America, that is all too sadly still to be expected.
But where is the public which, in a democracy, can control their government? Where are the fine American citizens, with their "Support the Troops" bumper-stickers cracked and fading on the back of their SUVs? Where are the great advocates of Christian morality, reading about cheek-turning in their bibles at night, and pouring out of churches on Sunday mornings?
Where are they, indeed?
Probably too busy watching American Idol reruns to ask these crucial questions, and to demand legitimate answers to them before they will allow their government to fight an increasingly violent war in Afghanistan.
It's important to keep your priorities straight, you know.
NOTE:
One problem with this author's piece is that he simply accepts as fact that Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. He does not discuss the fact that bin Laden is not on the FBI's "most wanted list",that the United States refused to furnish the Taliban with evidence of bin Laden's guilt and that former Secretary of State Colin Powell who promised to provide the American public with evidence that bin Laden's Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks--never did so.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
March 20, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- If there was ever a decent justification visible for the American war in Afghanistan, there isn't now.
That doesn't mean that one is impossible to imagine. I'm no fan of the Taliban or al-Qaeda, though that alone doesn't justify invading the country. Nor does a military occupation necessarily make things better, even if you assume that a particular regime is noxious enough that a regime decapitation is warranted. Time after time, great powers have learned to their chagrin that the natives don't always necessarily appreciate being invaded, occupied and told who the new boss replacing the old boss will be. People can be odd that way.
But leave all that aside for the moment. Maybe al Qaeda did 9/11, as we were told. Maybe the Taliban were harboring them. Maybe both had a violent, regressive and otherwise just generally ugly agenda. Maybe there was even justification enough for invading in 2001.
I nevertheless meant my initial critique quite literally, however. Whatever may or may not have been the case in 2001, it's now 2010, and any such clarity or justification is now invisible. Indeed, what I find most astonishing about America's latest military adventure is just how much this gravest of national decisions is not being seriously discussed in our national discourse.
Perhaps even more amazing is the degree to which that is true from the bottom of the national security policy process all the way up to the top. The proper way to conceive and consider these issues, I would argue, is in the form of a nested contextual hierarchy, in which each level of policy analysis has to justify decisions to the one, and ones, above it. We, as a body politic, are talking about and thinking about Afghanistan at none of these levels. In fact, of course, we're basically not talking about and thinking about Afghanistan at all.
The lowest level of policy decision-making is the tactical. America has to decide exactly how it is going to prosecute the war. We don't hear very much about that, which is itself more than troubling. Reports are now beginning to show up in the alternative press - but, significantly, not in the mainstream - of tactical operations all too reminiscent of those brutal affairs which have appeared previously in Iraq and Pakistan. Allegations are now surfacing about innocent civilians either being subjected to intentional human rights and war crimes violations, right up to and including murder, or at least wonton disregard for the "collateral damage" caused by battlefield tactics. There is certainly a moral question at stake here, and one that we are just not discussing.
But there is also simply the pragmatic question of whether such tactics properly service our strategy in Afghanistan, the next level up in the hierarchy. But what is American strategy? The latest version seems to be an ‘improvement' over the notion of simply defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda in battlefield engagements. Now the Pentagon brass and theater commanders are talking about following military clearing operations with ‘government-in-a-box' nation-building initiatives, ostensibly for purposes of winning the ubiquitous hearts and minds typically sought by contemporary counterinsurgency occupation forces. Theoretically, providing Afghans with security and with efficient, corruption-free governance will help to win their allegiance to a ‘better' (read American sponsored) way. While the ideas have some merit on paper, they also ignore the historical realities of similar attempts in Vietnam and Iraq, and they require for credibility that we suspend everything we know about America's long-time ongoing national version of the same strategy in Afghanistan, which has witnessed the Karzai puppet regime spending the better part of the last decade demonstrating just how corrupt a government can possibly be, and just how ineffective as well - at least when it comes to everything other than stealing elections or just plain stealing.
But strategy, of course, is not its own end. Strategy is used to achieve certain objectives which form the very purpose for fighting a war. Barack Obama is not quite as lame as George W. Bush in this respect (not exactly a stunning achievement, that), who argued that America should be at war with the weapon terrorism - as opposed to an actual adversary using that weapon. While we can say that Obama is not as deceitful (at least on this score) or idiotic as Bush, that's pretty much true of the entire world, isn't it? More importantly, what are America's aims in massively escalating our presence in Afghanistan? Are we trying to defeat the Taliban? Remove al Qaeda from the country (even though the Pentagon says there's only about a hundred of them left there)? Create a Jeffersonian democracy? Install an ally? Lift the country out of poverty? Again, it astonishes me that one could take a country to war without this most obvious question being part of the national discourse. But it isn't.
And neither is the question of how ‘winning' in Afghanistan, whatever that would actually mean, would effect American national security, just in the short term. If only for the sake of argument, suppose the United States could achieve whatever objectives are entailed by the notion of winning the war there. How long would it take? What would it cost in dollars? How many lives would be lost? What actual, live, current threat would be extinguished, such that America would be safer? What would be traded off, in terms of other uses of the money - from education to infrastructure to paying down the national debt - in order to win this war? What other possible security concerns would go unaddressed because the US took all its armies on the Risk board and moved them from Irkutsk and Yakutsk and Mongolia to Kamchatka? None of these questions have been addressed in the United States, let alone answered. And those just represent short-term security concerns.
As for each level of security policy analysis discussed above, short-term definitions of success should be constructed to give service to the next level up, medium-term ones. If it's true that there is a broader struggle going on against some sort of wider American enemy, of which Afghanistan is simply a single theater of operations, then the medium-term security question one has to ask is whether putting so many resources into that single theater makes sense in the context of the bigger objective. If al Qaeda is located in 60 countries, for example, is it smart to stick 100,000 American troops in just one of them, and spend a trillion bucks hunting down a hundred people, especially when they can just slide over the border into Pakistan almost at will?
Finally, is the medium-term aspiration for the country serving well the long-term foreign policy goals of the United States in which it should be nested? Are these policies likely to leave us better off, somehow, twenty and fifty years from now? Does an American presence in Afghanistan better America's position in the world, both with respect to friendly countries, and with respect to rivals, real and potential? It certainly doesn't seem to be having a positive effect with the former group, as NATO allies appear less and less interested in supporting American efforts in the country, either by being there at all, or by being anywhere near harm's way. As to potential rivals, could anything possibly be more amusing than this war to the grand strategists in Moscow and Beijing, hoping to supercede American as the hegemon of the new century? If there is any such possibility, it could only be the US blunder in Iraq. Either way, America could hardly have given its rivals a greater gift if we had simply wrapped a ribbon around the capitol and stuck a bow on the dome. Yes, as a matter of fact, history's lesson is correct - empires do die from within, not from external assault. Idiocy is more lethal than are Huns.
Like everything in America, both the Afghan war and US foreign policy in general have been relentlessly politicized in the last decades, ever since doing so was discovered as a survival technique for the otherwise completely bankrupt politics of the right. Regressives get more mileage out of knee-jerk reactionary national security fears than anything else they can invent as a reason for their existence. At the same time, pacifists on the left make the mistake of believing that there is no situation for which war is the appropriate response. I wish that that were true, but, unfortunately, it isn't. If I have to choose between World War II and a Thousand-Year Reich of darkness descending over the planet (which would, of course, entail at least as much mass violence, anyhow, to go along with all the repression and civilizational regression), I reluctantly choose war.
The problem for the United States, however, is that it long ago forgot about the reluctant part. We just keep going to war, decade after decade, from Korea to Vietnam to Grenada to Iraq to Panama to Bosnia and back to Iraq and so on. You could make an argument, as regressives often do, that the reason that we are completely unmatched by any other country in the world for the frequency with which we have gone to war over the last century is because we are doing the heavy lifting of international security that others either cannot or will not do. I'd say there's even some truth to that in some cases. By my estimation, about half of America's wars had at least a moderately legitimate casus belli. But that, of course, leaves the other half. When you're talking about the single gravest decision a society can make, it wouldn't hurt to get it right more often than you would by random chance, say by flipping a coin.
Afghanistan is one of the muddier cases, from the perspective of its moral justification. That's true, first, because it is really two cases - then and now. If it was actually true that al Qaeda did 9/11 and that the Taliban refused to give up the perpetrators, then I think invading Afghanistan in order to go after those individuals was an appropriate response, however reluctant I am ever to support violence, especially at the scale of war, and however clear it is that America's policies in the world all too often harm others. (Similarly, I think it equally appropriate that George W. Bush and gang ought to be sitting in an ICC courtroom right now, on trial for their crimes.) But now that first version of the war is long over, yet another botched product of the Bush administration, and al Qaeda has largely been neither captured nor killed, but instead driven into Pakistan. Whatever legitimate justification there was for the first phase of a US war in Afghanistan seems to me completely absent now that we are in the second.
And yet the president (another botch king, of a somewhat different and some similar sort) is dramatically escalating the American military presence there. I do not see any moral justification for that.
But part of why I don't see that is because we basically have not been presented with any justification whatsoever. And the reason that hasn't happened is because we, as a society, are not addressing seriously any of the nested policy questions necessary to an intelligent and just formulation of American foreign policy.
Are we using tactics in Afghanistan that are as humane as possible and that can work?
Do those tactics serve our strategy there, assuming we know what that is?
Does our strategy serve our goals for fighting a war in Afghanistan?
Do those political goals for the war serve a broader short-term American foreign policy outside of Afghanistan?
Do those short-term goals advance medium-term US foreign policy goals?
And do those medium-term goals serve the country's long-term goals?
Most of these questions are almost impossible to answer decisively, for the reason that we don't actually know what the country's tactics or strategy or goals are.
But if one had to try to answer these questions, based on the best information available, you'd probably have to say: No, no, no, no, no, no and no.
Not very impressive. It's one thing for a government to act recklessly with the lives of its citizens and those of other people, elsewhere. In less politically mature countries, like America, that is all too sadly still to be expected.
But where is the public which, in a democracy, can control their government? Where are the fine American citizens, with their "Support the Troops" bumper-stickers cracked and fading on the back of their SUVs? Where are the great advocates of Christian morality, reading about cheek-turning in their bibles at night, and pouring out of churches on Sunday mornings?
Where are they, indeed?
Probably too busy watching American Idol reruns to ask these crucial questions, and to demand legitimate answers to them before they will allow their government to fight an increasingly violent war in Afghanistan.
It's important to keep your priorities straight, you know.
NOTE:
One problem with this author's piece is that he simply accepts as fact that Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. He does not discuss the fact that bin Laden is not on the FBI's "most wanted list",that the United States refused to furnish the Taliban with evidence of bin Laden's guilt and that former Secretary of State Colin Powell who promised to provide the American public with evidence that bin Laden's Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks--never did so.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
Thursday, January 24, 2008
"Principle of Utility" Justifies Offensive Nuclear Attack
Editorial Opinion by Dr. J. P. Hubert
If anyone requires further evidence that rank Utilitarianism has become the prevailing ethic in the developed West--look no further. In a paper prepared for the Nato summit in April by five top military leaders the following recommendation is made: “The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.” see HERE...
Talk about moral relativism. Where is the evidence that these men understand the principle of universality which is part and parcel of every legitimate moral philosophy? What about the categorical imperative of Kant--only do those acts which you would be willing to see universalized? Where is the assurance that these military experts understand the first and second principles of the Natural Law; do good/avoid evil and treat your neighbor fairly? What possible moral philosophy could these individuals have employed other than the principle of utility as applied under a Utilitarian construct? Apparently for them virtually any "means" whether inherently immoral or not can be applied in the pursuit of an identified "end."
The first use of nuclear weapons is an immoral means for the accomplishment of any conceivable end since it involves purposely targeting innocent human beings--non-combatants. This makes it immoral under Just War Doctrinal principles period as well as under international Law (waging "Total War" is a war crime). Under traditional (golden-rule ethic) Aristotelian/Thomistic moral philosophical precepts, one must never intentionally kill the innocent. Offensively detonating a nuclear bomb under any and all circumstances, tactical or strategic involves choosing to intentionally kill the innocent (the object rationally chosen or "means") and it is gravely immoral.
In fact it is highly dubious whether one could ever detonate a nuclear bomb in a defensive capacity either, due to the predictable (and thus intentional) nature involved in the killing of innocents. Such an eventuality could not be termed unintended in the sense of "collateral" damage which refers only to those inadvertent and unintended deaths of non-combatant civilians in time of war which are unforseeable. If large loss of civilian life is virtually certain (that is, one possesses moral certitude), the planned military maneuver is clearly immmoral.
I include the following additional analysis which was posted previously as a NOTE on this topic see THIS...
Having personally lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis it is inconceivable to me that supposedly intelligent military leaders could recommend the use of offensive nuclear weapons in an attempt to prevent further nuclear proliferation and other weapons of mass destruction. There are several insurmountable problems with their analysis.
First, it is not true that "there is simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world" as the 5 author's have maintained. The original nuclear weapons state (NWS's) nations (China, USSR [now Russia], France, United States and Great Britain) which signed the NPT have through lack of leadership and good will failed to meet their treaty obligations to progressively disarm their nuclear arsenals. Yet, they continue to insist that non-nuclear weapon state (NNWS's) countries must not attempt to develop them. NNWS nations legitimately wonder why they should be held to their NPT obligation not to develop nuclear weapons when the original 5 NWS's refuse to abide by theirs.
The NWS's by some unknown "right" (perhaps might makes right) also insist that those NNWS countries which did not sign the NPT must also refrain from doing so. This is rank hypocrisy of the worst sort. Moreover it is clear that some NWS's have further violated their NPT related obligations by assisting other nations who were not part of the original NWS's to obtain them including Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea. Obviously, the original NWS's have made no realistic attempt to either progressively disarm (certainly not in the past 20 years) or to otherwise abide by their NPT stipulated agreement not to provide nuclear weapons technology to NNWS nations.
Second the 5 military authors who produced the latest radical manifesto have also committed a grievous error in logic. It is contradictory (violates the law of non-contradiction) in the extreme to purport that the best way to prevent an actual phenomenon from occurring is to in fact make it occur. Nuclear weapons proliferation is held to be disadvantageous because it is thought to increase the risk (likelihood) that nuclear weapons will be utilized; particularly offensively--a universally recognized and abhorrent historical reality based upon their first use by the United States against the Japanese. If that were not the case there would be no morally legitimate reason to limit proliferation.
Third, many nations already have nuclear weapons which are associated with some finite risk of use albeit perhaps incalculable quantitatively. Should nuclear weapons be used to stop a nation state from developing them, what does this say? It indicates that the use of nuclear weapons in an offensive manner is justifiable under some circumstances. Not only does it violate Just War Doctrinal principles it makes legitimate that which it is attempting to make illegitimate--the use of offensive nuclear weapons--whether by a nation state or a terrorist organization. Put another way, it says "do what we say not what we do simply because we say so." Those NNWS can legitimately reply, "you are hypocritical in the extreme. Why should you be the only ones to have nuclear weapons--you aren't even willing to disarm the huge arsenals you already have and agreed to reduce and yet you insist that we cannot even have one? How unjust of you."
Perhaps even more troubling to me is the idea that so many human beings including the top tier candidates for President in both US political parties are willing to consider the use of nuclear weapons offensively. This is a most disturbing development. It demonstrates that the so-called Bush doctrine of preventive war has become normalized despite its being completely incompatible with international law, Just War Doctrinal principles and traditional moral precepts.
Too many people seem to have lost sight of just how truly awful it is to detonate even one nuclear weapon. I suggest that everyone read or re-read the accounts of those who documented the carnage and human suffering after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings. The genetic and medical complications alone are still being felt to this day. The deleterious effects of radioactive fallout and possible complete fouling of the earth's atmosphere/environment were these hideous weapons to be utilized demands that they never be used again. There is no guarantee that--should even one tactical nuclear warhead be detonated--it would not result in WWIII. The resulting nuclear Armageddon and nuclear Winter would be capable of destroying all life on earth.
If anyone requires further evidence that rank Utilitarianism has become the prevailing ethic in the developed West--look no further. In a paper prepared for the Nato summit in April by five top military leaders the following recommendation is made: “The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.” see HERE...
Talk about moral relativism. Where is the evidence that these men understand the principle of universality which is part and parcel of every legitimate moral philosophy? What about the categorical imperative of Kant--only do those acts which you would be willing to see universalized? Where is the assurance that these military experts understand the first and second principles of the Natural Law; do good/avoid evil and treat your neighbor fairly? What possible moral philosophy could these individuals have employed other than the principle of utility as applied under a Utilitarian construct? Apparently for them virtually any "means" whether inherently immoral or not can be applied in the pursuit of an identified "end."
The first use of nuclear weapons is an immoral means for the accomplishment of any conceivable end since it involves purposely targeting innocent human beings--non-combatants. This makes it immoral under Just War Doctrinal principles period as well as under international Law (waging "Total War" is a war crime). Under traditional (golden-rule ethic) Aristotelian/Thomistic moral philosophical precepts, one must never intentionally kill the innocent. Offensively detonating a nuclear bomb under any and all circumstances, tactical or strategic involves choosing to intentionally kill the innocent (the object rationally chosen or "means") and it is gravely immoral.
In fact it is highly dubious whether one could ever detonate a nuclear bomb in a defensive capacity either, due to the predictable (and thus intentional) nature involved in the killing of innocents. Such an eventuality could not be termed unintended in the sense of "collateral" damage which refers only to those inadvertent and unintended deaths of non-combatant civilians in time of war which are unforseeable. If large loss of civilian life is virtually certain (that is, one possesses moral certitude), the planned military maneuver is clearly immmoral.
I include the following additional analysis which was posted previously as a NOTE on this topic see THIS...
Having personally lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis it is inconceivable to me that supposedly intelligent military leaders could recommend the use of offensive nuclear weapons in an attempt to prevent further nuclear proliferation and other weapons of mass destruction. There are several insurmountable problems with their analysis.
First, it is not true that "there is simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world" as the 5 author's have maintained. The original nuclear weapons state (NWS's) nations (China, USSR [now Russia], France, United States and Great Britain) which signed the NPT have through lack of leadership and good will failed to meet their treaty obligations to progressively disarm their nuclear arsenals. Yet, they continue to insist that non-nuclear weapon state (NNWS's) countries must not attempt to develop them. NNWS nations legitimately wonder why they should be held to their NPT obligation not to develop nuclear weapons when the original 5 NWS's refuse to abide by theirs.
The NWS's by some unknown "right" (perhaps might makes right) also insist that those NNWS countries which did not sign the NPT must also refrain from doing so. This is rank hypocrisy of the worst sort. Moreover it is clear that some NWS's have further violated their NPT related obligations by assisting other nations who were not part of the original NWS's to obtain them including Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea. Obviously, the original NWS's have made no realistic attempt to either progressively disarm (certainly not in the past 20 years) or to otherwise abide by their NPT stipulated agreement not to provide nuclear weapons technology to NNWS nations.
Second the 5 military authors who produced the latest radical manifesto have also committed a grievous error in logic. It is contradictory (violates the law of non-contradiction) in the extreme to purport that the best way to prevent an actual phenomenon from occurring is to in fact make it occur. Nuclear weapons proliferation is held to be disadvantageous because it is thought to increase the risk (likelihood) that nuclear weapons will be utilized; particularly offensively--a universally recognized and abhorrent historical reality based upon their first use by the United States against the Japanese. If that were not the case there would be no morally legitimate reason to limit proliferation.
Third, many nations already have nuclear weapons which are associated with some finite risk of use albeit perhaps incalculable quantitatively. Should nuclear weapons be used to stop a nation state from developing them, what does this say? It indicates that the use of nuclear weapons in an offensive manner is justifiable under some circumstances. Not only does it violate Just War Doctrinal principles it makes legitimate that which it is attempting to make illegitimate--the use of offensive nuclear weapons--whether by a nation state or a terrorist organization. Put another way, it says "do what we say not what we do simply because we say so." Those NNWS can legitimately reply, "you are hypocritical in the extreme. Why should you be the only ones to have nuclear weapons--you aren't even willing to disarm the huge arsenals you already have and agreed to reduce and yet you insist that we cannot even have one? How unjust of you."
Perhaps even more troubling to me is the idea that so many human beings including the top tier candidates for President in both US political parties are willing to consider the use of nuclear weapons offensively. This is a most disturbing development. It demonstrates that the so-called Bush doctrine of preventive war has become normalized despite its being completely incompatible with international law, Just War Doctrinal principles and traditional moral precepts.
Too many people seem to have lost sight of just how truly awful it is to detonate even one nuclear weapon. I suggest that everyone read or re-read the accounts of those who documented the carnage and human suffering after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings. The genetic and medical complications alone are still being felt to this day. The deleterious effects of radioactive fallout and possible complete fouling of the earth's atmosphere/environment were these hideous weapons to be utilized demands that they never be used again. There is no guarantee that--should even one tactical nuclear warhead be detonated--it would not result in WWIII. The resulting nuclear Armageddon and nuclear Winter would be capable of destroying all life on earth.
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