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Rules in War?
Should there be any rules when you are at war with another country? Why isn't it acceptable to kill everything and everyone moving until you reach your ultimate goal? Should the Geneva Convention be ignored? Why shouldn't we be able to torture peoople to get what we need from them? I think that everything is fair in war. If you get in the way you should get killed whether it be man woman or child. War is war. That is why the conflicts of today last so long. People are afraid to do what it takes and no one is scared of war anymore. War is this glamorized fixation now. We should make it like it was and put the fear back into it. What do you think?
Comments
It is wrong to start a war in the first place. Solve conflicts with peace.
I believe War does solve things and war helps our economy. But I do believe there should be rules. Soldiers are just regular people who are sometimes FORCED to listen to their leader whether they agree or not.
and then tell me why should anyone care what influence it has over anybody's economy.....
Remember, there is no draft. You chose to enter the Army at your own risk. Sympathy is not something that I give easily to those who choose a certain path.
That having been said, the very concept of rules to warfare, which is a dangerous thing anyway, is a bit bizarre, yet it can probably be considered a uniquely human thing, to be concerned enough for the lives of civilians and noncombatants to insist that soldiers treat them properly.
It appears to be a uniquely human thing to treat the symptoms and forget the root cause. What causes warfare to begin with? We don't, or at least haven't since the 1970s, tried to address this.
@ BryanL:
The idea that war leads to better economy is a fallacy. Africa by your logic should be the weathiest continent on the planet. I think most wars are not about economics; you are underplaying the people aspect of war. An IED will do the same thing as a JDAM dropped from a F18.
Disgusting in the sense that war is started by governments or those in authority against other governments or others in authority. Why should innocent people (women and children) suffer?
The fact of the matter is that there are rules in war as evidenced, say, in WWII. Soldiers did not kill women, children, or the wounded (save for when these groups would attack soldiers). Those that did kill were either reproached formally or informally. After battles, there was a designated period of time for each side to collect and treat its wounded. Even now, American soldiers in Iraq are being tried for the killing of innocents (being tried presupposes a set of rules, after all, there can be no violations without rules). Hence, factually, it would be foolish to conclude that there are no rules in war.
If you speak normatively (i.e. that there should be no rules in war), then you are a truly sick individual. You can justify the Holocaust or other genocides with this sort of amoral reasoning. The killing of innocent women and children can easily be justified under this sort of reasoning.
Here is an interesting thought: if there were no rules in war, many of the world's conflicts would have ended differently. The Soviets, for example, would easily have dealt with Afghanistan; the Americans with the Vietnamese (Viet Cong); and the Russians with the Chechens. The stronger side would just have annihilated the weaker one. But because guerilla warfare is at least parly reliant on the other side's courtesy (no killing of innocents), guerillas can fight at night and sell you vegetables during the day.
This meant that as the US and Canada geared themselves to war production, they could draw in massive numbers of unemployed people to work solely on war industry without severe dislocations (well, relatively speaking) that would have happened in the event of a country at full employment.
In addition, the war lasted about five years, which was just long enough for people to start spotting the advantages of extensive government intervention in regulating economic output without suffering the full impact that a fully war-devoted economy tends to bring on the civilian population in terms of infrastructure maintenance.
Just as an example, take housing. It's a critically important part of day-to-day living, yet war shortages ate so deeply into the construction industry that rent controls had to be extended through 1946 and 1947 to keep places affordable while the workmen went hell-bent for leather trying to play catch-up, because for the previous half-decade, they'd been building barracks for soldiers, or other military-related structures.
Now imagine if the war had extended on into the 1950s. At some point the housing stock would have proven so inadequate in the face of an ongoing war that the standard of living of the US and Canadian citizen would simply have stagnated, a situation not too dissimilar to that of the average Soviet citizen in the 1980s, when the Soviet government was spending so much on the military that few resources could be spared on continuing to upgrade the living standard of the average citizen.
It should be clearly recognized that wartime economic policies do have their disadvantages.
Rules...I guess having rule are better than not having them. It's good that no ones used germ warfare to kill everyone...yet.