I think too much effort has been made to create a positive spin on War. War in its basic definition (1), which is what I'm going to talk about, is a disease much like other diseases such as Famine, Pestilence and Death. And like them it is an antithesis of morality.

Morality attempts to define rules of conduct; there are no rules in war. Morality distinguishes between good and bad, war like an out of control forest fire equally consumes the good and the bad. Morality attempts to create a meaningful order, war is chaos. Morality is an expression of humanity; war is an expression of inhumanity. Morality has a conscious, War has no conscious. Morality has changed throughout time, war has not. War like any destructive force has no morality and thus is amoral.

Unlike forest fires or bacterial contagium, war is a pure function of man in that it represents man's ability to destroy himself by harnassing the destructive powers of the universe upon himself. It is only when you judge the man, their motivation for bringing about and going to war and the actions (and inactions) they take while at war can any determination of morality be made.

This is why I say the actors and their actions are more important.

The vast majority of men who fought in WWII were good men who felt they were defending their own homes. For the most part a man going to war to defend home and hearth is generally viewed as being morally superior to the man who fights for conquest, an act which is viewed with general contempt here in the US. This is why much of the question w/r to Iraq falls back to Bush's motivations for lying to the US public to further his administration's personal agenda (PNAC, Halliburton, oil, vendetta, etc.) and in allowing this naked ambition to serve as a foil for Bin Laden's own ambitions to take out Sada'am.




(1) As opposed to the corrupted definitions now used in such expressions as "War on Poverty", "War on Drugs", etc.

On Edit: Flipped paragraphs.