Just war

What do I mean by just war? Just to fight forever and ever, no sweat, just hold to your gun, your anger, and willingness to kill and conquer in perpetuity. Or does just war mean you are fighting for a just not an evil cause, an ethical, moral, or judicious idea for society. Or can “just war” encompass the two meanings together? That is just fighting forever and ever against constant evil and providing no corrective benefits to society, or that fail ethically and morally in terms of their value to the health of the world?

For instance, has war made drone-bombing various nations just, because it is said by the president it minimizes death tolls through technological means, identifying only enemies of the state? Is that really just, because we know that thousands of people die from drone bombing in those nations and areas where “terrorists” may or may not be, and therefore thousands of innocent people, women, children and men are killed. And that helps the tide of continual hatred towards America rise. The answer shouldn’t be, “Ah, but that’s just war,” over and over again, which is the pragmatic reasoning of warped consciences.

Just war can mean one is desensitized to violence, as in just another Iraq village is destroyed, just another dozen years of warring on the world is necessary, as in just constant escalation beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan, in search of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and terrorists.

This ploy was used to justify bringing down Iraq’s Hussein, who, it was claimed, planned to unjustly use WMD on the USA at any given moment. Yet the UN weapons inspector Inspector Hans Blix couldn’t find them, and it proved that we unjustly destroyed the country. And now we have been involved in the Egyptian Spring, a just war to take down the tyrant of three decades, Hosni Mubarak, which netted out to the Muslim Brotherhood replacing him. Was that just? Just crazy!

And now there’s Syria, which in the time its so-called just uprising turned to bloody civil war, the US started back-peddling on its involvement by covertly helping anti-Bashar al-Assad’s regime through other opposition forces, the once Arab allies and Turkey. But is that just? Or just war? Or is the question just moot at this point? No, it just stinks of endless death.

Let’s look at how “just war” continues to build an empire, without being challenged as described in William Blum’s landmark book, Killing Hope—U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. We just started ringing the world with our troops and bases to prove who the boss was post WW II. So that now there is just war all the time and everywhere, 450 pages of it, including footnotes of how we became the not-so-just world’s cop. And now “just war” is how we do the business of politics, poised pretty much always to pounce in our “justice,” which is as predatory as our drones.

That’s just how it starts and rolls to the finish. The Economic Hit Men roll in one way or the other, militarily, through the World Bank, or the Agency for Economic Development, and introduce the just victim nation to the predator. Before you know it, they’ve tied a lover’s knot (like a multi-billion dollar project for a dam the victim nation doesn’t need, or clear-cutting a forest for its timber, or to divert its water to a corporation, or digging into a mountain for its minerals, gold, coal, uranium.) And if the victim nation is not up for the knot, well, the predator nation can “just do it!”

That’s just how wars start, as if by spontaneous combustion. In fact, that’s what we have our intelligence agencies for, to discover if not think up these scenarios, from Libya to Somalia, Mali to Bali, Israel to Palestine, the Arab countries to Africa, China, Russia, and Japan.

And now America wonders how it got in so many wars, lost so many troops, killed so many innocents, squandered away so much wealth, and gave birth to so many criminals and cons in the financial system, so much paramilitary surveillance and spying on its citizens all the time. It’s just war: the War on Terror, the War to End All Wars, The War on Poverty, The War on Drugs, The War Against AIDS, Cancer, Infant Mortality, Hunger, etcetera, etcetera. Just say no!

But we need the “just” to mean justice. If not, the system corrodes and falls like another of our bridges, swept into the river of failing infrastructure. We have Washington, D.C., and a wannabe emperor ruling over it, as his Justice Department and its chief, Eric Holder, prosecute whistleblowers and snoop through journalists’ phone calls and email in their search for leakers, while the IRS puts right-wing groups seeking tax exemptions through the ringer.

Obama himself seems to be jettisoning his promise to close Guantanamo, which, in fact, the military is asking just $170 million to upgrade. That is the very same prison Obama vowed to close? So is this a sign that Guantanamo Bay is not closing any time soon? Is that just? Or just war? Or just lying?

Is it just to spy on one of the world’s most important news services like the Associated Press (AP) and turn their precious news’ sources over to our intelligence agencies, as if gathering the news was a crime? Is that just or justice or just looking for trouble that inevitably we create. Is Julian Assange really a traitor for exposing thousands of emails that embarrass the State Department? Is Ecuador an enemy for just providing him asylum? Can we live justly in an unjust state?

Maybe we should continue with cotton candy news, distorted visions of reality via Hollywood revisionist history, as in recent war films like Zero Dark Thirty. Reality is messy. War is messy. A just war is messy. And just handing over $3 billion a year to Israel to help disembowel the Palestinians is even messier. Yet, the Israelis don’t just want the Palestinians’ country. They want our balls on a silver platter or a silver dollar the size of a platter, platters of money to gorge on, and a dime to turn on us and Iran.

So, enough of this word play: war is hell. It’s not just or unjust. It is just crap, mucked up with blood and guts. We can’t crown it with the laurel wreath of justice. It’s mankind just going crazy. Somebody call an ambulance, a thousand ambulances, driven by young, wounded Ernest Hemingways.

Was the mother of all wars, The Hundred Years War just, or was it just crazy? Just read about it for a while at Wiki. It was just nuts. Just war is not just. Even WW II, which we claim we fought justly to thwart the original axis of evil, Germany, Italy and Japan, ended in us dropping the first two atomic bombs on Japan while millions of deaths occurred worldwide as well. That’s where war leads—to the toilet. And that huge flushing sound is the sky and ocean flushing away the earth of life.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.