Is There Such a Thing as a “Just War”?
BY ALFRED DE ZAYAS
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
War is a man-made catastrophe that is almost always preventable, but prevention fails because of poor diplomacy, bad faith, intransigence, or an animus dominandi bent on aggression. Once unleashed war becomes unpredictable and often yields other results than those intended.
Confidence building among nations is the best prevention against war, the availability of forums to facilitate dialogue and compromise. Retrospectively, it is easy to see where mistakes were made and how the outbreak of war could have been avoided. But very few politicians have ever learned from the mistakes of prior wars, few have learned anything at all from history. They live in their own worlds and believe their own propag...
