A Simple Question: Are we at War?

[givemebackmycountry]

I'm a war president says the monkey.
"We're at WAR" he screams.
"War on terra"
"War on terra"

Are we at war?

Many of us agree we are not.
You can't go to war with a tactic or a bizarre religiously insane ideal.

Are we at war?

I know our troops are dying like they are in one.

[Ian David]

1. Bush is DEFFINITELY engaged in "A War on Terra"

See:

http://www.climatecrisis.net/aboutthefilm/



This is the enemy in Bush's "War on Terra"

[Sinti]

10. No question, it's a war on terra - terra firma n/t

[RC]

2. No! Iraq is an occupation by a foreign invader.

[liberal N proud]

3. Did Congress actually declare WAR?

Congress has to actually declare war.
I know the rubber stamps gave the PNAC representative living at 1600 permission to take military action, but does that constitute a declaration of war?

[MrSlayer]

4. I believe the troops would tell you we are.

What with bullets whizzing by and IEDs exploding all over the place. I'm pretty sure the Iraqis and Afghanis would say we are at war too, with their bombed out houses and dead children in the background.

By law we are not officially at declared war but calling the "operations" our military are conducting anything less than war is simply ridiculous.

[The Magistrate]

5. No Sir, We Are Not At War

We are certainly not at war as a matter fo law, for there has been no Declaration of War, and absent that, no legal state of war can exist, however active the nation's armed forces may be.

The fighting in Iraq is not a war: it is mere colonial venture, that is collapsing in a welter of incompetence.

The necessary suppression of fundamentalist Islamic radicals in arms is not a war. It is a police problem on a colossal scale, in which the military arm must be employed to lend weight to the police arm in many circumstances.

[Sparkly]

12. Magistrate, I'm an admirer, but disagree about this definition of war.

The "conflict in Vietnam" was also considered "not a real war," for the reasons you stated.

These "colonial ventures" and "police problems" send our uniformed youth off to kill and die nonetheless.

BushCo loves to say "we're at war" and Chimpy is a "war preznit," and we bristle at that. At the same time, I bristle at the notion that it's just a "conflict" that caused so many people -- America, Iraqi, and other -- to be killed and injured. Calling it anything less seems to trivialize its magnitude.

Is there any definition of "war" beyond the legal Declaration? No, not legally speaking... But when it comes to thousands of dead and years of combat -- with or without a draft, with or without a declaration -- I don't want to call it anything less than "war."

So I want the word "war," even in some vernacular, to apply -- hell with the fact that they didn't make proper declarations!

Maybe "illegal war."
Maybe "undeclared war."
Maybe lowercase "war" vs. uppercase "War."

Or maybe we need some new word, beyond "misadventure," to apply to mistakes like Vietnam and Iraq. Something worse than "invasions," worse than "battles," worse than "conflicts" or "fights." I can't think of a better term -- so I'm left with "war."

Am I wrong? What would you call them?

Looking forward to your reply. If I'm a "fan" of anyone on DU, it's you! :)

[The Magistrate]

15. Many Thanks For Your KInd Words, Ma'am

To my view, the legal definition is always of paramount importance. A state of war, legally declared, is different from a state of peace, with genuinely different rules. A guard must always be kept against allowing metaphor to become accepted as fact. It distorts matters badly, and the excerpt from the Analects appended as my tag below has long struck me as about the most important comment on this ever made by a human being. When things are not accurately named, nothing will go right.

There is a good deal to your view that the enormity of the thing should not be trivialized, however. What is happening in Iraq is certainly a war in a vernacular sense: the bulk of the nation's armed forces are committed to it, and very active in that commitment. But using it, as you have noted yourself, does play into the propagandas of the enemy, and distorts the debate over the consequences of the thing, and the proper actions to be taken to end it (or even, for that matter, to prosecute it further, should that be the course one favors), in a manner that benefits the domestic political enemy. There really is no good way out of this semantic difficulty, unfortunately.

[Stinky The Clown]

6. 'No'

is the only possible answer

[billbuckhead]

7. Cheney wants to have a real war

Bush said he thinks WW3 has already started. I think the neoCONS won't be happy until they start a real war.

[Stinky The Clown]

11. They **need** war

It is their only hope to maintain power

[Mnemosyne]

8. I refer to it as the Iraq Massacre, not a war. n/t

[nealmhughes]

9. Technically, we are not at war,

we are in a state of something unprecedented, a veritable "Reichstag Fire Enabling Act" authorizing military action. If there is no declaration of war, how can there be a peace? Now, I am not being legalistic, but there were "military forays" dating all the way back to the undeclared Franco-American Naval War and the Barbary Pirates War, but why did we not declare a stare of war against the Taliban Government of Afghanistan after giving them an old fashioned ultimatum to surrender all al Queda members within x days to the US/UN/NATO/whomever or else a state of war would exist between the Taliban Government of Afghanistan and the USA? We had every legit reason to declare war on the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies. I believe most US citizens thought that was what we were semi-doing when the Enabling Act was passed. What is its official term "Authorization of Force"? Kneejerk blanket unanalyzed response unprecedented in our history?
Were the US at war, there would not be tax cuts, the President would not be on vacation and there would be huge maps on TV every day. No, we're not at war. Just don't tell my friend Jake's parents or his wife that: they seem to think we are. His flag-draped coffin tells them that we are.

[michreject]

13. We are at war

But we are at war on the home front not abroad.

We need to win this war and reclaim our country.

[Toots]

14. America is engaged in a Cultural War but war as in fighting another countr

No absolutely no. We are creating a huge police problem around the world but uniformed forces are not fighting each other..The USA is not at war. If you think we are please name the country we are at war with.