misgfool said:
Yes yes, and every country in the world which has won a war described their actions as defensive. Russ don't try to fool us, we (europeans) have been fighting for thousands of years. We know all excuses in the book. Or at least show some imagination and figure out new ones.
misgfool, I'm not trying to fool anyone, I'm not making judgements, I'm just explaining issues and logic. We have hindsight and distance, so we don't have to listen to what the starters of wars said, we can make our own judgements and look at how experts judge. And the fact of the matter is that history and political scientists, diplomats sitting around the UN assembly, etc draw the lines that I described and the majority draw the moral conclusions I draw. I'm not making this stuff up. The concept and philosophical exporation of Just War is thousands of years old and is in practice today. You may want to read up on the concept before dismissing it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war
In any case, the issue I as discussing was a very specific one and doesn't have anything to do with who started what war and what they used as an excuse, I am merely explaining the reasoning
actually used to take action in cases like the one in question. I didn't say in that quote whether the reaoning is right or wrong (that's part of Just War, but I wasn't discussing it specifically), I was just explaining what the reasoning
is.
I've also cited general examples that really happened, but maybe you haven't heard of them. In 1981, for example, the cat-and-mouse game resulted in the shootdown of two Libyan fighters by the US Navy. Now whether the US was right or wrong is not what I'm addressing. I'm simply
stating the
reason that they were shot down. They were shot down because they passed the point where our defenses could easily repel an attack if one of them actually released a weapon. They had
not passed the point of no return (release of a weapon without callback). The decision was made that rather than let them get to where they could launch an attack, they should be stopped before they got there. The space between those lines is where the grey area I described resides. That grey area causes a lot of controversy.
And you think that, he believes, that there will be no repercussions?
Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. If he's insane, that means his judgement is flawd. See Hussein, 1990, for a similar example of a disastrous miscalculation by an unstable megalomaniac dictator.
So why doesn't he do it even just for the pleasure of doing it?
Besides what was already said (not much pleasure if it doesn't hit its target), the incentive goes up with the despiration. He tends to ratchet up the rhetoric at times when he is the most desperate - back him into a corner he believe he has no chance to get out of and he may just choose to go out with a bang.