By war, I am assuming you mean the defender, as the aggressor is obvious. No, for reasons that you and I would both agree on. Since we are chatting about philosophy, i'll quote one of my personal fave's, John Stuart Mill, as I believe he summed it up much nicer than I could.
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse."
That would be incorrect on two counts.
1. When Congress speaks, it is the representatives of the people, not the people themselves, that have spoken. If we do not like what they say, we overthrow the current governmental regime every few years in the form of elections.
2. The morality is not moot simply because the Congress, the White House, or even the majority of the citizenry endorse it. Morality is not a utilitarian issue, nor is it based upon the mere actions of a governmental body's decision.
Not true. Take Abu Graib or Guantanamo, for instance. Or the Japanese internment camps during WWII. War was certainly "the selected option" by Congress and our President, but would you say that these issues were 100% morally correct? I wouldn't, because many of the activities that went on there are morally suspect. The only real debatable thing in these examples was the necessity of doing them - not the issue of morality here (for example, it was morally wrong to imprison the Japanese American citizenry in internment camps during WWII, but was it necessary?)
That would be an incorrect assumption. Furthermore, i'd be interested to know where you came to such an off-base conclusion. Last I checked, we were discussing the morality of torturing enemy combatants, which I oppose because it is immoral. Can you show me where I said or even implied that I wanted to "hinder victory" and "want Bush to fail"?
