On the Morality of War and War-Like Conduct

War is a fact of life. Republican, Democrat, USA, England, or Kazakhstan war permeates every facet of our culture. Therefore to ask if war is truly moral is a fallacy of composition. Certainly there are parts of war that are immoral. However, if society thought that war was amoral or immoral then I find it hard to believe that there would not be more massive protesting about “unwise” (Wasserstrom 100-108) wars. There was public support for WWII, yet this same support slipped away for the Vietnam War. There is some level of morality in war but it is based upon the perceived cause of the war. 

In World War II, we were attacked and Americans believe in self-defense at any cost. And unlike Wasserstrom in his feeling that only equal force is justified, public opinion strongly disagrees. “How about an unequal response,” President Bartlet asks in NBC’s The West Wing, “If an American is attacked anywhere in the world?” And he has it on the level. I will talk more on this later in the paper. The point being that self-defense is truly a reasonable defense of war. Any attack on a country’s sovereign soil is an invasion of that country’s right to exist, as such, any means of fighting is acceptable. In the Vietnam War, we invaded foreign soil, whether or not it was in defense, is irrelevant. We were the invaders. As such, the Vietnamese had every right to use guerrilla tactics, whether or not they were conventional warfare.