My Criteria For A Justified War Essay

, Research Paper

If given the chance I would gladly re-write the guidelines to justify a war as written by Caspar Weinberger, former Secretary of Defense. To begin, I would not suggest that the war may only be declared when it is vital to National interest simply because this statement is too vague. I would cut this statement completely out of the list and replace it by stating that a war can only be declared if national security is being threatened or that a race or population is being annihilated. Moving on, I completely agree with Weinberger’s second point, which is, the U.S. shall not declare war unless it has a clear intention of winning. This is a good point because if the U.S. goes into a war it knows it can not win it will probably do more damage to itself than to the enemy thus making matters worse than before we even entered the war. To continue, the third and forth points on the war justification list should state that the purpose of the war must be decided on and looked over for a period of at least two weeks after the president decides that a war might be necessary. This is better than Weinberger’s thoughts that the objective of the war must be clearly defined and re-assessed several times, mainly because it gives no time limit on how long or how many times the situation must be re-assessed. Also his third and fourth points may allow for rash actions and decisions as where my third and fourth points prevents them. Moving on, the fifth point on Weinberger’s list states that a war effort must have the support of the American public. I almost entirely agree with this statement except that it does not give what percentage of the American support is needed. To improve on the fifth point I would simply add that 75% of the American support must be had before war can be waged. Lastly, I would change Weinberger’s final guideline of force must be used as a last resort too, force must only be used in the event that all peaceful attempts of solving the problem causing the war had failed. All in all if I had the chance to re-write America’s war justification policies then I would do so as explained in the above paragraph.