Or, to put it another way, wars -- Diplomacy by other means -- are to be judged on a utilitarian scale.

If the benefits to the elite's status and long-term prospects outweigh the costs, then, war is a reasonable choice.

N.B. Of course one does have to drag the stupid demos along. But as Goering pointed out, that task is never a very difficult one.

Associated with every policy action, before it is taken, are all sorts of estimates of risks and rewards, costs and benefits. In light of those estimates, and the expected values assigned to alternative courses of action, the dividing line between something I must do and something I might do is still likely to be a vague one.

But this doesn't seem to get at the main area of contention in national security and foreign policy debates among US citizens. Like most normal human beings, I was personally raised to believe that there are only certain extreme circumstances under which it is permissible to kill other human beings. Even if one has some interest that cannot be defended in any other way than by killing, that does not make it permissible to kill unless the interest in question is something on the order of life and death: saving one's own life or the life of some loved one or innocent. I can't kill someone to, for example, hang onto my parking space at work, or even protect my job or salary, even if no other measures for protecting these interests are available to me.

And of course there are a number of moral traditions that build on these widespread condemnations of killing, traditions that attempt to give some definition to the narrowly circumscribed sphere of licit killing.

That doesn't seem to be the way most foreign policy practitioners are educated to think. For them, a nation's interests are the Alpha and Omega. If one's nation's interests are best served by killing, you do that; and if they are best served by doing something other than killing, then you don't kill.

This gap between the commonsense morality of most human beings, and the alien codes of the practitioners of "statecraft" seem to turn every foreign policy and national debate, for me, into a confusing and disorienting conflict of incommensurable outlooks. The leaders of states, and the advisory classes that attend them, just seem like so many criminal gangs engaged in their own private, amoral speculations about whom to whack and who not to whack in the pursuit of their peculiar business. I suspect a lot of us would rather not get involved with them. On the other hand, since they are in charge of everything, we have little choice.

Every act is a choice unless you're psychotic

I never realized that there was ambiguity in the term "war of choice"

I took for granted that everyone knew what it meant

i don't think i've ever read anything quite as stupid on TPM as geof stone's statement that "Arguably, in more than 200 years, the United States has never fought a war other than by choice."

let's examine that statement. he calls the civil war a war of choice. it was, if lincoln was willing to accept the secession of almost one third of the states in the union (11 out of 36), a choice that he, not surprisingly found unacceptable. the civil war was a war of choice, if the president was willing to see his country dismantled. what kind of choice is that??

even more stupid is stone's statement that world war II was a war of choice. he says we could have negotiated with the japanese after they bombed pearl harbor. that is ridiculous on its face. furthermore, he fails to mention that a day or two after pearl harbor, hitler declared war on the u.s. so the japanese declared war on us, and the nazis declared war on us. tell me, can anyone but stone call ww II a war of choice??

War is the health of the state:

War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become - the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's business and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, toward the great end, toward the "peacefulness of being at war."--Randolph Bourne

recent news report:

Over the next few years, the U.S. military is likely to become engaged in a number of hot and cold conflicts, each spanning five to 10 years, meaning the Pentagon must "adjust" its decades-old force sizing and basing constructs, says Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
"It is clear we are going to have conflicts whose character will not be the same" as the ones on which the Pentagon has for decades based its force planning and global basing postures, Cartwright said. "It's clear [U.S. forces] will be engaged in operations that [each] last five or 10 years - and that is fundamentally different that in the past."

In the United States all wars are by "choice" in the political sense.

In our Constitution, the U.S. Congress is given the power to declare war. The President is Commander and Chief of the armed forces, but is not given the power to choose to declare war by the Constitution. It is this separation of powers which makes this book title interesting.

By calling something a war of necessity, the Executive can claim they are compelled to respond to a threat. This argument, if successful, undermines the political will of Congress to question the need for war. FDR was able to make the case for necessity after December 7, 1941. Prior to that time, the case was made more as a war of choice.

A war of choice is usually the start of a conflict anyway. We start a war of choice with embargoes and diplomatic sanctions. Leading up to the War of 1812, the British seized American vessels and empressed British-born American sailors into the Royal Navy.

So War of Choice is the true label for war in a free country. War of Necessity is really just a symptom of a political problem. Where the Executive Branch seeks to prosecute a war which Congress is not willing to declare, the rhetoric moves from provocation to self-preservation. Here, the rhetoric from war proponents was all based on self preservation. In the Iraq War Resolution, the Congress gave the President power to: "to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to—(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq. "

The final choice over whether to go to War was delegated by Congress directly to the President, but the language used was defensive. The rhetoric was meant to make Congress believe that they were not actually choosing war, but rather choosing to defend the nation.

So the question is not whether a war is by choice in the United States, but how honest are our leaders in laying out the choices. Those with a bad argument often resort to a false dichotomy: limiting choices between bad and horrific, when there may be more choices available.

Parents do this with toddlers. That it works on members of Congress is an indictment of them. The President is both the servant of the people and the Commander in Chief. He or she is not our Daddy or our Mommy. In the case of the Iraq War, all three branches of our government failed to present the public with true choices.