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Comment by runawaybottle | Hacker News Reader

I think the suggestion was that the actual war was illegal, mostly proven by now, there was no basis for it.

As for what happens in war, we can take a look at what Geneva convention tried, but that’s not the debate.

This implies that there are political motives that justify killing thousands to millions of soldiers and civilians. Can you or anyone here provide a non-exhaustive list of these justifiable motives?

Money?

Grab some books on the Iraq war.

There’s plenty of money involved in making and buying rockets to throw at a country (defense industry), then rebuilding said country (defense contracting), then securing that country’s resources (oil industry), all while winning re-election (Politics).

In Medieval (Antiquity too? Goes pretty far back) terms, this is often called Plundering. There’s a real market for it.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the war on terror has been a calamitous waste of money. One reason for the precipitous decline in war over the last seventy year is precisely that it no longer pays:

(i) it does not pay to wage war because it has become highly resource-intensive and technologically sophisticated, and often involves protracted low-intensity campaigns against asymmetric guerrillas.

(ii) it does not pay to win wars because we now realise that land is not the principal variable of national economic growth, but the place of an economy in the global value-added supply chain.

I think the first motive was moral and political (along the lines of neoconservatism), and the second reason was a geopolitical vision of a reconstructed Middle East pliable to American demands, open to democratic reforms, and aligned with the interests of Israel.

Those are really old-fashioned justifications. In the first place, "land" hasn't been the motivating resource for over a century. USA has plenty of land. Now that we also have plenty of petroleum, it's easier to see what the real motivation for war has been for at least 70 years: transferring resources to armaments manufacturers, and thence to their puppets in politics and news media. All of our public discourse about security etc. is a manufactured farce, subordinate to the basic goal of churning blood into money.

I posted a long boring reply about this that you can read above, but it strikes me that your comment lives or dies on the meaning it assigns to the word "justify." If you're referencing _moral_ justification, then yeah of course you are right. War is horrible. But if you mean _legal_ justification, then here's a non-exhaustive list: - Self-defense

There can be non "political" motives, like self-defense from outside aggressors, but I can't think of much besides that (and even that doesn't really cover civilian deaths)

Stopping genocide. More generally the Responsibility to Protect[1]. For a while this seemed likely to have legs but after Libya went from a functioning state that was more or less peaceful to a never ending civil war with open slave markets due to Obama, Clinton and Power Russia and China are likely to veto any similar US actions. Note the US isn’t solely to blame. In Libya and Syria there was a lot of support in Europe for the US to spend its money, power and political capital doing things the French and others wanted someone else to do but were incapable of doing themselves, by which I mean, unwilling to pay for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect

Cool. I look forward to America using its responsibilities to stop the genocide in Yemen that it has been so far supporting for the last few years in its alliance with KSA.

"But the other kids do it too" is never going to work in the ICC. Which explains why the refrain is so common, and why the USA is terrified of the ICC.

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