Is War Immoral Anymore?

Paul Craig Roberts' latest column at Antiwar.com makes an important and disheartening point about how antiwar arguments have morphed over the decades. Rather than the common perception that the the Vietnam war was brought to its brutal end by antipathy for the draft, Roberts argues that Americans had tired of the immorality of what was until recently our longest war.

Roberts credits a (marginally) more independent media, unafraid to cast the war in moral terms through such images as "the film of the naked little girl running in terror down the road burning with napalm", for "arousing moral opposition to the [Vietnam] war."

Today's conflicts in Iraq and Af-Pak are all too often judged only on materialist conditions, such as U.S. military deaths, what Roberts calls, "Karl Marx's explanation." Indeed, when John McCain argued during the 2008 presidential campaign that the U.SI. could remain in Iraq for 100 years, his sole justification was limiting casualties of U.S. soldiers. Never mind the morality of forcibly occupying the native land of people with the same inalienable, God-given natural rights as the rest of us.

Roberts' conclusion for why the American people have tolerated these morally indefensible wars for so long?:

The answer is that the United States is an immoral country, with an immoral people and an immoral government. Americans no longer have a moral conscience. They have gone over to the Dark Side.

Sadly, I think that Roberts' prognosis is spot on. Christianity's peaceful heritage has long ago been forsaken in America. Pacifism among American Christians was much more widespread prior to WWI than after. Especially since the Cold War, Christians have been the worst warmongers of any segment of society. I would definitely describe that as a moral decline.

This article needs to be taken very seriously by any American who values morality as the foundation of a sound society.