Let's evaluate the following statement: War is evil and should be avoided, but in extreme cases it is necessary.
The situation in Iraq is too fraught with emotion to serve as a sufficient analytical example. Americans fear terror and aren't thinking clearly, Europeans think that America only cares about oil, and the whole world can't understand why Israel is allowed to kill Palestinian children when the United Nations passed a resolution that said they were supposed to leave the West Bank a long time ago.
Let's make up an abstract example free of French and American appetites for cheap oil and Germany's adoration of mustached dictators that who to kill people with gas.
For the sake of argument, assume that there was a country that was ruled harshly by a dictator who didn't hesitate to kill all those who opposed her regime, and every human rights group sighted her as one of the worst violators of fundamental freedoms in the world.
We would abhor that rule and through dialogue we would encourage change, but we would not go to war because the potential loss of life on both sides would outweigh the benefits of freedom and justice.
Now let's say this dictator invaded a helpless neighbor. We would be obligated to use force to liberate the neighbor, but not necessarily to oust the dictator. Hopefully, the fear of the impending ouster would force her to give up weapons of mass destruction and war could be avoided.
Let's say she agrees to that deal and lets inspectors into the country who find that she still has tons of weapons of mass destruction, and then she kicks out the inspectors without disarming. What if she then massacres thousands of innocent civilians from minority ethnic groups? We should all agree at this point that such an exercise shows that -- at least theoretically -- there are times when the benefits of war outweigh the potential costs.
But just to keep the argument going, let's say that we try the one last diplomatic option short of war: placing economic sanctions. We would allow the export of minerals in exchange for money to buy food and medicine for its people.
What if the dictator steals the money for food in order to build a bunch of golden palaces each twenty times the size of Buckingham Palace, causing 2 million people to starve? Then she builds a network of secret tunnels under those palaces so that even if she lets inspectors back into the country they will never find anything unless scientists talk. And that would never happen because they know that she will kill their families if they did. Okay, so that is obviously extreme and we would never let it get to this point, but if it did we would destroy the regime and free the people immediately.
But what if a Security Council member was buying the cheap minerals in lucrative deals, and their Francs were financing those palaces while the people starved? A war would expose this hypocrisy and destroy their cash cow so they insist on more diplomacy, and the dictator keeps building and hiding banned weapons for ten more years.
Now let's say there is a small country that calculates that there is a .5 percent chance that this woman will give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups that will destroy the country. Although a small percentage, given everything else, it would be irresponsible for the world community not to rally and attack.
But what if we give the dictator one final chance to disarm? We would outline exactly what weapons the inspectors found on their earlier visits and demand proof that these weapons had been destroyed within one month or else we would use force.
Now the month goes by and she offers no proof. Two months later, we have proof that she is in fact moving banned weapons as inspectors arrive. She still won't even let the inspectors interview her scientists by themselves, which is the only way we can learn anything.
Clearly we should work to resolve the conflict diplomatically.
