[general_re]

If there is no direct American interest, there can be no justification under our system, for Americans to wage war. Our young men are not the playthings of our politicians. Our Government must act under the authority given it by the Constitution, or it acts illegally--and obviously immorally.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion, but oddly, I do not find such language contained in the Constitution, that war is only legal and moral when it fits such a definition - only that Congress may declare war, without specifying what the grounds for a declaration must or should be. One may appeal to extra-Constitutional texts in support of such a thesis, but the Constitution itself makes no such distinction between moral and immoral wars.

[Ohioan]

The Constitutional grants to Congress are all premised upon the concept that they promote the Common Defense or General Welfare--i.e. the exact opposite of the particular welfare of factions, which modern politicians slaver over.

Washington and Jefferson both made it very clear, what sort of foreign policy they envisioned. It is clearly one driven by both a respect for the Law of Nations and the dictates of morality in a Republican system. (See An American Foreign Policy.)

We have had now almost 85 years--since Wilson brought the League Treaty home in November, 1918--of arguments for a different foreign policy; but they never confront the far more compelling arguments that the Founding Fathers made for the one they gave us. (Rather the technique has been to blow smoke in the public face, with allegations that our traditions were "isolationist." But nothing could be further from the truth.)

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site